020 How to Create the Perfect Character with Damon Suede

Hello Rebels, welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast episode 20. Today’s podcast is all about how to create the perfect character with Damon Suede. He shows you how choosing and identifying a verb for your character helps you go deep with characterisation. We also touch on personal branding, story arcs and more.

This Week’s Question looks at the personal branding side of the interview today. So I’m interested in your personal verb.

What is your verb?

The book recommendation of the week is VERBALIZE by Damon Suede

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The Rebel of the week is Edwin Downward

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

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How to Create the Perfect Character

Craft Cracking Characters with Damon Suede @LiveWireGuides #indieauthor #selfpublishing #IARTG #ASMRG #writingcommunity Share on X

Find out more about Damon on his:

Website: DamonSuede.com 

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/damon.suede.author 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DamonSuede

Episode Transcript

Sacha Black
Hello and welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast. Today I am with Damon suede. Damon grew up out and proud deep in the anus of right wing America and escaped as soon as it was legal. Beyond romance fiction, Damon has been writing for print stage and screen for almost three decades. He’s won some awards, but counts his blessings more often his amazing friends, his demented family, his beautiful husband, his loyal fans and his silly, stern, seductive Muse who keeps whispering in his ear year after year. Welcome.

Damon Suede
Well, thank you so much for having me on. I’m such a fan. I was so excited when you reached out because I read your books. I know you’re sort of articles. I’m always sort of following what you’re doing in the intertubes so it’s, it was an honor to be here.

Sacha Black
I just call when you messaged me back and said that I was like, but but you’re Damon… I’ve read all of your books and yeah, I have read both. Well, actually, I haven’t read activate because it’s more of a reference.

Damon Suede
Yeah, you’ve dipped into it. It would be weird to read it. Yeah.

Sacha Black
Yeah. Is it? Yeah, I mean, also it’s a weapon. It’s not a book. It’s a fucking weapon. It’s ginormous.

Damon Suede
It’s 2.2 pounds. That thing is a brick. That is my husband’s doing so this is probably part of the podcast, but as a sidebar. I originally was like, ebook only. It’s got 190,000 links in it, blah, blah, blah. And my husband was like, everybody wants reference books. And that was like it’s a resource… nobody wants. He was like, I promise they want in print. And it’s funny it is. I think it’s actually more popular in print than an ebook people. Yeah. all geared and flip through it and but yes, it’s 2.2 pounds. It’s quite hefty.

Sacha Black
That does not surprise me in the slightest because I actually went to buy it when it was still just an E book and I was furious with you. I was like, I want the paperbook. And then and then I think I heard somewhere that you were bringing the paperback. I was like, it’s fine. I forgive you. It’s fine. It’s fine.

Damon Suede
The funny thing is it actually that book started as a an appendix. It was originally 10. I was gonna do a 10,000 word small thesaurus of active transitive verbs in the back of verbalize. And so I started writing it. And then the 10,000 words became 11, and then 17. And then it was 25. And then I was like, Oh, I think this is a separate book, and it was 90 and then it was 120. It’s now 280,000 or 270,000 words long it and it grew. It just kind of grew on its own. And the more I dug into what, what were available in English as transitive verbs, when I started actually, I did these giant we can talk about all this later, but big word clouds talking about different genres and different types of character. And then once I dug in, I couldn’t stop it was like you don’t stop halfway through hell, you just go Virtual say when you’re going through hell keep going and going.

Sacha Black
Okay, well, we will dig into that more in a moment. But first of all, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your career and your journey of how you got to where you are today.

Damon Suede
Well, I started out I was a child. I was originally a child singer. When I was very, very young. I had a freak voice. I had a four and a half octave range as a little boy. So I was like a soprano Alto. And then by the time I got to puberty, I was like, a, like an alto, Barotenor, very, I had a very wide range. And so I love musicals, and I’m very, very extroverted. And I was a dancer and I had been a gymnast. And so I was doing all this musical theater as a kid. And then of course, that led to acting in classics because if you can speak quickly, articulately and you have received pronunciation, you can essentially do anything on stage. And so I did a lot of Shakespeare a lot of restoration that brought me to London. Right after college. My My degree is actually religion and philosophy but I gone to New York originally to be in theater, I wanted to work in the arts.

And I came to London I was at a I went to the London Academy, I had a blast. I had an agent, a manager, I worked in London British theatre Actually, I toured a lot of Shakespeare a lot of restoration because I’m very pale and I had a big ass. So I Well, I look good in tights, you see, so I can always scream, cry and get naked. And like, my last, my last professional acting gig on stage with Howard Barker’s, the possibility, where I literally screamed, cried got molested naked on stage with all your cameras. And while I was doing that, a producer came up to me and said, Hey, I hear you’re a writer. And I said, Well, yeah, I write like, you know, skits for charity benefits when I get asked because I’ve done a lot of comedy. And he said, Well, I have a play. I have a theater. And the playwright that I was going to be doing in the fall just dropped out. And I’ve got this gap. And I said, and? And he said, Well, do you want to write a play, which by the way, never happens? Like no one would ever do this? And he said, Well, I just think you’re really telling And I’d love to see what you do. Why don’t you write and direct something? And since we had no time we had three months I wrote I art directed a photoshoot wrote a play to fit the advertising and then the place sold out.

And I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a moment in British theatre when sort of the pub theatres in London had exploded like the king’s head and the Almeda sort of grown up at this point, Sam Mindy’s had just started Donmar and so there was a lot of interest in kind of edgy, funky, small theater, in sort of outskirts of London and a partially a sort of Edinburgh had expanded so much nationally, and internationally. And so I sort of fell into the deep theater scene in London. And then this show did very well and I did a bunch of other shows. And then I started I decided I wanted to write full time. And so as I was saying, before we started recording that I tried to immigrate, I wanted to move to the UK and because of tax reasons I couldn’t. So I moved back to New York, and I wound up working with a bunch of really fancy people in theater As an assistant as an assistant director as a properties designer at the public, I did all sorts of weird jobs. But my rule I’d never worked in retail, I’d never worked as a waiter. And I’d never worked in an office. And my rule was, I will do any job in the arts as long as I can have time to write. And so I started writing full time from that point forward, and I was 21 at this point. And so I came back and it’s sort of like not at all what you’re supposed to do as an artist, I guess. But I guess nothing is ever what you’re supposed to do.

So I came back, I started writing full time I was working with all these companies. I did a lot of Off Broadway did a bunch on Broadway. I did a bunch of doctoring. And then a play of mine won a bunch of awards, and it got bought by Tribeca by Bob De Niro’s company for film. And then I started doing a lot of film work, and I was working with Fox animated features, and I did, I started doing a lot of doctoring. And what I got known for was you could hand me any script, and I could make it sexier in about two weeks. And so I mean, they when they hire you like as a hired gun, you get a rep for certain things. I was really good at Sort of into like witty banter, I was really good at physical comedy, I was really good sort of sexy tension. And so I did a lot of doctoring. And I did that for a long time. And there got to be this moment in about 2009 2010, where I was like, I hate everything I’m doing. The plays that I’m writing are winning a lot of awards, but they’re never going to get produced, because that’s not really actually how plays work anymore. They haven’t worked that way since the 1940s. I’m doing a lot of film and television, which is not really what I want to be doing. It’s great money. And a friend of mine, and I were on the phone. She was working on an erotic romance. This was in 2010. And she dared me. We were we were working on a story of hers, she was having trouble. And so my husband’s out of town working on a murder case. And so I he’s a forensic investigator,

Sacha Black
I was gonna say, good clarification there!

Damon Suede
So he is a forensic investigator. He was working on a case. And so she said to me, she was like, if you don’t write a romance, you’re the laziest asshole I’ve ever met. And I said, Okay, I’ve never written them. Book and she said, You read all the time you love the genre, why don’t you try it? And she said the worst thing you can say. She said, I dare you. And so I wrote, and I live, she literally dared me. And I wrote my first book in six weeks. I sold it in two days, and it was number one for six months. And it changed my life. hothead was literally a watershed moment for me. And I didn’t know what at the time, but it actually ended up being something of a watershed for LGBTQ romance. Because when I came in, up to that moment, what they called quote, M/M romance was very niche. And I said, fuck that. I don’t want to be niche. I do not want to live in a ghetto. I did not come out when I was 14. To come out all over again. Like I write gay romance. I’m proud.

And so I was like, I want this to the New York Times numbers and so I promoted like a crazy person, but I promoted the way you do in film and television. I treated it like a package and so I had very, very big success with that book and then with the other books, and then that led me into romance. I call my my legit agent and I was like, Ron, I’m not gonna To be working film anymore, he was like, Fuck you. And I were my quarterly and he was like, Don’t fuck you. I love that. I was that like, you know, it, it. It was such a change for me to be in a community where everyone wanted to help you. Like in film, everybody wants to like murder you and rape your corpse and then eat whatever’s left when they’re done. And in romance. Everybody kept saying, How can I help? What can I do? Can I introduce you to someone? Do you need any help? Can I beta read? And at first I was suspicious. I was like, hire all these people. So nice. This is really weird. And what I realized is no, the entire genre is predicated on the idea that relationships are more powerful than solitude. So everyone wants to help you because they can’t write fast enough to satisfy their fans and so they need other talented writers. And so the journey has been really crazy because again, I started out as a loud kid with rhythm. And here I am right like 30 whatever. plus years later, I’m a professional romance writer. And it says though, you raised me in a vat to do this job because I was raised by a feminist lesbian in Houston, Texas 10 blocks from where RWA was founded. I’m now president elect of rW a. I’m so randomly here I am like living out my little destiny. But it’s it’s been an amazing journey. I would not trade places with anybody. I feel so blessed to get to do this job to get paid to make up nice stories for people love it. I

Sacha Black
I am actually speechless, because that doesn’t happen very often. Let me tell you. I love everything about your journey and your story. And there were lots of echoes. So when I was a kid, I also acted not I stopped when I was 16. So I didn’t take the lead and TV show, but I was bullied so badly and then can’t be stopped. But I also have an agent and I did a lot of voiceover work and yeah, so lots of echoes of you know, throwback memories, but yeah. Oh my god, I love your story. I love your journey. Yeah. Amazing. Um, okay. So I have read and loved verbalize and I now have activate. So Well, I know what I’m talking about listeners might not. So could you tell everyone a little bit about the concept behind it verbalize and how it can impact character creation and your writing in general?

Damon Suede
Sure, sure, sure. So this is there’s actually I’ve sort of teed it up a little because the way this started when I came into fiction, I came with this weird set of tools from showbiz. And I had been working in showbiz for so many decades that the idea that a character was a hair color and a job and a skin color was anathema because I can write as I always say, like I could write an erotic thriller for ADSL, but it winds up a web cartoon starring Pauly Shore as a talk poodle, you have no idea what you’re going to get when you turn in your script. So all you can do is give actors something to act, they have to have something to do on stage. And so when I would talk to people about their books, and I would say, well, what’s it about? And they would say, Well, she’s blonde and she has hazel eyes. And I’d say, Okay, well, that’s nice and all but what what happens? Like what is the story? And I found it really weird that every character guide I read, kind of talked as if it was doing a personal ad like it was. It was as if you pick these things from an identikit as if you were in a police station identifying a perpetrator or you’re like, Oh, you know, she’s a humpback lesbian with an eyepatch. And she’s a kleptomaniac who’s also a Zionist like it. It doesn’t that’s not a character, right? It’s just, yeah,

Sacha Black
It’s a checklist

Damon Suede
Yeah it’s a checklist and I call them impersonal ads. Because the thing is, there are many redheads, there are many, there are many women, there are many people with AI patches. There are many people that are Muslim, like how does that characterize somebody? It’s a it’s a bunch of it’s sort of a pig pile of traits. Well, when I first started writing in romance, what I did was what I did first script which was I gave my characters actions. And by that I mean I literally for every character I write, I give them a single transitive verb, an action that defines everything they are because, again, the example I use with this is Severus Snape. Because if I tell you that Severus Snape has black hair, and he wears a cloak with bat like wings, and he’s a teacher, and he’s, he’s a here arrow, and he’s a martyr, and he’s a lover, and he’s a coward, and all these things are true. How do you write that? Like, you can’t actually do that on on page and I guarantee Alan Rickman did not look at a script and say, ooh, black hair, I’ll take it. No, he looked at the actions he is an actor. That’s why directors call action on set because you want them to do something. What he does is he looks at what the character does.

And Aristotle in the poetics he says the character use the word he uses for characters ethos, and ethos does not mean what we mean when we say character. ethos doesn’t mean like a role or function. ethos literally means habitual action is that which one does habitually and so when you say like the character Severus Snape, you’re not actually saying tall, dark hair greasy, cowardly, heroic, whatever that’s horseshit. That’s all worthless. What you’re actually saying is he does something that is Snape like right? And so for me, I believe the action of Severus Snape is Vex what Severus Snape does is he vexes people he bets as Harry effects as Dumbledore effects as Voldemort effects the Slytherin effects as Griffin door he Beck’s is Lily he acts as James he acts as indexes, indexes, and for people who disagree and they’re like, Oh no, he does all these other things. No, what he does he vexes and in the course of vexing, he has tactics that change as REactions to the things around him right. Here’s the ultimate proof. The word Snape literally means Vex, literally the synonym of Snape is Vex and his name means Vex you severely. And I’m not saying that JK Rowling agrees with me, but I’m telling you that the idea of Snape is tied up in vexation in the same way that Valmont is tied up in ruin. I believe that the Vicount Valmont, Les Liaisons dangereuses is ruin, I believe Celie Harris in The Color Purple is question.

And so I start from this idea that when you verbalize a character when you put a character on the page, what you’re actually doing is not piling up a bunch of adjectives that’s kind of worthless. What you do is you give them something to do, because once they are in action, there’s automatically conflict. There’s automatically emotion, there’s automatically drama. And then based on that one action in different scenes, I have what I call tactics and those are synonyms of the primary action. So for example, Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice her act No, I should say I should caveat here caveat. So I say Severus Snape is vex but let’s say Sacha that you wanted to write Severus Snape and you’re like no, I think that Severus Snape is seduce. Every time I see several Snape I want to make wet love to him. Maybe that is the way you imagined cyberspace. Great. You’re a writer word choices how we work All of us can have our own actions. That’s why we’re writers. It’s part of our voice. And so for me if I’m writing the character, I think Vex is how I see and how I would verbalize him. You might have it different. So there’s no like sort of ultimate truth the proud characters, although things get pretty explicit. So for example, in Lizzy written Lizzy Bennet’s case, if you read Pride and Prejudice, the word the action that is given to Lizzy over and over again, is provoke on so many levels throughout that novel Lizzy is always provoking everyone. Now in the course of provoking she does other things. She mocks, she godes, she spurs she ridicules, she’s scorns, she does all these other things. They are synonyms of her core action, which is to provoke. And so in each scene, she has a different tactic, but her arc is one a provocation. And so when I want to characterize someone, I have their action and then these sub actions these tactics are reactions to other characters. And by doing that, I then kind of get facets out of the character and dimension And I always know what they’re doing in a scene. And because the verbs themselves are words that you choose, your voice is the only thing that is required to motivate them. Because it’s all driven by their energy and what they make happen on the page, and how other characters react because of course, every character has an action, and every action produces a REaction. Does that make sense?

Sacha Black
It does. So, excuse me, let’s look at that. So in terms of the character arc, then they are obviously starting with their verb, and the body meant of that. So what happens at the end?

Damon Suede
So here’s the thing, what am I net, you’ll notice that when I talk about it, I always say action and tactic. Both of those are verbs. So they start with their core verb, which is their action, but then their secondary verbs are their tactics. So if you start with this core action, that action never changes. If you write a book with 30 titles, you write to series with 30 books in the series. That action will remain for that character. All the way through the series because the minute you change the action of a character, they stop acting like themselves. That’s why when you’re reading a series and you think like, oh, that character is not the same character it was. That’s because the action has changed, right? And so over the course of say one book, if you were writing a book, and you want to have you wanted to set up a character, you start with a transitive verb, an action, this character will embody for the entire book, their action is not going to change. They may change, but the things that will change are not their core action, but their secondary tactics. Does that make sense? And so over the course of the story, the way they react to other people will alter but at the end of Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy Bennet is still provoking. Severus Snape is so to Vex like Vex is what he is so much so that after he is dead, his tears Vex people. Vexation in human form. And so it’s not that like Oh, he’s dead now he’ll stop vexting people know his corpse vexes people, like everything he is is vexatious, and so that that friction that he produces by vexing people persists. And if he came back in a different book, he would still be vexing. He is vexing on every page of those seven novels, and everything around him is defined by his vexatious nature right? And so as you’re building the example I always use is Streetcar Named Desire. Do you know that play street car?

Sacha Black
A little bit. Stella? Isn’t the main character I think no,

Damon Suede
Stella? No. You’re thinking Blanche is the main. Yeah, it’s the main character is Blanche DuBois. I believe her action is to conceal, right? She always veils and drapes and costumes and makeup she’s always covering and hiding things right. But Stanley who’s her direct opposite penetrates, he breaks and bellows and thrusts and shatters. He’s always ripping and tearing and pushing everything penetrate, penetrate, penetrate, right and she’s conceal conceal. What’s the most horrible penetrate in the world? Rape and if into the story. And the last scene, we see Stanley attacking her. He rapes her. That is his tactic and that scene, the last time that we see Blanche DuBois she’s still concealed, but her tactic is to imprison, and she imprisoned herself in a lunatic asylum depending on the kindness of strangers. And so the unpacking of concealing and penetrate reach their pinnacle their climax in rape in prison. Does that make sense? And so by the same token, the word like the word climax in Greek literally means ladder. And so you can think of the action as the ladder they’re climbing. And each of the tactics as a rung leading to the top of that ladder, do you know what I mean? It gets them where they’re going. And so those become the steps that they take scene by scene as they march inexorably towards the ending, whatever the genre, right, because if it’s a romance, the genre is going to end with hope. If it’s horror, it’s going to end with despair. If it’s a Western, it’s going to end with civilization. And those things are driven by all those tactics. pushing forward.

Sacha Black
What I really like about this concept is that it not only gives you characterization, but it also gives you plot. Yeah. Because your characters, , if they are embodying their verb, then it also in a way gives you the outcome, because they have to still be that thing at the end.

Damon Suede
That’s right.

Sacha Black
Yeah, I love I love this so much funny.

Damon Suede
This started the way this whole journey started. I secretly believed everyone wrote this way. When I first came into fiction. I thought everyone was doing this and just not talking about it. So I thought it was like a secret club. And we all knew but we were wink wink, nudge nudge ignoring it. And so I was on Kristen Higgins and Fairer, Shawn and I were teaching a three way character class and each of us took 20 minutes, and so Fairer when Kristen went then Fairer when and then I went, and at the end, I’m doing my little bit and I’m like, 20 minutes and I’m like bladdy, bladdy, blah. verbalize, blah, blah, blah, action tactics, blah, blah, blah, trajectory. And Kristen at the end was like, What the fuck was that? I was like, everybody works this way. What are you talking about? And this room, it’s like, we’re packed standing room only. It’s like 400 people in a room that can hold 200. And people are agod. And I was like, you all do this? What are you talking about? And they were like, we’ve never heard this before. And I was like, it’s actions. You’re you all right this way. And they were like, they were like, maybe we do, but we’ve never thought of it that way. The truth is I think all writers work this way. They just don’t do it consciously. And so it’s not that I think like all this is the one true way it’s that I think it is the way and we will reach it in different directions. And so like, everyone uses words, that’s what words are. In fact, Fitzgerald even says like, the art of writing is always in the verbs. The verbs. That’s why we say the word verbalize when you verbalize something. It’s because verbs are the core of language. And so why wouldn’t you go to that?

I always think of myself like what I’m teaching is like grammar punk. Like a lot of people are like, I hate grammar, grammar. sucks and I’m like, well when you’re 12 grammar sucks because you want to like cry and masturbate but like grammar is actually how you make money and grammar is actually how you make a better book and grammar is how you build a fan base and grammar is how you sell things. Here’s the cool thing once you verbalize your characters once you know what their actions and tactics are, that’s the way you sell the story too. That’s how you tell the story. That’s how you sell the story. Because newsflash, what is marketing language, active transitive verbs. If you go to a marketing copywriting class, they will tell you the language to focus on it’s not an adjective, it’s verbs. The verbs are where the cell is in your book. And when you’re pitching to an agent, they don’t want to know what color their hair is. They want to know what happens. They want to know what they do. And so by focusing on actions it as you say, like it’s character and plot, I secretly don’t think there’s any difference between character and plot they’re lenses that allow people to consider it. And so when people say like, I’m a character writer, I’m a plot writer. I’m like, okay, like you wear your underpants on the outside or you wear your like your glasses on your feet. Who cares? As long as you get words on the page and someone pays you to do it, you’re a writer. And so like, whatever the process is, it gets you there. But spoiler alert, you’re gonna get to verbs eventually. Because unless there is a verb, nothing happens on the page. And so why not start why not plug into the source, right? Like when I go right to the power?

Sacha Black
I completely agree, I don’t think there’s a difference either, because story arc is character arc. So it is just a nonsense like, you know, the plotting pantsing argument, who cares? As long as you get to the end.

Damon Suede
I always tell my students the difference between plotting and pantsing is when you do it, because a plotter is someone who sits down and they’re like, here’s what I’m gonna do. And the pants are someone’s like you. You’re not the boss of me. But then they write a big, ugly outline, they call their rough draft, and then they have to spend a million years revising it. It’s still gonna have an outline, because if you’re writing a romance, again, spoiler alert, it ends happily. Yeah, it’s a plot. Like it’s not that you don’t plot it’s really When you plot and if you like plotters are people who do it early. And Panthers are people who do it late. And the truth is we all pants too, because you can’t just follow a list. The stories aren’t cookie cutter, they’re not sort of widgets. But by the same token, you cannot drive in a hotwire car with no headlights and no gas and not go off cliffs occasionally. So you, you have to have both, I mean, you have to have plotting and pantsing

Sacha Black
Yeah, and I’ve I don’t know what your process is. But I found that my stories are very sentient, and they all have different personalities, and none of them necessarily follow the same method. And I swear this is probably because of the verbs of the characters, but some have very stroppy and what you know, will only give pieces to me and so they get written all over the fucking place, and then I have to piece them together at the end. And then others are incredibly, you know, straight laced, and come out logically, inherently chronologically, you know, and they can even be plotted it but you know, whatever. Yeah. So I think talk to you Enhancing and I was talking about this with Holly who has been on the podcast as well as she she also thinks that it’s a null conversation because different stories require different levels of plotting pantsing or you know, free writing or whatever. And okay, excuse me. So in your book, you also talk about you go down another level in terms of these verbs and you talk about how they are naturally create movement. And there are different types of movement direction. Yeah, sir, attached to these verbs. So, can you explain what you mean by that and how it impacts both sentences and character creation.

Damon Suede
Okay, so the way this the way to think of it is I it’s funny, I was down in Florida, and I was talking to Carol Carson, he writes category romance, and she had read the book and take some classes with me and she said, You know, I feel like I’ve been playing with dolls. And now I’m looking through the matrix. She said, I’m not picking up cliches stereotypes from other people in writing those. a verb has no race. a verb has no gender. a verb has an orientation. a verb has no politics. It is, in a way. It’s like catching lightning in a bottle, right? And so effectively what you’re doing when you’re verbalizing a story is you’re tracing where the energy goes, right? Well, the thing is, energy moves. There’s no such thing. I mean, even Static Energy is static, because it hasn’t been released into the environment, right? Even if it’s potential, the energy is waiting to be made kinetic. And so if it’s going to move, how it’s going to move, and when I was trying to, I was actually trying to figure out how to, how to verbalize how to vocalize the way I think about this. And I thought back again to shmackting of how you actually operate in space. And I was thinking what is the simplest way to explain to people who might be afraid of grammar or might be afraid of parts of speech, what a verb does, and so I broke it down in the most basic way I used Empedocles, actually, because I’m a classics nerd. Empedocles, whose the sort of route of the Aristotelian doctrine of the four elements, etc, etc. So this is pre Socratic Greek philosophy, which you never need to read about. But you can talk to me about anytime you want to at a bar. And so the idea is that effectively, there are four qualities and from these four qualities, we get the four elements. That’s a whole that’s another podcast we’ll do later when we’re drunk on whiskey.

Sacha Black
Gin darling, gin.

Damon Suede
I’m whiskey you’ll be gin great. I used to drink gin, I had a bad experience with gin when I was 14, no more.

Sacha Black
Ah, so also do tequila though. Happy to do tequila

Damon Suede
Yes please. sipping tequila. Okay, so next time I’m in London. So if you think about it this way, if you are a neutral character existing in space, and you do something, you have to ask yourself, Well, how am I, not how am I the doll or the the mannequin operating? But more important more? How do I flow in the space? And so I thought, okay, if I am the actor where does the energy go? And so I thought, here’s the simple Way to divide it, some energy moves away from us, some energy moves towards us. And that is push and pull. So there are times where we push forward into the world. And there are times we pull the world towards us, those are two basic directions right outward and inward. And this is again from emphatically is the idea that some energy moves out into the universe. And some energy moves in towards the operatives, the actant right, the person doing the thing. But then there are some things that happen outside of us that we don’t actually have a connection to directly, but they happen in the world and we observe them and those things can either be put together they can be joined, or they can be separated, they can be split apart. And the reason I started trying to divide the words this way is that when you look at a verb and look, I’ll give you an example.

The verb seduce, because seduce is pretty clear. If I say someone seduce someone you have a sense of what that is. Well, what is seduction actually energetically, right? And I don’t mean in a woowoo way. I mean, just literally, what are you doing when you seduce someone? Is it a push thing? Are you pushing towards them? Well, no What you’re trying to do is make them come closer to you. It’s a pole verb, do you see what I mean? And so many at core, seduce is a pole action, and not every action is clear. Like for example, I believe that teaching or educating is actually a join verb. Not because yes, you may push the thoughts from you out into the world. But what teaching actually does is it builds communities it brings things together outside of yourself. And so teach, educate mentor edify those are all join verbs in the same way that when you mutilate something, you are splitting it you’re tearing it apart, so anything that involves murder, torture, death, slaughter, annihilate, obliterate explode, all of these things are split verbs because what they do is they take something that is whole and they separate it. But then what about confusion? confusion is also a split verb, it confused is also a split verb, because what it does is, it muddies the connection between people And the world around them. It divides communities in the same way that join verbs create communities. Does that make sense? And what I discovered was and this actually happened, I started doing these word clouds as I was building act. So I wrote verbalize first. And then everyone kept saying do with the thesaurus through a thesaurus.

So I wrote Activate this big brick you were talking about. And when I was doing it, I thought, well, I don’t want to have just a big pig pile of alphabetical verbs. Because what are people going to do with that? First off, every because when I’m doing chemistry, the way you build chemistry between characters, you give them antonyms. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You have two lovers and you want them to love each other. You have one hide, and you have one seek or you have one pursue and you have one escape. And so those things create friction, automatically. All you have to do is have those actions. And then by extension, there’s songs tactics, work antonymically, but so if I’m going to do that, I had to start thinking about, well, what makes an antonym what creates a synonym? And so this is why I call it like grammar punk. I had to like get down in the greasy underbelly of the language. And so I started looking sounds so ridiculous. I started looking at the etymology of words. I started I’m looking at like, the indo European roots of some of these verbs like where they came from. But I also started looking at genre.

So I started building world word clouds because I wanted, as I said, not just alphabetical, I wanted to also divide the verbs based on genre, because there’s certain actions and tactics that are specific. And they don’t only occur in these genres, but they’re very, very native to it. So for example, when I teach a romance group, if I’m teaching an RWA chapter and I talk about romance heroes, there was one action that comes up over and over again for heroes. It’s uncanny actually, the first time I did like an eight day masterclass on characterization. I’m, like, 150 people, we’re out in New Jersey, I’m teaching this big ballroom, and I said, Okay, who’s got an action for their hero, and everybody raises their hand and I’m like, Okay, how many of you have the action protect, and 65% of the room had their hand up 65% of the romance authors in that room saw protect as the or action for heroes, right? In the same way for for the sort of love interest of that hero. So whether you’re doing Hero, Hero, heroine, heroine, hero, heroine, whatever the gender orientation combo, protect is a core also defy is another core action of romance. Because a lot of romance is about bringing down power structures, right.

And so what I started doing to figure out how this work is I did word clouds genres, I would go in, and I would pick, say, the 50 most popular genre novels in one area. So like, all thrillers, or all Gothic or all westerns, and I started looking at what the actions were the verbs in their blurbs in their opening chapters. And as I compiled all those, I started seeing trends. And so I built these big word clouds. I just literally took all the verbs that occurred and I built word clouds. And you could see, oh, these 15 verbs come up all the time and Regency romance when you’re writing a Regency. These are the verbs that everyone’s going to look at for actions and tactics. And so as I did that, I started digging, and then I was doing a class for RWA on tropes, and I started doing I just actually, I’ve got to write this book. I haven’t had time. But I did a whole thing with tropes, where I looked at like secret baby books, or friends to lovers books, or two dogs, one bone or the discovery of the body. Like they’re these tropes that occur in different places in fiction, and the actions and tactics shift over time, you can actually see the difference between say, a 1990s who done it, a 1960s who done it, and a 1930s who done it, the actions change. And so when you say like, the verbs make it happen 100% because what’s actually happening is when the readers go shopping, they’re not going and looking for redhead or, or a limp or or golden retriever. What they’re looking for is the actions. They see words like avenge or charm or court, or penetrate or arouse, and they know what the story is going to be about. Because the action tells you what the emotion is verb shapes, vibe, and that’s true for marketing copy. That’s true for the writing of the book. It’s true for everything. Because what do we want to know? What is it kids say to you when they want to hear a story? Tell me what happens. Tell me what happens. That’s a verb. Does that make sense?

Sacha Black
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m having some personal revelations over here.

Damon Suede
Well tell you, you know, you have a book on villains. This is one of my favorite books on villains actually. And I was thinking about this because I had a woman who wrote Gothic romance. And she said, Would you mind if I did a blog post? And I said, No, not at all. She did an entire blog post that is just about the actions the standard actions of Gothic heroes and how they change over time. Over time as the Gothic evolves from like traditional Gothic to Neo Gothic in the 1960s. to modern like, quote, domestic thrillers, what are the actions of the heroes do and that really made me think about your villain book? I was like, what are we talking about? When we talk about archetypes? we’re actually talking about what they do.

Sacha Black
Absolutely. And so one of the things that I think things really interesting is how you say that, that you can watch the verbs change. And I think that’s so true because I’ve been reading Young Adult since I was a young adult, which was quite some time ago now. But, and I’ve seen a change in the heroes of that genre. And we are I think we’re just about moving into something else now. But we’ve just come through this extremely large boom of very defiant and this is, this is because you use the word defy, and I was like, Oh my god, this is what every young, strong young adult female protagonists has been for like the last half a decade, if not a decade. And I was like, Oh, shit, I feel so called out, like, you know, the characters. And then I was like, Oh, I think I also might write romance. Like my, my young adult has, it’s a it’s really just a romance.

Damon Suede
Feelings. It should have feelings. Yeah, that’s a good, that’s wonderful.

Sacha Black
Um, yeah, I love this so much. I’m like, my brain cannot keep up because I’m just I’m thinking all of the thoughts and and I just, yeah, I’ve just this is an amazing I need to when I transcribe this I’m going to be writing so many notes.

Damon Suede
Okay, so I’m gonna throw another one out. I’m gonna throw I’m gonna throw an anecdote out, but it’s, hopefully we’ll make some sense. So I was doing an interview for CBS Sunday morning with Faith Sally. And she said something crazy to me. She said, Isn’t daymond suede a character? And I said, Oh, absolutely. And she said, Well, I mean, you’re in public, and you have people watching you and you do stuff on camera all the time and on radio, and she said, What’s your action? And I literally staggered me like I was I was, my brain blew up. I was like, Oh my God. I knew instantly. I know what my action is. My action is to energize everything daymond suede does is energized and then I looked at my tactics and I was like, What do I do? I stimulate, I educate, I activate I all of those things are part the tactics. They’re the synonymous tactics of energize. And so now when I’m going to a conference, what I asked myself is, how will this energize people? Or if I’m buying a bookmark, I think is that the energizing choice? If I’m picking out clothes, I’m like, which is the energized version? And so in a weird way, if you learn to verbalize yourself, if you come up with your own action, your own tactics, your own trajectory, you can accomplish anything.

It’s like branding, with grammar, because all you’re doing is activating your own desire because aren’t we characters? Yes. Don’t we have goals motivations in complex? Yes. And so once you start thinking about what am I doing, not what am I being but what is the thing I must do to make something happen? And so then again, it becomes this sort of, I don’t know like a it’s a it’s a really wonderful mirror to look at yourself because you start thinking, what is the thing I do every day? That is in my nature, and I always tell people like when I’m doing I’m teaching a marketer. In class, I always say the most annoying thing about you is your superpower. Because if you well think about it, because if you could control it, you would stop it. So the thing that you so for me is energy, like my energy is so off the hook, it drives people insane. And so as I’ve learned to harness as I’ve gotten older, that is my fucking superpower. And so energize is not just something I do, it’s what I am. And so whenever I’m talking to authors, I’m like, What is the most annoying thing about you? Because whatever that is, whenever your kids are like, Oh, my God, or your, your partner is like, could you have to? The answer is yes, you do, because that is who you are. And then if we’re going to write the narrative, as a protagonist in your own narrative, you have to figure out how to harness that demon because that thing wants to be loose, and you’ve got to find a way to use it on behalf of you. So that like the magic is actually working magic for you, not against you. Right.

Sacha Black
So this is a perfect segue because my next question was about personal branding. And the fact that I think I’ve heard you mentioned this somewhere before that, in fact, it might have been on Joanna’s podcast, but that each of us has a verb. And, and so I’ve been I spent a long time thinking about what did you get? What was it? Well, ironically, I think it has to probably be rebel. Because it’s that is the thing about myself, that annoys me the most, because I will, if I try to implement any rule or set a deadline or make, you know, I will immediately have to do the opposite of that thing. And, you know, I was told not to cut my hair off, so I cut two feet off. Yeah. I i. So I have a very distinct memory at work, when I used to be in a day job, and they told me I didn’t dress corporately enough. So I went to work the next day in Converse trainers and leggings and I never stopped going to work in that.

Damon Suede
So no, can I ask you a question? Yeah, because rebel is an intransitive verb right? You can’t rebel. Something you rebel against, right? It’s a phrasal it takes a preposition. So the question is, do you resist? Do you challenge? Do you defy? Do you agitate? Do you alarm? What’s the thing that you do directly to them? Are you shocking them? Are you ready? I think so maybe? And which

Sacha Black
would make sense because that’s probably what I write as well, I think. So I write as a young adult, predominantly, although I am now moving into an adult fantasy, but yeah, I think it would be it’s also it’s the name of the podcast, and I didn’t really ever know. It was actually somebody else who identified that kind of branding. And I think, and this is the epiphany that you’re giving me is that if you embody that thing, it is the thing that you do the most. So it’s sort of just it was there so I think it probably is defy because

Damon Suede
it’s your superpower. That is your superpower.

Sacha Black
Yeah, it’s also my Achilles heel and

Damon Suede
But then think about it this way. Like I always say, if you know what your action is, then you go, you literally have activate, you can look it up, go and look up that action and look at all the synonyms because those synonyms are going to tell you what your options are in different situations. Because if defy is your action, look at all the things you have. I mean, you have things like debunk, confront, challenge, attack, agitate, battle, needle, vex, I mean, these are all things that you do, but then on top of it, who are the people that you’re going to be most attracted to? Then look at your antonyms and those are gonna be people that ameliorate, pacify, mend, heal, right? Those are the things you’ll be drawn to because that is the opposite of an opposites attract, right? And so we’re actions speak louder than words you’re going to find the things both that make you powerful, and the things that you need that you can’t do, right? Because I’m great at energizing. I am terrible at relaxing people. I’m terrible at calming people down. That does not work for me.

Sacha Black
This is so fascinating because So my Myers Briggs is an E N TJ and if you look at the, the description of one of these, it is a challenging, blunt, abrupt, you know, confrontational person. I’m like, Oh, fuck, this really is me. I feel so called out. I, you know,

Damon Suede
It’s good to know those things, right? You notice things, and I, for the record, I’m an ENFP. And I’m such an ENFP, that when I meet MBTI people, they’re like, oh, ENFP is when I, my husband and I were talking about this, you know, one of the things they have people do in the government is they do testing like personality testing. And he and I said to him, I was like, Oh, well, you’re obviously an ISTJ. And he’s like, how did you know that? And I said, That’s funny. It is the diametric opposite. Oh, yeah. Yeah. diametrically opposed. And so it’s, it’s, it’s not that and you know, I always say when it comes to sort of verbs when it comes to anything, it’s not that I’m saying like, you’re born under this line, and this line is your destiny. That’s something else. But what it does is it gives you a clear sense of where you are now, that right now in my life, energize is the thing that I do the thing that I am right. And so, over time, the way I react, right, my tactics are going to change. So it’s not that I’m caged by energize. It’s almost like a path. And this goes back to your question right about building the arc. It’s not that, oh, the character is limited, because we’re picking this one, this one action and this action is going to cage them. No, it’s not a cage. It’s a trellis. It’s like something that the roses grow on. And so you’re giving the character something to fill in with blossoms and thorns, right? And that’s true for us too. Because Listen, being if you are a defy, defy is incredibly powerful and revolutionary, and rebellious and all those things. But it’s also necessary for change because if there is no no one to defy, nothing ever alters nothing has ever moved forward. And so it’s it’s learning how to kind of surf the energy that is endemic to you, that’s native to you.

Sacha Black
Ah, I just thought… I’m just I’m always breathless here. So, the thing that I picked up is so I Oh, god, this is so personal but so when I was in the day job, psychologically, I was almost better off because I was I was writing and being defiant against, you know, the man and the corporation and having left I’ve not lost any of my creativity or my motivation, but I it is harder for me to focus almost because there is nothing to rebel against other than myself and this Oh, fuck, I’m just my head is exploding.

Damon Suede
Your question is, so Like if you know, I mean, the thing with defiance is defiance is inherently aggressive. And you need a recipient. I mean, this is something else I talked about in verbal I mean, I talked about this in all the books but is the idea that if you have a transitive verb, if you’re using a transitive verb, what makes it transitive is it takes an object grammatically, right? So subject, verb object, so I drink the water drink is transitive, not I drink like I am a drunk, that’s a state of being, but I drink the water is an action, I’m doing something to something. And so if you defy, you can’t just stand in the middle of a room and defy this is actually what happens to a lot of crappy writing is people say, Oh, my character broods and I say, how do you brewed something? I mean, unless you’re a chicken and you’re sitting on it, how do you actually brewed as like a sexy dude in a why a novel? And the answer is you can’t, it’s intransitive. And so you’re just being a mood. And that’s a boring character because they never interact with the world. And so for you, you’re never going to be bored because you’ll always find something to fight just like I will always find something to energize The thing is, I’m not going to try to energize people who are already energized. What’s the fun in that? I’m gonna go find the Find the quiet people, the still places and then run electricity through. That’s what I always want to do blow shit up.

Sacha Black
Yeah. Yeah, and I always I’m not trying to pick a fight or anything. I just want to do the thing you don’t want me to do? Yes. Oh my goodness me I am I needed a gin right now. Wow I feel like I’m just I have not been a great podcast host right now.

Damon Suede
Wonderful podcast, I feel very welcomed.

Sacha Black
Okay, I’m gonna I’m going to come back to my questions because my brain is racing at 10,000 miles per hour. Um, what mistakes Do you see authors making with verbs?

Damon Suede
Um, there’s actually I’ll tell you there there are a couple of really key ones but the biggest one, the one that I see more than anything else is but the big one is negatives. When I’m teaching baby writers, especially writers that have just started or writers that have like, read a bunch of books, and they want to try, or they watch some television, they have an idea for whatever. The thing that they do is they say things I’ll say, what does your character do? And they’ll say, they avoid, or they ignore, or they neglect, or they forget, the problem with a character that avoids for an entire book is that they can only react to other people, they don’t do anything. In the same way that if you just ignore things for whole book, like, what are you actually, and it’s not that you can’t use those actions, it’s that you have to be incredibly skilled and deft to make it specific enough for someone to give a shit because nobody wants to watch an entire book about a character who ignores everything around them, right, or avoids or escapes or whatever.

And so like if you look at a character like Emma, and one of her tactics in in Jane Austen’s novel, is to ignore things or to disregard things right? That is a negative tactic, but her actual action is very positive her action is to claim. And that’s what the claim instance of live, but it’s also claiming a sense of pursue. And it’s also claim instance of steel. And so she’s actually quite active. But the impulse like a baby writer would take that character and they would say, No, no, what she does is she ignores and so I would always caution writers against looking at negative actions, because we live in a culture that sees passivity as a virtue. It’s why passive voice creeps into so much writing, because what they’ll say is, mistakes were made, instead of he made mistakes, right? And so because of that urge towards passivity, we are very apt and In television does this to us too. We are apt to allow characters to Bob along passively affected by everything else without doing anything. And so my baseline what I always say is do something to something, what is the thing you’re doing? What is the thing or the person you’re doing it to and if your interest Or like women’s fiction or YA or romance where it’s all about the people in the personalities, make sure the object of that sentence is another person. Because if they’re only doing things two things, you wind up with what they used to call boys genres, right? Where you blow shit up and things fall down and the shirt comes off. Those kind of objectifying genres love characters that do things to things. But if you’re in a personal genre that loves the inside the inner landscape of emotion, always look for your object to be a person and don’t avoid them get wrapped up in their face, man, figure out the thing you’re going to do that’s going to get you where you’re going, whatever your objective is for the whole book. Do you see what I mean?

Sacha Black
Yeah, absolutely. So I do developmental editing. And I often see a lot of very passive heroes, and it’s usually because they’re not taking action upon things. They are either letting things happen to them or not. So I always think there’s this difficulty where writers work As a character to be meek at the start, and then you know grow into their leadership and their heroism, but the problem is you even when you have a protagonist who is shy, retiring, whatever, they still need to be driving the plot forward and taking action. And I think, yeah, so that makes an awful lot of sense to me.

Damon Suede
It’s um, it’s funny. That’s actually I think some of that comes from Chris burglars misreading of Joseph Campbell. It’s one of my big beefs with Vogler is writers journey and the idea of the quote unquote, heroic monomyth. Like the, you know, the hero’s journey as a plotting model is that a it’s not Joseph Campbell and a lot of it’s kind of folderol, but on top of it, it is based in the idea that a character is essentially interchangeable, that one character could be moved into any story. And so it doesn’t matter whether you’re Harry Potter, or you’re Frodo or your Katniss Everdeen, you could really be anybody in any novel and just move grunt. That’s manifestly bullshit. Because if you put Katniss Everdeen in the Harry Potter series, that series would be over in chapter two, she just kill everybody. By the same token, if you stuck Harry Potter in the Hunger Games, mofo would be dead mofo would be dead instantly. The point is, you cannot move them because their actions are intrinsic to the story. And so this idea that there’s this interchangeable like, now I’m an orphan, now I’m a martyr now I’m a wanderer horse shit. Nobody, people are not cookie cutter interchangeable chess pieces, right? We’re not it’s not a, it’s not inert blobs like gingerbread people. And so whenever people do that sort of routine, I always think to myself, like, well, you’re going to write a totally forgettable book that will read because there’s so blank, even Bella Swan, one of the most neutral characters ever. People invested so deeply because she was always acting. She took action. She was a very passive character, but she was active in her passivity. That also had a bunch of other things going for it sort of like Zeitgeist do things going on board, but those books are active, whatever else you say about the quality of the writing of the world building and all the rest of it. There is action on every page. And I think that’s what drives them. When people say it’s not good writing, but it’s a good story. What they’re talking about is the action. Always

Sacha Black
Out of selfish curiosity. What is Katniss is verb.

Damon Suede
Oh, that’s easy. That’s hunt. Okay, honey. I actually I’ll go step further. You want it? So I was talking about antonyms? Right? We’re talking about how antonyms work. So Katniss is absolutely hunt. She hunts in every moment of every scene about series, she’s always hunting. But if you look at the two love interest right at Peta, and it Gail, I knew, unlike page 40, who she was going to end up with at the end of the trilogy, and the reason is Gail is consumed. What he does is burn everything around him. He devours everything around him. And what I thought was, Oh, yeah, it’s hard to be with the one who eats you up. One you’re gonna stay with is the one who feeds you and that, of course, is Peta’s, action, actually peace. In every scene feeds her. And so you look at feed consume feed hunt is an opposition that is an antonymic relationship. Fi consume hunt is an antagonistic relationship, feed, consume and antonymic relationship. That’s why it’s such a perfectly balanced love triangle, because each of them has an antonym in the other person. And so there’s tons of friction between them, which makes for a really good storytelling, right? It makes really good. I don’t know, I that’s one of my things that I love. It’s one of my things that I love is to take a book that I love and figure out why, like, figure out how it works. And so this is a game that Geoffrey and I play all the time of read a book, we watch a movie where I was like, Okay, what are the actions? really fun to do? Because it’s just verbs, right? Just makes writing better.

Sacha Black
Oh, yeah. I have an obsession for deconstructing books down to a forensic level. And I, I commit sacrilege and underline things in all of the books that I read and then I take them all at the end and look at them and Look at the patterns, and then look at how they’ve, you know, so one author might be very good at characterization or another author might be exceptional at description. And then I’ll go down to the sentence level and look at the patterns and look at how they are creating the, you know, Lauren Oliver, for example is very good at description. And so I deconstructed how she she describes and yeah, I just yeah, I fully geek at this level too.

Damon Suede
But the thing is, is I think it makes us better writers, but I think it also makes the genres better. I think the, you know, the genres aren’t static, they’re always evolving. I’m always weirded out. When I talk to people. They say, Oh, I don’t read. I don’t I don’t read. How do you change like, how do you grow? Because everything is shifting, or contemporary romance with a navy seal in 2019 is a different book than it would have been 2009 or 1999 or 1959. Those are all different. And so the idea that you just sort of, you just say like, Oh, she’s She works on a ranch, she’s, you know, she’s a ranch hand and any ranch and at any time no, because ranches in the 1960s different ranches, the 1980s are different than ranches in 2010. And so like Martha Graham, I always quote this, Martha Graham have used this quote, she said, No artist is ahead of their time, the artist is the time. That’s what art is. Art is always a snapshot of where you are in space and time how your consciousness interacts, your heart interacts with the world around you. And I think that’s why people read as they want our voices, kind of giving them a door into a world that they’re never going to inhabit because we’re not going to get to slay dragons. And we all don’t get to go to Mordor and throw the ring into Mount Doom. And we don’t all get to hunt down people in the Hunger Games, but we can read about it, we can feel it and that’s why again, I always go back to the actions because what we want is the doing we want to do stuff.

Sacha Black
It’s so funny that you say that I literally heard I was listening to writing excuses today, which is another… The were talking about how they are all okay with their, you know, their early books because they were snapshots in time of who they were as an artist at that point. And so I think that Yeah, I completely agree. And I think I think it’s also very, very important to read because, you know, I can, I know just from sticking with my young adult genre that it’s now okay to have sex in young adult books. It was not okay to have sex in a young adult book, you know, 5-10 years ago. Now. I mean, Jesus, you need to look at Sarah J mass. It’s basically like, teen porn, you know, um,

Damon Suede
But the thing is that the ecosystem is always shifting. And if you don’t, the thing is if you don’t evolve, you will die. Like if you if you dig, if you walk in the same path over and over again, you’re gonna dig a grave with your feet, and you might as well just get in the dirt and pull it over you and your career can never go anywhere.

Sacha Black
Oh, I completely agree. I it’s gone out of my head now but my dad says something along those lines of if you’re not moving, you’re dying or something. Okay sentence level at any quick tips or tricks to create better characters with these verbs?

Damon Suede
Yes, absolutely. So on a sentence level, literally just writing craft the simplest thing in the world. I have a friend who wrote a beautiful way. It was a wild fantasy. bordering on steampunk, like, bordering on Gaslight fantasy, beautiful world building beautiful everything and I realized I was like, there’s something with this book, it just bugged me. And I realized that on every page is was were has, everything was a passive verb. Everything was a verb that was a state of being. So at the simplest level, if you go through any page of your manuscripts look for every time you’re telling someone, either is something was something or a group of people were something or they have something. These are all states of being their moods. Right. And so the minute you can replace that with them doing something actively transitively your story comes to life in a different way. Even if it’s a feeling, even if it’s something related to the world building or the scene setting or the POV, by activating the language, literally activating the language, you bring your characters to life in a different way. Because then every sentence is actually characterizing your people. It’s actually driving the narrative instead of relying on sort of nouns and adjectives, which are kind of sexy, but concrete like they’re just lie. They’re like bricks.

Sacha Black
Amazing. Okay, this is the last official question. always my favorite question, for obvious reasons given this conversation, but this is The Rebel Author Podcast. So tell me about a time you unleash your inner rebel. I can’t even get to the end of that sentence anymore without laughing.

Damon Suede
I can’t really imagine a time that I wasn’t doing that. I mean, every business I’ve ever been But when I came into romance First off, I’m a man in romance. That’s weird. I write gay romance. That’s weird. I write gay romance, which does New York Times numbers. That’s weird. And so like, I’m sort of, I’m an anomaly on so many levels, but at the same time, like I have a deep respect for tradition. I love tradition. But I love it because I want to know how it’s going to blow up and mutate and become sort of a zombie death princess like I want to. I want everything to change and transform. And so for me, I feel like everything every day, I’m always sort of blowing things up on an ongoing basis, like my life is nitroglycerin. But specifically, I would say specific if you ask me for a specific moment, I my first ever romance conference, I went to a big romance conference, I should say I’ve been to one small one. My first ever big romance conference. I walked in the room and I it was like 8:30 in the morning and there were 3000 women eating cheesecake with their hands off of plates in the middle of tables.

I walked in and I, I bent down and I got under the table and I called my husband on my cell phone and I was like, get me out of here. Something horrible is going to happen. They’re gonna kill me. They’re gonna hurt me. I was like, I’m this weird, sweaty, pale, Queen frights. Like, what on earth am I doing here? Get me out. And he was like, why are they being mean? I was like, no, they’re all really nice, but I think they want to hurt you want to kill me. And the truth was, they only wanted to help. And within an hour, I actually at that event met some of people who were my closest allies and colleagues and friends in the industry. And so the thing that I did that day is I decided rather than treating the sort of professional arena of it as as a neutral landscape, I decided to treat it as a treasure hunt as if every conversation had something secret buried in it if I could just crack the pin yada. And so for a whole day I went around and I was just like, okay, what’s the candy in this pin? yada what’s the candy in this pin yada and I went around basically like shocking people and doing weird thing. And taking my pants off and showing my ass and wearing things on my head. And I mean, I was always doing this crazy shit and, and what’s funny is I did it for this day and at the end of the day Geoffrey was like, well, how’d it go? And I said, Well, I think some people were shocked. And there’s some pictures you’re gonna hate. But the truth is, I think I now know what I’m supposed to be doing every day in this genre. I’m supposed to be rattling cages and shocking people and loosening things up and asking impossible questions and saying the weird thing. And so that’s what I’ve done.

I mean, that’s sort of become my model for writing. genre fiction is how do I make people uncomfortable in pleasant ways, right? And so in a way I feel like my entire life is lighting fires in heaven and pouring waters on hell. I’m always looking for a way to kind of burn down paradise and and rebuild it as something more beautiful and more weird and more exciting and more inclusive because I think all genre is stronger because people Coming together, create the world right? They make up the world. I’m always quoting this book by Lynne hunt called inventing human rights and her argument she’s a historian. She argues that the reason we have modern democracy The reason we have a vote, the reason that torture has been outlawed and that dungeoneering is no longer used is because of popular romance novels that you can actually track as popular romance novels gained in popularity. As they grew, their audience grew that little by little a group, the group of literate people, educated, wealthy people reading them said things like, I think my wife might be a person. I think that black man is a human. I think that people have ideas and thoughts. I think that child might actually have a future. And little by little romance novels taught people how to empathize in much the same way that science taught people to look at the stars and look at the future and look at technology in much the same way that westerns taught people to look at savage landscapes and think about what law look like right what civilization look like, in the same way that fantasy helps us. Look. Look at the past and unpack history in ways that maybe aren’t literally true, but they’re emotionally true, right? And so for me, I feel like all of us just by participating in genre are rebels. That’s the nature of genre. Genre as a name as a word means general. It is a category right? But all we’re ever trying to do and we’re like birds inside a giant burning cage. We’re all in this cage thing. Here we are together. How do we tear it apart? Right. How do we reinvent it and what is more punk then that? Right?

Sacha Black
Amazing. I I am going to need a very long lie down

Damon Suede
listen the next time I’m in London, I’m taking you out. That’s amazing. Amazing.

Sacha Black
Okay, tell listeners where they can find out more about you and your books.

Damon Suede
Alright, so I’m pretty much like mold. You can find me anywhere. My name is Damon suede da mo n su e d I’m at Damonsuede.com. My Twitter handle is Damon suede. Facebook Damon suede. Literally if you type in Damon suede I come up all over the place. I’m also the income the president elect currently of romance Writers of America. And so my contact information is all over the RWA site. And I’ll be president next year And so again, I’m always fine with your art anyway. But I’m everywhere man. I’m on Goodreads. I’m on Amazon. I’m on NPR. I’m always doing stuff. I’m always around and about.

Sacha Black
So I know that you teach but do you? Have you done like online courses yet around?

Damon Suede
I’ve done a few. I have to tell you I always prefer in person because I think the sounds too wacky, but the energy is different. And so I could do an online class actually reads the record. If I had asked me to do a class for read z, which I’m going to I’m going to do a class about verbalizing for branding like an intro class. I just haven’t had time to finalize it. But I do I teach. If you go to my website, I have a class page and I travel two to three weeks a month I’m on the road. So I’m always traveling on like three different continents. So I’m like I was just in Bristol. I’ll be in Miami. I’ll be in Ohio like I’m always sort of traveling around. So I’m probably coming to a city near you as we speak because I’m I have a little bit of wanderlust and I also just I love I’m an extrovert and so I love interfacing with people and talking shop and I learned more from them and they learn from me.

Sacha Black
Well, next time you teach in the UK, I need to know because I am coming

Damon Suede
They Incidentally, they’re talking about founding an article a chapter in the UK, they’re working on that. You’re interested. Let me know. I’ll send you the info.

Sacha Black
Yeah, okay. Fabulous. All right. Well, thank you very much to all of The Rebel Author podcast patrons. If you would like to get early access to all of the episodes, as well as bonus patron only content you can use there by going to www.patreon.com/Sachablack, that is Sacha with a C. Thank you very much to everybody listening and thank you for the amazing Damon,

Damon Suede
well thank you so much for having me on and thank you for anyone listening. It’s been really wonderful to hang out today.

Sacha Black
I’m Sacha Black. You are listening to Damon Suede and this was The Rebel Author Podcast.