How coaching CEOs and running peer advisory groups shapes the way I write thrillers · @Glen Hellman
Once a month I sit at a table with a group of CEOs and founders, and we ask each other one question: “How do I?”
Then I go home and kill people. On paper.
People assume those are two different jobs. They’re not. Coaching executives and facilitating peer advisory groups is the best fiction-writing workshop I’ve ever attended, and nobody in the room knows they’re teaching it.
Everybody brings a plot problem
Every issue that comes to the table arrives as plot. A partner missed a deadline. A client’s development team walked out. A distributor is pricing the product out of the market. Something happened, and now something has to happen next.
Our process doesn’t let anyone stay at the plot level. Before the group offers a single suggestion, the person in the hot seat has to answer a short list of questions. What’s the issue, stated as “How do I?” Why does it matter to you? What does it cost you if this doesn’t work out? What have you already tried?
Read those again. That’s not a business protocol. That’s a character interrogation.
What does my protagonist want? What does it cost him if he doesn’t get it? What has he already tried that failed? If I can’t answer those three questions about a character, I don’t have a character. I have someone standing in the way of the plot.
And the most interesting answer is never the first one. A founder says his problem is coordination. Twenty minutes later it turns out his problem is that he’s chasing someone who doesn’t answer to him. Another says he can’t decide whether to sign a deal. Underneath it is an old insult he never answered, and it’s coloring everything he sees. The plot problem is the door. The character is in the next room.
That’s how I build the Greg Newsome books. The thriller machinery—the chases, the bodies, the deadlines—is scaffolding. It’s there to force people to show you who they are.
Nobody finishes a sentence
I record our sessions so I can write up the recaps. If you ever want to cure yourself of writing tidy dialogue, read a transcript of smart, successful people talking about something that matters to them.
Nobody finishes a sentence. They restart. They answer the question they meant instead of the one you asked. They repeat the number that’s keeping them up at night three times in five minutes, because it’s keeping them up at night.
That repetition isn’t a flaw. It’s character. It tells you exactly what’s eating at the person.
So my characters talk the way people actually talk, not the way people write. Editors occasionally want to clean that up. I occasionally let them.
The jokes are load-bearing
Here’s what surprises people who’ve never sat in a CEO peer group: it’s funny. Not polite-chuckle funny. Funny.
Someone is describing a deal that could sink his company, and someone else says, “Can you tell he’s an entrepreneur?” The room laughs, and the person in the hot seat relaxes enough to say the true thing he’s been circling.
The worse the news, the better the joke. Humor under pressure isn’t a break from the work. It’s how people survive the work. It’s how they say hard things without anyone losing face.
That’s why my novels swing from a body on the floor to a punch line and back again. Readers sometimes call it tonal whiplash. I call it accurate. I’ve watched a room go from a man describing the worst thing a client ever said about his team to a riff about whose kid is uglier—in under five minutes. Nobody thought that was strange. That’s what people do.
Everybody’s friends until it’s not profitable
One line from a recent session has been rattling around my head: everybody’s your friend until it stops being profitable.
It was said about a business partner. It could be the logline for half the thrillers ever written.
Loyalty, leverage and betrayal show up at my table every month. Nobody gets shot. The stakes are a contract, a customer, a reputation. But the mechanics are identical to the ones I use on the page. Who needs whom? Who knows something the other one doesn’t? Who’s about to find out they were never really friends?
I just raise the stakes until someone ends up in a trunk.
The rule-breaker in the room
As facilitator, my job is to enforce the process. No stories until we know the “How do I.” No advice until the questions are done.
I also break those rules when the room needs it. I’ll cut someone off mid-story, jump to a suggestion early, or call out what everyone is thinking and nobody is saying.
That’s the narrator I write. He knows the format. He talks to you about it while he’s inside it. He breaks the fourth wall because sometimes the fastest way to the truth is to stop pretending the wall is there.
What doesn’t leave the room
A fair question at this point: am I putting my clients in my books?
No. What’s said in the room stays in the room. My members trust me with things they don’t tell their boards, and that trust is worth more than any plot.
What I take home is the shape, not the story. How fear sounds when a smart person tries to hide it. How a joke lands at exactly the wrong moment and turns out to be exactly right. How someone describes a betrayal while still hoping it isn’t one. The people and details in my books are invented. The human behavior is borrowed from everyone.
It works the other way, too
Writing makes me a better coach.
Novelists are trained to read subtext—to notice what a character avoids, what she keeps returning to, what he says instead of what he means. That’s most of executive coaching. The question under the question is usually where the answer is.
So one job sharpens the other. The coaching keeps my fiction honest. The fiction keeps my coaching curious.
If you’re a CEO or founder with a “How do I” you’ve been carrying around, I offer a complimentary, no-obligation online coaching session. Bring the plot problem. We’ll find the character.
