Hook Readers By Page 10: The Secrets Of Character with Matt Bird (Classic Replay EP#573)

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🔁 CLASSIC REPLAY — This episode was originally recorded in 2023 and the writing craft advice is just as relevant today.

Matt Bird is a screenwriter and the author of two craft books for writers, The Secrets of Story and The Secrets of Character: Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love. For the second book he read the first ten pages of dozens of great novels, memoirs, movies and TV pilots, and found the same three moves in nearly all of them: the reader has to believe in your hero, care about their circumstances, and invest their hopes in them. In this episode of the SPA Girls Podcast (EP573) he shows how to land all three before your plot has even started.

Whether you’re drafting an opening chapter, working out why readers aren’t connecting with your lead, or looking for concrete character development tools you can use today, this one is practical from end to end. Matt covers the first page of The Hunger Games, giving a character a unique object and a metaphor family, why repetition beats surprise early on, and how to set, upset and reset reader expectations. Plus why readers pick your hero for you, what James Bond’s first scene tells us about vulnerability, and the single thing he’d tell every writer to do — put an ironic object in their hand.

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About Matt Bird

Matt Bird is the author of Secrets of Story, and creator of The Secrets of Story podcast and blog. He has an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University. He lives and writes in Chicago where he and his wife Betsy are raising two delightful kids.

All episodes of his podcast with James Kennedy, The Secrets of Story: A Screenwriting & Novel Writing Podcast can be found on podcast apps.

Matt’s latest podcast, A Good Story Well Told with co-host Jonathan Auxier, is also on all podcast platforms.

http://www.secretsofstory.com/

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