Damon Suede’s Hot Head, Verbs, and Jane Austen
I was lured into reading Damon Suede’s Verbalize after hearing him do interviews with Kobo Writing Life and Joanna Penn’s podcast. In both, he laid out his approach to writing by focusing in on character strategy and tactics rather than psychology and background, with a particular focus on how this dynamic plays out in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The moment I heard him lay out the idea that Darcy’s strategy is preserving, while Lizzy Bennett seeks to provoke, I was sold on the potential of his approach. That he continued this analysis in both Verbalize–in more detail, and spreading the focus to the minor characters–was one of the delights of his book. Naturally, after reading his non-fiction books on writing, I got curious about his fiction work and how he deployed his advice there. I picked up his first novel, Hot Head, about a pair of firefighters who develop feelings for one another and try to hide it for
