Red Notice

Find the overall arc first, then pick chapters by their drama. Browder starts by asking what the book is about and why anyone besides him would care. Red Notice's arc was rags to riches, flying too close to the sun, tragedy, then justice from the tragedy.

Only after the arc is set does he list the interesting events as chapter titles, before writing any of them. "Why is that interesting to anybody other than yourself?"

How I Write▶ 37:09

Write a 50,000-word mini-book before the 140,000-word book. He writes a mini chapter for every chapter, laying out the drama, challenges and resolutions, then fills it in with color, life and characters. Red Notice ran about 45 chapters of ten pages at most.

It is more than a bullet outline, so he knows where every story goes before writing scenes. He also uses the mini-book to sell the book to publishers. The process is linear: outline, mini-book, then the full book chapter by chapter.

How I Write▶ 8:05

End every chapter on an open challenge, like a miniseries episode. Each chapter holds a challenge that is overcome or partly overcome, and the open challenge at its end carries into the next, so the reader is always waiting on a resolution.

Every chapter has a clear dramatic purpose. The chapter on courting his wife was planned as a challenge of standing out from her other options, with the payoff a gift of Tuesdays with Morrie after a few false starts.

How I Write

Show the scene, then nail it in with a one-sentence summary. Browder follows show, don't tell, but sums up at a chapter's end in a sentence or two what the reader has just seen. Red Notice's line that Russia had no rule of law, only a rule of men who were crooks, came from this.

He calls it putting the nail in properly.

How I Write▶ 41:55

Close by returning to an early claim that sums up the arc. Red Notice ends by recalling that buying a Polish stock that rose tenfold was the best feeling of his career, then comparing it to watching the European Parliament condemn the injustice done to Sergei Magnitsky.

The ending pays off the arc from narrow finance guy to fighter for justice. "There is no feeling as satisfying as getting some measure of justice in a highly unjust world."

How I Write▶ 46:30

Ask of every sentence why anyone should care, treating each page as page one. Browder has a stack of unread books by his bed, each dropped after ten boring pages, and didn't want his book to join it. He writes for the reader, not himself.

He says the story does the work and the writing is "just sort of a technical thing." Being arrested in a Russian airport is dramatic in itself.

How I Write

Any material turns gripping once you find its drama and stakes. A dull New York deposition became a thrilling chapter after he spent a month reading transcripts. The thread was a former lawyer who switched sides and used the deposition to dig up personal details the Russian mafia could use to kill him.

He looks for drama, tension and uncertainty, and for what readers can relate to: betrayal, the mafia, being scared.

How I Write

Two or three sharp details carry a whole place or person. Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport gets its smell and brass ceiling fixtures that look like coffee cans, which together say Moscow is dated, strange and unkempt.

Readers have little capacity for detail. Characters get just enough to seem likable or rotten, with good guys showing charm and bad guys their rottenness, never caricatures.

How I Write

First-person memoir means rebuilding memory with the people involved. Browder interviews the other characters and takes rigorous notes. For the traitor lawyer, who would sue over any error, he relied on court transcripts and quoted his speeches.

Many details come from going over a situation again and again. About 40% of his ideas come in the shower, so he keeps his phone close.

How I Write

He wrote the book to get a film made; it did the campaign's work. Officials gave him half an hour at most, too short to retell the story, and Hollywood said a book would make a film a hundred times easier. He expected nobody to read it, and Red Notice became an international bestseller in 2015.

Hollywood still won't touch the story because nobody wants to be on Putin's list. During COVID an Australian senator inspired by the book contacted him cold, and a Magnitsky act passed in Australia after Zoom calls alone.

How I Write

A book buys about twelve hours of a reader's emotion. Few people read, finish or remember a Financial Times article, while a good book gets roughly twelve hours and readers keep its stories for years. People stop him in the street to talk about specific stories.

It is a risky bet: about four hours a day, five days a week, for three years, and most books are never read. For someone with a cause, he says, that is probably too risky compared with other work.

How I Write

Going public made killing him costlier than staying quiet would. Advisers told him to set up a fund for Magnitsky's son and widow and go to ground. He believes the Russians would then have killed him with nobody knowing why; a widely read book means everyone would know.

"It makes the prospect of killing him without consequences pretty low," not safe.

How I Write