Finding your book’s main characters

Megan Greenwell's “Bad Company,” annotated. Plus: What makes dialogue work on the page?

September 19, 2025

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Dear Storyboard community,

This week, contributor Carly Stern has a new annotation for us — a chapter from journalist Megan Greenwell's book, “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” published by HarperCollins this summer.

What started as a personal story for Greenwell — she was editor-in-chief of Deadspin when the private equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired its parent company, Gizmodo Media Group — turned into a deeply reported examination of private equity's impact on many businesses and industries, including the media.

This week, we are once again seeing the results, as corporate mergers and megadeals become bargaining chips for controlling free speech in the U.S.

To tell the larger story of private equity, Greenwell needed to zoom in on the personal. And that meant doing an enormous amount of legwork to uncover the right main characters for her book:

This was by far the hardest part. I knew I needed people who readers were going to want to spend a lot of time with. I had three characters in the proposal but four in the book. One from the proposal ended up in the book.

I did so much grunt work to find them. A lot of LinkedIn searching for people who had previously worked at various companies. A ton of scouring Facebook groups and Reddit, and talking to nonprofit groups to see who they recommended. I was trying to plumb every possible avenue. I talked to a little over 300 people for the book as a whole, and almost 150 of those were potential protagonists.

Greenwell's annotated chapter shows us the results of that time-consuming research, and how she wove it together. It's about two people whose lives were changed by the toy store chain, Toys R Us.

Understanding how an author does her work can have unpredictable ripple effects. As Stern, a longtime Storyboard contributor, said of her conversation with Greenwell: “As someone who underwent a different media meltdown that influenced my career path, I felt echoes of my own experience in Megan’s story. This conversation got my gears turning about how our own personal experiences as writers are often a gateway into the questions that animate our work. But the question of where to situate our perspective in that work is ultimately a choice. And as a narrative journalist who’s long been drawn to the idea of someday writing a book myself, our conversation also reinforced the importance of marinating. Sometimes the best ideas need to simmer until a story is truly ripe and we are ready.”

Megan Greenwell on holding out for the once-in-a-lifetime book idea

The journalist and debut author reflects on the merits of waiting until she was seized by an obsession and couldn’t let go.

[ Read the story ]

Links of note

What elements make certain dialogue so effective on the page? Author Matt Bell offers a fantastic lesson from fiction and screenwriting, breaking down advice from Robert McKee’s book “Dialogue” and passages from Denis Johnson and Ursula K. Le Guin. Bell writes: “As I go through a conversation I’ve written, I ask myself, What cue is Character B responding to in Character A’s dialogue? And, Where is that cue located?” For journalists, these fictional exchanges can help us better understand where in our own reporting we might discover similar moments.
Lane DeGregory and Maria Carrillo's podcast WriteLane debuted a new season this week, as the journalists sat down with ProPublica reporter Kavitha Surana to discuss her award-winning project “Life of the Mother: How Abortion Bans Lead to Preventable Deaths.”
For aspiring and early-career editors: ASME NEXT is hosting a feature editing workshop on September 30 in New York City. Alongside veteran editors, attendees will practice turning unedited rough drafts into polished features and explore how to bring stories from an idea to the finish line. Register here by September 25 (hat-tip Carly Stern).
“Heavyweight,” the beloved narrative podcast series hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, also returned for a long-anticipated ninth season this week, after Goldstein and his team reacquired the rights to the show from Spotify. The show's senior producer Kalila Holt talked to Skye Pillsbury about the journey from Gimlet Media, to Spotify, and now to Pushkin, and the process of pitching a show in a difficult environment where budgets are tight and even existing shows with devoted audiences aren't safe.