Writing Hard Truths And Tips For Writing Non-Fiction With Efren Delgado [Video]

How do we write authentic humanity into our books, whether that’s our own experience or a fictional character’s? How can we embrace the challenges of life and the author journey and make the most of the opportunities along the way? Efren Delgado gives his tips in this interview.

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(https://efrendelgado.com/)

Efren Delgado is a former FBI special agent with 25 years of national security, law enforcement, and private protection experience. He’s also a consultant, professional speaker, and the author of The Opposite is True: Discover Your Unexpected Enemies, Allies, and Purpose Through the Eyes of Counterintuitive Psychology.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app (https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/)  or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Balancing being authentic while maintaining your boundaries

• How to take our failures and move on to success

• Creating a mind map to help during the brainstorming process

• Fact checking and managing citations when writing nonfiction

• Writing to deal with trauma while avoiding using it as therapy

• Uncomfortable truths indie authors need to face about the industry

• Common misconceptions authors get wrong when writing FBI thrillers

You can find Efren at EfrenDelgado.com (https://efrendelgado.com/) .

Transcript of Interview with Efren Delgado

Joanna: Efren Delgado is a former FBI special agent with 25 years of national security, law enforcement, and private protection experience.

He’s also a consultant, professional speaker, and the author of The Opposite is True: Discover Your Unexpected Enemies, Allies, and Purpose Through the Eyes of Counterintuitive Psychology. So welcome to the show, Efren.

Efren: Thank you, Joanna. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Joanna: Yes, it’s very exciting. First off—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you went from FBI agent to author.

Efren: I’m going to backtrack a little bit. It all started from a little bit of minor bullying, relatively minor bullying, when I was a child. That planted a basic seed in me just asking, why would people choose to be mean when they could simply be nice? If you think about that question, it’s the fundamental question of psychology.

Why do people do what they do? More specifically, why do bad people do what they do?

As a child, I had no idea and a legitimate interest. So that seed was there. It did also inspire me to want to protect others if I ever could.

As I grew up throughout school and university, I developed my interest in psychology and, accidentally, my interest in criminology. I decided to pursue a career in protecting people, and I simply thought the best vehicle for that was the FBI.

So I joined the FBI, I implemented my purpose, you could say, in protecting people in the National Security Division of the FBI, and later the Criminal Division, what most people think of when they think of the FBI. Then later in the private sector, protecting people as a bodyguard and a threat assessment consultant.

Now, currently as a writer, author, speaker, I’m just trying to express the observations I’ve made to help encourage the “good guys,” your audience and my reader, that they are actually stronger than the bad guys.

They are not chihuahuas barking at the doorbell presenting this large presentation of how scary they are. Good guys actually have the courage to be vulnerable, to…