What I Learned About Storytelling from a Career in Finance

By Kristine Delano

I spent more than two decades in finance before I ever imagined myself a novelist. As I managed strategic products and high-octane teams, I thought I was learning how to survive bull markets, upside down risk, and meetings that should have been emails. What I didn’t realize was that I was being trained to be a storyteller.

Finance teaches you quickly that facts are necessary but wildly insufficient. Data alone does not persuade. Narrative does. I watched airtight analyses get ignored while shakier ideas sailed through because someone had a better hook and far more interesting stakes. If that isn’t a lesson for fiction writers, I don’t know what is.

I also learned that the best tension is rarely loud. In finance, hardly ever does someone kick down a door. Instead, drama unfolds in pauses, side glances, and emails sent with the subject line “Quick Question.” That’s suspense. And it turns out you don’t need explosions when you have silence.

Then there’s the matter of villains. Finance cured me of the idea that bad guys wear dark ski masks. Most people believe they are being perfectly reasonable. They justify. They rationalize. They explain and explain and explain at length. Corruption doesn’t announce itself. It sidles up to you in a designer suit and with a congratulations on your daughter’s latest gymnastics’ ranking. It knows you and it wants something from you. Watching that slow moral drift taught me how to write antagonists who are far more unsettling, and more interesting, than obvious monsters.

Perhaps the most sobering lesson was how easily work seeps into life. High-pressure careers don’t stay neatly at the office. They follow you home, sit at your dinner table, and quietly convince you that missing your kid’s soccer game is necessary, temporary, and totally worth it. Until it isn’t. Finance showed me how ambition extracts its price in small, almost invisible installments.

So, when I wrote The Lies We Trade, I wasn’t tracking bad guys with death wishes. I chased the catastrophic effects of the lies people sell themselves to get through the day. I wanted to feel the moment when the protagonist realizes the story she’s been selling to herself no longer holds up.

Turns out, finance wasn’t just my career before storytelling. It was a very long, very intense writing workshop, complete with ankle-wrecking heels and way better coffee. 

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Kristine Delano is a former Wall Street executive turned award-winning author of domestic thrillers set in the high-stakes finance world. She hosts the We Talk Careers podcast and mentors women on work-life balance. When she’s not writing or reading, she enjoys scuba diving, playing games with friends, and chasing her family down the ski slopes of western Maine.

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