In this episode, Dialogue Doctor Coach JP Rindfleisch IX holds Office Hours with three authors. Office Hours are times when authors and hangout with a Dialogue Doctor Coach and ask questions they have. In this episode, JP and that authors discuss what to do when the middle of your book starts to fade, how do you keep someone interested in your character as you build out the character’s problem overtime, ways to provide depth of perspective, and more.
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To watch JP and the Dialoggers talk, check out the episode on YouTube.
Thank you, Lisa, Danielle, and Saurin, for the questions you presented to JP!
Thank you, JP, for your teaching. A light bulb went off in my head as to one reason I have a tendency to write the end of the story (character growth-wise) more so at the beginning than at the end. Your explanation of story structure, envisioned through the writing of the characters’ resistance to change in the book’s first half and saving the deep work of the character’s change arc for the second part of the book, made sense to me. Up until now, I’ve had difficulty ‘getting’ the notion of the refusal of the call concept, but as I continue to write, listen to the Dialogue Doctor Podcasts, and think of how I can apply the concepts you present in your book, Story Hypothesis, tying in the aforementioned knowledge to how you described structure in terms of the first and second half of writing a book, greatly helped me.
While I’ve considered myself, to this point, as more of a discovery writer than a planner, I now have a clearer understanding of the structure of a story. Writing the first half of a story as the characters’ resistance to change will motivate me to plan more and strive to stay within the boundaries of the resistance I’m writing rather than to write its conclusion. I believe this will help me slow down and not reveal too much, too fast, placing the end of characters’ growth arcs and plot (sub-plots) where they belong—the second half of the book. It will take practice!
JP, I went back and re-read the first chapter of your book, Mandrake Manor, to revisit the example you gave between your two characters, reflecting the technique of hinting that something isn’t right by how one character responds to the utterance of the first character as if everything is quite fine and natural. This lets the reader know something’s afoot without giving up the information.
I suspect this is a skill that takes some time to master. Thank you for sharing it with us. There were other very helpful points you offered. The ones I mentioned are the ones that jumped out, helping me immediately. 🌞