My guest this week is Daniel David Wallace! I’m so excited to have him on. I’ve been part of his amazing summits as a participant and guest speaker. Every time I listen to him, I learn something new about story and the process of writing. Find out more about Daniel here. His next summit is Perfect Your Process, is coming soon: March 24th to 27th.
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TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE:
Kat
Welcome back, everyone. Today I’m excited to introduce to you, well, you might know him already, Daniel David Wallace. Hi, Daniel. How are you doing?
Daniel
Hi, Kat. Thank you so much for having me here. I’m doing really well.
Kat
Good. Yes, you’re such a busy guy that this has been in the works for a little bit, but I’m excited to talk to you. Before we get into it, you want to tell people a little bit about yourself?
Daniel
Yeah. Hi, everybody. I’m a writing teacher, online. I’ve been doing this about six, seven years. I run some summits. Kat was a fantastic speaker at one of them. I also offer coaching and writing classes. A lot of what I teach stems from this idea, what I call character first writing, which is just about helping fiction writers in particular, but I think it can be helpful for narrative nonfiction writers too, just trying to connect the reader more closely to the protagonist, to the person the story is happening to. I find that solves a lot of problems.
Kat
Yes, I agree. That’s probably why we get along so well. I heard of you… Okay, I was running along the river in Spain, my husband’s hometown in Valladolid, and you were on the Joanna Penn podcast, and you have an extensive background, educationally. So what got you into writing? Was it always about writing to you? Because don’t you have your PhD, all these university things? Shouldn’t you be teaching in Harvard somewhere?
Daniel
That’s very kind. And if Harvard is listening, please go ahead. I will consider some offers. I was living in Taiwan a long time ago, teaching English, and I was really getting into fiction writing. And I had this feeling of like, I should study fiction writing.
Kat
Really? Okay.
Daniel
That was just how I felt at the time. And I started applying for creative writing MFA programs in the US because I had been told that if you got into the right program with the right offer, then it would be free to go.
Kat
Who told you that?
Daniel
It turned out to be true. I got a very generous, well funded offer from Rutgers University outside of Philadelphia, Rutgers-Camden. I moved first to New Jersey and then to Philadelphia and did my master’s degree in creative writing about two and a half years.
Kat
Wow, that’s intensive.
Daniel
Yeah, it is. But I will say that the master’s experience is very different to the PhD experience. The PhD thing is what I did next.
Kat
Oh, my word. You just couldn’t get enough, huh?
Daniel
No, I thought, this is going well. Let’s see if I can get into a PhD program. So I studied at the PhD level, creative writing, again, English. I read a lot of books during that time. The MFA is intense, but it’s over fairly quickly. Two years go, by pretty fast. Most people can live in a place for two years, phD is different. That’s like four, five, six years. It’s like going off into space and when you come back, your town is totally different. Your life has changed, you’ve changed, your life has changed. It’s a very different kind of experience. And I would encourage people who are interested in it to carefully consider.
Kat
We don’t want to discourage anyone. And yet, carefully consider.
Daniel
Just something to think about. It’s a big commitment. Many people find the process to be very emotionally taxing. But I will say that a lot of the vague ideas I had during the masters level when I was doing my MFA, the PhD really clarified for me. I was just reading all the time. I had lots of people to bounce ideas off and talk to. I feel like a lot of the ideas I have in my coaching, come from that period of time of just studying and studying and trying to figure out what was going on. And also taking workshops, listening, reading people’s work, going online as well to Reddit and seeing people critique other people’s stories and thinking, wait, what’s going on here? That’s where I came up with a lot of this stuff. So I’m so grateful to the PhD experience, even if it’s a commitment.
Kat
It’s a commitment. So it included learning to critique things, learning to… Was it more editing or more critiquing or more seeing the story as a whole? What experience did you get in that helped you with your coaching now?
Daniel
That’s a great question. Partly it was the creative writing classes themselves, I had some great teachers. But a lot of it was just reading books, reading books and knowing that you had to say something interesting about it in a week. And I remember very early in the PhD, I was taking a class on James Joyce, and I was sitting there with a pencil underlining words in the Novella of the Dead, just looking for words that repeated and underlining them. And I had this just real breakthrough in how I saw the story. I saw elements of the plot repeating that I’d never seen before when I just been reading casually. You get to the end and you’re like, Oh my god, the ending is pretty clever. And only through studying, you really start to see things appearing. In addition, I was becoming really fascinated with this idea that where a lot of contemporary fiction falls down is that the reader can’t really understand what’s going on. And so one of the things that was really valuable was reading Victorian novels where the narrator just tells you what’s going on. Antony Trollope, for instance, he is a wonderful person to study because he just says it. The scenes are pretty driven, it’s not like the scenes are boring. People are running around, getting into arguments, lying to each other, stealing things. But before and after Trollope just tells you, oh, he was a coward, what a coward. Who would have thought he could be such a coward? And then he’ll wrap up and say, As always, a coward will do this. And it was really revealing because you’re like, actually, this is fun to read. I was told that this would be terrible. I was told never show, don’t tell. But actually, it’s pretty engrossing. People enjoy this stuff. And one thing you never worry about with Trollope is what is happening. You are always clear. Like 100%, every single page, every single line, you’re completely clear what’s happening. And that really made me think about, obviously, I don’t want to teach someone how to write an Anthony Trollope novel today, that would be a disaster. But how do you help someone writing today get a little clearer? Because I think that where a lot of… That’s just what I came to believe, that where a lot of people are getting into trouble is; it’s not that their ideas are bad, it’s not that they’re not working hard enough, they don’t have an interesting vision. It’s simply that we read, my stuff, included when I was doing these my own stories, we read my stuff, we read their stuff, and we just don’t really get it either at all or enough. We’re not quite in the story like we’d like to be.
Kat
I like Victorian novels. I like old novels. And I like people who write almost like that still in Europe, still today. So I’m like this very eclectic reader. And so what I find frustrating on the writer side of my brain is we say things like, show, don’t tell, and no head-hopping, and all these headliner things. And then you sit down to write and you’re like, well what does that mean? And then you’ll pick up a book that you enjoy and you go, well isn’t that showing and not telling? They’re telling and what am I doing? And then you can just get yourself all wrapped up and like, I don’t even know. It’s not helpful for writers to get these little quips.
Daniel
There’s moments where you read someone’s work and you think, show, don’t tell was invented just to try and help you. Because often it’s like, a writer editorializing about a particular group of people, about a character, and you think, this would be much better if you could just demonstrate the character doing this thing. I think it is a total misunderstanding of the idea that I think that many people interpret show, don’t tell to be something like characters can never think on the page. A character can never just tell you what is their thinking and feeling. You have to illustrate everything by, I don’t know, their hands were shaking. They reached up and touched their hair. And that stuff can work, but it often can leave people totally confused. Why was he touching his hair? You have no idea. He could be touching his hair for many reasons. Oh, I thought you’re just trying to say he had nice hair. The reader is totally confused often. I think that it’s very interesting to reread some of the writers that are considered to be the starting points of show, don’t tell. One of them is Anton Chekhov, who’s supposed to have come up with the idea. But when you read Chekhov’s short stories, of course, they’re full of telling. They’re full of very vivid details and dramatic moments, surprises, and they’re full of subtle things that you pick up and, oh, he’s touching his hair, interesting. But they’re also the character thinks about things, the narrator thinks about things. And so it’s through that combination that we get very vivid storytelling. I think that a lot of people would be better off just saying on the page, what the character thinks is happening. Usually, we don’t have a narrator these days. Most people in the British American tradition don’t like having an omniscient narrator talking to us, which is fine.
Kat
That’s interesting that you say Chekhov has the narrator thinking. I’m thinking of a particular story he wrote, and I just remember seeing the girl on the back of the wagon, because he’s so vivid in his detail that you can see that. I don’t even know if I finished the story, but I can see that one. But isn’t it interesting that he had the character thinking, well the narrator is thinking? And I feel like today people would be like, you can’t do that. We make these arbitrary rules that won’t necessarily make the writing better because it’s really about the storytelling, don’t you think? It’s like understanding, like you say, the character of the story and what is that story that the character is trying to experience and the reader wants to learn about. And then you can almost break all the rules as long as you’re doing it well, with the story. But that’s hard to say, isn’t it, and teach?
Daniel
As we’ve already mentioned some names and books and so on, I thought I’ll mention this one book, which is a wonderful book. If people are interested in reading this stuff, which is Wayne C. Booth’s book called The Rhetoric of Fiction. It’s a wonderful semi-scholar, semi-craft. A working writer could read it for their own interest. And one of the things he makes the case is that when people stopped, in the Anglo-American tradition, stop having narrators that would just talk to you about the story, is that writers would start trying to fudge, trying to sneak in bits of old style narration because it was so useful. So you would see things in the 20th century novel where they would say, it seemed like he was “blank”. And Booth’s saying, that’s the writer being too embarrassed to say he was angry, because that’s like narrating. That’s like breaking this anti-narrative thing that had developed. But it’s too valid, you can’t just say, oh, he stood there, his hands trembled, because nobody knows what that means. You have these lines in 20th century novels that are like, He seemed to be very angry. It was as if he was furious.
Kat
I see a lot of that. Sometimes I write that.
Daniel
It’s so useful. What that made me think, and this is how I try to teach, how I coach, is if we’re going to be clear about this, like we can’t write like Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope today, then we’ve got to make our main character really… We’ve got to level up that main character because that’s the only person a lot of our novels doing any internal thinking at all. If you’ve got a one-POV novel, following one person around, the only place that you can come up with, like, reflections, observations, without doing some odd stuff, is your protagonist. You’re missing out on all the tools that other writers had a while ago, hundreds of years ago. And so if your main character is not constantly commenting on what is happening, what they think, what they feel, what’s surprising them, then your reader is just often going to struggle to just be in the story the way they would like to.
Kat
You want them in the story, right?
Daniel
Yeah. Ironically, the more you try to stick to a very mechanical show, don’t tell, the more you’re distancing the reader because you’re saying to the reader, you’re across the room and you’re watching this guy or girl do a bunch of things. You’re not really sure why, but they’re doing them. Well, they talk a lot, it’s more distant. Whereas if the character picks up the phone and calls someone and a new person answers the phone. Well, as a human being, your character has thoughts about that. Oh, it’s Bob, not Sue. I thought Sue always answers the phone in the afternoons. Bob’s a tough nut to crack. I better think of a better story than I was going to use with Sue. That’s what we do as people all the time. We’re constantly thinking, oh, the Zoom call is live. Is my hair okay? And if we don’t show that on the page, then the reader is just lost or just distant, is the best way to put it.
Kat
Yeah, just there. I’ve been thinking a lot about how it’s possible that writers are now trying to write as though they’re watching television, as though the reader is watching television. And I think it comes a little bit with another phrase of ground the reader where the characters are. We don’t want floating heads or… Is that what we call them? We have all these things that we say as coaches or editors or teachers. And it’s true, we do want to know where the characters are. We want to know if they’ve moved or shifted. But then, like you said, we get so distant that we’re watching them through a screen almost. I think television has really changed that. We are watching them touch their hair. And as you said, I just went to a workshop on this and they’re like, everyone reacts to anger the same. So maybe somebody doesn’t like touching their hair or only touches their hair when they’re nervous and they’re going to assume that the character is nervous, not angry, all these weird… So I think what we do is we end up putting the writers in this corner, especially novice writers or people just starting out because nobody’s ever taught this in school. Even reading, we don’t really look at that. We’re always looking at theme in high school. That’s about.As far as we get.
Daniel
I’ll very quickly say my one controversial thought, and I want to come back to what you said about cinematography, which is I do think as a writing teacher, I personally try to never try and talk about theme at all. Because I find that when someone’s working on their first draft, say, or even the second draft, this is just me personally, but I think that what we’re trying to do is lay down this track for the reader that’s based on what the character is experiencing, what the wider world of the story is, and what the plot is. And trying to discuss theme early on is a bit like trying to review your own novel before you’ve written it. It’s almost like not for you to decide what the theme is. Let the other person decide. That’s the readers’ job. And I do wonder, just as we’re very used to watching TV, which is just totally true, we’re also used to being in school. And so we’re used to have these, like, oh, the theme of the novel is blank. It’s like, well, the teacher told us that. And the teacher figured out because they read a book about it, but your reader does not have that book available to them because your book is brand new or it’s not even published yet. So there is no century of people doing criticism about it the way there is with Hemmingway, where they can tell you, oh, the theme is about “blank”, the theme is about something else. It can be a real distraction.
Kat
I find writers get a bit caught up in theme. It confuses us. What’s your theme? Well, this person goes here and then they do this and this happens. And then the writer… I don’t know. I don’t know what might be. We feel that suddenly we’re in that school setting and the teachers has their spotlight on us. And we’re like, I feel like there’s a right answer to this, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t know about you, but I and all my clients seem to be like, Don’t ask me that question.
Daniel
Yeah. I think I would encourage writers who are listening to this to, I think that when you are deep into the story, multiple drafts, I don’t know, you got a cover picked out. Then it’s time to think about the themes. Can you maybe add a line or in the story? But I really think that the easier thing to do when you’re in a fairly early stage or even a middle stage of writing a book is to accept that the theme is something the reader provides. The theme is something that means something to the reader. That’s not really in our control. We might hope that they do that. But someone with a radically different life experience is going to connect to our story in a very different way.
Kat
Interesting point.
Daniel
We can’t control that. I find as well, this is where it gets a little controversial, is that sometimes talking about theme can be a way to avoid making changes that you know you have to make. Everyone reads the book and says, I don’t know why we go to the brother on chapter 3. Why are we meeting this brother? I don’t want to meet him, who is he? The writer says, well, that’s really important for the theme. I genuinely think that happens quite a lot. And it’s better to look at it and say, okay, I have this idea about what I’d like the brother to mean.
Kat
Just asking, is that coming across? As a writer, it’s better to ask that instead of digging your heels in the sand and saying, no, he is the same. He will bring it to you.
Daniel
You’re not forcing people to read this book in school.
Kat
That’s so true. Is that your goal so that everyone will be forced to read it? Because that’s almost like, just keep reading, you’ll figure it out. And you think, well, lots of people won’t keep reading, right? They’ll be like, I don’t know what this brother is doing here.
Daniel
And then your point about the cinematography, I think, is so valid. I think that we all love watching TV films, and even some computer games have this cinematic quality now. It’s easy to get used to that experience of watching someone do a thing. But I think that is dangerous for a fiction writer on two levels. One, is that we’re not actually filming anything. We can give off the impression that we’re filming things. Oh, it was a dark room with this and that and a blue chair and this. But what’s actually happening is something much closer to someone speaking to you. A voice is speaking to you on the page. And it’s this peculiar modern voice that it’s not really a person, it’s a narrator voice. It’s the main character talking. Someone is actually talking to you and you’re not actually filming it. So no matter how many things you say about the blue chair, it’s not the same as a movie or a TV series where a prop designer spent an hour finding the right chair and scratching it up a little bit just to give it this right effect. I think when we think about that, we take that seriously, then we think, okay, what do I care about in a story? I think it’s different. I think we care about human things like longing, like regret, like the hope for something. We care about like, who is this person that I’m hearing from? And are they okay? What do they need? And I think that there is a desire by many people to describe the protagonist’s eye color as if that’s how we get to know them. And there’s a few cases, of course, where eye color is important in a novel. But most of the time, I just see it as a misunderstanding of how we’re connecting these people. We’re not connecting to them as we’re watching them on screen. We’re learning who they are on a very deep level, and that’s the connection we’re trying to make.
Kat
Yeah, I agree. V. E. Schwab made the eye color and the Invisible Life of Addie LaRue really part of that character, right?
Daniel
Of course.
Kat
But it had a purpose. She did it on purpose. But I think you’re right, it requires a lot more digging into the psychology of the character. And I think you’re right, like figuring out, what am I trying to say about this character? The hope, the longing? And what’s interesting is when you go back to books that you love that you read as a reader, maybe not so much for PhD, but as a reader. A lot of times you’ll realize, well, at least I have gone back and thought they must have told me a lot about the setting because I can still see it. And I’ll go back and they actually haven’t. I just filled it in as a reader, which goes into allowing… As the writer, we need to allow and let go just as much as the theme, the fill in, that the reader will see what they want to see. And actually it will stick with them longer, even if it has nothing to do with how you see the story or that room or the house or whatever. I mean, as a kid, I saw every single house in a book as my house. It didn’t matter how they described it. That was the house that I saw. And at one point I realized, that’s weird. No, the bedroom should be over there. And I realized what I was doing in my head. But it goes into you cannot control that, right? So as a writer, if we’re letting go of the theme, even though most likely somebody at some point told us to start there and don’t start writing until you figure it out, we get all this weird advice. And then we’re going to look into a character driven book. That is how you teach. And so you’ve put together different workshops and summits and book clubs and all these things. And is that what you’re really looking at when you’re teaching and you have your students coming to you? Is that what you’re focusing on is getting them to see the character more than anything else? And then what happens, the plot comes behind it? Or how does that work?
Daniel
That’s a great question.
Kat
It’s a long one, but…
Daniel
That’s a great question. Well, the very quick throat clearing answer is, of course, particularly with coaching, you always want to be looking at what the person is trying to do. So sometimes there’s always that thing of like, what is actually on the page? And then is my advice useful? Is my usual advice useful for this story? But in general, what I’m trying to do is, I call it character first, rather than character driven, because there’s a lot of people who don’t want to write a character driven book. They want to write…
Kat
What’s the difference?
Daniel
So to me, character driven is people talking and sitting around and slowly changing and improving over time or getting worse. My advice is just as valid, and maybe more valid, if you’re trying to write a story about somebody punching giant spiders in space. Because this character first is saying that the spiders only matter to us if it matters to someone in the story, and that someone has probably got to be our protagonist because that’s the only person we have access to.
Kat
Right. Because they’re the one fighting, otherwise, why?
Daniel
Who cares? You can say anything in a novel and the reader might have a range of reactions or no reaction. So if we’re going to say that these giant spiders in space are a problem, then we’ve got to figure out how can we make that important to our protagonist and not simply have an old guy with a beard show up and say, you have to save the world from the giant spiders from space. That’s not going to cut it with today’s reader. How can we introduce this character and show them doing things early in the story that help the reader connect to them, form some a bond? And how can we keep that… This is like, in one of my courses, I spend a lot of time on this. I think a really good novel, often, the things the character cared about at the beginning, they’re always important, even after we discover the giant spiders, that stuff was still important. It’s not like if the character began the story going out to get a glass of water for his partner and bring it back. Well, the partner still needs the glass of water, even though we’ve been fighting the spiders for 100 pages. That we’re not just abandoning whatever that character’s original thing was, but that it’s always there. Sometimes it’s there as a source of regret. The character thinks like, man, I thought I had come here to make some money, but now I found myself in this conspiracy. Or, all I wanted to do is become mayor of my town, but now I’m investigating this old conspiracy about land use from 100 years ago. But that original goal is still there. It’s still valid, it’s still real. Even if it’s not what the story is about. The story is about something else. But we’re doing it justice . One of the novels, I talk about this one particular novel all the time because I just think it’s such a good teaching lesson. It’s the very first Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, where Lee Child invents in this particular novel a really absurd reason for Reacher to be in the town where the novel takes place. It’s so ridiculous to even explain it. But the novel takes that very seriously, that Reacher has come to this town to find a totally irrelevant to everyone else, musician. The rest of the world has totally forgotten. And really, Reacher has no real reason to do it either. He’s just settled on it. You might see it as a theme or a symbol of his loneliness, alienation, whatever. But in the story, there’s no reason for it. There’s no reason for it. And yet, Lee Child finds a way to bring that musician back in late in the book. It’s as if saying, okay, that was absurd the way I got this whole story going. I know, but I’m going to take it seriously. It wasn’t just like a MacGuffin. It wasn’t an inciting incident thing. It was like taking that seriously. I think that’s really interesting. I also really am interested in novels where the protagonist spends a really long time resisting what they’re supposed to be doing. I’m not the first person to observe this in fiction, so there’s lots of ways of describing it. But I think that people that often, protagonist in successful novels, they’re way more hesitant, reluctant, poorly informed about the story for much longer than we tend to think. They don’t really get what is happening until, it depends on the novel you’re writing, but I think that often it’s like until it’s almost too late. But at the very least, they’re spending the first half, the first three quarters, maybe, not doing a very good job. They’re not doing a good job. It’s not like on page 10, someone shows up and says, Time to fight the giant spiders, and then you need to come up with 200 pages of giant spider fighting. But rather that we’re seeing someone who’s just doing a terrible job with these spiders and they’re not really investigating it properly. They’re not good at fighting. They’re still worried about their wife and the glass of water. That’s what I find really interesting. And that’s how I would distinguish character first, which is what I’m talking about, to something like character driven novel.
Kat
Well, as you talk, the books that have made it into the, I guess, bestselling or the books that have done the best. I haven’t… Did I read The Hunger Games? I think my daughter did.
Kat
She was pretty obsessed with them for a while. But the storytelling, regardless of what anyone thinks about writing. Your pros doesn’t have to be perfect if your characters and your storytelling are perfect. And that reminds me of Hunger Games of like, you go back and watch it again because, of course, kids watch things 500 times. And you realize, if she’s actually a hero, why isn’t she taking advantage of this and this? And why is she doing that? And you start thinking, but the writer was doing, Collins was doing what you’re saying. She’s messing up over and over, and she doesn’t really realize because what she’s going to be set up to be until almost the end. That’s a fascinating thing to point out because what we’re really interested in is what would I do if I was there? I mean, subconsciously, that’s what we’re doing as a reader. We’re like, oh god, thank god it’s her and not me.
Daniel
I think that sometimes writers, particularly writers who are writing a fantasy, urban fantasy, scifi type story where a normal person is drafted to do something really extraordinary, I think that we massively overestimate how brave and capable most people are. We’re not.
Kat
I agree.
Daniel
We’re pretty useless. And with enormous amounts of practice and training, we can become good at a couple of things. And in real life, we’re constantly being presented with other things we could be doing than the stuff we are doing, but we ignore it. We would not be able to function if we didn’t. But the reality is that you constantly see little things and you’re like, oh, I could go to that event. I could talk to that person. Oh, that person seems interesting, but you don’t. And I think that we then create these protagonist who are so eager to go off and do something, all it takes is a little magic trick in front of them and they’re off. And I always want to say no, you’re ruining your story when you do that because that’s what the middle of the book is about. If the character is in the pilot seat by the quarter mark, what are you going to do for the next half? There’s nothing left to happen except you explain a bunch of backstory. I find that to be really helpful for a lot of people, too. The thing you’re thinking happens 10% or a quarter of the way through the book, is really 60 or 75% one of the way through the book. If we get there, there are novels, I think Hunger Games is a great example, where the final act that wins the Hunger Games for her is still a act of desperation, it is chance. A few things come together that she figures out, but it’s not like, it’s an act of a desperate person piecing together what she thinks is going to work, and she’s lucky it does work.
Kat
Yeah. I guess that’s what we’re talking about when we say don’t make your character too perfect, right? And that’s a hard one to really understand, too. It’s like, perfect? What does that mean? But you’re right, perfect would be the person who says, yes, I will save the world right now. I’m going to go out and learn how to wield the sword and fly the plane up, whatever it is. But really, that’s a lot of your book is how do they get to the decision where they come to the conclusion that they better go do it, otherwise, whatever. They won’t live with themselves or who knows?
Daniel
And I think just to get back to your earlier point about cinematography, I think that we’ve become a bit, we can be a little… If we’re using this picture of the TV shows we watched and films we watched, you forget what it’s like not to have this incredibly good looking good professional actor performing the lines. Because in a TV show, the script is just like, at most, half of the story. And I suddenly see that with dialog, people are writing out all this dialog, and there’s no reactions on the page, no one seems to be doing anything. And it’s like, yeah, in a script, that would be great. Because pick your favorite actor who’s playing the role, the favorite actor can emote. That’s what they do, that’s why they pay millions of dollars. They emote really well. But when you’re writing, you don’t have any of that, so you need to be filling in stuff all the time, that the actor would be providing in a TV show. And I sometimes think that people forget this and just believe that it’s the dialog alone doing it all. And it’s absolutely not.
Kat
Yeah, that’s a good point, though. And that’s a really good point to think of when you’re doing dialog. And I think that is the main reason why dialog trips people up is dialog in itself is telling part of the story. But when you have Tom Cruise telling your dialog, he’s going to put in that emotion. And I think John Truby says it like, as a novelist, you have to be actor, director, writer. You have to make sure that the reader understands what your character is saying and what they’re doing. And that’s tough. It takes a lot of work, I would say, but you put provide a lot of classes, I would say, that can help people learn that stuff. So would you tell us a little bit about what you provide for people and where people can go to find that?
Daniel
Thank you so much. Yeah, for sure. I just like to add one thing about John Truby, like we said, I think we’ve heard that, we’ve all heard this, you have to be the director, the actor. What I would just add to that is you have to do the things on the page. Everything you want on the story should be written down and you can always edit it out later. But if the character is to react, the character should react on the page. It can’t just be like a… anyway. I have a main course where I explain all these ideas in a lot of detail, which is simply called Plotting and Planning a Novel. And it is a self-study course with interactive prompts that guide you to imagine how you might use the techniques of the course in your own writing and the usual videos and mini-essays on different ideas. And the course tries to take people through, firstly, just this idea of how is someone reading a book? What is going on? Why do they stop reading? Then tries to then build up some building blocks and then says, well, here’s how we might build a plot out of this. People can also try out, which I’d recommend for listeners to the podcast, my free short story course, which is called Character First Story. You can find it, I think, at characterfirststory.com. This is a free course, it has 12 lessons, it comes out by email and it’s self-paced. If you interact with the materials, you get the next email immediately, if you don’t, it comes in a day. It basically talks you through designing a short story where a bunch of stuff happens. There could be ghosts, there could be magic, there could be all kinds of stuff, but it’s character first. We’re connecting deeply to the main character, even in a short, short story situation. I recommend people trying out that first. And then very finally, I also run, as you mentioned already, some summits every year. So far, every year, I’ve run three summits a year, different parts of the writing craft, and they’re a great experience, and they have paid and free tickets. So I try to offer a range of things for writers of all backgrounds and situation.
Kat
And every summer, it’s a little bit different, right? Just on the part of the craft, I guess, or the theme of the summit is a little bit different.
Daniel
Yes. So every October, I do a summit on plot called Escape the Plot Forest. And then in March, I’m doing a summit on the writing process called Perfect Your Process.
Kat
Awesome. And where can people find that? Because people will be listening to this for the first time in the beginning of March, so they’ll have time to go and check it out. So where can they find it?
Daniel
Oh, well, I’ll share the link. We’ll share the link in the show notes. But I think it should be summit.perfectyourprocess.com.
Kat
And if they go to Daniel David Wallace, they can get on your newsletter. And that’s when I always find out that you have…
Daniel
And they’ll hear about it extensively from me, yes. Definitely subscribe to my mailing list to find out more.
Kat
Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Daniel. It was lovely to talk to you. I love hearing your ideas on craft and writing every time we talk.
Daniel
Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.