Jeff Elkins, aka The Dialogue Doctor, has finally written a book! Over the last two years, Jeff has done more than 200 editing sessions with writers. This book is a collection of the tools he built together to solve problems around writing dialogue. Reading it will help you write dialogue and create characters that connects with readers. Want to find out more? Listen in or find the book here. Find more about Jeff at https://dialoguedoctor.com/.
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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:
Kat
Welcome back, everyone, to Pencils & Lipstick. I am very excited to have my friend Jeff Elkins with me today. He has written a new book called The Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now. I love this. I love how we were talking about it. You’re like, I’m so serious. Obviously, you’re so serious that you called your book The Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now.
Jeff
I had so many long titles that were like, how to write dialogue and characters that will engage readers and improve your writing. I was like, these are just dumb and boring. And so I asked my wife, I was like, what should I name this? I love it. You should call it something about the Dialogue Doctor. I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. She’s like, you have this brand. You’ve built this podcast. You should use it in the title of the book. I was like, oh, yeah, that works.
Kat
Yeah, so that people know who I am.
Jeff
Yeah, so that people, when they go to buy it, they’re not like, who’s Jeff Elkins? Oh, yeah. The Dialogue Doctor. Okay, I know that.
Kat
Yeah. Does anyone know your name? So if nobody knows you, obviously your name is Jeff Elkins, but actually your name is the Dialogue Doctor, right?
Jeff
The name is the Dialogue Doctor. Yeah, no, I’m Jeff. Thanks for having me on, by the way. I appreciate it.
Kat
Of course. So we wanted to talk about this book, but before we get into it, who are you? So that how did you become a dialogue doctor?
Jeff
Who am I? Isn’t this the existential question we all struggle with forever?nWho am I?
Kat
Let’s go through a deeper question of life.
Jeff
That’s right. I know an old poem from my theology days. I know an old poem by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that is very sad and serious. He wrote it from a Nazi internment camp called. I will not quote that right now.
Kat
Let’s keep things lighter, Jeff.
Jeff
Keep things lighter. Okay. All right. We got to be here positive. I am the author of 12 novels and I started coaching writers in 2020. And since then, I’ve done over 200 one-on-one sessions with writers, coaching sessions with writers, which is a badge of honor I am proud of.
Kat
That’s awesome.
Jeff
I podcast and coach as the Dialogue Doctor. Trying to think of what else you need to know about me. I don’t know. We talk a lot about dialogue.
Kat
You do workshops. I’ve had you doing workshops for me.
Jeff
I do masterclasses. I have a masterclass coming up in August that’s going to be fun. It’s four and a half hours on the Enneagram. We’re going to do the first half hour. I’m going to introduce everybody how to talk about how to use the Enneagram to create unique character personality and voices. And then we’re going to spend the next three and a half hours talking about how to use those voices to develop a cast and to build a character growth arc in your book. That’s going to be fun. That’s the crap that I do at the Dialogue Doctor. We go deep into dialogue, characterization, character growth, all that stuff.
Kat
Yeah, which is important. I was telling you before, I just came back from the self publishing show in London, and there’s a lot of fantasy writers, whether it’s fantasy romance, fantasy, fantasy, sci-fi, but they have huge cast of characters. And all of them said at some point, the importance of having each character sound different was key it’s huge.
Jeff
Yeah. And lining up cast personalities is super important. When we look at master works and master writers, even master screenwriters, because I find that it’s easier sometimes to talk movies because people, they have more familiarity with the same movie. So if you think about master big cast screenwriters like James Gunn, who put together the Guardians of the Galaxy or put together the Suicide Squad. He is a master of these 6 to 7-person cast. It’s not just about having different voices, it’s about understanding how those voices combine and what they do in a scene together. So if you take two shy characters and put them in a scene together, you’re going to have a very reflective and quiet scene. If you take a commanding character with a shy character, you’re going to have a scene where the power and balance feels weird. If you take a… well, since we’re talking fantasy because these are super popular in fantasy. You take a lone wolf, snarky character. That’s the fantasy sci-fi bread and butter. She’s got a big ax and she’s super capable, but she goes it alone and she makes 80s references and jokes. So you take that like, snarky lone wolf character, if you put them with a shy character, the scene is going to feel weird because the shy character is going to disappear behind the bigger personality. So you have to know, okay, if I got this snarky lone wolf, then I probably need someone who’s sarcastic but craves community. And then I probably also need somebody who’s a little dense and can’t quite catch what’s being said. Maybe has a big ego. Well, so now you’ve put Rocket, Drax, and Star-Lord together in a scene.
Kat
You got to love Drax and Star-Lord.
Jeff
And that’s funny. When you put those three characters together because you’ve balanced the personalities, you’ve understood how to combine the characters, you get comedy. That’s why all of the comedies we watch nowadays are, since really, Seinfeld and Friends are these big casts because they know, hey, this making funny is much easier if I just throw the right personality combinations in the room.
Kat
Right. Oh, that makes sense.
Jeff
And after you’ve written a cast for a while, you can get half a book done. And if you have strong personalities and you understand how their character voices sound and work, you’ll start to get like, a lot of authors I coach will be like, okay, I need a dramatic scene here. So I need characters A, B and C in this scene, and I need to get D out of there because if D is in the scene, it screws it up, because their voice doesn’t fit in the drama. But yeah, I think the best if you really want to look at this, I think the best ones to look at right now are the superhero movies that come out because they have such big cast. So Marvel is great at it, too, especially in their Avengers movies. They know what characters to put in it and what scenes to make scenes draw emotion. When Iron Man is dying, you have 20 choices to come and kneel down next to him. The right choice is, you have to put his wife next to him, but she’s not the right choice, because she’s stoic and strong. She’s just going to hold his hand while he dies. That’s not moving. You get the innocent, naive kid who has a has verbal diarrhea, and you put that character next to him. And now the entire movie theater is crying. And that’s what understanding cast and personality does, which I actually go into a little bit in the book. I touch in it some of the book is we talk about engine anchors and vehicle characters and hazards and starting to understand how characters connect to each other as you’re developing a plot line and as your character develops character growth. So vehicle characters are the characters that you’re following through the book. They’re the characters that your reader is emotionally connected to, most typically the point of view characters, because they’re the ones whose story we’re following. You’re going to have next to them engine characters, engine characters are characters that encourage positive growth in your vehicle character. So they make your character go. That’s why we call them engine characters. Or anchor characters are characters that weigh your vehicle character down and make them want to be the worst version of themselves. And so they’re anchor characters. So if you think of like talking romance, if you think of Bridgette Jones’s diary, in the movie, she’s got two options. She’s got Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. And Hugh Grant is an anchor character. Whenever he’s around, he encourages her to be the worst version of herself. He’s always lighting up her cigarettes. He’s always telling her not to speak her mind. He’s always questioning what she wears and makes her feel self-conscious. Even though he’s the fun boyfriend, he’s the boyfriend that makes her revert to her self-conscious nature that she’s trying to get over. Whereas Colin Firth is the engine character. Now, she doesn’t get along with Colin Firth like she does with Hugh Grant. Colin Firth isn’t as exciting and fun as Hugh Grant is. In fact, most of the time when she’s around Colin Firth, they’re fighting. But when she’s with him, she speaks her mind. She says exactly what she means to say. She has the confidence she always wants to have, and she’s never smoking around him. So it’s this engine and anchor of these two characters. If you want a scene where Bridgette is empowered to be her best self, put her with Colin Firth. I think his name is Darcy because we just keep writing Jane Austen over and over again. Put her with Colin Firth. If you want a scene where she is going to be self-conscious and going to fail. Put her with Hugh Grant. And that’s understanding those character relationships so that you can navigate through your plot.
Kat
So do you think one of the biggest mistakes we make as writers is not really understanding the need for that? I don’t know if you hear it all the time, but the artistic idea, side of us, thinks that there shouldn’t be a mathematical side almost.
Jeff
That’s interesting. I don’t think of these as necessarily art versus math. I think of these as tools.
Kat
Which is we should. I just wonder how many… It’s like the newbie writer thinking, I’m just going to write whatever I want. But a lot of times the characters we want to write, I don’t know if you see it, I see a lot of characters from the beginning being who they should be at the end. And I always have to tell my writers, no, okay, they have to be weak at the beginning and they have to grow at the end. Or I guess if your anchor character, he needs to always be an a-hole.
Jeff
Well, not always. Sometimes your anchor character can be the nice guy. That’s why we use engine and anchor instead of ally or protagonist or antagonist or villain. Because for example, in the Batman movies or in the Batman saga, even in the books and comic books, his anchor is typically someone he’s trying to save.
Kat
Oh interesting.
Jeff
Okay. Because they want him. His engines are always his villains. His villains make him the best version of himself. His anchors are usually the people that are like, well, so like the Heath Ledger Batman movie, which I think everybody saw. His anchor is Harvey Dent, the prosecutor, who’s encouraging him to move into tactics and do things that you don’t want him as the viewer doing. Right. So a lot of times, especially in young coming adult novels. Well, so I just read, as the Dialogue Doctor community, we just read the Hate U Give by Angie Thomas as our book club book. We do a twice a month call and we’re always reading short stories and books, and that was the one for this month. But in her book, the anchor characters are Star is the lead character and the anchor characters are Star’s two friends from school. And they’re not villains, right? There are villains in the book. There is a gang lord that’s causing all kinds of problems. There’s police that are causing all kinds of problems. When you’re thinking about the plot, those are the antagonists. Her friends are actually the anchors. When she’s around these friends, she’s the worst version of herself.
Kat
Okay, that’s an interesting. So you’re talking like, this maybe crosses over into plot sometimes, but not always.
Jeff
Not always. Ideally, all of these things align. Ideally, your plot aligns with your character growth and your genre conventions and your theme. And so I think going back to the tool analogy, and going back to new writers, do new writers need to know all of this at once? No. Does a writer need to know this at all? No. There’s natural writers who just this stuff just comes out of them. They sit down, they write a book and you’re like, oh, my gosh, the themes are amazing. The character growth is astounding. The plot is expected, yet surprising. And somehow you hit all of the genre conventions. Go write another one. Great job. But for the rest of us, we’re going to be strong in a couple of areas, and then we’re not going to understand our tools and others. I think about my kid who’s 20 now, who’s a really fantastic artist. He helped me do the cover for the book, actually. But when he was first learning to do art beyond just doodling in the sketchbook, he was really big into pencil. He really liked pencil drawings because it was what he was comfortable with. But then he wanted to do something that would require more, so he moved to charcoal. And it was like, oh, this is a new tool I have to learn. This is a new thing I have to learn to play with. And then he wanted to do something with color and more dynamic, so he started moving into painting. And he tried to play with the watercolors and he hates them. He’s like, I don’t have enough control over these. So he moved into oil painting. But as he progresses, what I watched was him finding the tool and learning the tool. Were his pencil drawings better than his paint or vice versa? I don’t know. They’re just different. He’s learned a new tool and it gives new texture to his work. And it’s the same as us as authors, as we go, I hope we’re constantly learning new tools. And so usually plot and genre conventions are the first two you learn. And I think that you asked, what mistakes a lot of authors make. I think the mistake I see authors making a lot are like, okay, as long as I hit the genre conventions, I’m going to have a good book. That’s not necessarily true. You can hit the genre guess good is a term that we need to define. If you hit the genre conventions, you advertise it well, you have a great cover, you will sell that book. Is that book a good book? Is anybody going to pass it to their friends? Is anybody going to be like… No. Not necessarily. Are you just going to sell? Are you going to write something that gets passed around and people cherish and love? Neither of those goals are better or worse than the other. You just have to decide what you’re doing. So that being said, picking up and putting down new tools, you might capture the genre tool. Sorry, that’s where I was going. A lot of authors I find are like, okay, if I understand, I can Google the genre conventions as long as I have these scenes in my book is going to be great. And it’s like, not necessarily.
Kat
I’ve thrown a couple of those books out.
Jeff
Yeah. Now, your book might… and again, your book might sell because we need to distinguish. Great is really about what your expectation of the book is. But these authors come in with like, my book is going to be great. I’m going to be the next Jane Austen. My book is going to stand the test of time. Everybody’s going to read this for the next 50 years and it’s going to be amazing. And then they get a bump of sales, they get a nice quick buck and then the book disappears. They’re like, well, why didn’t that get passed around? Why didn’t that stay? Why didn’t that have this last? Why wasn’t this the next to Kill the Mocking Bird? Well, you got to use some more tools besides just genre conventions. So part of what the book is and what I do at the Dialogue Doctor isn’t necessarily teaching people craft. We look at problems and we solve them. And the way we solve them is by trying to understand what tools do we need to solve this problem? With genre conventions, part of the thing that we started… this isn’t in the book, but part of the thing we started talking about is, what are genre conventions? Well, if the story is an emotional journey that readers are going on, because that’s what story is. Story is an emotional journey. Whether it’s an audio story or a visual story like a movie or TV series or an imaginative story like a book, which I call a book an imaginative story because Robert McKee says in his book Dialogue that the book is the only one of the few vehicles left that puts you in direct connection with the consumer of the story. Whereas when you’re making a movie or when you’re making a radio program, you’ve got producers and you’ve got directors and you’ve got actors. You’ve got all these people in between you and the consumer of the story. It’s more a team effort. Writing a book, depending on how involved your editor is, writing a book really does put you in direct connection with the reader’s imagination.
Kat
Right. You only have the ink and the paper.
Jeff
The ink and the paper and the personality. All that to say, like genre conventions, if the book is an emotional journey that connects directly to the reader’s imaginations, genre conventions be the emotional expectations that reader expects when they’re coming to the book. Romance readers have certain emotional expectations when they’re coming to the book. They’re like, these scenes need to make me feel this way. Now that you know that, you have the freedom to meet them or surprise the reader by playing with them. Because if you know how the reader wants to feel when they’re reading your book, you now have the ability to manipulate the reader a little bit.
Kat
Yeah, that’s an interesting way to… Writing is so much more complicated than we sometimes think it is. But you’re making me think of a book and it was a romance book, I guess. I guess that was the genre it would go into. But I knew that the writer was trying to make us feel sad but hopeful, like, she was the main character is trying to get over the death of her husband. But I think what was missing in that book is a difference in voice in the characters. And there was no like, you’re cheering for people, but it was more a reliance on the plot rather than what you’re saying where like, I was telling people, this just isn’t believable. But I think it’s more the terms you’re using, what she needed was an anchor. She needed to have somebody pulling her back into the I’m alone, my one chance at love has died. And then more of an engine, maybe that would have made… Because it just felt like this hovering.
Jeff
It was just spiraling. It was just circling around.
Kat
Is this worth my time?
Jeff
Part two of what I talk about in the book and what we talk about in the community is that a scene… This is actually, I’m going to retract my previous statement. If you’re going to ask me what writers get wrong most often, it is they think a scene is a plot point. A scene is not a plot point. A scene is a group of characters interacting. Now, if they interact and something happens, then something that happens is the plot point. But you have to start with the characters interacting. And oftentimes when a book feels like it’s spiraling, it’s because the author is trying to get things to happen but doesn’t understand that those things only happen when characters interact. So you get chapters where there’s a lot of sitting and one person reflecting on something or long memories of like, oh, this… And as the reader, you’re just like, okay, what is happening here? Why do I need to keep… can I skip this?
Kat
You feel like they’re talking a lot, but they’re not.
Jeff
They’re not. They’re just reflecting. And it’s like, okay, have the characters interact around a conflict. Ideally, that conflict is going to accomplish something in the story. And what the plot actually is, so likewise, we’re redefining tools. When we talk about plot, what we’re talking about is things that happen on the journey of the character’s growth. But a lot of times what we do is we’re like, okay, I understand genre conventions, and there’s a lot of books about plot, so I’m going to hit my genre conventions, and I’m going to follow the hero’s journey, and I’m just going to hope that the character grows.
Kat
Yeah. You’re relying on your imagination at that point of like, I’m going to hope that I know what I’m doing.
Jeff
Yeah, it’s like cooking. We’re like, okay, I’ve got potatoes here and I’ve got flour and I have a frying pan. So I’m just going to put them all in there and hope that whatever happens is edible. And it’s like, well, probably potatoes are great. And if you put them in oil, something will happen.
Kat
It’ll be fine. It might be edible. It might be horrible.
Jeff
It might be amazing. It might be terrible. But so we can get more strategic about our success.
Kat
And can you replicate it?
Jeff
Yeah, and we can understand our tools. So that’s what my personal mission as the Dialogue Doctor is like, hey, let me create tools that can help you solve the problems you want to solve so you can tell the story you want to tell.
Kat
Okay. And to anyone writing, let’s just… I went back and relistened to the Harry Potter. Everyone gets better as you go. You’ve said, do we have to know this all at once? It’s hard to know all of this at once.
Jeff
You can’t know it all. You have to get so good at a tool that using it is not even thinking.
Kat
Yeah, it’s like just reflex, right? So who do you help? Do you help people from the beginning? Do you mostly help people in the middle, in the end? I would.
Jeff
Say the Dialogue Doctor community is actually all and above. What we do is coaching. And I say we because there’s three of us now that do coaching. But what we do with coaching is we assess where you are and we’re like, what do you want to learn? What do you want to work on? We read your work and we’re like, Okay, let’s work on this. And a lot of times people are like, usually the starting places, character voices. People tell me all my characters sound the same. I’m like, okay, well, that’s something we can work on. And this Enneagram class, the masterclass we’re going to do, is going to help a lot with that because we’re going to talk about what does it mean to have different sounding character voices? And so we use a tool we call the dialogue daisy that helps you understand character voice. And that’s in the book, too. And then we use a character voice chart that helps you just think about your character voices differently. And then I would say once you start getting character voices, the next stage in that is like, okay, how do these characters interact? And specifically, how do voices modulate to express emotion or change? Once you’ve got a character voice down, again, once you master a tool, you can start playing with it to do fun things with it. Once you understand that Spiderman in his normal scenes is plucky and anxious and uses jokes to situate himself in a world where he feels like he doesn’t belong. So once you have the voice of like, I’m telling one-liners and I am occasionally panicking in my voice. My phrases are pretty short, sentences are pretty light, and I don’t talk about myself very much. Once we have Spiderman’s voice down, when we need him to destroy the consumer of the story as Iron Man dies in front of him, now you know how to modulate his voice. Jokes go away. You keep those sentences short, but he can’t quite finish them. He’s still not going to talk about himself. He’s going to talk about what’s happening. But he’s going to panic. And you’re going to rev that anxiety up a thousandfold. And now, because the reader knows what he normally sounds like, or because the viewer knows what he normally sounds like, the viewer goes on this emotional journey with him because we’ve modulated his voice to this big extreme. So the viewer feels that modulation. And that’s what happens in our books, too. I was talking about the Hate U Give with Angie Thomas. Her character Star, the theme of the book is how do you interact in these worlds? Because her character Star stands in two worlds. I would say the theme is how do you bring justice into these two worlds? What’s the appropriate way to do that? And what should your voice be? And Star is constantly in both worlds in the world of the private, suburban, wealthy high school she attends and the inner city, lower socioeconomic class neighborhood she lives in. It’s like she has two voices. She modulates her voice for each world. And she’s trying to figure out how her voice sound. And as the book goes on, she starts confusing the two worlds, and she uses a voice in one world that actually belongs to the other. And by doing, by confusing the modulation of her voice, as the reader, we really start to feel the trouble that she’s going through. What’s funny is that Angie Thomas will actually comment on it. She’ll be like, oh, crap. That was my other. That was the voice that was supposed to be in my home community or like, oh, crap. I’m talking like I should at school. So her character, the reason I’m using this example is because her character openly struggles with it. She talks about like, oh, my gosh. My voice is modulated in the wrong way. She doesn’t use the word modulation. But then at the end, the big climactic scene, she takes to the roof of a car with a bullhorn and finally discovers her voice. And it’s a voice of strength and confidence and honesty. And it’s this first authentic expression where she’s not worrying about what she’s going to say. She allows herself just to be in the moment and to experience all of the emotions she’s felt through the whole book. So it’s that voice modulation. Once you understand character voice, then you can start playing with the modulation. And once you get the modulation down, now you’ve got two really powerful tools to take your reader on a journey.
Kat
Right. And that climax probably wouldn’t be the same if she hadn’t started messing up.
Jeff
If Angie Thomas didn’t understand when she was writing the book that this is about Star fight… I’ve never talked to Angie Thomas, but I actually asked if I could talk and she was like, they’re like, she’s not doing interviews right now. Well, put me on her list. But she didn’t understand that Star’s voice had to modulate. And part of what Star’s struggle was going to be was finding her voice. And that final scene isn’t as powerful. But because the theme has aligned with the character growth and the character growth, and the plot points have worked out beautifully to take us to this moment, the points along the road have worked out to take us this big emotional climax, when the voice modulates, all of the tools work together. And you’re like, oh, this is a powerful moment. But again, the key is not that you have to master every tool, but let’s master some. And so that as you master them, you can use them in a powerful way. And again, can you write a powerful story without thinking about any of this? Absolutely.
Kat
But I feel like the more you write, almost, the more the expectation of the reader. I always tell people the more that you can do on purpose, the easier for you.
Jeff
Yeah. We become one-trick ponies. If we’re not constantly improving how we do things, if we’re not studying our tools, if we’re not understanding, okay, I need to pick up a new tool. I need to play with this tool a little bit. We become like, Yeah, this is what I do. This is the thing that I do. And there’s a lot of authors that have had great careers around.
Kat
And it really, like you said before, at some point, it’s like, what do you want to do? I mean, I’ve had people who are not writers comment to me like, how can people read fantasy over and over or romance over and over? And really, the way that you can do it because there’s a lot of well written books is because they take the tools and they take the genre, the expectations and they twist them and they know how to use it.
Jeff
And they know how to play with them and they know how to make them expected and surprising, which is the goal.
Kat
Which is what we love. That’s what humans love about story.
Jeff
We love it. We’re like, oh, I thought it was going to go this way.
Kat
Why are there four John Wicks? I don’t know. We can’t stop.
Jeff
There’s an emotional journey there that we absolutely love. I was talking to my boys last night because they wanted to watch a movie. I have three teenage boys in the house right now. They wanted to watch a movie and I was going to bed. And they were trying to decide and I was like, They wanted an action movie. And I was like, well, why don’t you try to watch Extraction? I was like, that’s a new one on Netflix. Well, it’s not new. It’s a couple of years old.
Kat
Yeah, but Extraction 2 is out now.
Jeff
Yeah. So I was like, why don’t you watch Extraction? And they were like, what’s it like? And I was like, huh, it’s like John Wick, but it’s grittier. And they’re like, oh, but it’s that I’ve taken a specific genre and I’ve turned it a little bit and given you a new perception of it. And that’s what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to be like, okay, I know how to write a John Wick, or I know how to write an Extraction. Now I’m going to take it and make it smooth and maybe a little humorist, which is what I would say John Wick does. Or I’m going to take the genre and I’m going to make it gritty, which is what Extraction does. And it’s that, again, understanding the tools of what we’re using. Part of the reason I keep caveating, and I should say this, there’s no right way to do this, is because I don’t want anybody to feel judged.
Kat
We always feel judged.
Jeff
This is hard enough. The last thing you need is some dude who’s like, I’m a doctor, but I don’t have a PhD, walking around making you feel like you have to pick up all these tools. That’s the worst. So I don’t want anybody to feel like this is stuff you have to have. You can tell great stories just from your gut. You have them in you.
Kat
Well, I bet if you think about it, because I’m thinking now, as my mind thinks of a million things. Yeah, I know exactly who my anchor guy is in the novel I’m working on. I know exactly who my engine character is. Oh, but now that I know that and they have a specific name, I can go, okay, now I know exactly how he should act and she should act.
Jeff
Now that you know it, and you look at a scene that’s not working, you’re like, this scene, there’s something in my gut that tells me this scene isn’t working.
Kat
Yeah, the gut ones are the worst because you’re like, What do I do?
Jeff
Once you know your tools, you’re like, oh, I’m using the wrong tool here. I’m using the wrong tool in this place. I need to use a different tool. Or something in my gut, I want this scene to be funny. Something in my gut says this isn’t funny. Well, you’ve put the wrong characters in that scene.
Jeff
You need Drax.
Jeff
You need Drax. You need Drax to make it fun. Star-Lord and Rocket just hack each other off. We really need Nebula standing there to be for this scene to be funny. You got to have that third ingredient. And it is like cooking. It’s like, oh, this is too acidic. What is wrong? Well, you got to add something that has more of a base to it to smooth out the flavor. But if you don’t know that that’s how flavor palettes work, then you’re just like, I don’t know, add more salt.
Kat
Just keep adding it, it’s fine or more oil.
Jeff
Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. But it is about empowering, understanding our tools is about empowering you.
Kat
Yeah, I think so.
Jeff
To be able to connect to the reader in how you want to do it, right?
Kat
Yeah. I think the more that you do things on purpose, the less you will take it personally if somebody doesn’t like it, I think. It’s like, Well, I was trying to do this, so the fact that you don’t like it’s fine. But actually, I was exactly trying to do that, so I’m pleased with it. I just think that writers are empowered, like you say, when they know these things, they do it on purpose. We might do it better or worse than other people, but at least it’s not like… I mean, we can go on that downward spiral after 10 reviews come in and they all say something different and we’re like, now what do I do?
Jeff
I think part of what I’ve loved most about coming to understand my tools as a writer is that it really enhances my reading. I was reading a John Grisham book today. He’s got a new book of short stories out. And he did this thing in the middle of one of the short stories where he transferred the POV from one character to another over a phone call.
Kat
That’s tricky.
Jeff
And I was like, damn, way to go! I think once we understand our tools and we understand our point of view. I caught it because I’ve been really focusing on point of view lately because it’s a problem we’re having in the Dialogue Doctor community. A lot of writers are like, can we talk about point of view? So I’ve been thinking about point of view lately and focusing on point of view lately and when you switch and how you switch and how those switches work and how you bring the reader along to those switches if you’re going to. So I don’t think if I hadn’t been really trying to understand that tool that I would have noticed what he did. It would have seemed just like something that happened in the story. But understanding tools helps us really appreciate what other people are doing in their world. Yeah, that’s really cool. I saw it this morning. My kids were at a swim meet, and the worst part about swim meets is that they swim and then there’s 20 minutes of just waiting for their to just leave. So I was sitting in the chair reading the book, and it happened.
Jeff
I was like, oh, look at that. Look at what he did right there.
Kat
It’s what you want to tell everyone.
Jeff
They’re like, great. I was looking around. I actually put it on the Dialogue Doctor Slack. I was like, I hate this thing because they’ll appreciate it. But I think for me, coming to understand tools is a celebration of life. It’s a joy of like, let’s look at what we can do and what’s possible and this stuff. I think it does remind me, too, of good chefs. Like you were saying, I’ve known some great chefs and they’ve made things for me. And I was like, oh, I don’t like it. It’s bitter. And I’m like, Well, it’s supposed to be bitter.
Kat
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff
And then they’re feeling sorry. They’re like, oh, yeah, that’s what I wanted it to be. I was like, oh, mission accomplished. I don’t like bitter things. I won’t tell you that again. It’s not like… But they knew what they were doing and how to create it. And as I’ve cooked more, I’ve come to appreciate, oh, what they were doing to create that bitter thing was actually really hard. And I can’t do it. You start to understand why we call masterworks masterworks, why they stick around for… I was teasing about Jane Austen, but what Jane Austin does in Pride and Prejudice is really hard. What she did in that book is amazing. And you’re just like, oh, and she has her anchor and engine characters. And she has in a time where books weren’t necessarily dialogue centric, but were very heavy in the description, she has a book that’s like, massively full of character interaction. And it’s so impressive. It’s like, yeah, this is what you know. And you’re thinking about like, filling a book with character interaction like that before visual media was a big deal is shockingly impressive. It’s like, this is something that she… And that’s why that book stood the test of time because she understood tools in a deep way. And as we come to understand them, we read her work and it’s like, oh, it’s not just that this has a good plot. It’s that there’s really great craftsmanship happening in this piece of art that she made.
Kat
Right. So you mentioned that she has a lot of dialogue. And you are the Dialogue Doctor. I’ve heard you talk before why dialogue is important in your books. There’s a couple reasons. Was it you that says the majority of the chart topping books has 80% of what, I don’t want to mess it up?
Jeff
Yeah. So back in 2020…
Kat
They’re heavy on dialogue, right?
Jeff
They are. Back in 2020, right before I started the Dialogue Doctor, I had all these assumptions and I was like, I need to test them. I need to look at them. So I started taking just what people think of as masterworks and not like, oh, these are high literary fiction. Not like, oh, I’m going to go find James Joyce. But American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Kat
We all have him on the shelf, but we’ve never actually finished his stuff.
Jeff
Let’s just say it. American Gods by Neil Gaiman or The Road by Cormac McCarthy or Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I looked at Hail Mary by Andy Weir. These books that we just celebrated, we’re like, oh, my gosh, this book is above and beyond. And I just took a highlighter. And I was like, every time characters are interacting, which is dialogue, characters interacting is dialogue, I’m going to highlight it. And every time I get exposition, which usually looks like a paragraph, but it’s descriptions or reflective material or a summary of action. I’m going to highlight it in a different color. And without fail, books that we love are 60, 70, 80% dialogue.
Kat
That makes sense, though, right? Because it’s not tiring to see somebody come into an idea or a realization or make a decision through dialogue.
Jeff
That’s what we show up for. We’re showing up for the character interaction. That’s what as readers, we’re coming to imagine characters interacting with one another. And that’s what happens in dialogue. And so we’re coming… a better way to probably say it to help people understand this, we’re coming to experience a moment. That’s what we want.
Kat
Oh, I like that.
Jeff
Yeah. We’re coming to live in a scene. We talk about it, or I talk about it at the Dialogue Doctor as like, there’s a… well, this is a good example. The first time I took my teenagers to New York City, we took the ferry over from New Jersey. And we’re on the ferry and we’re looking… You can take in all of Manhattan. You can see all of these buildings and they look far, they’re far away and it’s awe inspiring. And it’s majestic in some ways. You’re like, wow, look at this giant creation of humanity over the ages. Look at what we’ve done. This is insane. This is wild. All of these buildings, they reach so high, they’re so big, and you’re taking them all in. That’s what exposition does. Good exposition pulls you back, brings you to a moment of reflection, helps you feel outside of the moment, and you take in big things. But when we got into the streets, when the ferry landed and we walked a couple of blocks, and now we’re in the middle of New York City, and there’s smells and there’s sounds and there’s texture to stuff. You can touch the buildings and you can see the people walking around and there’s action.
Kat
Metro, steam, and the…
Jeff
Yeah, all of it. It’s all happening.
Kat
And the dog poo.
Jeff
And we went to Bryant Park and we ate black and white cookies. And we looked at all the people. We people watched, the people interacting and we listened to the birds. We were in the life of the city. There’s an energy there and there’s a passion there that you don’t get when you’re looking at it from the ferry. Being in the city is dialogue. That’s characters interacting. Your reader is showing up to sit in Bryant Park and get the black and white cookie while they’re watching.
Kat
Yeah, they want to be in between your characters. Just like head shopping, right?
Jeff
That’s what they want to be. They want to be in it. They want to feel like they’re in these scenes and like they’re in this moment. But again, these are two tools that we have to come to understand because does that mean exposition is bad? No.
Kat
No, we need it, right? Otherwise, it’s a screenplay.
Jeff
Yeah. That means the majority of your book needs to be dialogue because that’s what your reader is showing up for. And if you have too much exposition, your reader starts to skim. They’re flipping pages. They’re like, When do we get back to the characters interacting with each other? When we get into the character interaction, you can have too much of it. There is an overload of sitting in Bryant Park. You’re like, All right, I’ve already.
Kat
There’s an overload of Drax and Star-Lord.
Jeff
You need to take a step back and you need to take in and you need to reflect on what’s happening and you need to summarize what your character is experiencing. You need these moments. You need to describe the room. It’s things that we have to do to establish, to ground our reader in the moment, which is what exposition does really well. It zooms out and it’s like, hey, this is New York City.
Kat
It’s not Baltimore, it’s not DC.
Jeff
Yeah, this is where we are. This is what it is. Get ready. This is the big Apple. And then we zoom into the streets and we actually experience it. Part of what I talk about in the book is when to use Exposition and when to use dialogue. I talk about like, hey, these are the two different tools. This is what they do. And so understand that when you get to breaks in your dialogue, which I won’t go into detail here, but in the book, I call them segment breaks. But when you get to a segment break, it’s really important to have some paragraphs of exposition to back up and to be like, okay, I got to take a step back and I got to let the reader’s mind slow for a minute. We’ll give the reader a breath from the craziness of Bryant Park. Give them a breath to breathe and take it in. And now we can go back. And it actually enhances understanding that where to put that exposition and how to use that exposition in relationship to your dialogue allows you to craft a more strategic emotional journey.
Kat
Which is what we want, right? Which is what.
Jeff
We want. So when you get to a place where you need to have a big emotional moment, you’re going to find that you’re going to be using more exposition there because you want to slow the reader down. Slow them down. Make them sit in that emotional mess that you just created.
Kat
Yeah, right.
Jeff
If you want an action scene, and this is something that writers get wrong a lot of times. They’re like, okay, I’m going to write an action scene, so I got to write paragraphs and paragraphs of what they’re doing with their arms and legs. No, that makes the reader feel heavy and slow and reflective. They’re not a part of it. Make that action scene feel more like a back and forth. Get their voices in there a little bit. They don’t have to be saying full sentences, but just let them vocalize a little bit. Use that action scene or that sex scene as an exchange between two characters. Make it feel like people are talking to one another physically. And your reader is going to be really into that. It’s that get them in the moment. And they don’t get into the moment. I say don’t, but again, I’m going to caveat with, are there master exposition writers that make us feel present with a paragraph of text? Yes, there are. But the tool that what they’re doing is they’re such a master at this one tool. They’re using it in a way that we wouldn’t use that. So make that action scene, that sex scene, that feel more like dialogue in exchange between two characters. And your reader is going to move into it with the characters.
Kat
Right. And I think you said about your son learning a new tool with art, writers can also… We don’t have to start with a novel with this. You can write a little novella. You can write a short story practicing and honing these tools. Because it’s a scene, a short story is usually one or two scenes, maybe, and just practicing. So in this book, is this a workbook? How do we use this book? Is it more informative?
Jeff
The book is a manual. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel like a manual. Each chapter talks about a different tool. And we start like, hey, this is dialogue and exposition. This is what they’re for. This is how you use both of them. Let me show you some examples. And then at the end of each chapter, there’s a summary, like here’s what I want you to take away from these tools. And then there’s two exercises. There’s a reading exercise and there’s a writing exercise. And then the next chapter is like, here’s this, let’s break down dialogue. Here’s the seven different components of dialogue. Here are the pieces of it. Here’s what each piece does. Here’s why we describe each piece. Once you understand what a segment is, here’s why it’s important you know where segments are and what happens. This is a vocalization. This is what a vocalization is like. This is body language. Body language enhances the emotional texture of a vocalization. So starting to understand, here’s what these different components of dialogue do. And now empowering you to use them strategically. That’s what the book… and it’s short, it’s eight chapters. In the book, I cover… sorry, I struggle with we and I because we do have more coaches at the Dialogue Doctor, so I never want to take credit away from them. But they didn’t write the book. I wrote the book.
Kat
But the Doctor wrote the book.
Jeff
What I go through in the book is we do dialogue and exposition, like what dialogue itself does. Then we go, here are the components of dialogue. Then I go to, once you have the components of dialogue, let’s get down into the different types of scenes. And I’m like, so there’s four different ways to start a scene. We talk about the four different ways to start a scene. Again, knowing your tools, knowing the four ways to start, what each one does to the reader, and what happens when that thing doesn’t land with the reader. And what the danger of using that tool too much is. Here’s the four types of ways to start a scene, and then we go into, here’s the three different types of scene based on the number of cast members in them and how you as the writer need to manage scenes differently when you have different numbers of cast members in the scene, and the power and the weaknesses of each size of cast. And then I go into specific character voice and I’m like, here’s what a character voice is. We go through the dialogue daisy. I explain, here’s the five components of a character voice, and we break each of those down. And then I give you, I think I do eight different character voices and how they sound. Here’s a shy voice, here’s a commanding voice, here’s a bubbly voice, here’s a unhinged voice, here’s a… we just go through, here’s all the different… So you can start to understand, oh, I can compare and contrast these. And then we start putting them together. Here’s a bubbly yet anxious voice. And you start to see how to combine character traits to build the voice you want to have. Then we go into modulation. There’s a chapter on modulation, like how to modulate the voices. And then we do character growth and engines anchors, hazards and vehicles. Here’s this tool too. I try to take you from big conception of dialogue down to, let’s get small down to what’s actually happening on the page, and then do the same with characterization. Here’s the big understanding of what a character voice is, and then let’s get real small in how to use it.
Kat
Nice. I like that. And do we need to read this book before we participate in your workshops?
Jeff
No, not at all.
Kat
Really? Okay.
Jeff
I would actually say the book is… The workshops are like, let’s take one thing from the book and go much deeper in it. Whereas the book is like, hey, let me give you an overview of all the tools we’ve discovered in the Dialogue Doctor. It’s one of those things of like, I really think you’ll appreciate that reading the book is going to… So the Dialogue Doctor community has been going for two years. There are several authors, many authors who have been on this journey with me for all two years. And we’re routinely communicating around what our problems are, what we’re struggling with, craft wise, how we can improve our work, craft wise. I do a weekly podcast and every other week it’s just an editing session I have with an author where I’m like, let’s talk about the tools and how they’re being used and how we can use them differently. So what this book does is fast forward your two years in the journey. Here’s all the language.
Kat
Catch us up.
Jeff
Yeah, here’s all the stuff we’ve learned. Here’s the first two years of what we figured out about dialogue working together.
Kat
Okay, so then we can come into the community and not feel completely lost.
Jeff
Not feel completely lost. Not have to be like, hey, you said the word anchor. What’s an anchor? Which we don’t get all. We get some, but I also tend to overexplain everything as you probably noticed in this interview. So there is that… It’s not that you are going to come into the community and get lost. This is just like a booster shot. Some people don’t want to be a part of the community. That’s what I found. They’re like, hey, look, writing this hard enough and it takes enough time, the last thing I want to do, Jeff, is be on a Slack channel with you. This is also for people who are like, I want this stuff.
Kat
But I want all your info so can you write a book?
Jeff
Yeah, I want to learn this stuff, but I don’t want to listen to two years of podcasts to understand it.
Kat
I have to say, though, your podcasts are pretty good. If people are walking or just like… You have interesting ideas that I haven’t heard other people talk about in bringing in the dialogue. I always use the example of how you say every person that wears a uniform at work should speak differently when that uniform is on their body.
Jeff
Yeah, modulate the voice to the uniform.
Kat
Right. That is an interesting… yes, it seems obvious when you say it, and yet unless you really put it out there, it’s like lifting weights. Unless they tell you how to lift it properly, you’re just like, Well, I’m just doing it.
Jeff
Great example of that that I saw this week. The Bear season two is out. I’m not going to spare anything. I’m not going to spoil anything. I love, love, love, love that show. And this season takes you into many of the characters who are side characters in the first season. And you spend an episode with each of those characters. When you’re watching, pay attention to when they put new uniforms on. Every character puts on a new uniform. And when they put the new uniform on, they take on a different persona.
Kat
Which is perfect, right? Because we know what that means intuitively. And you want your reader to just figure it out, to just roll with it.
Jeff
I’m not going to spoil it, but there’s even a character closer to the end who he won’t take his uniform off. And he’s like, no, this is me. I’m this guy now. This is what I do. I like that. Yeah, and it’s great. It’s like, oh, that’s perfect. You have put on this uniform and you’ve modulated your voice. And you like it. It’s not that your personality has changed. It’s that you’ve decided, well, in this case, decided. Sometimes they don’t decide, but sometimes characters don’t decide. It’s just a natural reflex. But he’s decided that this is how he’s going to present himself to the world now. His personality is the same. He’s not a different character. He hasn’t changed his personality, but he’s deciding to present himself differently, which is character change. You don’t have to change a character’s personality to show character change.
Kat
That’s a masterful way to do it, though, right?
Jeff
Because they’re modulating different aspects of their voice across the story. And if they sound differently from the beginning of the story to the end of the story, we go, They’ve changed.
Kat
Yeah. Okay.
Jeff
And that’s what you want.
Kat
That’s interesting.
Jeff
All right. And the Bear nails it. Season 2 of the Bear, so great.
Kat
You don’t need the book. You just need to read it. I’m just kidding. You got to go watch the Bear. Just go watch the Bear? Yeah. Okay. So where could people…
Jeff
Read the book and then you’ll appreciate the Bear 10 times more. You’ll be like, oh, man, this is right.
Kat
You’ll become me. And I’ll be like, it’s because he has the most to lose. That’s why they made him. My whole family is like, shut up.
Jeff
Stop ruining this for me. Yeah. No, it is. And that’s what, just going back to what we were saying, it’s weird that a show about cooking in a restaurant, right? That is such a mundane everyday thing. Cooking in a restaurant is that there’s no spy thriller to it. There’s no goblins or gnomes. In the first season, there’s no romance. There’s nothing that should make that show be an international hit. But the writer of that show understands their tools. And they’re like I’m going to show you character growth. The writer of that show knows that this character has experienced a deep trauma and tragedy. And because of that, this is how their voice needs to be modulating. And as they deal with that trauma, I’m going to modulate their voice to open them up more to the people around them. And as they open up, we are all going to be captivated by these intimate moments between these characters.
Kat
And that’s what we want to do, no matter what genre.
Jeff
It doesn’t matter what genre it is. We love it. We’re like, we’re all in for this.
Kat
That’s awesome. So where can people find the book? And then when is the workshop again?
Jeff
Book? You can find the book in all places. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo. Go grab it. Ebook and paperback are out, by the time this drops, they’ll be out. And it’s called the Dialogue Doctor Will See You Now. The workshop, you can find it at DialogueDoctor.Com. It’s happening August 1st. It’s going to be a blast. You can attend it live, which I recommend because it is a workshop. So if you attend it live, we talk, we ask questions, we cover things. You get to slow me down and be like, wait, what the hell did you just say? So you’re just like, oh, yeah.
Kat
It’s all right.
Jeff
I just said they’re Manhattan versus Bryant Park, and now you can stop me and be like, hey, can you explain that to me? So that’s the value of coming live. But you can also just buy a recording of it if you’d rather be like, I can’t come on August first. You can just buy the recording.
Kat
Okay. And then the dialogue doctor, dialogue, not thedialoguedoctor.com.
Kat
DialogueDoctor.com.
Jeff
Yeah, everything’s there. DialogueDoctor.com, you can find everything.
Kat
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jeff, for coming on. Congratulations on this book. The Dialogue Doctor will see you guys.
Jeff
Thanks so much.