Mary (26:02):

So let’s take a hard pivot and I want—marketing, schmarketing, sharing your book with others, whatever. I would love to talk about your own book and some of your work as a developmental editor and craft connoisseur because it really does seem like all of these disparate things that you do are all connected back to that as a conduit.

John (26:26):

Yeah, I mean I got into Bookfox because I love books and I love stories and I love helping people with stories. So that’s where my heart is, and I’m just doing all of this publishing and marketing stuff because I realize that’s the best way to serve people once I’ve helped them with stories. But yeah, I have a book called The Linchpin Writer published a year and a half ago, and it basically helps people with the linchpin moments in their book, meaning the absolute key points where if you mess it up, the reader’s not going to enjoy your book. So things like the ending, the beginning, the very first line of dialogue, very first time you describe a character, if you have a romantic scene, making sure you nail that and it’s not cheesy or yawn-inducing, things like describing a place, how do you do that well in a way that creates wonder rather than creates someone skipping to the next page because they’re bored with your description? So I’m just trying to help authors with just these really key points in their book.

Mary (27:33):

So there’s a lot of structure, narrative, plot theory out there. We have the 15 beats from Save the Cat and Save the Cat Writes a novel and Save the Cat Writes a YA Novel and that kind of approach. We have Eric Edsons 22 part Story Solution. John Truby got in there. Story Grid is a grid, literal grid. It’s gigantic and very elaborate. So there are a lot of ideas, writer’s journey, hero’s journey, all of that. Anyway, focus, there is a lot out there and so I like this approach of the linchpin moments because it seems a little bit more malleable in terms of being less prescriptive and more adaptable to an individual story. How did you identify what you consider to be the linchpin moments?

John (28:32):

Well, first of all, I have an ax to grind with all those formulaic people. I really don’t like them. I tried reading Save the Cat and when it gets to the granular level on page 76, make sure this plot point happens and I’m like, ew.

Mary (28:53):

We are a big fan of Jessica Brody here in Mary Land, which is different from Maryland, the state. I should really think before I speak, but that horse has left the barn. We are, but to your point, I think both truths can be true. Oh my God, that yes, it does help to think in a structured kind of even formulaic the F word, right? Formulaic way about plot. But does it have to be on page 76? So that gives you the yuck. Tell me more about that.

John (29:34):

Yeah, I mean I’ve made plenty of videos and blog posts about structure and I dip my toes into that, but I think ultimately you want a book. Narrative shapes can be a lot more malleable than a lot of these books prescribe. So I want to give a little bit of leeway and a little bit of freedom to authors who should be inspired, be inspired by some of the points, put them deep in your subconscious, but if you have ’em at the front of your brain when trying to write a book, the book’s going to come out a little stilted. I think they’re good to know, they’re good to know. And then forget so your unconscious can use them, but your conscious mind isn’t like, let me do this now.

Mary (30:17):

I have definitely run into writers who have maybe box checked all of the energy and originality out of their work because they do follow some of these rubrics to the letter. We don’t have the spirit of the story, we have the letter of the story, and once they’re done checking all those boxes, they wonder why it doesn’t achieve liftoff.

John (30:44):

Yeah, it reminds me of a question, would you rather write a story with passion and heat or one that is structurally perfect? And for me, I’d rather read and write a book with heat and passion, but maybe it’s a little messy, a little flawed than write something which is technically perfect but lacks the energy and the soul of the writing. But that’s a question for the authors who are listening, right? If you go, oh, I want to write the perfect structural book, then go for that. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I would tilt the other direction.

Mary (31:21):

And that’s not to say that you don’t try it once, try it. People who don’t outline their work, I am just like, try it. You don’t know. You don’t know until you try it, all you have to lose is a couple hours of your time, right? Because there is good stuff that comes from, like you said, internalizing story structure, maybe tucking it away in your subconscious, try it, try writing a beat sheet, try writing a novel and checking those boxes and getting comfortable with structuring something. It doesn’t have to be what you do for every project, just like every project doesn’t get the same publishing path

So how did you go about, going back to a question from seven digressions ago, how did you go about selecting which linchpin moments and they were my digressions. Nothing on you, sir. How did you go about selecting … you’re sifting through everything that you know about story. How did you pick and choose?

John (32:24):

I picked and choose because I have almost a thousand blog posts at Bookfox and the ones that people found most helpful or really resonated or ones that still stuck in my mind as topics that were super important for authors. In a way, I sort of tested all of this stuff with the blog and saw what worked best for authors and then I sort of took some of that best information and connected it with stories. I felt like every single chapter in this book has some sort of real life story that I’ve gone through in my writing life that illustrates this particular craft point. So if it had a story and if it was something I’d seen really connected with authors and helped authors before then I thought, okay, it fits in this book.

Mary (33:15):

So you sort of reverse engineered this book from user data. You looked at comments, engagements and you said, Hey, these are the, I forget how many chapters there are. It’s a fabulous book, The Linchpin Writer, but you parceled it out into X number of chapters and you put a guide together.

John (33:39):

Yeah, it was definitely listening to what helped people and listening to authors through the almost 20 years of doing this that helped create the book. I feel like listen, a lot of books like writing books, authors, they write a couple books and they’re like, you know what? I think I can teach how this works, but maybe they haven’t done a lot of teaching before or maybe it’s been at the undergraduate level. I don’t know. Sometimes these writing books, they come out a little bit half formed, maybe there’s a lot of them that seem very similar to other books out there, and I’m like, okay, I want to write something that doesn’t exist, that’s a little more advanced than your typical, oh, here’s how to do plot, howdy-duty-doo. I feel like that’s what I do with my blog and with my YouTube as well as I’m not trying to speak to the beginning level writer. I’m trying to speak to writing a writer who reads some blogs and reads some craft books and has some writing under their belt. What’s the next level up from there? How do I talk to medium career writers, mid-career writers and help them along the journey? Only so much work you can do working with beginning writers, right? Let’s move a little bit into more complex stuff and even I think my book is still helpful to beginning writers, but they’re getting something which is different than all the other stuff out there. I’m trying not to repeat other people.

Mary (35:16):

I have so many thoughts, including I think it’s very astute that once a writer writes a lot, they want to put their name on a writing guide and sort of contribute to the cannon. I can think of several examples, and I’m not going to name names, but one of them is our book club pick for tomorrow. So I’m especially fired up about this. Beautiful novelist, wonderful. The writing guide, not so much, but it’s a brand extension. We are now a thought leader in the publishing world. I also validate, I think, not that you need my validation, but this need for sort of more advanced craft books because there are only so many ways that you can rehash the same five topics of character, plot, world building, voice, and I really think it’s admirable that you are speaking to writers who want a little bit more. They don’t need the handholding, they need the now what.

John (36:19):

Yeah, and to go back to your point about great authors who write a mediocre teaching book, craft book, I think that they’re very different skills. You could be the best writer in the universe but not be very good at communicating how you do it or teaching people how to do it in their own book. And I think that reverse is true too. You could be the best craft teacher in the universe and not be that great of a writer. They’re just very different skillsets and that’s why you see, if you look at developmental editors in the publishing industry who work in New York at the very best developmental editors in the world, a lot of them aren’t writers. They’re just really, really good readers. So be okay with people who have different skill sets. I have people come to me and be like, well, if you haven’t written a New York Times bestselling book, I don’t think you have anything to teach me. And I’m like, well, for one, I have lots of friends who are the most amazing literary writers of all time and they just don’t sell a lot of copies. So the idea that writing a bestselling book is a mark of being the best writer is simply not true. Sometimes they’re not very good writers at all, but they’re very good at structure and plot and mystery and easy pleasures.

Mary (37:43):

Easy pleasures. I like my pleasures difficult. No, I was reading the book, The Plot, it came out in 2021 and it has a lot in common with About the Author and Yellowface, which have all sort of tread this structure of a writer stumbles into a wonderful plot and they steal it and the ramifications and the internal justifications and all of that. It’s so funny. I finished it last night and it had so much to do with this. Okay, what is it about this plot that the author stole that made it an instant New York Times bestseller compared to other plots? And is it really about the writing? Is it about just the consumability of the story? So this is very timely and I do think that there is a big difference between the sort of stuff, politics aside, the internal mechanics of the list. We know which one we’re talking about aside. I do think that there is a certain type of book that tends to receive that kind of high concept attention, that book club selection attention. And to your point, certain books just shouldn’t expect to go on the same journey.

John (39:04):

Yeah. Some authors come to me with a particular type of book and they’re like, I want to be a bestseller. And I’m like, well, you didn’t write the type of book that is a bestseller. You wrote a book that fulfills a very specific niche. It’s very well written. It’s going to sell a couple thousand copies at best, and you should be happy with that, right? Not every book is destined to become a bestseller. If you wanted to write a completely different book and I could teach you how to write that type of book, okay, that will become, you have a chance of becoming a bestseller. But personally, I don’t want to write that type of book. I have very specific, I’m sending out two novels now and neither one of them are particularly marketable, but they’re the books I wanted to write.

That’s exactly what I wanted to write, and I know it’s not going to have a huge audience and I’m fine with that, but authors sometimes have these pipe dreams and a mismatch between the book they wrote and their marketing expectations for it. And then the other thing is my wife’s a big reader. She reads like 150 books a year and she reads very different books than I do. She reads books that sell a lot of copies and she always tells me the plot and I’m like, yeah, I can see why a lot of people want to read that. And then I tell her the plot of what I’m reading, and she’s like, okay, and there are fewer people—

Mary (40:22):

She’s asleep. She doesn’t even respond because she’s asleep.

John (40:26):

There are just fewer people that want to read some concepts or books that are difficult to describe. You’re like, okay, well it’s going to be a really hard time selling that book, and that’s fine. Both books should exist. I love that all those books exist.

Mary (40:41):

So I’m going to pin you to the mat a little bit on describing high concept. So you just said, and I think that’s a great entry point. Some books are hard to describe. You have to really sit and try to engage and try to communicate the themes and anyway, bestselling type books, the kind that your wife tells you about don’t tend to have that same hurdle. One of the hallmarks of a high concept premise, at least to me the way I think about it is it’s easy to present and people hear it and they get it. So what’s your definition?

John (41:21):

It’s something you can describe in a single sentence that makes a person say, I want to read that. It’s an idea they haven’t heard before. It’s concise. You can do it in a single sentence and it’s immediately like, Ooh, I am intrigued. Give me the book now. And the best way to do this is get a subscription to Publisher’s Marketplace. You get an email once a week with 150 books that recently sold, go through and read their one to two sentence descriptions of every single book. That’s pretty much the definition of high concept. You go through theirs, I feel like 90% of them are pretty high concept, and you’ll know the ones that are high concept like, oh, I wish that was out now rather than coming out a year and a half from now.

Mary (42:09):

You’ll also know it by the language “Good deal” and significant deal and major deal.

John (42:14):

This is true.

Mary (42:17):

Which are for people who have not yet subscribed to Publisher’s Marketplace, despite my years of telling you to just go ahead and do it. Those are the notations for the genteel notations for how much money the publisher spent.

John (42:32):

Yeah, yeah. I love that. They’re like, we’re not going to tell you directly. We’re going to give you a code and then you have to look up what it means.

Mary (42:38):

There’s a key. There is literally a key where the dirty dollar amounts are actually mentioned.

John (42:45):

Yes, I forget there’s one 500,000 and up, which is significant.

Mary (42:49):

Significant actually I think major is 250 to 500 and significant is 500 and up or maybe significant is just seven figures. Anyway. Sometimes they will say in a seven figure deal as if you didn’t know already by all the sub rights and foreign rights and movies option sales.

John (43:09):

But it really is an excellent education, and honestly, if every writer before they figured out what their novel is about, just read Publisher’s Marketplace for a month and got a sense of all the books being published right now, you’d probably come up with a better book idea.

Mary (43:27):

I think what is so key about what you’re saying is that it’s not about the statement, it’s not about the premise statement, it’s about what the premise statement conveys. So if you’ve written a quiet intergenerational coming of age saga that doesn’t have that, we decided to reanimate dinosaurs from DNA, that’s Jurassic Park. But if you don’t have that, if that’s not the story that you’ve written, you’re not going to be able to make it into that by composing the perfect premise statement. It’s not like a shibboleth that gets you an agent. A lot of people focus, a lot of writers I think focus on the query. They focus on the logline, they focus on all of these pitch related elements, submission elements, and think, man, if I can just add some sizzle to this pitch that’s going to get my story, which is not at all sizzly, and that’s fine. It’s not a sizzler. It’s going to get it across the transom in a big way.

John (44:35):

First of all, excellent use of the word shibboleth. Well done.

Mary (44:40):

I used to watch a lot of West Wing and had to look it up, and that is how I learned it.

John (44:46):

Two, great job using the word sizzler in a non-restaurant related way. Good job. So yeah, I totally agree with all that, and I would say that if you have written a quiet intergenerational saga, then the way that you make people want to read it is not with that crazy log line, which is it’s the sizzler and exciting. It’s by comparing it to two books that are great. Then authors are like, or readers are like, oh, I liked both of those books. That’s what this is. So you can create excitement in other ways. If you don’t have a high concept book, which you might not, you create it by comparing it to other non high concept books that people enjoyed.

Mary (45:30):

Are titles as big a deal in publishing as writers make them out to be when they obsess about that one sentence in the query letter?

John (45:42):

Well, first of all, recognize that a comp title is more about convincing the agent that you’re not an idiot than it’s about picking the right comp title, right? Because 90% of the time the agent’s going to go with different comp titles, right?

Mary (45:57):

Yes. The agents absolutely pick their own comps, and it is a rare day when one of yours gets reused.

John (46:04):

Totally. So take the pressure off of yourself. All you have to do is pick a comp title that shows the industry. You’re not picking Harry Potter as your comp title, something incredibly obvious or incredibly famous. Pick mid-level books that the agent probably has heard of, but maybe didn’t sell a gazillion copies that have just something in common with your book, and the agent will think, all right, this is the person I can work with.

Mary (46:34):

You know what? This was the perfect response. It articulated something that it just so blazingly obvious, but I have never heard anybody express in quite this way before. Yes, if you’re pitching Twilight meets The Da Vinci Code meets whatever it conveys unrealistic expectations. If you pitch something that is maybe a bit more niche, maybe hit the list for one week so you know about it and is recent within the last three years, an agent’s going to say, this person doesn’t just want to write a book. They have read a book. At least one.

John (47:15):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s much more a way to convince the agent who you are, to tell them who you are. I mean, yes, it does tell them something about the book, obviously, but you’re trying to pass this bar to convince them I’ve got realistic expectations and I know what I’m doing in this industry.

Mary (47:35):

How does somebody, so what I love about you is your very holistic view of every writer, every project which you have to have if you serve writers, is if you work as a developmental editor and you strive to see the integrity of their idea and who they are as a person, their intentions, all of that. If somebody is suffering from unrealistic expectation itis, which a lot of writers do, we just naturally do. This is the dream of our heart, and why wouldn’t our dream shoot off into the stratosphere? At the same time, we feel like hacks and imposter syndrome, and we are illiterate sometimes in our writing, but how does somebody come to peace with some of these ridiculous expectations and still find the motivation to keep going? How does that maturity process happen for a writer?

John (48:39):

Redefine what success means. Success for a lot of authors means having their book made into a movie, getting on a bestseller list, having it bought by a traditional publisher and getting a big advance. That is not what success should look like. I mean, yeah, that’s great if it happens, but think about all the other different ways you can define success that I went to an a WP panel where someone talked about how his book, someone contacted him and said, listen, my mother was dying. I took your book and I read it to her, and we read your book together for the day and a half before she died, and we laughed. We laughed about it, we cried over it.

Getting an email that is worth, that is the definition of success. Your book touched this person and her mother in her final days. How wonderful is that? And I’ve gotten lots of emails from people saying, oh, I love this thing about your short story. I struggled with this in my family, or it makes this really deep emotional impact. To me, the definition of success is one person reaching out and say, your book really touched me. It really connected with me. That’s what success is, and if you do that, you’re going to feel much happier about yourself as an author and feel much happier, happier about your career and feel like you are successful rather than having these crazy expectations of materialistic wealth or fame.

Mary (50:30):

That was a mic drop of an answer if I’ve ever heard one. That is beautiful. What an honor. You’re so right. One of the reasons that we write and read is to connect emotionally to make meaning from life, and this is the ultimate meaning that was made in this beautiful little bubble between reader, mother and book, and that is just, you can’t take it to the bank, but it is such a glory to the soul.

John (51:02):

Can’t take it to the bank, but I’m sure that author will take it to the grave with him. My book matters.

Mary (51:08):

I did something. I left a mark. I was the butterfly that flapped its wings and halfway around the world it reached somebody. That’s beautiful.

John (51:17):

That’s right.

Mary (51:19):

Well, I don’t know what we can talk about that could possibly top that beautiful anecdote. Thank you. And I think I maybe speak for both of us when I say we will part as friends, or at the very least frenemies.

John (51:38):

Glad we got over the nemesis. We’ve had a character arc!

Mary (51:43):

A whole, oh, here’s one. Does a character have to grow and change?

John (51:50):

No. You have all sorts of static characters. Think of like James Bond, who’s a pretty static character.

Mary (51:57):

That’s true.

John (51:58):

Like Sherlock Holmes is a pretty static character. If you’re writing episodic fiction and the character really doesn’t change, and usually it’s minor characters who change, right? You’ll have the villain who might change in that story or maybe some other minor character around the steadfast character, but if you’re not writing episodic fiction, it’s usually good to have a character arc. But the trouble is most authors think it needs to be a big character arc, and it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes a character arc is very small, sometimes it’s a very small epiphany about themselves or a moment of realization. It doesn’t have to be a huge change, so work on subtleties in your character arc, and also if your main character is changing, then there’s less pressure to have your minor characters have enormous character arcs as well. Sometimes minor characters can be like steadfast characters in your pantheon if your main character as a huge arc.

Mary (52:58):

What I’m hearing you say though is that there should be some proxy for the main character if the main character doesn’t change, or perhaps even devolves. There are books like that. Somebody should be experiencing something for that human redemptive or aspirational element.

John (53:16):

Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s true. Yes, someone should be, and I also think the refusal to change can be a very interesting dynamic, even if they don’t change, because if someone refuses to change when the audience is yearning for them to change, it creates a lot of friction and tension toward the end of the book, which has its own emotional rewards for the reader in the same way that having them actually change would provide a lot of emotional rewards. So there’s different ways to get at that emotional reward for the reader. That doesn’t have to involve enormous change, and

Mary (53:56):

It all depends on the type of writer you are and the type of book that you are working on.

John (54:03):

Yeah.

Mary (54:04):

Well, a beautiful landing for our interview and a bonus craft tidbit from John Matthew Fox. Where can people find you? Where can the people run for more wisdom?

John (54:18):

My website is the johnfox.com, or you could just Google Bookfox. I’m also on YouTube as Bookfox. That’s the social media I’ve been working on most recently, but I do have an Instagram and BookTok if you want to look at older.

Mary (54:32):

I hear you are big on TikTok.

John (54:35):

Yeah. It was fun to do TikTok. It was an education in some ways for me, learning what younger writers wanted and what they really responded to. It was not what I expected. The videos that blew up, I’m like, huh, wow, okay. That got over a million views. I mean, I just shot that in one minute in my bedroom and didn’t even think about it that much, but I guess people loved it sometimes being really, I don’t know, just not overthinking. It ends up connecting with people a lot more than really rigid. Let me lay out all the principles.

Mary (55:11):

Maybe for one of your next classes for Bookfox Academy, you can do a curriculum on how writers can stop overthinking.

John (55:22):

Yeah. I guess that sort of fits in with what we were talking about, formulaic fiction and things that are too scheduled out and too outlined. There is a danger to that. I mean, there’s a danger in not doing it, and there’s also a danger in doing it. So yeah, that’d be interesting to talk about more.

Mary (55:43):

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your wisdom and just sharing your wealth of knowledge with us. John Matthew Fox is the Bookfox, and I am Mary Kole with Good Story Podcast. Here’s to a good story.