Episode 178
Do you want to improve the dialogue in your novels? Author and dialogue coach Jeff Elkins shares tips on differentiating character voices and tips for using (or not!) dialogue tags. We also touch on the “rules” of writing versus reader expectations.
Author Website:
JeffElkinsWriter.com
DialogueDoctor.com
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Time Stamps:
0:05 Dialogue Doctor
6:48 Writer’s Journey and Defining Success
15:56 Building a Writing Community
24:47 Starting a Small Business, Unique Voices
35:22 Writing Dialogue
44:47 Dialogue’s Importance and Writing Techniques
59:57 Importance of Slowing Down in Writing
Transcript:
Jami Albright [00:00:33]:
And I’m Jamie Albright. And this week on the show, we have Jeff Elkins. It’s a great episode talking about dialogue. He’s a dialogue doctor. So, yeah, it’s great.
Sara Rosett [00:00:41]:
Yeah. And so we really delve. It’s very craft focused this week, and it’s all about we ask him, you know, about making characters voices different, how to distinguish them, and we get in. We talk a lot about things like the shoulds that people say. Like, you should do this or you shouldn’t do that. And kind of, you know, it’s the myth busting dialogue episode or something. You know? A lot of the things that we think we should or shouldn’t do are just arbitrary rules, you know, that we don’t have to follow. Correct. So, yeah, so that’s coming up. Whatever you’ve got going on this week.
Jami Albright [00:01:19]:
Nothing. I was just telling Sara, I’m still at my daughter’s, There was an issue with the pool, and so I didn’t get to finish swim lessons until Wednesday. And then I was supposed to leave on Thursday, but decided to bring the kids home some of the kids home with me, but then they couldn’t leave yesterday. So we were gonna leave today, which is Friday. And then my daughter remembered last night that the girls have to get their hair done tonight. So we can’t leave till tomorrow. So Sara said it’s a hostage situation. that. Pretty much. I can’t. I can’t. So I’m still here.
Sara Rosett [00:01:57]:
The coco hostage situation. The grandkids won’t let you go. Of 2023.
Jami Albright [00:02:00]:
Yeah. so, yeah, that’s kinda what’s going on. I’ve been doing some consulting, though, while I’m here. So been fun and, really enjoyed it. And so, yeah, that’s just me. And I don’t have really very much. kinda getting ideas about things to write when I start writing and so that’s exciting and really getting exciting about excited about writing. So that’s that’s really good. That’s good. For a very long time. So, yeah. yeah, so that’s that’s just said, gone to a couple of movies. I saw Barbie, and I loved it. And if whatever. If people didn’t like it, that’s fine. That’s their opinion. I loved it. I thought it was hilarious. Ryan Gosling is just hysterical. And then I saw the haunted mansion last night, and it is delightful. I mean, delightful. It is so funny and pulls at your heartstrings. It’s just the right amount of spooky and Tiffany Haddish is just… She’s still showing my opinion. It’s just great.
Sara Rosett [00:03:05]:
Yeah. Oh, that’s awesome. That is awesome. Yeah. I haven’t been to see anything, so that will go on my list. And Barbie too. probably haven’t seen. I kinda wanna see just to see why everybody’s either so in love with it or so mad about it. Yeah. It’s —
Jami Albright [00:03:25]:
because it’s like It’s like anything else. It’s silly. But, I do, you know, those are energy pennies for me. Yeah. Oh, yeah. stuff like that. So, yeah, what about you? What’s going on with you?
Sara Rosett [00:03:34]:
well, I’ve been doing some stuff on the Kickstarter to get it ready. It’s getting closer. I think I’m almost got everything ready to go. I’m I’ve ordered a couple of things that I might use as rewards, like higher reward things, but I wanna see the quality of them. Yeah. So, you know, like, cause I ordered one thing and it wasn’t great. And I was like, okay. Maybe I can figure out some other way to do this. So waiting on those things, and, doing a little bit of writing, not a lot, kinda getting back into that. I feel like summer’s been a little crazy with travel and stuff. And, like, now it’s time to get back to the groove, you know, but, yeah, not a lot of that. So kind of scattered, basically is how I feel. But, yeah. So coming along, things are coming along.
Jami Albright [00:04:18]:
Yeah. We have a new we have a new sponsor? I mean, not sponsor. We have a new, supporter.
Sara Rosett [00:04:30]:
Yeah. We have CJ Anderson, and they picked the rocket ship. So that’s cool. Thank you, CJ. And for all our other supporters, we really appreciate.
Jami Albright [00:04:40]:
We do y’all. I mean, it just means so much to us and, yeah, we love you.
Sara Rosett [00:04:44]:
And another exciting thing happened. We crossed a 1000 members in the group, right, in the Facebook group? Yes. So that was cool.
Jami Albright [00:04:54]:
So we’re excited about that. And, yeah, we just love that y’all love the podcast, and we love that you want us to keep doing it. So that’s what we’re going to.
Sara Rosett [00:05:05]:
Yeah. And we’ll have some details on a a supporter Zoom in August sometime, I think, but we’re just waiting for things to kinda settle down for both of us. so that we can actually know a good date. So we’ll have we’ll have an update on that soon. When I’ve been released. Yeah. That’s right. We’ll negotiate Jamie’s release. Alright. Well, we should get on with the interview. Alright. Well, here is Jeff. Today, we are really excited to talk to Jeff Elkins. Hi, Jeff. How are you?
Jeff Elkins
Hey, Sarah. Thanks, for having me on. I really appreciate it. we’re excited you’re here.
Sara Rosett
So let me read your bio and we’ll get started. Jeff is the author of 12 novels and over 100 short stories. as the dialogue doctor, he helps writers improve their dialogue to better engage readers.
Jami Albright [00:05:59]:
That’s great. I’m so glad you’re here with us, Jeff.
Tell us how you got into writing because you write in your own fiction. Correct?
Jeff Elkins [00:06:08]:
I do write my own fiction. I actually started writing fiction long before I started doing the dialogue doctor. I got it. The dialogue doctor. I’m not a doctor. I just play one on a podcast. I got into writing. writing was tough for me. I was dyslexic as a kid. I I’m still dyslexic. It wasn’t just as a kid. It didn’t go away. and, I really writing is the only class I ever got less than a B in in any of schooling. I gotta be I gotta d minus in freshman English, which was like composition. so writing and I just weren’t friends. And then I was in my thirties. I was working a really hard job. and I I wrote something as part of the job. Like, I was writing an illustration to help explain something for somebody. And I wrote it as a short story, and I was like, man, that felt really good. and so I went online. I found a book called How to write a short story by Joe Bunting, which is fantastic short book. And, I just started writing a short story every night, and I did that for, over a year, and that’s how I kinda caught the bug. And then, the way I got into writing novels was I’ve been in short story every night for about a year and a half, and I was kind of at that point managing a weird online journal that, like, 5 or 6 writers were all writing to, which was ill advised if we wanna talk about mistakes I’ve made as a writer, that was a mistake. I mean, but it was a lot of fun. I was having a great time. And, we’re having a blast, publishing things that no one read. but having a good time doing it. And then, I got, fired from a job, very suddenly and very unexpectedly. and, had no income. I’d been working non profits for 15 years and you know, the thing about working non profits is that, it’s it’s really the mission of the work that you live off of, not the salary. So I was, I was, broke for. I we had just moved to take this new job, and I had, 4 kids and my wife was 9 months pregnant with my 5th kid when they told me like, hey. well, they didn’t technically fire me. They told me, like, you can work then we’re gonna fire you in a month, or you can resign now, and we’ll pay you for a month. And I was like, I will take the pay for a month. Thank you. but I really got scared. I was terrified. And I was like, I can’t ever be in a place again where all of my income is dependent on one place. I was like, I don’t ever wanna feel I have too many children. I don’t ever wanna feel this way again. So that moved me from short stories to novels. Yeah. And that’s how I really got in from then. It was just I started writing. I found that I could do about 2 a year. That’s my capacity. I’ve tried to do more and I just burn out. so I I can get to done a year and I’ve done 2 a year I think I published my first one in 2015.
I’ve done 2 years. A little more. Sometimes I I do I did have a couple of years where I did 3, but and then I had a year where I did 1 because it’s too emotionally heavy. I couldn’t carry more than 1. Yeah.
Sara Rosett [00:09:34]:
I totally get that. I came from traditional publishing. So 1 a year was, like, the thinking of doing more than that at overwhelmed me. I can’t do that now, but at the time, I was like, I couldn’t even think of it.
Jeff Elkins [00:09:48]:
Yeah. It’s it’s hard because there’s that, like, I think there’s that thing in the industry that’s like, you know, write fast publish and repeat, which is fantastic advice if you’re the type of writer that can do it, But for those of us that aren’t, I went through a season of really deep discouragement where I was like, I’m I cannot run the pace. that the genre fiction, the the common wisdom about genre fiction was telling me I had to run it. I was like, I can’t And part of it is because I get very emotionally tied to what I’m writing and it, you know, writing a novel for me is a is a an emotional journey and by the end of it, I’m tired. I don’t wanna go start the next one.
Sara Rosett [00:10:36]:
So — I totally get that. Becca Syme calls it the Cult of Speed. We’re like, wait. We have to write faster. We have to do more. And I think that’s kind of fading a little bit, but it’s definitely been part of the indie author community for a long time.
Jeff Elkins [00:10:48]:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t I think AI is kind of throwing it into not into not necessarily into question, but definitely creating a new bar for it. I like what I don’t I don’t know if y’all have had Joe Salarian. he wrote a book called Advantage. And, I really love what he he describes the publishing industry as, winner take all. And he’s he’s at one of the reasons the right fast publish feet works is because it is winner take all. So if you win and you can keep winning, you know, you get kind of the spoils of the war, but you have to be winning to to get anything. Right. I think for a long time, and I think that model will continue. Like, I don’t think that model’s going anywhere. I did, but I guess it was, like, you know, 3 or 4 years into my run as a writer, I did encounter his work and, you know, listening to others like Joanna Penn and Mark Leslie LeFebvre who just have decades in the industry and learning like, okay. There’s a long tail here. There’s a way to make money that isn’t this rapid fire attacks. and it’s trying to find, I think for me, I started being motivated my money, but then well, my external motivation of, like, this is why I’m doing it is financial success, but then coming to learn, like, in seasons where I didn’t have any financial success, but I still had this deep desire to write trying to understand, like, what is that? Like, what is it that now I have this bug. I can’t stop. because there were years where it’s like, okay, I would make more money. Like, picking up two shifts at 7-11 that I would with this novel. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, and I’d ask myself to be like, should I just take all this hours I spend writing, like, drive Uber? Like, what am I doing? But there is I found that I really am motivated by taking readers on an emotional journey. you know, it did take, like, me talking to my readers and being like, hey, you know, talk to me about your experience in my books and listening to them talk about what they enjoyed. And then when would they enjoyed also sparked something in me? I was like, that’s it. That’s what I that’s what I love to do. That’s why I write. Yeah. And it was this, like, I love to connect you to a character. and give you and that character an emotional experience together. Yeah. which really helped because, like, oh, I don’t write series. Like, I that doesn’t motivate me. I’ve never finished 1. I get really tired of them. So for me, it’s like, oh, we’ve done the journey. We’re done.
Sara Rosett [00:13:36]:
That’s great. Well, you sort of answered our second question by your definition of success.
Jeff Elkins [00:13:43]:
Oh, nice. Good. I’m running the podcast already.
Sara Rosett [00:13:46]:
So it’s all about the characters for you. Like, just creating that emotional journey.
Jeff Elkins [00:13:50]:
I would say it’s about the reader. it’s about can I if I can make the reader cry and laugh in the same book, I feel like I’ve won something. Like, and that’s that for me, that’s it’s, you know, does that make sense?
Jami Albright [00:14:01]:
It makes sense completely to me because I feel the same way.
Jeff Elkins [00:14:10]:
Yeah. I really want, you know, it’s hard because I don’t I’m not motivated by the reader buying the next book, which is very bad for business. Terrible for business. I am super motivated about the reader emailing me and being like, this made me feel something. Even if that feeling is bad, like, I had I just wrote a book. the book I published last year, was pretty controversial for some people to read, and they I got letters of, like, this made me really angry, and that felt like a big win to me. Yeah. I was like, yes. so, yeah, it was a but I really like making them feel things.
Jami Albright [00:14:50]:
That’s great. I do love that answer. I think that’s, super smart, way to define success.
But what assumptions did you make at the beginning of your writing career? And looking back, did they turn out to be right or wrong?
Jeff Elkins [00:15:07]:
I made I think that I think there’s 2 super negative assumptions I made. 1, I thought of writing as a solo sport. And I was like, oh, this is something I do on my own. I coach a lot of writers now, and I’d I talked to all of them about, like, hey. This is a team sport. like, we do this as a team. Not that you’re, like, co I do co write with somebody. we have a series that we co write together, which is fun and wonderful, but, not I don’t mean it’s a team sport in co writing. I mean, you have to have a community of people around you to support this endeavor. It’s it’s too arduous. It requires too much rigor. It requires too much emotional investment to try to, like, isolate yourself and do this outside of your peers. So you need to be talking to other authors. I spent the first probably 5. After I stopped writing short stories and I switched to novels, it was, like, 3 or 4 years where I just isolated myself completely. and it it was it was terrible. Like, it wasn’t fun. I would listen to podcasts that I wouldn’t I didn’t really have a community didn’t have the ability to go to conferences. So, yeah, I didn’t have the financial means or the ability to travel because the job I was working. And so I was like, okay. But I didn’t attempt to connect with anybody online. I was just like, this is and I didn’t connect attempt to connect to anybody locally. partially because of my own imposter syndrome, which also was just an excuse because I’m an introvert, and I didn’t wanna talk to people anyway. So it was that, Yeah. So that was the first one, I think. writing changed for me when I started connecting with other people. when I was like, oh, can I stop seeing them as competitors and started seeing them as peers? really started seeing them as teammates. Like, even people that wrote in my same genre, and I knew we’re, like, we’re going for the same readers. The truth is neither of us were making a big enough impact to actually say we were competing with each other. So I was like, no. I we could talk. We could share notes. Like, maybe we can even share some readers. It’d be great. But it’s that, like, you know, let’s viewing, like, stop that need to shift from like, oh, these are my competitors. Like, we’re in this together. This is a community endeavor.
And, the best work comes, I think, when it comes out of a heart of like we did this. And then once you once you make that shift, you know, all of a sudden, all these examples appear like, oh, yeah. You know, Hemmingway had his, like, community people and Fitzgerald was part of that community. And, you know, even like, you know, Jane Austin had, like, you know, her family around her. Like, there wasn’t anybody that’s like, it’s hard to find a ride that was like, yeah, this person was completely isolated doing work in their own world.
Sara Rosett [00:18:01]:
Well, how did you connect with other writers?
Because a lot of writers were all are introverts and How did you kind of make those first connections? Cause I had the first one to the hardest.
Jeff Elkins [00:18:08]:
They are the hardest. For me, it was raw desperation. I was listening to some podcasts I was at a place where, like, okay. I’m not selling. I don’t know what I’m doing. I am I am exhausted and I’m tired of like pushing forward. And I was listening to Mark Leslie, LeFebvre’s podcast, the stark reflections podcast. And he had he sat on there. He’s like, hey, you can go to my website and just schedule all the time with me. And I was like, I I’ll do that. And so I did and he was, like, wonderful and he was, kind and like, very knowledgeable about kind of where I was. Like, it was a it was a shock to me that I was in a commonplace that everybody goes to. And he was like, yeah. This is kind of the stage you’re in. Like, so and then he kind of connected me with other people. He was like, hey. There here’s an online group here. Here’s an online here. Like, try this online group. I will say the best thing he did for me was he connected me with cohorts that were mid to small. because I was in some writer groups, like, on Facebook, there were, like, 10,000 people. Yeah. And those aren’t helpful. Like, they weren’t they’re helpful for understanding the market. and knowing the industry and learning about how to sell, they’re not helpful for building relationships. So, like, I needed to get so I ended up I ended up falling into another through Mark you know, engaged with some other writers and fell into kind of a cohort that was starting that had an online component that allowed me to talk. That will say, like, we live in a beautiful time that makes this possible.
Sara Rosett [00:19:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. It it the smaller groups can really, really help a lot. Like the big groups are great, like you said, for knowledge, but the small groups is where you’re going to make friendships.
Jeff Elkins [00:20:08]:
Yeah. And if I can say, like, small, just a caveat, like, what was important for me was small groups that had the same ambitions I did. because I the the local writer community where I am, I’m in Maryland. the United States and the local rider community where I am is really strong. They were very, very focused on getting traditional contracts. And I don’t have anything against that, but I also recognize that, like, there’s a path there that the busyness of having a full time job in 5 children do not allow me to pursue. Right. Right. I actually do have a a I right now, I am working on a I traditionally published contract, but it I have to be hybrid. Like, I can’t take every book and then wait to see if I get accepted. So it was, and the contract I have now actually came up. They came to me. So it was different, but that that local group wasn’t my group. I went to him and I was like, oh, I feel weird here. And it doesn’t feel right. And Like, I remember I’d written 4 detective novels, and they were like, I was talking to one of them about writing a detective novel, and she hadn’t finished a novel yet, and she started dumping on me all these books about detectives that she was studying because an agent had given them to her to, like, to get her like, hey. If you wanna get represented by me, I need you to understand these technical crime things. And she’s like, you have to do this before you publish another book. And I was like, you and I are in different places. Like, we’re not we’re not speaking the same language. So we’re still friends, but I that was not a good. So I think not just finding a community, but finding a community that shares your ambition is important. And I know ambition’s usually a bad word. I’m using it here in a post. No. I get it. like what you want.
Sara Rosett [00:22:02]:
I get it. Yeah. Because for me, lots of my local writing groups that I tried, they didn’t have the same goals I did, and so it just didn’t it doesn’t fit. You know? It’s just not a good fit.
Jeff Elkins [00:22:18]:
Yeah. It’s funny. And you try to it like, I found when I try to force myself into those places, like, you know, another aspect of what I do is coached people in running better dialogue as the dialogue doctor. And I remember I I had this was when I first started. I had been asked by a romance writers association, like, hey. Can you do, like, a 6 hour seminar for it? We want you to do our yearly retreat. I was like, yeah. That’d be great. So I did a couple of those, in a row. I did, like, 3 or 4 of them where we did, like, a 6 hour deep dive on characterization and dialogue. And then I had this moment. I was like, you know, I’m doing this for these people that are like around the world. Like, I should be doing it for my local community. So I called my local chapter, which was, like, 10 writers in my neighborhood. Like, literally it’d be, like, 2 minutes from my house. But I was like, hey. I would love I just did this 6 hour thing for these people. I would love just to come and do, like, 45 minutes for, like, I’m not gonna charge anybody anything. I’m just gonna do a free, like, you know, we know each other from the pool. Like, how And they wrote me back a letter. There’s like, you know, they really struggled with it, with the idea of me coming. And then they wrote me back a letter. They was like, you’re not qualified because I don’t have a master’s in English. I don’t have an a degree in English. and they all have masters in English, and they were like, you’re not actually qualified to teach us this stuff. And I At first, I wasn’t mad. I’d like to say I wasn’t mad about it. At first, I was really pissed, but I got over it. But I came to understand like, oh, I was forcing myself into a hole where I didn’t belong. And I knew before I reached out to them that I didn’t belong there. And so I think forcing yourself into groups where you don’t fit actually makes it worse for you and the group. It’s much harder.
Sara Rosett [00:23:59]:
Yeah. Well, those are all things that I think a lot of people can identify with, like, the same about where’s the prophet without honor? in his home hometown is like they don’t ever that’s often where they don’t get it. So you’re you’re not the only one who’s experienced that. So But, before we move, we do wanna talk to you about the dialogue doctor stuff, but before we move on to dialogue, can you tell us,
What’s, the most important lesson you’ve learned?
Jeff Elkins [00:24:28]:
Oh, that’s tough. I think the most so I would say since we’re gonna talk about craft, let me talk about the most important lesson I learned just like running the business And that is and this was a tough lesson for me to learn. That is if you don’t have seed funding, starting a small business is slow and hard. And I think when I went into publishing again, I I started publishing my own work at 2014, 2015. I can’t remember where. So I’m almost a decade in, but when I started doing it, I had the stream that, like, oh, I’m gonna I’m gonna put books up on KDP. I’m just gonna publish multiple books. People will read them. I’m gonna give one away for free. People will read that. They’ll go to the next one. It’s gonna be great. I had already missed the Kindle Gold Rush. And I, like, I didn’t know that, but I know now, like, oh, yeah. I had missed that season by, like, 4 years. So, like, maybe more. So, I got really angry and frustrated not understanding why my work wasn’t going, and I started trying to run ads And I was like, I get the math of this, but there is a, like, what I didn’t understand up front is that, like, you gotta lose to gain. when you’re playing the ad game. You have to lose you have to have the money to lose. Yep. Like, I would apply for a back when the bookbub was, like, the gold standard of advertising you know, not that even that long ago may still be. I don’t know. Back when I would apply for book clubs, but I’d be like, I don’t have the money to pay for this. If they give it to me, I’m gonna have to tell them no. Or I’m gonna have to, like, have a conversation with my wife who’s like, okay. We can pay the mortgage. I could pay for the bookbub. But, like, is that like but that’s just like we were you know, we had spent so many years working for churches and nonprofits, it for very for no money, just like surviving on the day to day. that I didn’t have a safety net. I didn’t have savings. I didn’t have we were living check to check. And so I then started the business thinking it was gonna save me financially not realizing that, like, no dummy starting a small business requires capital. And it was, I think now, starting I will say, like, what I learned was like, okay. starting a business that you’re okay to work hard at before it for 5 to 7 years before it earns anything. doesn’t require any capital. You can do that. But, you know, the I had to shift my mindset to understand this is the game I’m playing. There’s a lot of game. The long game. Right? This is the game I’m playing. I am earning one reader at a time. I am thinking about that reader as a customer that I wanna keep coming back to my store over and over again. I am coddling that reader with emails that are personal and that, like, attach them to me as an author, not just to my, you know, not because I hit the right genre tropes, but because I have a personal brand of writing that they wanna be a part of long term and so that I’m not, like, having to pay more for things like email newsletters, I’m getting rid of readers who don’t fit that who aren’t there for me. who are there because I wrote a detective novel they liked, but not there because they liked my writing. And I’m, like, figuring out ways to give them off ramps. So my community, like, you guys can go. I don’t need to pay for you. Like, you could get off. let’s keep the people who are gonna buy the next book that I write regardless of what genre it is. Like, it’s that I think that was a hard lesson for me to learn. You know, it it was and I will say, like, it was a good lesson to learn because I’m ten years in. And now, you know, my writing pays my kids college tuition. I have 2 children in college. And, you know, we had, again, no savings. Like, because of the decisions I’d made as, coming out of school as to what jobs I took. And so, you know, there was real anxiety around, like, how are we gonna get these kids to school? And, you know, I my daughter’s going to New York next year for college, and we are funding her launch into adulthood. And, but it’s funded with with the work I do writing. So it’s, you know, the long tail does pay off, but it’s years of work, which you know, where you have to figure out a different way to motivate yourself than.
Jami Albright [00:29:20]:
I agree. Well, let’s talk about dialogue now.
So give us some tips on how to make each character’s dialogue different or each character sound different.
Jeff Elkins [00:29:33]:
Yeah. That’s a great question. So I think to start, to start that answer, we need to understand what we mean when we say sound different. And this is what we mean by that phrase that the term is character voice that I know y’all both know. I think the problem with character voices, we often say it, but we rarely define it. We’re just like, oh, yeah. We know what that means, but we don’t necessarily. So the character voice is the expression is how the character’s personality sounds on the page. So and oftentimes what we do as writers is we go and we define what we want the character personality be. Like, if we use, you know, let’s say we use the enneagram, we’re like, oh, you know, my character’s an enneagram 1, and they have very firm opinions about what’s right and wrong, and they have this inner critic that they really struggle with. And then we start writing, hoping that knowing that personality is going to translate into how that character sounds on the page. But there’s actually a big leap there because you have to pause and think about, like, okay. How does this character sound on the page? What is this character’s voice? we could go into how to get that, but That being said, like, once you get into, like, understanding the personality is an the character voice is an expression of the personality, then you can start looking at your different characters and being like, okay. This is this character’s personality. How is it how is their voice expressed? This is character b’s personality, How’s character b’s voice expressed. And then what I do as a coach and as an editor is I actually help re writers line those voices up. we compare and contrast. And then we could even get it to the place where we’re like, how are these voices empowering your plot? Where what voices create conflict when they’re together? What voices naturally encourage each other? Like, what voices, build energy? Like, you’ll have 2 characters and If their voices share pacing and their voices share cadence, it can build a lot of energy in that thing. If you have 2 characters strongly contrast. Like, you have a commanding character and a shy character. There’s just natural conflict that creates there. So building that in the absence of understanding character voice and in the absence of thinking strategically about how our voices come out on the page, all the character as we write, the characters more and more sound like us. And you start to get this mud where it’s like every character sounds like me. And so it is that being intentional. And I will, like, just say it works for plotters and pansers. So I’m a heavy plotter. I have to have, like, every beat outlined in a spreadsheet before I can write anything. I do change it as I write, but if I don’t have my spreadsheet set up before I write did nothing’s happening. so I will build my character voices before I write. Right? But I also work with a ton of pantsers. There’s a ton of pantsers in the community. And for them, I tell them, like, okay. Let’s write 7000 words. And then let’s pause and let’s ask, okay, who is this character now that I’ve written a bunch of them? How do they sound to me? and then let’s go ahead and codify, like, how they sound. So that when you come back and after you pants for a bunch, when you come back and edit, you have a guide. You have, like, this is what I wanted from this. So, then we can use that character voice as an editing tool. if that makes sense. So it works on either way. It can it can if you’re big into, like, planning and then writing to a plan, we can build that character voice as a plan. If you’re big to like, writing, like vomit writing and then coming back and fixing, we can build that character voice after you write some and then use as an editing tool. But I do think that key is, a, understanding that character voice is its own thing. and then being able to define it for each character so you can compare and contrast those characters and ensure that they all So they’re saying, like, nobody comes to a book going like, oh, I want 5 shy characters in this book. I mean, maybe they do. But, like, if you do, like, that’s not usually the point, but a cast we dream of, the cast we dreamed of are, like, dynamic, and they’re fun. And they’re like, oh, this is the bubbly one, and this is the shy one, and this is the, like, one that has trust issues. Right? Like, but then we have to pause and be like, okay. So what is the one who have trust issues? What does that sound like when it comes to the topics they talk about the words they use, the body language that they convey. The, like, construction of their utterances on the page, and then they’re like, how often they participate in conversations of 3 or more characters. Right? Like, so once we can define that character voice, we can start to compare and contrast and make sure we have a diverse cast. And, again, I think the kind of 201 level of that is make sure we have a diverse cast that’s empowering the emotional journey we wanna take the reader on. So using that cast in a way that, you know, if we want a sad book, then we can have a sad cast if we wanna not a cast that is sad, but a cast that makes each other sad. If we wanted, a romantic book, then we can build couples that have, attraction and union to each other. It’s why, like, you know, Romeo and Juliet has a different feel than Othello. Othello and Iago are very different character voices than Romeo and Juliet. Right? Like, we design the character voices to empower the plot that we want. Does that make sense?
Jami Albright [00:35:11]:
That’s great. I love that. I love that. I’ve never thought about it using it as an editing tool, but you’re right. I mean, yeah. And that’s really cool.
Jeff Elkins [00:35:22]:
I think writing is so well, I mean, for me, anyway, writing is so emotionally taxing. And you know, the vast majority have to write with day jobs and children and the life, just life. You know, even if you don’t have a day to have a nice job, you have life. You gotta dinner. You gotta get up in the morning. You gotta, you know and there’s always something going wrong. Like, I last night I was writing as I was writing, all of a sudden, my fridge started making a weird noise, and I look in, like, the ice maker, the like, cord to the ice maker is, like, spewing water everywhere. And it’s like, yeah. This is what I need while I’m trying to write. Right? Like, this is the thing that had to happen right now. So I think there’s writing’s hard already to fit in. Once you have motivation, the last thing I want you to do as a writer is to try to, like, add something to your work that’s gonna stifle that motivation. So if you’re a pantser and you like a blank page, and you wanna go at that blank page. If that motivates you, let’s put the tools on the back end of that motivation. help you create the story you wanna create, but let’s not interrupt the motivation that you have with tools. And I think that’s people talk about and this is I’m just we talked about this a little bit beforehand, so I’m just gonna bring it in here. I think it’s a good place to say this. when people come to the craft of writing, I think we do ourselves a disservice by thinking that there’s rules. There’s no rules. There’s no there’s no grammar rules. That’s not rules are not a thing. There’s reader expectations. The reader expects the period to mean the sentence is over. The reader expects there to be punctuation. The reader expects things within quotation marks, to mean someone is vocalizing something. But Margaret Atwood wrote the handmaid’s tail has no quotation marks, and we love it. and Jose Saramago wrote blindness, and there’s no punctuation at all. And we love it. Right? Like, we eat it up because there it’s not a rule. It’s an expectation, and you can defy the expectation to create a reader experience as long as you are strategic about it and know that your readers gonna have to jump over some hurdles to engage with what you’re doing. It’s the same with dialogue. There’s expectations around dialogue. Readers expect dialogue to, to happen in segment form, which means characters talk to each other about a topic or a specific emotional moment. And then after that, there’s some exposition. There’s a couple paragraphs that allow the reader to take a mental breath, to take in what happened, and then we’re back into the conversation. Right? Like, that’s kind of the standard boiler plate way dialogue works out in a novel. you can defy that. You can have a novel with tons and tons of expositional paragraphs. You just need to know you are asking the reader to jump a hurdle to share your imaginative journey of this book. Right? You can have a book that is a 100% dialogue. I’ve read them. They’re they can be great, but you all you have to know you’re denying the reader mental breath that they that they expect to have. So, like, the key to doing dialogue well and, like, character voice well and all these things that we’re talking about is knowing the reader’s expectations, understanding your tools, and what your tools do Right? Like, character voice is a tool. How we shape a character voice and how we compare cast members, those are tools we use to craft this journey. understanding what different character voices do to each other allows you to strategically build the story you want your reader to experience. It gets, like, what’s happening in your imagination into their imagination. So the key is, like, knowing that there’s not a, like, everything I talk about when I talk about, like, hey, the personality is expression of the character voice. I the character voice is expression of the personality. That is true. That is a tool you can use to define character voice. it it is not a right or wrong. There’s it’s just a tool.
Sara Rosett [00:39:32]:
Which can be very freeing for. Like, I think when you especially when you first start, I was so worried about being, you know, having everything correct, you know, like, having the grammar and everything is, you know, mystery writer. So I get emails about typos and things all the time. And so I was trying to get all that stuff cleaned up. but it’s okay to have an incomplete sentence. It is okay to be creative with the way you do things.
So we do want to also talk about dialogue tags and body language.
Jeff Elkins [00:40:01]:
Oh, great transition because these are things that they’re, quote, unquote, rules about. Like, there’s, like, oh, this is the way it has to happen. Yeah. So we’ll talk about it. How does social media platform? I can’t even remember which one and someone who’s like, this is the way you do dialogue tags. I was like, oh my gosh. Come on. Can we stop? so, like, the the advice that most often people hear is 1 of 2 extremes. And so I’m gonna talk about what you’ve probably heard, and then I’m gonna just talk about what the tool actually is. So what we hear is that, like, never have them. Only use action to describe who’s talking. There’s a reason for that. And the reason for that is is that the repetitive nature of said can be frustrating in a book. So you have editors who are like, I’m so tired of reading said, I only want the person who is talking be revealed with that action. The problem is that energy builds in the exchange of vocalizations. So if you’ve ever watched like Gilmore Girls, or west wing, or one of these, like, shows or read a dated man at play where we’re like, oh my gosh. the dialogue is amazing. It’s got this energy to it. How do I capture that energy? The way you capture that energy are short uninterrupted exchanges between characters because as they pass that hot potato of dialogue back and forth, the energy and the scene builds. Right? So if you are if you have a three person conversation, those we love 3 to 8 person conversations, what I call a big cast conversation. As readers, we eat them up, they are the center point of, like, all visual media. So we just and the reason we love them is because there’s the possibility for so much energy as all these diverse voices play off of each other. If you are trying to do that 3 to five person conversation. And every time a new person talks, you are describing how they move across the room that is going to feel so disjointed and you are robbing the energy from that piece. So the advice has a purpose, but the purpose actually works against you sometimes. The other side of the advice is like only use said and use it all the time. And again, this works against you, especially in our audio book age, because the poor audiobook there, she said, she said. He said, she said, I said. You said, he said, she said, she said, it’s just like, oh, man. Everybody’s saying everything. So the and, again, dialogue tags are a tool. that have a kind of beautiful use for them. And by saying, like, I’ve got this you know, wonderful tool shed that has, like, I can make anything in this tool shed but the only thing I’m gonna do is hammer nails. That’s what using said is it’s like, I’ve got this beautiful multi faceted tool that can, like, I can use to do all these things, but I’m only gonna use it to hammer nails. It’s like, alright. Well, if that’s what you wanna do, like, Great. But — SARA: You can build a house that way. JEFF Right? It doesn’t need to be this way. Like, you get there’s no rules to this. So What I did it, as part of what we do at the dialogue doctor community is, we take these problems. And I say we, because there’s a community of people that, like, kinda work on this with me. I do the majority of the labor, but we take the problems and we say like, okay. Let’s go to Masterworks. Let’s go to works that have, like, expanded the test of time and that we love across genre, across time periods. We read them. We look at how they’re using this tool or, like, what are they doing? And you’ll find that in Masterworks, none of them are doing any of the advice on either end of the spectrum. And we can say that all day, but that is not what they’re doing. So, like, you know, Tony Morrison and beloved, master use of dialogue text uses desperately uses exhaustively uses these, like, things that we’re told never to use as a dialogue tag. puts dialogue tags all over the book. Sometimes has no dialogue tags. Right? Like but she understands what makes her a master, she understands the tool and how to use it and then wields it to craft a story. So that huge buildup to say dialogue checks have 3 purposes. They, identify who’s speaking super important in conversations of 3 or more characters. In conversations of 2 characters, This tool isn’t important because you have paragraph space seem to do it for you. And, ideally, you have different character voices that also aid in the like here’s who’s speaking. So this tool is a necessary tool, though identifying the speakers a necessary tool in 3 or more people in this page, the worst thing one of the worst things for a reader is reading a conversation, and they can’t figure out who’s talking. it’s the worst. and usually readers will just give up. They’ll be like, I don’t have time for this, and I’ll just move on. So we gotta use it to identify who’s speaking. 2nd way it works is it it shapes the character’s vocalization in the reader’s mind. So if I say, hey, it’s Taco Tuesday. Well, if I write, It’s taco Tuesday today. Do you wanna have tacos Billy said? Putting the Billy said at the end, makes it fairly ignored. It’s like an afterthought, and the reader’s gonna be moving on to the next line by the time they get to Billy’s said. But if I say Billy said, hey. It’s taco Tuesday. Do you wanna go get tacos? Even with, like, the mundane stupid example I’m using, you can see it how the front, it caused a moment of reflection and pause. We can shape characters voices by moving that dialogue tag around or if I said, hey, it’s Taco Tuesday. Billy said, do you wanna go get Tacos today? It creates a beat in the reader’s imagination, a microbeat in the reader’s imagination that shapes that vocalization. So, again, this is a stupid and mundane example, but you can see how, like, moving that dialogue tag around allows you to craft how the reader hears that thing. So when you’re in a real emotional scene and your character is devastated and they’re struggling to get their words out, utilize those dialogue tags and put them in the middle of the vocalization. If you have a shy character who’s reflective and struggles to vocalize. Maybe she has deep internal thought, and her internal thoughts are all over the page. But when it’s time for her to talk, she struggles. get those internal thoughts and those dialogue texts for her in front of her vocalizations. So there’s a pause before she speaks in the reader’s imagination. that makes it feel like that creates that space that makes her feel more hesitant to speak. So there’s a thousand ways we can play it. I’m just giving kind of 3 general examples. There’s a 1000 different ways to play with your dialogue tags to shape how your character’s vocalization sounds in your reader’s imagination. So that’s the second way. The third thing is dialogue tags emphasize emotional expression. So this is where you start using different words like he yelled. So, you know, hey, it’s Taco Tuesday. We could do you wanna go get tacos today? Billy screamed. Just as a different emotional feel that Billy said. Billy really wants tacos on Tuesday. Yeah. It may be that we’re recording this near dinner time. That may be my problem with my examples, but all of just examples in this podcast were food related. so but it’s that, like, understanding that, like, hey. This, again, you have a tool, and you can use that tool to shape the reader’s experience. One of the ways to do that is to, like, to change it from said to something that’s more descriptive. Can you overuse a tool? Absolutely. Can you under use a tool? Absolutely. Right? Like, part of how you use the tools, when you use the tools, what tools you obsess over, what tools you completely ignore is your author voice. Right? So if you’re like, I’m gonna limit myself to only using said. Fantastic. You’re making a decision for your author voice. It’s who you are as an author. It’s very possible that an agent is gonna look at you and be like, I don’t take any works that you know, ever use dialogue tags. Great. That is that agent making a decision about what kind of author voices they wanna represent. Right? Like, so the but I say that to say again, to go back to you, like, there aren’t rules. There’s just expectations and, standards that we set up for ourselves. And I encourage I personally…
Jami Albright [00:49:32]:
Preferences is yeah. There I mean, in the case of the agents, That’s a preference. You know, that’s not because the next agent may say, oh, it’s totally fine. You know?
Jeff Elkins [00:49:45]:
And I will say I have yet to find a master work. I’m gonna get you over this. People are gonna send me letters. I’ve yet to find a master work. where I’m like, oh, they never use dialogue tags. I’ve yet to find a master work. We’re like, oh, they only use said. I mean, and I read a lot. I haven’t found one. so, you know, there is a, like, advice we give beginning writers that we excuse all of the masters. Oh, well, Cormac McCarthy can write everything against Alex because he’s Cormac McCarthy. Well, No. Cormack McCarthy can write everything in tags because he understands what that does to the reader’s experience of the book. Like, he knows — Yeah. You know, yeah. Cormack McCarthy can get away with giving the characters on the in on the road names because he’s courtroom McCarthy. No. He can do it because he understands what keeping them anonymous I promise I’ve I didn’t talk to him when he was alive, but I promise that that was a strategic choice he made because at some point, he realized This becomes incredibly personal if I don’t name this kid.
Sara Rosett [00:50:50]:
But, like, the all those decisions, there’s a reason behind it. Yeah. Instead of being just like, oh, I think I’ll just not do this and see what happens. It’s like it’s a strategic decision in producing it in effect in the reader.
Jeff Elkins [00:51:00]:
Then and it may start with I’m just gonna do this and see what happens, but you do have to pause and be like, okay. What’s happening? Like, you do have to stop at similar and be like, hey. What’s going on here? And the key to, like, do making strategic decisions about dialogue tags or anything else is to be consistent. So, like, make the decision for the whole work. If you’re only gonna use said, don’t use said for 4 chapters, and then all of a sudden be, You know what? I’m really gonna use Scream here. Or if you are gonna do that It is gonna have a huge impact. Make the reader feel it. Like, make them know that’s what’s happening. Right?
Jami Albright [00:51:41]:
Well, what are some of the biggest, like, issues you find with authors and their dialogue
Jeff Elkins [00:51:50]:
So mono mouth is a big one that I did that, like, all the characters sound the same. We’ve already and we’ve already covered that. I won’t beat that horse. That is a big one. Like, And I think the like we said, the problem with the mono mouth with all the characters sounding the same is that you’re just not you’re not thinking about it. you’re hoping that because you have a picture of what the character looks like in your head, it’s gonna translate to a different character voice. for some authors that might work for most of us, it doesn’t. We have to go ahead and figure out what the character voice looks like on the page. The next, problem I’d say is that writers, don’t understand what dialogue is for. And that’s the 2nd biggest problem, I think. So dialogue, your story. people hate it when it is, but I I will I will fight people on this. Your story, it should be 60 to 80% dial. your scene is characters interacting. Which is dialogue. So dialogue doesn’t just encompass the vocalizations. It encompasses body language too. Like, we communicate through body language with each other. your scenes, whether they are a love scene or a fight scene or a, you know, drama scene or a comedy scene, whatever seeing your writing, it needs to be dialogue centric. Screenplay ready Right? Like, I should be able to remove all of the paragraphs around your scene and still know what’s happening and enjoy your scene. And so I think as writers, I think a lot of times what we do is we ramp into scenes because we’re trying to, like, get ourselves mentally engaged. So you’ll get, like, 8 to 9 paragraphs of, like, what’s happening in the description of the room and, like, the description of how we got here. And then, you know, we’re in the middle of the conversation, and we’re like, oh, I have to tell them that this thing happened in the past. And so then we’ll drop, like, 3 paragraphs in the middle of a segment of dialogue about, like, oh, and, you know, 10 years ago, this went on and this she feels this way about it. And you’re destroying the impact that dialogue has. What dialogue does, characters interacting as dialogue pulls your reader into the moment. It zooms them down in. So if you think about, like, walking through a forest dialogue, hearing characters connect is like being in the forest. Do you feel the crunch of the leaves under your feet? You can smell the wetness of the air. You can reach out and touch the trees. You hear the wind rustling through. That’s what happens to a reader when they are in the midst of 2 characters are more interacting with each other. They get intimate into the scene. They feel what the characters are feeling. exposition, paragraphs of, like, summary or description, pull us out at the moment, and we zoom out and have these moments of reflection. So it’s like getting in a helicopter and looking down at the entire forest. You need both experiences. But if what readers, what writers will do is they will have me above the forest for so long with paragraphs. It’s like, do I get to, like, I wanna get in there? Can I get in there? Can I get down in there? And then they put me in the forest, and I’m in the forest for, like, a minute, and then they yank me back out, and I’m back in the helicopter, and then they put me back in. And I’m in the forest for, like, another 2 minutes saying yank me back out. and I have, like, more exposition. So, you know, really, I think part of what I train I try to train people to do with the dialogue doctors. Like, Let’s write your scene first. So we’ll and I the people I work with, I’m like, hey. If we do this ten times, you’ll never need to do it again. just write the dialogue. Don’t write anything else. You’re not allowed any paragraphs. start the scene and write the dialogue. And then after you’ve written the dialogue, come back and write the paragraphs. And you’ll find you’re like, I don’t wanna interrupt this. I don’t wanna put these paragraphs in, and I don’t actually need to know what Billy was doing 4 years ago. the scene works just fine without it. Right? Like, so it’s that and it feels like and the interesting thing is the 3rd problem we have is once we fix that. And once we’ve done that, it becomes incredibly addictive. And then we stop adding paragraphs altogether, and I get to this place with writers that I work with because I do long term coaching sometimes, and there’s writers I’ve worked with for, like, a year and a half, and now we’re at the place where I’m like, hey. You have to add some paragraphs. You have to give people the reflection. You have to give them the mental break, and they’ll fight with me. They’ll be like, no. I’m in the scene. I’m in the moment. I’m like, yeah, but we just have this big emotional Yeah. Moment in the conversation, and the reader needs to sit in the emotional mess you made. So give them three paragraphs here. where we, like, talk about what just happened, right, like, reflect on what just happened in 3 paragraphs. And I will get to it. You’ll I promise if you do it, ten times, you’ll get to a place where you’re like, I’m just writing dialogue. This is super fun having these characters interact with each other, and you’ll get editors like me coming back and being like, Okay. You’d have to add paragraphs.
Sara Rosett:
You’re — I love the dialogue, but where are these people talking? Are they indoors outdoors?
Jeff Elkins:
We’re not right. What? But, you know, again, it’s funny. You’re gonna find that it matters less than you think it does. Yes. It it will yeah. It matters less. Like, now that’s not true for all. Like, again, genres bring reader expectations. Right? And I use the word reader expectations and genre conventions synonymously. I think they’re the same words. So, like, if you’re writing historical fiction, you’re gonna need more paragraphs. And and your readers want that. That’s what it works for. And, again, you can get away with not having it if you’re strategic about it and you know your readers so well. that you’re like, oh, I understand their expectation. I understand it to the level where I can now screw with them. Right? Like, but you do have to understand the tool to the level that, like, they don’t know what they want. That’s the advanced maneuver. Right? Yeah. And it’s got that’s what we see when the master’s there. Like, you you know, going back to Tony Morrison in beloved, she has these amazing conversations between Sethi and Paul D. And you’ll notice, like, I you’ll notice as you read them that, like, the who’s leading and who’s following really changes in the conversation. Morrison’s a master of it. And it’s one of those things of, like, man, you know my expectation that Sethi started this conversation, so Sethi’s gonna lead this conversation. but right in the middle of it, you flipped it. And when you flipped it, you gave me an emotional moment that I didn’t expect to have. But that’s a master that understands their tools. Right? Like, And I think it’s something for us all to aspire for. It’s like, yeah, this is where I wanna be as a writer. I wanna be so great with my tools and understand how they work so well that I can just take the reader on this emotional journey. and by the end of it, they put the book down. Like, I think the dream for all of us is the end of it, they put the book down. They’re like, wow. That was an experience. Where’s the next one? Like, that’s what we want.
Sara Rosett [00:59:27]:
I agree. Yeah. That’s that’s how you want your reader to feel when you finish your book when they finish your book. So, yeah, Well, we always like to ask everybody, final question.
What’s the best thing you think you’ve done to set yourself up for success?
Jeff Elkins [00:59:46]:
Best thing I think I’ve done is set myself up success. Ow. Sorry. I’m thinking about all that we’ve talked about. I don’t just wanna repeat myself. I you know, my writing changed when I started doing the dialogue doctor in 2020, And I started off, I got encouragement from another writer because I was like, I need to give back to the writing community. They’ve given me so much. I need to figure out how I contribute to this. And they came the writer I was talking to Jay Thorn was like, hey. You know, you do dialogue for a living because writing dialogue is part of my day job. We won’t go into that, but I’d I mimic dialogue for my day job. So he was like, you you should bring what you know from that into writing. And I was like, okay. But before I did that, I really wanted to prove the hypothesis. Like, I had all these ideas, and I wanted so before I did anything, I went and got 20 Masterworks, and I just reread them. Just see, like, is this is this real? is this some is what I’m sharing actual. And I think we get so excited about writing. and we just wanna write that we stop and so we start reading our own genre. We start reading books that are selling in our genre. I think we forget to, like, really try to learn from what’s going on. And, there was a season in life where I was a pastor, and, we were all starting to go to school. we’re all in seminary, and it was felt like such pain. And a lot of us were like, why do I even need seminary? I actually just gotta be a pastor. And I remember, a guy I really respected was doing a conference with us. And he looked us, and he was like, why are you in such a hurry? He was like, you know, do you think the world needs you right now, undeveloped and, uninspired with no knowledge? Like, I think what he actually said was with just enough knowledge to hurt somebody. Is that what the I don’t think any writer’s gonna hurt anybody, but I do feel that way about my own writing. It’s like, hey. My writing radically changed when I paused and actually, like, tried to prove my case. I think there is something too that we’ve lost in the, like, write fast, publish repeat of the, like, let’s slow down and test the hypothesis. Let’s figure out what we’re doing. Like, I was there’s a conversation, this week between Brian Kaufman and David Lipsky, David Lipsky just wrote an amazing book called, The Parrot and The Igloo, which I’m reading right now, which is gonna go down as a master work. And it’s you know, he’s doing all this history work, but it’s so character driven. and you’re just so into the characters, even though it’s a work of historical nonfiction, you’re just deep in these characters. And I think, it he’s when he was talking about writing it, it was like a 7 year project.
And part of me is like, I know that a lot of us have bills to pay, and we gotta move, and we gotta go, and we gotta keep churning, and we gotta keep hustling, and there isn’t 7 years to write one book, right, like, if only. But there I think there is something we can glean from that and that, like, we do need to be finding times to slow down and ask, like, what am I doing that’s good and, like, what are other people doing that? What do you have other people before me done that’s good? And how can I learn from it? And that’s that’s the best thing I did to set myself for success was to take a moment to pause. I just took a month, but I took a moment to pause, and I was like, let me test this hypothesis, and let me make sure that this is real. And this is what I’m this is what I’m doing is actually what I wanna be doing and that it’s helpful to my goals. And so.
Jami Albright [01:03:58]:
That’s great. Love them. Yeah. Love them. Well, where can people find out more about you and, the dialogue dialogue doctor information.
Sara Rosett [01:04:11]:
And your podcast.
Jeff Elkins [01:04:13]:
So you can find me at dialoguedoctor.com. All of the stuff is there. There’s the yeah. There’s a weekly podcast that comes up. This is the dialogue doctor podcast. It is I should warn people It is not an interview podcast. People are always like, you know, this wasn’t what I expected. I was like, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s not an interview podcast. It is, me and a writer get on, and I edit their work. And that’s and it’s we add it together. So it’s a craft podcast. So just, yeah, warn people in advance. Oh, that’s what you’re showing up for. We are going to get we are going to talk about where he said goes in this vocalization. We’re gonna get dirty, dirty. So you can find that’s the podcast. I’ve put out a weekly newsletter. You can find that to. I just published a book. The dialogue doctor will see you now how to write dialogue and characters readers will love. it came out at the time of this recording It’s about 2 weeks old. And it everything I’ve talked about today is in that book. It is I think of it as, like, the first two and a half years of learning from the dialogue doctor community. Like, this is what we’ve learned about dialogue together working on it for the last two and a half years. it all we also go deep into, like, character growth and, like, how to use dialogue to empower character growth and, Yeah. So Dialogdoctor.com has all of that work. I have a couple other dialogue doctor editors that work with me, and we’re always holding, like, master classes and you can find all of that effort at the site.
Sara Rosett [01:05:46]:
That’s great. And we will have all those links in I’m curious about your podcast. I can’t wait to listen to it. So I didn’t even know you had a podcast, so I’m excited to hear about that.
Jeff Elkins [01:05:58]:
We just did episode 150, which was great. And I it’s so fun. Like, I think, what I love most about the podcast is that, there were people who started this journey with me in early 2020, and they’re still very strong members of the community. And so what I love doing with the podcast is all the episodes are up. So, like, you know, my friend Shane Miller, who’s a amazing writer and editor in his own, you know, before he ever started working with me, You can find, like, the 5 episodes that we’ve done over the last 150 episodes, and you can kind of see his writing transform as he goes. So I think the podcast is a lot of fun because it’s not just a, like, weekly time to think and talk about craft, it’s also a, it becomes a time capsule where we can, like, look at how we’re we’re growing and changing overtime. And me as an editor, like, the the real time capsule is like, watch Jeff learn to edit. So that’s that’s the real.
Sara Rosett [01:07:04]:
Oh, that’s great. But that’s really good because talking about is kind of abstract. So being able to really dig in and use examples is probably really good. So So we’ll have all the links to the podcast in your book and your website and everything in the show notes, and those will be at wish I’d known for writers.com. And thanks to Alexa Larberg for editing and producing the podcast and Addera Wiggins for doing the editing. Thanks for being here today, and we’ll see y’all next week. Bye, everybody.
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