What are the crucial linchpin moments in your novel and how can you keep a reader turning the pages? John Fox gives fiction writing tips in this interview.

In the intro, writing and publishing across multiple genres [Ask ALLi]; Pilgrimage and solo walking [Women Who Walk]; My live webinars on using AI tools as an author; Cowriting with ChatGPT: AI-Powered Storytelling by J. Thorn.

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

John Matthew Fox is an award-winning short story writer, a developmental editor, writing teacher and blogger. His latest book is The Linchpin Writer: Crafting Your Novel's Key Moments.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

Writing a book based on a blog — what needs to change?
Linchpin moments and why they are important
How to write emotionally moving stories
The difference between scenes and chapters
How to write wonder
Writing better endings
Using AI tools when writing fiction and editing

You can find John at TheJohnFox.com or on TikTok @johnmatthewfox. John has courses for writers here.

Transcript of Interview with John Matthew Fox

Joanna: John Matthew Fox is an award-winning short story writer, a developmental editor, writing teacher and blogger. His latest book is The Linchpin Writer: Crafting Your Novel's Key Moments. So welcome back to the show, John.

John: Thank you, so wonderful to be back.

Joanna: Yes, indeed. Just in case people don't know you—

Tell us a bit more about how you got into writing and publishing.

John: I started my blog way back in the day, 2006, just to join the literary conversation. And over time, it evolved from a blog on literary news and commentary into more of a craft blog, just helping writers with their novels, short stories, children's books, any sort of fictional storyline.

Now, I've been editing for quite a while for authors, doing developmental edits. I offer courses, both on-demand courses and live courses. I'm starting up a publishing branch, which is self-publishing assistance, I like to call it. Not traditional publishing, not vanity publishing, but something in between.

Joanna: There's certainly a call for all of that. Your courses are great. I think you've got some fantastic information on your site.

Is this the first nonfiction book you've done?

John: Yes, it is. I had the short story collection, and then the nonfiction book just came out in October, so it's relatively new. I've been getting lots of feedback from writers who have been enjoying it and using it to write their books and revise their books. Those are lovely emails to get.

I guess I'd been helping writers in one way or another for a whole decade through emails, and articles, and developmental editing and whatnot. So I'm like, well, why don't I try to put down some of the things that are most helpful for writers. Why don't I try to put that down on the page?

I have a good amount of stories about the writing life as well, so I thought I'd include those so it's not just cut and dry, boring, do this and do this craft information, one, two, three. I think it has been helpful for writers. It's been a joy to interact with them on another level.

I do think nonfiction, in general, is a lot easier for me to write than fiction is. There's so much imagination that has to go into fiction, and so much plotting and characterization. Nonfiction, man, I just sat down and wrote it. It just spilled out so easily, so it made me enjoy the process of writing quickly.

Joanna: We'll get into the book in a minute. I know a lot of people listening, they might also have years’ worth of blog posts and articles, and you have a lot of really well-crafted articles on your site.

How did you turn some of those into a book? Or did you start from scratch? You know, because a while back there was this sort of ‘from blog to book, just output your WordPress files into a book format.' And it's like, no, that's not how you do it.

Did you use elements of your blog articles and rewrite them? Or did you start the book from scratch? What was that process?

John: I definitely started from scratch because if you know anything about how to write for online media, it is just vastly different than writing a book.

You definitely can't take that blog post and just throw it in a chapter and be like, alright, I'm good. It doesn't work like that at all.

So what I did is I took topics that had been really important to my readers, certain topics that I'd written a post on, and then I just wrote on that topic, but completely from scratch.

I don't think I used a single sentence from the blog inside the book. It's all new stuff.

Then there was some stuff that wouldn't work as blog posts, like, I don't know, like writing about wonder or writing about emotion, like that's stuff that people aren't going to search for. It's really difficult to write a blog post about that, but they work really well inside of a book.

That's probably because not a lot of authors talk about them or not a lot of authors like study those topics. So the book gave me a lot more latitude to go into areas that I hadn't been able to cover with the blog.

Joanna: I think that's good advice. I do think starting from scratch is a good idea.

Okay, let's get into the book. So the book is called The Linchpin Writer.

What are these linchpin moments, and why are they important?

John: So linchpin refers to these little pins that go inside the hub of a wheel so it doesn't fall off the axle, right? That's the original term, and then what it's become is a term that refers to like really key people or objects or ideas inside of an organization.

I think a linchpin moment inside of a book is a make-or-break moment where the reader might stop reading, or if the reader doesn't like that particular scene, it's going to ruin the book for them.

So they are the most key places in your novel where you absolutely have to get them right. So as writers, we should probably concentrate on those places more and make sure we really nail them.

It's stuff like when you became a writer, it's a death scene for a character, it's stuff like romance, or a particularly climactic romantic scene. It's describing a character for the first time, or ending a chapter, or ending the whole book.

All of these are really critical moments whereas the writer, you've just got to nail it, you got to nail them to make your reader happy.

Joanna: Well, first up, you mentioned a linchpin moment for an author, and I think that's really interesting.

In the book, you say, “when they became a writer,” and I find this a very interesting phrase, “became a writer,” because to me, these days, there are a lot of different routes to market. I mean, someone might be a blogger for a decade, that makes them a writer, but that doesn't necessarily make them an author. Someone mi...