Watch as I explain why I chose to embed the personal growth themes of 18: A novel of Ruin and Redemption, into a tense, dramatic story, with characters and action that will take you along on their journeys.

Video Transcript

Yvonne:    Yes we were going to talk about the dramatic twists. You know we don’t always see that kind of thing in a personal growth message book, a book with such a personal growth message as 18 is. How how did you decide to do that?

John:         Well as far as the the plot line and the intersecting story lines – and the drama, if you will, because I believe there is some drama there – when I had the idea, the conception, for the book I didn’t want to write a personal growth book. I wanted to tell stories. It’s not only who I am – I’m a storyteller. However, it’s also about the impacts.

In my experience, in personal growth, growth happens when there’s an emotional connection. When there’s an emotional event. All of our stories are our stories and are powerful because we had an emotional reaction, an emotional event around them.

So I wanted to create characters that, hopefully, the reader can identify with, connect with, and have a bit of an emotional experience about. That’s both meant to be entertaining, and I think it is, and it’s also meant to be educational. That stuff sticks when you’ve got an emotional connection to it. So that’s why the drama.

And I hope, let’s face it, a lot of times it takes a little effort to get through a personal growth book. Sometimes it can be very heavy. Maybe it’s just more narrative than anything else. Something my first editor, God bless her, told me. I would have narrative parts of the book about different events, about different characters and she would say, “Okay, you told me. Now show me. Put it in a story and tell a story that way.”

And I believe that’s more effective and more entertaining. So that’s where we got to all that.

Yvonne:    That makes a lot of sense.