The Story Craft Cafe Podcast

Two weeks ago we had zero ideas. Last week we filled our book with characters and gave them some emotional baggage. This week we make their lives much, much harder.

We're Hank and Abby, and we're co-writing a novel live as part of Dabble's 60-Day Novel Challenge. Week 3 is about conflict and subplots, the engine that drives a story forward. At its bare bones, a story is a goal plus an obstacle. Without the obstacle, it's a textbook...

What happens when the story you need to tell won’t fit the structure you planned?

Amy Goldmacher joins me on the Story Craft Café to talk about her memoir, Terms and Conditions, and how a collection of personal fragments became a book organized alphabetically.

Amy originally imagined a chronological memoir about her relationship with her father. But as she wrote about family, genetic testing, and the desire to know what the f...

We're Hank Garner and Abby Mathews from the education team at Dabble,  and we're about to co-write a novel. There's just one problem: we have nothing. No genre, no characters, no plot. Zero. Zilch. NADA. By the end of this livestream, we'll have a direction.

This is the Week 1 live session for Dabble's 60-Day Novel Challenge: 30 days of planning, 30 days of writing, and 50,000 words by the end. It's not as unhinged as it sound...

andall Wright and Ward Wright join Hank Garner to talk about their new creative venture and the changing world of publishing. In this conversation, they discuss how web publishing is opening new doors for writers, artists, and storytellers who want to build direct relationships with readers.

We talk about creative independence, the shift away from traditional gatekeepers, what it takes to launch a publishing project online, and wh...

Liv Constantine returns to the Story Craft Café to talk about the new psychological thriller Promise Me Never—and to pull back the curtain on how great suspense is actually built.

Hank and Liv dig into the craft behind the twists readers have come to expect from a Liv Constantine novel: planting clues in plain sight, using red herrings without cheating the reader, creating characters who can be interpreted in completely diffe...

What if the problem with your creativity is not that you need more freedom? What if you need a smaller box? In this Fireside Chat, Hank Garner and Abby Mathews talk about forced scarcity: the creative practice of putting restrictions on yourself so your imagination has something to push against. Page limits. Time limits. Genre limits. A tiny cast. One location. One point of view. One impossible problem. It sounds like a prison, but...

What do you do with a first draft once you finally type “The End”? You put it in a drawer. At least for a little while. In this Fireside Chat, Hank Garner and Abby Mathews talk about one of the hardest transitions in the writing process: moving from finishing a draft to actually being ready to revise it. When you’ve lived inside a manuscript for weeks, months, or even years, you’re too close to it to see it ...

Some characters walk onto the page, do their job, and disappear.

Others stay with us.

In this Fireside Chat, Hank Garner and Abby Mathews talk about round, flat, and foil characters—and why each one matters more than writers often realize. Not every character needs a tragic backstory, a ten-page wound, and a fully mapped emotional arc. Some characters are meant to change. Some are meant to stay wonderfully, stubbornly the sam...

Kevin Tumlinson, the Wordslinger, is back on the StoryCraft Cafe. We both came up during the first Kindle wave, and lately we've both felt it: that scrappy, take-the-bull-by-the-horns indie spirit is back, and a lot of it is being driven by what's happening in traditional publishing right now.

We talk about why authors are walking away from trad deals, why AI detectors are a scam with a subscription button, how the Claude watermark...

A protagonist is only as strong as the wall they're trying to break through. Your antagonist isn't the obstacle to your story — your antagonist IS your story.

Pull up a chair. Before we dive into Workshop 4, Hank Garner and Abby sit down for a relaxed fireside conversation about the most underrated character in fiction: the one standing in your hero's way. We're talking villains, rivals, systems, storms, and the quiet "no" th...

Why do readers stay up until 2 a.m. turning pages?

It's rarely because of the plot.

It's because they care about the person living through it.

In this one-hour writing workshop, Hank Garner breaks down the core principles behind unforgettable protagonists—the characters readers will follow anywhere, even when they aren't always likable.

You'll learn how to build characters with emotional depth, compelling motivations, and aut...

Most unfinished manuscripts in the world died somewhere between chapter eight and chapter sixteen. The writer didn't lose interest. They lost the shape of it. The plot started to drift. The scenes started to feel disconnected. The book stalled.

This 65-minute workshop is about the shape. The bones of a novel that works — and the structural diagnostic that tells you, every time, which beat in your draft is the one that needs w...

Most new writers freeze on the first line because they think it has to be brilliant. It doesn’t. The opening line isn’t the point. The opening page is. And the opening page is doing a job. In this 60-minute workshop, novelist and writing coach Hank Garner walks through what an opening actually has to do, the three kinds of hooks that work, and a five-question diagnostic you can run on any opening you’ve ever writt...

Welcome to First Novel Problems, a brand-new YouTube series from Dabble Writer for anyone who's ever wanted to write a novel and didn't know where to start (or got stuck partway through and gave up).

In this introduction episode, meet your hosts:

Abby Mathews: Community Manager at Dabble, published middle-grade author, and someone who tried (and failed) to write a novel three times before finally figuring it out

Brooke: brand-new t...