Aristotle for Novelists, And A Strategy For Selling More Books With Douglas Vigliotti

Why is ‘story' more important than ‘writing'? How can you write characters that engage the reader? And how can you sell more books by connecting authentically? Douglas Vigliotti shares his tips.

In the intro, Bookshop.org will start selling ebooks [TechCrunch]; LinkedIn for Book Promotion [ALLi]; The Money Making Expert, branding and marketing [DOAC]; 24 Assets – Daniel Priestley; My J.F. Penn books by location; Death Valley, A Thriller; Copyright and Artificial Intelligence [US Copyright Office]; Superagency: What could possibly go right with our AI Future – Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Douglas Vigliotti is the author of four books, a poet, and podcaster. His latest book is Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story.

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

• Why Aristotle?
• Creating characters that resonate with our readers — and the four important elements to keep in mind
• Why story is more important than writing
• Creating complications that make readers want to read on
• The intersection of commerce and art
• Tips for pitching podcast interviews

You can find Douglas at DouglasVigliotti.com and his latest book at AristotleForNovelists.com.

Transcript of Interview with Douglas Vigliotti

Joanna: Douglas Vigliotti is the author of four books, a poet, and podcaster. His latest book is Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story. So welcome to the show, Doug.

Douglas: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Joanna: It's great to have you on the show. So first up, just—

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

Douglas: My journey is long and winding, but that's probably similar to most writers. I grew up as a pretty, I would say, average or normal American childhood. Youngest of five boys, played hockey, played sports.

Believe it or not, writing and books and all of that was not even a thought in my mind until I reached probably my 20s, early 20s, mid 20s. Then kind of a light switch turned on. The first book that I ever wrote, and the first writing that I ever did publicly, was actually a derivative of my business career.

It took me following my interest, and growing as a writer and as an artist, to start exploring that more creative side of writing. Then that's how I ended up writing novels and poetry and all that good stuff.

Joanna: What was that business?

Douglas: My professional career, I started, let's see, 20 years ago. It was sales, selling.

I've sold everything from financial services, to medical devices, to payroll and tax filing, to myself.

Then I wrote a business book called The Salesperson Paradox, and it was in conjunction with my sales consulting company at the time, and that was how I started into my creative career. So it was totally, totally orthogonal to where I ended up.

Joanna: Well, or not. We're going to come back to that because I love this. I love that you have a sales person background.

Just so you know, I'm actually the eldest of five children. Obviously, not all boys. So being of five siblings, I completely get, which is very cool.

Let's get into the book itself. In case people don't know—

Who was Aristotle? Why write a book based on his work?

Douglas: So I think in modern day, we throw around the name Aristotle quite a bit because it's referenced a lot in pop culture. I think it's one of those things where you hear the name and you assume—I don't know what you assume. You assume smart, you assume historic, you assume legendary.

People probably don't know who he is, and that's always an interesting thing. The fact that he's lasted over 2300 years is something of a testament to itself. So he was a philosopher and a polymath, really. I think his life, it was 384 BC to 322 BC. He studied under Plato, and Plato studied under Socrates before him.

When I said he was a polymath, that's really essential to understanding who he is, because he wrote over 200 works that spanned across a plethora of topics.

From politics, to economics, to poetics, and all of these different subject matters that ended up becoming, in some cases, the foundational material for many of these disciplines in universities across the world.

So the fact that his ideas and his philosophies and concepts have stood the test of time is sort of a testament in itself, as I alluded to. One of the interesting things about those 200 works is that many of them, call it 80%, so I think we've only recovered 30-something of his works.

I mean, the number is kind of debated. I don't know how they quantify this, because if they're lost, how do we know how many we recovered? But they've only recovered 30-something of his works.

One of those is Poetics. So that is actually the nature of tragedies, but more broadly, storytelling. It's one of the major reasons why I ended up writing this book, obviously.

Joanna: You didn't say there that we're talking about Ancient Greece. So we're in Europe. I often think Americans forget that it all started over here in Europe.

Douglas: Sorry, I tend to skip over things sometimes, but you are correct. Ancient Greece.

Joanna: It's funny because we seem to be at this period in history, in literature, when people just refer a lot to, obviously, the Stoic Movement and a lot about Marcus Aurelius. Obviously, Roman emperor, but the empire that came after the Greeks. A lot of this is resurfacing, isn't it, in culture?

Do you think there's some kind of zeitgeist where this is all coming back?

Douglas: So in a general sense, or in a broad sense, I think it's more comfortable for people to reference people who are already gone, so to speak. I don't think it's as easy for people to credit living legends or living thinkers as it is to credit people who are gone. So I think there's something to that.

I also think that there's something to the idea of grabbing onto something that gives people a framework to think that they know, even though they might not really know. Like foundational philosophical thinkers, they were at some of these topics first, so they have some really strong ideas around a plethora of things.

So I think when we bring them to life, to this day and age, we realize, wow, there's really—and I'm going to use a biblical quote here, not to be religious—but it's nothing new under the sun.

We are living these same issues over and over and over again, and I just think that there's a lot of resonance for that.

Look, I think there's a certain thing to nostalgia that we have as a society. It's a saleable commodity.

I didn't write this book because I was trying to fill a void with Aristotle and his ideas and storytelling. To me, when I started to research story as a concept, everything started funneling back to Aristotle. Then I realized, wow, everything is there. You know, it was how I learned about story.

So the fact that Aristotle, his ideas in this book came to fruition, was more of a function of me realizing that all the theorists in modern day, or practitioners for that matter—so people in the dramatic world, like Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet or a lot of these people, they'll often reference Aristotle.

Or if you read theorists like Robert McKee, they'll often reference Aristotle. So for me, it was only natural to then double down on Aristotle, and read Poetics, and read multiple translations of Poetics, and really understand the text.

Then what I quickly realized was how resonant these ideas were in modern storytelling, on both the screen, the page, and in our lives. I think that that's one of the big things that drew Aristotle to storytelling in general was how intrinsically linked it is to living, because we live stories.

So I think that the principles that we'll talk about, or some of these ideas that we'll talk about, they are applicable to our life, as well as they are applicable on the page and on the screen.

Joanna: Yes, and of course that quote you mentioned is from the book of Ecclesiast