J.L.G. Dufort

ORIGINS, ODDITIES AND ONGOING EDITS

J.L.G. Dufort’s stories have wandered into Voice and Vision from 2015 to 2026, slipped into Airdrie Life magazine, bloomed in Flowers of Remembrance by Tandy Balson and friends, and found homes in the collaborative novels from Lintusen Press — Laurel Lake Lodge (2025) and Whiskers Through Time: The Calgary Cat Chronicles (2026). They also paddled their way into Beaver Moose Canoe: An Anthology of Canadian Icons (2026) from Lintusen Press, without getting her feet wet.

She graduated from the University of Calgary with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, a Bachelor of Education in Social Studies, and a Human Resources Management Certificate, later earning the Certified Human Resources Professional designation. In other words, her hobby was collecting courses the way some people collect novelty mugs — enthusiastically and with no regrets — before building a successful career in the Human Resources field.

After retiring, J.L.G. turned her focus to writing The Sarken Legacy, a fantasy novel that has insisted on being edited approximately four times more than originally planned. She is currently deep into the fourth edit, where characters change their species, write their own romantic arcs, and commas multiply like rabbits.

WHAT SPARKED ME TO WRITE THIS BOOK?

I dared to dream at a time when the people who mattered most believed I would fail. My dream was simple but life‑changing: to attend university.

This book is for anyone who chooses to believe in themselves — in their goals, their worth, and the quiet power of their own dreams. When others insist you cannot, when voices around you say you are not enough, I want you to hear this clearly: I believe in you.

Follow J.L.G. Dufort’s writing journey — the discoveries, the lessons, and the creative process — on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@youareinthewriteplace Embark on the journey of The Sarken Legacy, where despair turns to determination, resignation becomes resolve, and darkness gives way to dawn.

SEND WORD TO THE AUTHOR

If you'd like to get in touch, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at jlgdufort@shaw.ca — I promise I respond faster than my characters do.

INSIGHTS ON EMOTIONAL CONNECTION by J.L.G. Dufort

Stories move us most when they reveal a character’s inner truth and awaken our own.

In Jack Whyte’s The Camulod Chronicles, the death of Publius struck me quite hard. I had grown very fond of him that returning the book to my local library felt oddly like visiting a funeral home to pay my last respects to a dear friend. For several weeks afterward, simply passing the library stirred a wave of sadness. Whyte had created within me, actual grief, an emotional connection so real the library became a place of mourning. Whyte achieves this through the combination of three techniques: vulnerability, moral clarity, and earned competence.

An equally similar emotional pull appears in Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister. Mrs. Bennet’s treatment of Mary positions her as the emotional underdog, drawing readers naturally toward her. Hadlow shows Mary internalizing her mother’s dismissiveness until it becomes part of her inner monologue. This is where the emotional connection deepens. Hadlow technique blends: emotional resonance, mirror-memory response and identification.

Whyte and Hadlow used different emotional architecture, yet both rely on precision, restraint, and interiority to make readers care. Emotional connection is not about conveying information; it is about resonance—writing in a way that stirs recognition, understanding and a shared sense of humanity.

Drawing from the shelves of my own library, three different story-craft theorists offer three different explanations for how emotional connection works.

Lisa Cron’s core argument in Story Genius is that story is fundamentally about emotion, and that emotion is driven by internal triggers rooted in the protagonist’s past, worldview, and misbelief. Cron views story as brain science. She argues that story is a survival mechanism and that readers engage because narrative helps stimulate real-world problem solving.

Donald Mass’s core view of emotion in The Emotional Craft of Fiction is that the goal of emotional writing is not to make the character feel something, it is to make the reader feel something. It is to create the emotion in the reader. He sees story as emotional intensity. He focuses on micro-tension, inner conflict, and the “third level of emotion” that keeps readers turning pages.

K.M. Weiland’s core view, in Creating Character Arcs, is that emotion rises from the character’s internal arc—the Lie they believe, the Ghost that wounded them, and the Need that drives their transformation. Readers connect emotionally because they recognize the universal human struggled embedded in that arc. They don’t want to connect to what the characters feel, they connect to why they feel it. Weiland maps character arcs and plot beats into clean, repeatable frameworks that help writers build coherent emotional journeys.

Although Cron, Mass, and Weiland approach emotion from different angles, they unite on one powerful truth: readers connect emotionally only when a character’s internal psychology gives meaning to the events on the page. That meaning is what triggers emotion in the reader.

Across all five writers, Whyte, Hadlow, Cron, Maass, and Weiland, they converge on three shared truths about how emotional connection works.

1. Emotional connection begins with interiority.
2. Empathy is earned through contrast and pressure.
3. Connection deepens through specificity, not generality.

Emotional connection arises when a writer reveals a character’s private truth, what they fear, desire, misinterpret, or endure, and places that truth under meaningful pressure. Whether through Whyte’s stoic endurance, Hadlow’s wounded interiority, Maas’s emotional intensity, Cron’s cognitive realism, or Weiland’s structural clarity, the goal is the same: to let readers feel what it is like to be that character.

Cron, Lisa. Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere). New York: Ten Speed Press, 2016.

Hadlow, Janice. The Other Bennet Sister. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020.

Maass, Donald. The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2016.

Weiland, K.M. Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author’s Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development. Lancaster, CA: PenForASword Publishing, 2016.

Whyte, Jack. The Skystone. Toronto: Viking Canada, 1996.