I'm writing a book called "What Your Buyers Actually Want." The whole thing is a dialogue between two characters, Josh and Mitch. No chapters of exposition. No numbered lists of principles. No "in this section we'll explore." Two people talking, arguing, circling back, interrupting, getting frustrated with each other, occasionally saying something true.
People keep asking me why I chose this format. The honest answer is that essays are cowardly.
Not all essays. Not the ones that earn their authority through genuine vulnerability and rigorous thinking. But business book essays. The kind where the author sets up the argument, walks you through the evidence, addresses exactly one pre-approved objection (gently), and then concludes with a summary that makes everything feel inevitable. Nobody talks back. Nobody says "that sounds nice but I tried it and it failed." Nobody asks the question the author is hoping you won't ask.
Dialogue doesn't let you do that.
When Mitch pushes back on Josh, I can't dodge. Or rather, Josh can dodge, but the dodge is visible. Mitch sees it. The reader sees it. "You didn't answer my question" is a sentence that can exist in dialogue in a way it can't exist in an essay, because in an essay, you just move to the next paragraph and nobody notices the question you skipped.
Plato didn't write essays either. The Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedrus. All dialogues. Socrates didn't lecture. He asked questions until the other person's position collapsed under its own weight, and sometimes his own position collapsed too, and that was the point. The truth wasn't in the conclusion. It was in the friction.
I think about that a lot. The friction is where the actual thinking lives. The moment where Josh says something that sounds clean and Mitch says "okay but what about the client who did exactly what you're describing and still lost money?" That's where the book gets honest. Not in Josh's framework. In Mitch's refusal to let the framework go untested.
Most business books are monologues disguised as instruction. The author knows. You don't. Here's what the author knows. Now you know too. Go execute.
I've read hundreds of them. The good ones are good despite the format, not because of it. The great ones, and there are maybe a dozen across the entire genre, succeed because the author is honest enough to include their own uncertainty. But the format fights them the whole way. An essay wants to conclude. A dialogue wants to continue.
My book wants to continue. Josh and Mitch are still arguing in my head about things I haven't written down yet. That's how I know the format is working. If I'd written it as essays, I'd have finished months ago. It would be clean and organized and complete and it would sit on a shelf next to every other business book that says smart things nobody remembers.
Instead it's messy. Mitch won't stop asking hard questions. Josh keeps trying to build frameworks and Mitch keeps finding the edges where the frameworks break. And somewhere in that breaking is the thing I actually want to say, the thing I couldn't find by sitting alone at a desk performing expertise.
I don't know if it's good. I know it's honest. And I know that every time I try to take a shortcut, to let Josh win an argument too easily, to let Mitch soften a question that should stay sharp, I feel it. The way you feel a false note in a song. The format won't let me hide behind abstractions.
That might be the whole reason I chose it.★