The Grapes of Wrath. The Jungle. The Handmaid’s Tale. Tek War. Modelland. All classics rich with commentary on important social issues of their day. From labor rights to suffrage to making sure people can’t clone fashion models, these books have sought social justice for real world issues while also being entertaining pieces of fiction in their own right.

Of course, not all stories do this. Some stories are just trying to excite us with good old fashioned space battles and courtroom dramas. But if you really want people to respect you and think you’re smart, and still not have to learn a bunch of difficult math or some shit, weaving social commentary into your writing is a great way to do this.

It could even be argued that fiction is a great way to sway public opinion on real world topics, perhaps even more than a newspaper. If you’re a good writer, your reader will sympathize with your characters and their plight, whereas most people just shrug about all the people who die on the news. Upton Sinclair used his fiction to get labor laws changed, and as I mentioned before on the channel, my novel Slight of Hand led to a three percent decrease in hate crimes against pygmy street performers.

You don’t have to be an especially progressive person, necessarily. You simply need to have an issue that’s near and dear to your heart. While my political views are a bit complicated, I think my weapons arsenal would at least prove that I’m no bleeding heart liberal. But I hate seeing immigrants in the United States demonized just for trying to find a better life for them and their family. The ones I hired at D&E Publishing were mostly great workers, always diligent and positive, even though it was frustrating to have to hire an interpreter to translate their break room conversations recorded by my hidden wiretap I put there when I thought somebody was poisoning me. Anyway, my novel Storming the Gates of Heaven really shined a light on the economic and cultural hardships immigrants face.

We’ll try to build a better world, or at least do some virtue signalling, on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Now you might be asking, John, do I really want to go down this path? What if I piss off the wrong people? Do I really want to have to go take dead animals out of my mailbox every morning and then have to bury them in my yard because the game warden at the local park says you can dump them there any more even though you don’t see why, I mean, you’re just returning them to nature?

Unfortunately, just like traffic, taxes and alimony, social issues are something you can’t avoid.

Look, people are going to hate you no matter what you do. I mean, I once tried to show solidarity with battered women by attending one of their meetings so I could hear their stories and be more sensitive in my writing. But they said that first, men usually aren’t allowed at those meetings, and second, personal firearms absolutely aren’t allowed at those meetings. I tried making up for it by writing A Dressing In Disguise, about a woman who murders an intruder and then gets a taste for bloodlust, going on a rampage to kill forty male sex traffickers along the Eastern seaboard. But the support group didn’t like that because I guess any kind of violence is a trigger for them. And a lot of my old fans didn’t like the idea of a woman who used a knife to do anything besides carve a turkey. So when you get down to it, there’s just no pleasing some people. Just be true to yourself.

Let’s see how we can make sure we approach these issues delicately and powerfully through our fiction.

Tip One: Make your issue part of the story, not the whole story

Your first goal as a writer, besides making a lot of money, should always be to write a compelling story with memorable characters and engrossing drama. Any asshole can just say how they want society to look. That’s what Twitter and podcasts and the White House Press Room are for.

But unlike the White House Press Secretary, a fiction writer has to be able to hide the fact that they’re full of shit. Let’s say you want to write a story about gun violence and how we need more gun control. I mean, I’d think you’re crazy, but that’s beside the point. Give me a story about a man who lives through Vietnam. His arc should be about dealing with his PTSD of the horrors he saw. Maybe he does this by befriending a nun or coaching a little league team or something. And then kill him at the end in a random act of street violence, saving the nun or little league team in the process. You have social commentary about gun violence while the narrative stays true to the character’s arc.  

Tip Two: Decide if you want to use a metaphor or be direct

To be honest, this is a good advice for anything in life. When I ran office meetings and had to talk about important issues to my employees, sometimes I’d yell at them to clean the break room, because the break room was dirty. But sometimes I’d yell at them to clean the break room because it was a metaphor for the sloppiness with our editing and press releases.

If you want to directly tackle the issue in your novel, that could work great. But then you have to make sure your research is impeccable, which will require access to a college library, a place that some people might be banned from for various reasons.

If you want to go the metaphorical route, just make sure your audience is able to connect the issue in your story with the issue in real life. Fahrenheit 451 is obviously about censorship and The Expanse is about prejudice and how billionaires always fuck things up for everybody else.

But audiences were confused by my sci-fi novel Defrosted. I thought it was clearly about science going too far – in the book, a group of scientists clone a murderous Santa Claus – but many of my right-wing readers took it as an allegory for the war on Christmas.

You might not think it at first, but as a writer, there’s a lot you have in common with a drug dealer. You both have to hustle to make money, the cash you do bring in comes from selling a fantasy to clients, and the best of you know how to keep that client hooked and neglecting more important things in their lives.

Hold on, John, you might be saying, I got a college degree that I paid for with my own parents’ money. Don’t lump me in with those criminal street urchins. Well, first of all, drugs are what make our federal government and financial institutions run on, so get off your high horse. But for the purposes of this video, there’s a lot us writers can learn from drug dealers.

You see, each book we write can be thought of as a dose or a high or a trip. If we do it right, we’ll have them clamoring for more. But we’ve got to be reliable. We have to make sure our product is always available on the corner of Douglas and 3^rd,, in a manner of speaking. For writers who don’t write series, or even worse hop genres, well, that’d be like your neighborhood crack dealer switching to peyote with no warning.  

An ongoing series is a great way to build a following, even if you’re a small-time author. If there’s one change I’ve noticed in the industry in my 26 years inside it, besides the fact that pretty much everything is sexual harassment nowadays, it’s that the biggest authors are the ones who write series. Take Sarah J. Maas, for example. Now, I’ve never actually read Sarah J. Maas, but any writer who can get their books sold next to the Doritos aisle at Target is doing something right.

But writing a successful series is a tough thing to do. You have to go beyond writing individually compelling works of fiction. We’ll make hugely elaborate plans and hopefully not get bored before we finish them on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Before you start writing a series, there are a series of questions you need to ask yourself. Let’s take a look at them.

Question 1: Do I want to devote years to this project? Do I have any friends or family that might get upset that I won’t answer their teacher’s emails or pick them up from the bus station at midnight?

A book series is definitely something best tackled by a writer whose family is either all dead or who, by this point, doesn’t expect them to ever change.

Question 2: Does the concept behind the series have enough stamina to last for several books?

For example, I was planning on writing a five-book historical fiction series about the assassination of President Garfield, but by book three, I realized my reader was probably getting sick of hearing about 19^th century civil service reform.

Question 3: Can you keep track of all the details and weave them throughout your series?

You might want a minor character to appear in the first book and not return until the fifth book, when they’re all grown up and handsome and ready to raw dog the heroine.

But it can be an organizational nightmare.

That’s why when I started the ten-book series, The Blackstone Chronicles, in 2018, I hired a man servant to live with me and keep track of all my ideas. I even got a cot for him to sleep in the corner of my bedroom so he could write down ideas that came to me in my dreams. If he hadn’t stolen my social security number to pay for his wife’s knee surgery, I likely would’ve finished the series.

So let’s say you’ve got no family obligations, a killer concept and a loyal man servant who came cheap on Craigslist. Let’s look at some tips to make sure this series stays strong.

Tip 1: You Need One Overarching Plot and Each Book Needs Its Own Resolution

Cliffhangers are great and everything, but no reader’s going to wait until Book 10 for you to blow your load. In Star Wars, for example, most of the movies end up with them blowing up a death star, but it doesn’t really matter because the overarching plot is to stop this old white guy who, in fairness to him, can do a 1080 barrel roll from a seated position.

I find it helpful to think of the overarching goal first, and then break it into smaller subgoals. When I wrote the They/Them Murders series, the main goal was to uncover the leftist billionaires’ plot to arm trans people to commit murders and other acts of terrorism. But each book was mostly focused on solving an individual murder case. Of course, it turned out the information I was using for research was fabricated by a right-wing conspiracy theory podcast and my first book had endangered the trans community of Missouri so I cancelled the series.

Tip 2: Consider the Format

Like an open box of crackers or a relationship that lasts more than a month, a book series runs the risk of becoming stale. For example, I didn’t need nine books of The Expanse telling to keep reminding me that billionaires are awful. If I needed that reminder, I’d just poke my head outside the window.

So spice things up by switching to a totally different format. Get wild with it. When I wrote the young adult five-book fantasy series, From Mud to Clay, I paused from the quest to find the stones and defeat the evil witch and made Book Four a medieval cookbook. Granted, this was also because I was hoping that writing educational material for children would give me some much-needed tax breaks, but it still shook things up nicely, I think. If I’d actually gotten those tax breaks, I likely would’ve bothered writing Book Five.

Tip 3: Be Consistent

You can’t forget that people are mostly reading these books because they like you and your writing style. Sometimes when looking at yourself in a mirror, it’s a tough thing to remember that people like you.

You can switch formats and genres and add some gratuitous sex scenes, but you shouldn’t try to be something you’re not. If you’re funny, don’t lose your sense of humor. If you’re good at exploring the dark side of humanity, kill a few dogs if your main characters need to survive to the final book.