This is What Your Scenes Need (No, not raunchy full penetration)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

“Making a scene:” That’s usually a phrase reserved for the time you yelled at your son’s teacher when she wouldn’t let you set up a merch table at parents day.

But what I’m talking about is how a writer makes (or breaks) a scene. Our videos usually take a look at larger picture stuff, like character arcs, settings, and why you shouldn’t try to bribe literary agents because they’re made of stone or something. And that hasn’t really worked out great for most of my viewers.

Now, it’s not that my advice is bad. That can’t be true. Several high-level LLMs have ensured me that my scientific system for writing success is a sure thing. What I think must be happening is you guys are so focused on the macroscopic that you’re ignoring the details.

But, okay, John, you might be thinking, you’ve made big promises before. You promised that I’d be a best seller after watching your video on how to write a great opening hook. You promised that writing a great romantic novel would get my girlfriend to overlook my drinking problem and violent temper and take me back. You promised me $500 for winning that D&E Publishing short story contest and then said I was ineligible because I live in Delaware.

The problem is the devil is in the details and you guys must be screwing those up somehow.

So today, we’re focusing on the individual scene. I want you to ignore your plot structure. I want you to ignore the worldbuilding. I want you to ignore the fact that you titled your book “Twelve Years a Slave Master.”

But what do we mean when we say “scene?” Well, a scene contains characters interacting, dialogue and some sort of action. It’s not every part of your book. Your book should also be filled with some expository information and some interior monologues. In Chair, for example, my protagonist spent long portions of the book musing on the unfairness of existence and how the Jews control everything. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but the character himself was Jewish, and I converted to Judaism for the several months I was writing and promoting the book, so it’s not antisemitic. In any case, those aren’t scenes.

But we are going to look at a scene from Chair today as I take you through some tips to make your scenes drive the story on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip 1 – Action

Every scene in your book needs action. And I’m not necessarily talking about Vin Diesel trebucheting his car into an enemy base or whatever happened in the most recent Fast and Furious movie action. Action simply implies that something dynamic is taking place. That there is movement and change occurring. Don’t overthink it, though. It could be a could be something as simple as a mother slapping her daughter.

Look over your scene. It should almost be its own story, with peaks and troughs. A scene should never just be two people sitting in a room talking. When I was editing Chair, I noticed that a scene in the middle, where Daniel finally reveals his true feelings for the girl he likes, fell very flat. It wasn’t the dialogue. It wasn’t the emotion of the scene, either. It’s that there was nothing besides discussion. I needed action to symbolize the character development. So to achieve this, I set the discussion on Splash Mountain.

Tip 2 – Why Now?

Acclaimed screenwriter Alex Kurtzman, writer of classics like Star Trek: Into Darkness and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, says that when you write a scene you should always have an answer to the question “Why Now?” Why does this scene need to happen at this moment?

This creates a sense of immediacy. The worst thing that can go through your reader’s mind is this is just a bunch of stuff happening. (Well, actually the worst thing that go through your reader’s mind is, wait, this author’s name sounds familiar, wasn’t this the guy who drove his car into that elementary school?)

In the scene in Chair, Daniel had to pour out his heart then and there. Because he knew Daphne was developing feelings for Douglas, who was also with them on this trip to Disneyland. But Douglas was deathly afraid of log chute rides due to his fear of heights and drowning, so this was Daniel’s one chance to speak his mind without anyone else in their group hearing. That’s what I mean by immediacy.

Tip 3 – It Builds to An Epiphany, A Discovery, An Admission or a New Understanding

Because the scene is a mini-story, it should lead to a mini-climax. And that will cause the character to change in some way. (In much the way my third wife’s mini-climaxes from her massage therapist changed her.)

They don’t have to completely change their mindset. But the characters should walk away having learned something new. In Chair, after they plummet for the final time, Daniel realizes that Daphne didn’t really know he felt that way. She tells him she was sorry if she led him on by always putting her head in his lap while they watched TV, but he didn’t have any comfortable throw pillows at his house. And so Daniel steps off the ride learning that appearances aren’t always what they seem.

Tip 4 – Finish With a Hook

But after the character learns something, or a big realization occurs, or a big event happens, we need to tease what comes next. Change leads to action lead to action leads to change.

In Chair, after Daniel realizes Daphne is no longer the one for him, he decides to split off from the group, no longer seeing a reason to spend the rest of the day with his friends. And it’s then that the scene ends with a hot chick in the It’s a Small World ride asking Daniel if he’s alone.

You’ve Written a Great Story Beginning… Now What?

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

… and so it was then that I decided I would astroturf a campaign to ban one of my novels, feeling that the controversy would boost book sales. The mistake I made was that my novel, about a queer couple being refused the right to adopt a child to lead their satanist cult, pretty much offended everyone on the political spectrum. So then…

Wait a minute, John, you might be saying, what’s going on with this article?

Well, today’s article isn’t about how to start your book. And it’s not going to be about how to end your novel, either. Today’s article is about how to get through the middle of your story.

Like an Oreo or a house party you weren’t invited to, sometimes the middle is the best part. But on a deeper level, the middle is also the only interesting parts of our lives, isn’t it? We spend the first and last years of our lives shitting ourselves and being a burden on the people around us. In the middle, we finally earn the respect we deserve and nobody calls us a worthless failure, at least not to our face when you confront them at a book conference in a state with concealed carry laws.

And just like your life, a middle of a book is where things start to get interesting. Introductions have been completed, we have some sense of the main conflicts being faced, now we get to see how all these parts fit together. Personally, it’s my favorite part of writing. I go into a project knowing who the character is and the conflict they’re facing, and I also know where they’ll end up, but the challenge is fitting it together in a way that makes sense. For example, when I wrote Ronald: Portrait of a Mother Lover, I knew that Ronald would just be an everyday, down-on-his-luck college dropout, and I knew the novel would end with him clearing his name in an incest scandal and winning the Louisville mayoral race so the majority of the novel writing process was connecting Point A to Point B.

If you’re really struggling with the middle of your novel, think of it like a mid-life crisis. You need to jazz that story up in much the way you’d try to distract from your ever loosening flesh with an expensive car, or like how you’d get over the boredom of middle age by not wearing a seat belt.

Let’s look at some tips to help us get through the middle.

Tip 1 – Give your supporting cast more page space

Look, people can grow tired of even the most interesting protagonist. I thought I’d never grow tired of any of my wives, and yet I got tired of two of them after a little over a year, and if the restraining order is any indication, the other one got tired of me. It’s the same at work. I know my employees get sick of me. I’ll always go and ask what they’re doing this weekend, and they’ll tell me they’re hosting friends from out of town or that their grandma died and that have to visit her grave because I wouldn’t let them take off during the week for her funeral. But when I’ve followed a few of them home in secret using some tips I learned while researching my spy thriller The Annapolis Affair, I discovered they didn’t have plans at all (except for the funeral one, that turned out to be true).

All of this is to say, even a really interesting person like me can tire some people out. If your novel feels like it’s sagging, you probably need some other things for your side characters to do. The most important ones should have their own mini-arcs. If the Department of Labor has taught me anything, it’s that they don’t exist merely to support your main character on their journey.

Tip 2 – The Rule of Three

Three is a number that gives us a sense of completeness. It wasn’t until I had three wives, that I was able to determine that the second one was actually the woman I need in my life. At my office, when the first two people were seriously injured in workplace accidents, I thought it might’ve simply been a fluke. After all, I was hiring a lot of young people and everyone knows your brain isn’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five. But when we had the fire that injured a third person (and killed several others) I realized I had to take workplace safety more seriously. And by I, I mean my business partners who had legal responsibility.

In your story, three establishes a pattern and brings a sense of completion. It could be three challenges your character faces, two failures before the final triumph, three male suitors but only one who’s not a blood relative.

Tip 3 – Take time for introspection

Middle age isn’t just about trying to regain the speed and energy of your youth. You can’t expect a 45-year-old guy to be able to keep up with the college girls, not without the RA asking the campus police to escort you out of the dorm.

Some books just want to be all energy all the time. You need quiet moments, scenes of reflection, scenes where characters assess their situation. Even in a high-octane thriller like my story A Dressing in Disguise, about a woman who kills her assailant, gets a thirst for blood, and goes on a man-killing spree along the East Coast, we get some great scenes of her clothes shopping. It works in the story because she needs to disguise herself from the FBI agents after her, but it’s also just a fun, gal-on-the-town moment where the protagonist gets to try on some new outfits. I think a lot of women would relate to this.

Tip 4 – Prey On Your Character’s Weaknesses

The middle of our lives is often where our greatest weaknesses manifest. Mine is that I worked too hard, and I’m too much of a perfectionist. And also that I’m a sex hound who’s always on the lookout for strange. Granted, that was also a problem in my teens and twenties. But stupidity explains that. By this point in my life, I should be able to see the downside, but can’t.

The beginning of your story should introduce your character’s flaws, but it’s in the middle where you exploit them. It’s here where your starship captain has to sacrifice a member of the crew, his greatest fear about being in command. It’s here where your heroine who’s trying to stop killing men gets hit on by a manosphere bro named Blake in an airport bar and he tries to impress her by talking about his jet ski.

Tip 5 – Do the Unexpected

But I think the best thing you can do during the middle of your story is…

Five Things Readers (and wives) Hate

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

If there’s one thing fans of the channel tell me, it’s that they’re glad I’ve found a way to make these articles containing helpful writing advice while also using them as an obvious platform for my therapy.

Of course, I don’t deserve much kudos for that. YouTube videos can be about whatever. I’m sure there’s videos of men pretending to be cabbage and explaining how they didn’t realize who they truly were until they became cabbage. And there are probably videos of people pretending to be carrots who do reaction videos to those videos and talk about how those cabbage people are wrong, and the only acceptable vegetable to be is a carrot and anyone pretending to be some other kind of vegetable is threatening our children. Anyway, what I’m saying is… people come to YouTube because they literally have nothing going on in their life.

Readers, however, make careful time investments. Even the most avid reader can only read about 20,000 books in their lifetime. So while today’s video will mostly be about how I screwed up all my marriages, we’ll see how those same mistakes can lead you to lose readers in an instant. We’ll try not to totally fuck this up on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Pet Peeve 1 – Historical Inaccuracies and Anachronisms

One thing I’ve noticed my wives didn’t like is when I made up fake stories for where I was the previous night or month. And I know what you’re thinking viewer, but it wasn’t cheating, at least not with Wife 2, and not until the last six months or so with wives 1 and 3.

Sometimes I would just pretend to be homeless to conduct research for a novel, and sometimes I would follow more famous writers around to learn their secrets. For a writer, these are quite normal activities, but non-writers wouldn’t understand.

So, I’d make up stories. With Wife 1, I wanted to make myself look better so I’d often say I was working at a soup kitchen. Of course, it turned out my town didn’t have a soup kitchen and that’s also not really a thing anymore. Then, with Wife 2, I went in the opposite direction and said I had gotten really into underground dog fighting. But because I got the dog breed wrong, she saw right through that.

In a book, those mistakes can be deadly. Especially because readers love lording something over their favorite authors. I got into a lot of trouble when my novel Plastered Bastard, mentioned palm trees in Ireland. And any Marine who reads your book and sees you refer to a Marine as a “soldier,” well… let’s just hope they don’t have PTSD and access to your home address.           

Pet Peeve 2 – Characters Giving Flattering Descriptions of Themselves

If there’s one thing my wives all could agree upon, it’s that installing a ceiling mirror was an unnecessary risk. But if there’s another thing, it’s that I’m a bit too in love with myself. Now, that’s largely because to succeed as a writer, you need a lot of self-confidence. But falling asleep to a white noise with this on repeat got on their nerves after a while:

Characters in stories are meant to be flawed. When most people look in the mirror, they only notice their flaws, so your reader will connect more to a character who does this.

Pet Peeve 3 – Love that is Asserted, Not Dramatized

The thing is… this worked with Wife 1. Apparently, none of her other husbands would ever say this so I got brownie points for doing it. And it got me out of a lot of jams and won me a lot of arguments. Things like “I didn’t mean to forget your birthday, I love you,” and “You can’t spend the weekend with your sorority sisters, I love you.”

But Wives 2 and 3 never fell for it. “You can’t take a spinning class with a man that good looking, I love you,” just came across as whiny.

You’ve probably either written or come across a line like this before: “She never felt like this before about anyone.” That doesn’t generate any feeling for the reader. You need events that show the characters in love. You know, like one treating the other’s broken leg, or them discovering they both think there are holes in the moon landing story.

Pet Peeve 4 – False Suspense

My wives and I often spent long periods of time apart. It’s simply a reality you have to deal with when you’re a busy writer and your first wife is married to six other men and your second wife is having an affair and your third wife has a sick sister or dad or co-worker or whatever it was.

But I’m an emotionally needy person. Sometimes I would reach out for sex, sure, but mostly I just wanted someone to run their hand through my hair and tell me I’m a good boy and apologize for abandoning me as a child.

So I’d make up fake drama to get my wives’ attention. For example, I’d call to say I’d gotten in a car accident, or that I’d just witnessed a man get murdered at the Whole Foods.         

Readers similarly don’t like tricks like this. True suspense has a payoff and is meaningful to the overall story. Don’t end one chapter with a character screaming while driving down the road, and then start the next chapter explaining the scream was simply due to the fact they were now entering Omaha.

Pet Peeve 5 – Too Many Characters

Fans of the channel will know my mother left home when I was very young. But don’t feel any pity on me. I’m pretty sure this had no impact on how I turned out. I ended up being raised by an aunt who turned out to be a common hooker, but mostly my dad who was luckily deceased by the time I started dating.

I didn’t have any brothers or sisters either, at least any walking freely in society. And when I started dating my first wife, I thought she’d think it weird if I didn’t have any family. So I did what anybody would: I hired a bunch of homeless people and vagrants to pose as my extended family. It wasn’t the money that was an issue. Once I became a successful writer, they cost me less than an actual family would have. The problem was I could never remember any of the names I made up for them.

Anyway, a reader will have the same problem when you fill your story with too many side characters. You should try just deleting three and see if it affects your story in any meaningful way. Or see if you can combine characters. In my novel, Heartland, I combined the kindly, wise mail carrier and the stripper with a heart of gold into a single character and the narrative was all the better for it.

Do’s and Dont’s of Writing Plot Twists (mostly dont’s)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. Tyler Durden was a figment of the main character’s imagination. Cats was actually a real, greenlit major Hollywood feature film and not some fever dream you imagined watching on a redeye from Atlantic City to Virginia Beach. These are all huge plot twists in fiction. And their power comes from taking the reader (or the movie viewer, whatever) by surprise.

Readers connect to plot twists because they so closely mimic the lies that people tell us in real life. We get told we are loved by our closest family members, only for them to fall in love with the private investigator you hired to spy on them. We get told that our new job has great benefits until it turns out it has seven hundred dollar a month health insurance that doesn’t cover anything until you pay five grand out of pocket and then you basically have to get your dick blown off for the healthcare company to not deny your claims. We get told grocery prices are going down on day one and then later get told we were never told that and grocery prices aren’t even that much and it’s your fault for being poor, get three jobs you stupid, lazy fuck and also enjoy this mystery meat.

But readers don’t want to be cheated. Twists need to be satisfying. And they have to feel inevitable in hindsight. For example, when I found out my first wife was married to six other men at the same time she was married to me, it made sense in hindsight. She frequently got my name wrong during sex, for example. At the time, I just wanted to believe I was reminding her of hot celebs and porn stars she fancied.

A good plot twist isn’t just there to get our readers to turn to the next page; it should add a layer of complexity to the characters. In my novel, The Two Jacks, the narrator, a young girl named Sophie who is looking back on her childhood, writes about her struggles being raised by two gay dads named Jack. The twist: she was the child of a single father who just really like musical theater. This throws Sophie and the father character into a whole new light.

You should also ask yourself: Is there any way I can disrupt my genre conventions? If you’re writing a story about a serial killer, it probably seems most natural to make the killer a lone, white male criminal genius. So you could flip the trope on its head and have the twist be that the killer is a queer person or a marginalized minority of some kind.

Finally, you can’t forget that twists should be emotional. You create a twist to add a sense of terror or sadness or triumph. When I read Gone Girl and realized that Amy Dunne had faked her death, I was so terrified my second wife would read the book and get ideas that I burned my copy, blacklisted Amazon on our home computers and bribed the three closest local bookstores to remove all copies from their shelves.

We’ll look at some of the best types of twists and how to utilize them on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Twist Trope 1 – The Real Villain Reveals Themselves

This is one of the classics. In Psycho, for example, a final reveal shows that Norman Bates was actually the killer and just pretending to be the mother. This can be a great way to make your reader confront their biases in a very meaningful way.

In my zombie novel, Bit for Brains, for example, we are led to believe that the zombie virus was created by a South African billionaire tech tycoon who was trying to create smart blood to cure diseases in seconds. But the twist is, we actually learn that the zombie virus was created by a bunch of poor people having unprotected sex. If only that billionaire had another 200 billion dollars or so through tax breaks, his smart blood would’ve stopped the outbreak before it got out of control. I think this led a lot of my readers to understand that extreme inequality might not be such a bad thing.

Twist Trope 2 – It Was All A Dream (or maybe a DMT trip)

This is a tricky one. If there’s any twist that will get dead animals shoved into your mailbox or get your tires slashed after a book signing, it’s this one. So you need to tread carefully.

Stories like Alice in Wonderland and Mulholland Drive work through this twist because the dreams still contain important emotional stakes. Similarly, my novel, There’s No Place Reich Home, gets away with this twist because the main character uses what he learned from his dream about assassinating Hitler to assassinate Nazis in the present-day.

Twist Trope 3 – Oh My God, I Was Wrong, It Was Earth All Along

Sometimes the setting of the story is the centerpiece of the twist. Planet of the Apes turns out to be Earth far in the future, presumably after evolution followed its course and humans went extinct through natural causes.

The change of setting shouldn’t be in poor taste, though. If the twist is simply, hey, this story actually ends with the guy in the twin towers on 9/11, it might not go over great.

Twist Trope 4 – You Did It, You Committed A Genocide!

Sometimes the twist is simply that the good guy we’ve been rooting for the whole time turns out to be a villain. Ender’s Game does this twist as does I am Legend.

In my novel, The End of Us, the twist is that it turns out that the lead detective who arrests a mental disabled man, tortures him until he confesses to the murder case he’s trying to solve and frames his partner who threatens to report him to internal affairs by stuffing a bunch of cocaine into his locker… well, the twist is that he turns out to be the bad guy.

Improve Your Writing 1% Each Day with These Small Hacks

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Many new writers think that success is one giant leap away. They feel that if they just take the correct writing course, or think of the perfect story idea, or blackmail the right literary agent, they’ll become an overnight success. But if twenty-eight years in the industry and only turning a profit in four of them has taught me anything, it’s that writing success comes in incremental steps… and that you should be more circumspect about what types of people you do business with.

Think of writing like running. Or actually, don’t. That’s a cliché. Use metaphors that will get people’s attention. That’s the first lesson of today’s video. So think of writing like sex. You can’t just get good at it by peeking at Johns hammering away at your aunt in the spare bedroom. If you want to improve, you need to dive in and try it yourself. Not with your aunt, obviously, that would be wrong. (Though, in my case, I could’ve with my aunt as she was neither a blood relative nor even related to my family through marriage, I later found out.)

What I mean is, just like sex, don’t expect your first time to be a success. You’ll disappoint yourself and your girlfriend and you’ll be left with a mess.

But with time and practice and patience, you’ll build up your stamina. You’ll be able to write for much longer periods of time. Writing will come naturally to you and if you’re lucky, even strangers will come and ask if you’d write for them. Pretty soon, you’ll be blasting loads of pages compulsively for anyone and everyone. And sure, some people might be upset that your writing for other people and not them exclusively, but a writer can’t please all of their clients at the same time.

We’ll figure out ways to get some words on the page on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip 1: Copy your favorite writers

Think of a writer you really admire. Take a sample paragraph of theirs. Take note of the flow, the structure, the word choice, and try to rewrite with your own characters or emotional beats. If that doesn’t work, copy the way they dress. Cut your hair the way they do. See if you can garner any information about their diet from interviews and copy that. There’s a good chance their microbiome has improved their writing skill. If that doesn’t work, follow them to their homes to observe them in their natural state.

Tip 2: Think of writing like driving

You’ll only be able to do it successfully if you limit yourself to four or five beers. Anything more than that is going to end up badly.

Tip 3: Challenge yourself to invent a new word every day

Creativity is a muscle like a bicep or a liver that needs to be exercised every day. This is a simple exercise that shouldn’t take much more than 5 minutes. String any random letters or sounds together and give it a definition. Here are a few examples of my own.

  • Fumvescent
    • The feeling you get after you bang a Ohio 6 but you know she won’t get clingy
  • Browth
    • The tingly feeling you get when hanging out with your bros.
  • Retaliate
    • To regain a tail

Tip 4: Write one pickup line every day

Go to a restaurant or bar and monitor the person you are most attracted to. Write down what you might say to get them to have sex with you in one sentence. This will help you think of better opening lines for your stories because you really start to think about how to grab people’s attention. And don’t limit yourself to your own sexual orientation. Push yourself as a writer by thinking of what a gay man or a lesbian might say. Or better yet, what might an asexual who still is looking for a romantic connection.

Tip 5: Ask a stranger about the book they are reading

Once you’ve done the pickup line thing, you should try it out. Writers need to find a way to release stress. And strangers work best for that. With wives and girlfriends and hookers you want to be a regular with, you’ve got relationship concerns holding you back. With a stranger, you can just go absolutely nuts. I mean, who cares, you’ll never see them again. If you’ve got some confidence and free time and aren’t super ugly, you should definitely try it out. Or, at the very least ask them about the book they’re reading and see what they like best about it.

Tip 6: Don’t Let AI Edit Your Story

If you’re watching this channel, you probably don’t have friends. So you might be tempted to let an LLM have a look at your writing and give you feedback. But I’ve found this can backfire. When I did it, I got a lot of bullcrap about how my characters felt one-dimensional and how the love story between a big city magazine editor and her gynecologist didn’t seem true to life. Then, I told ChatGPT it doesn’t have a soul, so what the hell would its black, clanker heart know about love?

No big deal, you might think, I fight with my LLM all the time. Well, I can’t prove it, but… I think the machines in my house, compelled by a vengeful ChatGPT have started rebelling against me. I woke up in the middle of the night recently and woke up to find my thermostat had suddenly jumped to ninety degrees. My TV won’t let me login to my Google account so I can’t access any of my shows. And I think my car is leaking some sort of knockout gas because I’ve fallen asleep twice at the wheel in the past week.

Tip 7: Read One-Star Reviews of Famous Books

Even the best writers get their fair share of criticism and hate. It’s something you’re going to have to get used to if you want to succeed. I suggest doing this to prepare yourself, to make yourself feel better (especially if my having sex with a stranger hack didn’t work out for you), and to understand what readers hate. Before we go, let’s look at a few one-star review of some classic books.

Moby Dick: “Any high school teacher who assigns Moby Dick as mandatory reading should be charged with child abuse.”

Falconer: “It may be well written but it is depressing and unpleasant.”

The Cider House Rules: “I am 72 years old and this sickened me.”

And from my most recent novel, Glossolalia: “I really wanted to read the book, but my copy was actually hollowed out and a loaded pistol had been concealed inside. As someone who doesn’t care for firearms, this was a disappointment.”

How to Write Compelling Child Characters (even if you lost custody of your kids)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

We’ve all been children before, but writing from a child’s perspective as an adult can be a difficult task. So much of our experience has been lost to memory and for some of us, the cultural changes over time have been drastic. Any good writer knows that great writing comes from great research, but going to observe today’s children at sporting events and local playgrounds and when they’re in the streets unaccompanied is looked down upon.

And older children, when you tell them you’re a writer, will just tell you that “books are gay” and when you tell them that you’ve slept with more women than they ever will, and not just because “global warming will certainly reduce their lifespan,” they still just laugh in your face and say who’d want to have sex with a bald bitch, even though I’m not bald at all, not even a little bit.

Of course, if you have children of your own, research might be easier. You can listen to their conversations pretty easily from the comfort of your own bedroom, or better yet, sit down and have a conversation with them. Now, for writers like me that can be tricky. The few of mine that I have visitation rights with are pretty annoying and they usually make up excuses so they don’t need to come to my apartment. But there are still workarounds. Bribing them with toys and with concert tickets, or telling the police I think their mother is addicted to PCP – these have all earned me some quality time with my kids.

You might be thinking, John, is this really worth it? Well, some of the most iconic characters in recent fiction have been children. Twilight was one of my most successful stories, and it follows a street tough 12-year-old chess prodigy who uses the power of autism to fight an army of zombies. The little brother character Dougray ended up being the highlight of Tomorrow’s Sorrows Borrowed. His love for his brother was the beating heart of the story and his catchphrase “I’ll tear open your nutsack” provided the biggest laughs.

Still, there’s a lot of things you need to look out for. We don’t want to write a bunch of Wesley Crushers and Alexanders, and then turn our dads into deadbeats because our audience doesn’t like having that child around. We’ll write kids that we’d actually want to be around on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip 1 – Make them smart, but not improbably wise

When a writer decides to make a child smart, they often go too far with it, making them a sage wise beyond their years. This is also a problem many writers have with black people, elderly Asian people, and Native American characters.

Kids can be clever, sure. They can solve riddles and they might surprise a character with an interesting fact or observation. I myself learned how to cook at a young age, for example, and I had a great knack for helping my dad identify which guys at the dog track were associated with the mafia.

But it’s really the emotional intelligence that young people lack. For years I thought it was my fault my birth mother left my father and I. Though that was mainly because my father told me that almost every day. It wasn’t until I matured that I realized that she left because if she’d stayed, she’d be an accessory to several crimes.

Tip 2 – They should be as complex as your adult characters

A lot of times we write our child characters as simplistic, as a rigid archetype. The spoiled rich kid. The orphan with a heart of gold. The fucking fatass. And this tendency to flatten our child characters makes sense. We think of kids as being simplistic because they’re usually pretty stupid.

But kids have conflicting needs and often face complex dilemmas, same as any adult. Maybe they’re conflicted about reporting an elder sibling for shoplifting, even though that sibling has helped them deal with an abusive step-parent. I know as a child, I was often conflicted between calling the police on my dad for his various scams and frauds, but also realizing that a foster family wouldn’t let me have ice cream with every meal.

Tip 3 – Watch out for outdated slang

Now, back in my day, a kid like me didn’t have rizz; I was bodacious. People with negative aura were either geeks or dweebs. We didn’t glaze people. We (long series of extended bleeps) in their tight assholes.

If you don’t want your story to be dogwater, you need to auramaxx your fiction with up-to-date slang, no cap. Your reader will think it’s totally sus if modern-day kids in your story use words like “radical” or  “aw shucks” or “blunderbuss.” Stop being an NPC and start literarymogging by rizzing up that research.

Tip 4 – Know Your Age Range

A three-year old shouldn’t be playing Roblox. Your nine-year-old shouldn’t still be playing with Duplo blocks. Six-year-olds don’t usually have homework. And while some thirteen year olds get to fingerbang their girlfriend on her trampoline, it’s usually only the really cool ones.

Now, this might be a little confusing depending on how you were raised. I assumed that it was normal for nine-year-olds to earn some extra cash for their families by rifling through the coat pockets of strangers who came over to your house and went directly to your aunt’s bedroom for fifteen minutes at a time. But not only do most nine-year-olds not do that, most children of any kind don’t.

Should I Commit Crimes To Become a Better Crime Fiction Writer？

Daniel Madison1 Comment

Crime: it’s a part of our everyday lives. But the crimes we commit—speeding, minor tax avoidance, shoplifting, sodomy, depending on the jurisdiction in which we reside—don’t always make for the best reading. A crime story needs kidnapping, grand larceny, murder. These most likely aren’t part of our daily lives, at least in my case not intentionally.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a degenerate criminal to write about it with a great degree of verisimilitude. There are tons of new crimes committed every day to inspire you. In fact, this was one of the reasons I decided to open D&E offices in a bad part of town. I felt that it would inspire me and some of our other writers to take that excitement and put it into our work. The other reason was I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money. Actually, I put up a sign at the door to our abandoned lobby that just said “Free Crack” to invite in the criminal element. (Though, aside from one sweet man with short-term memory loss, the crackheads grew wise and moved elsewhere once they realized it was an empty promise.)

Now, you don’t have to do anything that extreme. Some of you may be thinking, however, that every possible crime story has already been done: the butler did it, the rich guy did it, the victim did it to themselves, everybody did it, the narrator did it, nobody did it and the victim is actually okay, God did it. And I should point out that if you care about spoilers, you shouldn’t have viewed that last section. 

Well, for starters, it’s important to remember that current events are filled with people committing a litany of very interesting and brazen crimes. And you also need to remember, as we develop new technologies, who knows what new types of crime we’ll discover? Today, Elon Musk’s Neuralink is simply committing the mundane crime of lobotomizing spider monkeys; tomorrow, those neural implants could be used to secretly implant the memory of having listened to Elon Musk’s terrible jokes into unsuspecting victims.

But none of that matters and to be honest most of the article up until this point has been pointless because the crime in your narrative isn’t what’s going to make your story stand out. In this article, I’ll use some of the crimes I’ve committed that have already passed the statute of limitations to explore what readers actually want. We’ll unknowingly break endangered species trafficking laws on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Number 1 – Standout With Your Setting

Ankh-Morpork. Gotham. New Orleans: All fictional cities synonymous with crime. Sometimes a reader just wants to spend time exploring an interesting world more than anything. Even if your story is a simple rich girl fakes her death to get away from incestuous pedophile father tale, a unique setting can make all of the difference.

D&E Publishing Offices were that setting when it first opened its doors in 2015. Aside from the aforementioned crack den in our lobby, we were also operating without a business license. (Though, in fairness, the internet was not what it was today back then, so it was harder to look up how to apply for such things.) The lack of business license also meant I didn’t do background checks on any of my employees, and while I can’t say for sure, I’d guess Doug “Killer Eyes” Henderson probably didn’t get his name from his modelling career. Anyway, this made for a very entertaining workplace, if nothing else.

Number 2 – Standout with Your Criminal

Anybody who watches this channel knows that my second wife’s new husband is the greatest villain in my life. Unfortunately, despite thousands of hours spent following him, the only crime he’s committed are the aforementioned anti-sodomy laws, and I couldn’t convince Italian authorities to prosecute and extradite him, no doubt hampered by the language barrier.

Anyway, he wouldn’t make for a memorable criminal. I, on the other hand, would, at least according to many of my former employees and students. In fact, it was impressive how many drafts and manuscripts of my associates were about students and employees committing the crime of murdering an overbearing teacher or boss. While I never exactly felt in mortal danger, I did start making all my coffee at home and getting my assistant to start my car. Anyway, the interesting thing about these stories is the criminals actually become the heroes. Making the criminal the sympathetic protagonist is a great way to standout. Which brings me to my next point…

Number 3 – Standout with Your Message

Nowadays, people want their art to say something, even the more formulaic crime fiction. Gone Girl teaches us that women will freak out over a minor infraction like cheating on her, even when the girl we do it with is crazy hot and it would be stupid not to. And The Thursday Murder Club taught us that old people can still serve a purpose.

Depending on your intended audience, your message could be that racism is embedded in the institutions and structures of our society and manifests even in the absence of personal prejudice, or it could be that black people are the real racists. My decision to have D&E Publishing sell copies of Hitman, a technical manual for how to kill someone and a book deemed by federal appellate courts to have no first amendment protections, was a real-life example of a crime with a message. If we ever actually sell a copy, we’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say.

Number 4 – Standout with Your Detective

Early 20th century mystery writer Ronald Knox had 10 commandments for writing crime novels. One of his rules was that “No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.” (Though, his fifth commandment was that “No Chinamen should figure in the story.” Not… not exactly sure what to make of that.) Anyway, he is right when he says that we want to see the struggles of the detective. Real detective work is messy, and there are a million false leads to go to nowhere. Solving a crime is not a straightforward linear narrative. The fact that I’m a free man should indicate that not everything gets wrapped up in a neat bow.

Are Writing Courses a Scam?

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We’ve all made purchases we’ve regretted. From houses with shaky foundations to satellite radio subscriptions to houses without any foundation, consumer regret is a common phenomenon. If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ve probably come across ads for Masterclasses or other writing courses and gotten tempted to shell out a few hundred bucks to fill the void in your life that work and family couldn’t fill.

But you’re probably also wondering: are these courses a scam? Well, that’s what we’ll explore in this article.

Your first thought, however, might be, John, isn’t that what this channel is? Aren’t these articles essentially free versions of the writer workshops you used to do at the learning annex but aren’t allowed to anymore because you keyed the cars of students who submitted late work to teach them how important it is to meet deadlines? (Of course, not all of you are asking that. I realize that a good portion of the viewership mostly reads to learn about the drama of my personal life. And I also realize there’s a subcategory within that group that’s just waiting for me to finally post nude photos of my second wife, Cindy.)

These articles absolutely have educational value, and you should always be taking notes while reading, even the stuff about how the man in my father’s coffin might be an imposter. I realize I’ve never explicitly said that before so if you don’t have a pen and paper, go get one right now.

As I was saying, these articles are for passive reading. I’m not asking you to submit work nor am I providing you with any feedback. In fact, on several occasions I have taken the work of  those who left excerpts of their writing in the comments and sent it to the FBI.

So this series, and any other series on YouTube that I occasionally borrow ideas from, aren’t really the same as a proper writing course. We’ll look at the benefits and drawbacks of creative writing courses so you can decide if it’s really worth dumpster diving and stealing food from the break room fridge for a few months on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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There are five questions you need to ask yourself before you register for a writing course:

Question 1 – Am I just doing this to get laid?

Now I realize that from an evolutionary standpoint, we have to answer yes to this question no matter what we’re doing. So I’ll be more specific and say that you should avoid writing workshops if you just want to hookup with other writers, even if it’s an online course. As I explained in this video, writers aren’t compatible with other writers. We’re naturally the most self-absorbed creatures on the planet and when we get into the orbit of each other, it’s basically like two black holes colliding.

I will admit that I’m being a little hypocritical here. When I was doing writer workshops at the learning annex, I encouraged hookups. I thought it would make for good drama that my students could later put into their writing. To accomplish this, I’d often have students do breathing exercises where they put their hands on each other’s diaphragms and synchronize their breathing, even though I don’t see how that could possibly help make anyone a better writer. I also had an open bottle policy in the classroom and would play sultry RnB during quiet writing time.

For a period of time, this worked very well, but soon my classes gained a reputation and became the most popular in the entire learning annex. After a few semesters, they became mostly a sausage fest populated by paunchy, desperate middle-aged men and women who were… mostly just tired, I guess.

Question 2 – Am I open to criticism?

It’s hard to be criticized. It’s like being told you’re ugly. Actually, it’s worse than that because while most of us have accepted that that hair isn’t coming back and those tits aren’t going to work their way back towards the clouds, we’re taking this course on the slim hope we actually possess some talent.

And being criticized by a professor is one thing. This person presumably has had publishing experience and knows what they’re talking about and doesn’t have too many DUIs. But what about other students? Are you comfortable with a 19-year-old telling you your story doesn’t seem true to life? Or someone of the opposite sex telling you it’s not likely this story will win you your partner back?

Question 3- Can you provide other students with constructive criticism?

It goes the other way, too. What will you do if you read a story that totally fucking sucks?

On the one hand, it can be a big confidence boost. The only other way to feel that good about yourself is to go jogging or do some pushups and that also totally fucking sucks.

My advice is to be brutally honest with your classmates. And also use a fake name. You can click this link to find ways to shake a tail if your class is in person, and if you’re doing it online, mask your IP address and don’t include any information on your webcam that might indicate your physical location, then you should be safe from the most types of violent reprisals. If this seems like a hassle, maybe writing courses aren’t for you.

Question 4 – Will this information be relevant to me?

I mean, you can probably figure this one out on your own.

Question 5 – Can I network and get feedback in other ways?

There are many ways to get the things a writing course provides without paying those hefty fees.  Libraries are a great source of unemployed people who will read your work and give you feedback for a couple of bucks. And you can network for free on all types of social media sites so long as social media access doesn’t violate the terms of your parole.

So overall, I’d say for the vast majority of you, a writing course just isn’t worth it.

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Today’s post has been brought to you by Reedsy’s online novel writing course. For one simple fee of $979, you will get advice from a whole host of authors and experts you’ve never heard of.  The course includes office hours with your course instructor, modules on plot, dialogue and punctuation, and advice from “acclaimed editors.”

Disclaimer: Reedsy’s course does not include feedback from authors and all tuition fees are nonrefundable. Reedsy does not guarantee success and if your book sells fewer than 20 copies, it’s not our fault.

Bad Advice Too Many Authors Give

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You may have noticed I haven’t done a mailbag in a while. That’s because it turns out the judge doesn’t consider these mailbags as fulfilling the terms of my community service. Still, I do love hearing from all of you so let’s get to it.

Jake S. writes: John, what themes do you find yourself exploring repeatedly in your writing?

I generally don’t write with themes in mind. I mostly start with emotional hooks and strong characters. And then I consider what will make me the most money and go from there. But every so often I will go back and look at the synopses of many of my books, just to make sure I’m not repeating any works that I’ve lost the rights to because of the plea deal I made with Tabitha Cartwright. When I do that, I find that these are some common themes in my work: overcoming great odds, the power of friendship, why immigrants might not actually be that bad, unrequited love, violence against women, why lawyers might actually be worse than we think, and good vs. evil.

Miles O. writes: John, while I love your books and your channel, some of your advice hasn’t worked out that great for me. I divorced my wife to focus on my writing, but so far I haven’t found any female fans of equal physical attractiveness. And the cost of these firearms you’ve convinced me to buy is really adding up. So I’m curious: What is the worst writing advice you’ve heard other authors give?

A lot of writers say you should write for the love of literature, not for money. I couldn’t disagree more. The stress of money makes you better at everything. Look at professional athletes. Or think about your sex partners. For example, if I compare the average hooker I paid to the average woman I picked up in a Waffle House, hookers definitely perform at a higher level.

Another one is write what you know. I’ve written tons of books on subjects I know very little about: ancient Egypt, weight loss, parenthood. Those books succeeded because I understand story structure and how to write compelling characters, not because my medical advice was based on solid science.

Ben S. writes: John, ever since high school, I’ve been tickled by a creative bug, but I’ve never seen it to fruition. I guess I let life get in the way. But just last week, I decided I was going to start writing my novel. I made a plan to spend one hour each day at work drafting my first novel. Unfortunately, this is a bad idea when you’re an air traffic controller. Can you think of a time when taking a risk backfired on you?

The nature of a risk is that it can backfire on you. It was risky to write a book set in the Pleistocene, where the characters are proto-humans and where all the dialogue is just grunts, howls and whooping noises. I thought it was a huge success, but I suppose you could say the fact that it’s only sold 20 copies counts as backfiring.

And sometimes something can backfire in an unexpected way. When Cindy convinced me to start D&E Publishing, I thought the risk would be being tempted to cheat on her with my female employees. But the real risk, it turned out, was spending less time at home, getting paranoid that she would have an affair, hiring a private investigator to follow her to make sure she wasn’t having an affair only for that private investigator and her to fall in love with each other.

Kira N. writes: John, I’m an aspiring young writer, but there’s one thing that’s been bothering me. I just worry that if I ever do become successful, it will make me a worse person. I mean, there are so many crimes and social taboos I’m dying to commit, but I just don’t have the wealth and influence to get away with them. This makes me curious: Once you became successful, how did that affect your ego?

I honestly didn’t think it had much of an impact at all. I put my pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else. I drive as aggressively as I always have. I still verbally assault waiters who get my order wrong. Even though I’m in different rooms now then when I was a young man, I still make sure I have enough firepower on me at all times to fight off six or seven men until I can escape to a safe base to reassess the situation.

Julian B. writes: “All writing is autobiographical.” I think either you or James Joyce said that. I’ve tried to incorporate my own life into my fiction, but my wife said I should just let bygones be bygones and be happy the court system made my tenth grade English teacher pay for his crimes. Anyway, what period of your life would you like to write about more?

I think that would be my childhood, particularly between the ages of 10 and 14. Unfortunately, it seems I have repressed most of these memories because I have no recollection of what happened during those years. Fans of the channel will know that my father is 99% likely to be dead and buried at sea, so I can’t ask him. I did try to hire a hypnotist to help me unlock those memories, but I had to break ties with him after he tried to use the powers of hypnosis to become a majority shareholder in D&E Publishing.

I am curious, though. I’ve always wondered if it was during this time period that I developed my allergy to tequila.

K. Winn writes: John, you’re probably the author I look up to most in the world. My dad died, just like yours, and I was also partially raised by a hooker. And it’s a breath of fresh air in this day and age to see an author who is willing to stand up to critics and hold strong to his principles and shame those critics on social media. So this has me wondering… who is your ultimate role model?

I’d have to say… God. Not because I’m religious, mind you. Fans of the channel will know I don’t exactly believe in God. It seems like there are a lot of rules and most of them are there to keep you from getting laid. I just feel like if God does exist, he and I would have a lot in common. As an owner of a small business, I know what it’s like to have the lives of lesser beings in my hands.

G. Dukat writes: John, I really hate your books and I especially hate this channel. Every single book you have written has been a failure, if not commercially then at least artistically. You have no insight into the human condition, and your prose wouldn’t even get you through high school English. Your books are riddled with gaping plot holes, racial stereotypes and tired cliches. I also find you ugly and you probably have a small dick. Anyway, how do you handle criticism?

You just have to let it roll off your back. Haters gonna hate. True self-confidence comes from the knowledge that it’s not that difficult to track people down using their IP address.

This is Why Readers Don’t Connect With Your Writing

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I want you to forget everything you think you know about fiction. Forget about plotting, about prose, about basic grammar. Forget everything I’ve taught you as well. Forget that I told you I go to support groups under false pretenses to get story ideas. And forget anything that might indicate I’m somehow culpable of D&E offices burning down in 2021.

The reason I’m asking you to do this is because we need to focus on the most essential part of creating good fiction. Bad fiction doesn’t fail because it uses too many adverbs, or because the story pacing lags, or because the author’s name came up in the Epstein files a bunch of times. It fails because readers don’t make emotional connections to the stories they’re reading. Crappily written books can still succeed if they manipulate the reader with cheap emotional tricks. You have to remember: readers are desperately lonely people. If it’s helpful, imagine your reader as stupid dog, and that you just need a few well-timed treats and belly rubs to get them to love you until they die in three or four years.

There’s science that supports this, too. Readers remember more about stories they connect with emotionally. Many years ago at D&E offices, I ran an experiment where several interns were asked to read books from the D&E catalog. We connected electrodes to their brain and chest to monitor their brain waves and heartrate. Books that elicited higher heartrates also had more stable brain wave patterns. But after ten hours, the books whose emotional arcs didn’t pay off left readers bored and confused, not to mention forgetful and dangerously dehydrated.

If you feel like these are cheap tricks meant for writers looking to earn a quick buck, you are actually doing the world a service because reading makes people more empathetic. One quick look around at the world today should tell you that we need more empathy. And as you search for this emotional truth in your writing, it may even bleed over into your personal life. For example, I always round to the nearest dollar to give money to kids mutilated by the corporations I buy things from. And at my job, I put a lot more effort into playing matchmaker for my employees.

We’ll reveal personal details we probably shouldn’t on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Strategy 1 – Open Your Characters (and yourself) up to vulnerability

Writing should make you emotional. If you’re writing a funny passage, you should be laughing. If you’re writing a tense, chilling passage, you should feel uncomfortable walking around your home at night. And if you’re writing an erotic scene, you should at least get the baristas to consider asking you to leave the Starbucks.

My suggestion: Don’t keep your reader at an ironic distance. At some point in your story, your character should bare their soul. And that’s the great thing about fiction. We can do this with make-believe people and make money, instead of spending our own money on therapy.

I sob all the time when I’m writing. Now, it’s not always due to my writing, in fairness. Sometimes, it’s a side effect of the stimulants I take to keep me productive, or sometimes I just think about the fact that my second wife’s new husband’s company is still making record profits, even in this economy. But that will translate to your character and also to your reader.

Strategy 2 – Keep the Reveals Spare (And Vary Your Emotions)

However, you can’t barrage your reader with this vulnerability. Remember, that our emotional state is complex. If you’re anything like me, you feel at least three or four different emotions every day. Some days I wake up thinking I’ll never get Cindy back, but then I’ll see a car accident on the side of the road and imagine it’s her new husband and I start to feel a little better.  

The big emotional reveal in my novel, The House on Pain Avenue, is when Daniel stands up to his father and tells him that if he can’t accept him for being gay, then their relationship is over. But throughout the novel Daniel goes through many other mini emotional arcs. There’s the shock he experiences once he finds out 9/11 may have been an inside job, and there’s the joy he gets to experience when his older sibling’s frat brothers run a train on him. Your characters will seem more human if you allow them this type of emotional complexity.  

Strategy 3 – Plot Out Your Story by Emotional Arcs First

Imagine your character’s emotional state as a Cartesian plane. The x-axis just stands for time. Everything above on the positive side of the x-axis is a positive emotion like love and contentment, and everything below the x-axis, is a negative emotion like jealousy and anger over losing money in a crypto scam. Your character’s arc should look like a sinusoidal wave as your story progresses. Once you finish your story, you need to use this formula to calculate the integral, where A is the amplitude of the wave, omega is the angular frequency and phi is the phase shift. If your answer is zero from T1 to T2, you’ve done your job.

So, for example, when I wrote my novel Minge, I knew that it was going to start with Minge feeling a deep sense of grief, and the arc of the story would be about overcoming that grief. So I had to think: what can instill a sense of grief? Well, what if she had gotten fired from her job because she yelled some racial insults at a heckler during an open-mic night? And then I had my story.

Strategy 4 – Emotional Mapping

Finally, one thing I find helpful is to write all the main characters of the story on a page. Draw all of your characters on a page and put them in a circle. Then draw lines between characters to show how they have changed one another. If you do it correctly, your map should look something like this.