How Watching Loved Ones Suffer and Die Can Inspire Your Writing

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If you’ve ever been caught in the rain without an umbrella, or caught in the middle of a murder of crows without an umbrella to fend off their attacks because they followed you to work after remembering that you were the one who threw rocks at them to be quiet that morning on your lawn even though you live 25 miles from your office, then you’ve experienced one of fiction’s timeless conflicts: man vs nature.

This is the third installment in our six-part series about the key conflicts in literature. For those who hate themselves for what their father did to them, you can check out our Man vs. Self article, and for those who hate their father for what he did to them, then our Man vs. Man article might be more up your alley.

Man vs Nature conflicts are different than many other conflicts in fiction. Nature has no motives, plan or vendetta. Characters are fighting against something that has no awareness that they exist at all. This is relatable because it reminds so many readers of their love lives.

But it’s also relatable because this conflict has been with us since caveman times, when leopards would come and take our children in the dead of night instead of the elders who made up a bunch of bullshit rules for our tribe to follow.

And yet with all of our modern technology, it’s a conflict that’s just as relevant to our lives today. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably lost loved ones to cholera or rabies, with no cure in sight. And the greatest blow to my publishing career was not a vindictive agent or publisher, nor was it my lack of self-confidence. It was a fire that destroyed D&E offices in 2021, and while the courts argued that it was caused by my business partner siphoning electricity from a nearby building – making it a man vs technology conflict – once the fire got out of control, it really just became man vs the natural melting point of human flesh.

We’ll trek across vast deserts and gun down ravenous herds of deadly goats on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip One – Use Nature to Reveal Character

Much like alcohol, a man vs. nature conflict will often reveal a person’s true identity. Back in 2018, when D&E Publishing was really taking off as a company, I took my employees on a scavenger hunt through wilderness of southern Utah. Groups were paired off with nothing but a half-bottle of water, a compass, a magnifying glass, an emergency flare and a copy of a survival guide that I wrote but decided not to publish because it wasn’t profitable.  

I quickly learned which people were the strivers and which were the cowards who immediately went to their cars afraid they’d die of dehydration. I also learned a lot about myself, particularly that I’m not a great planner and I don’t have a great understanding of how much damage emergency flares can cause during the dry season.

In your fiction, you should similarly use natural calamities to reveal character strengths and flaws. In Cast Away, for example, we learn that average humans are so resourceful, they can even learn to make friends with volleyballs. Diseases show which of us are so self-centered that we refuse to wear a piece of cloth on our face for a few hours a day to save our fucking neighbors and grandparents.  

Tip Two – Make Nature Specific

Don’t just say that a storm is approaching. Describe the atmospheric conditions. Is this caused by a high pressure or a low pressure system? Give barometric readings or your reader just won’t buy it.

I remember one reader sending me a manuscript about a bear attack. In his book, the side character was killed instantly when the bear ripped out his jugular. Having once watched a friend be killed by a bear during a camping trip, I knew that the bear was likely to start by eating his abdomen and then his face before he slowly died of blood loss. I rejected the book on the spot.

But you also have to be specific about what nature can’t do. If your snake finds a way to open doors, or your Ebola finds a way to drive a car, well… then we’re moving into man vs. the supernatural territory.

Tip Three – Don’t Ignore the Cost

Conflict needs to have consequences for it to be interesting. If your party ventures across dangerous terrain and comes out on the other side never losing a member or an important item, your reader won’t feel anything.  

And it’s just not true to life. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t think of my employees lost in that fire at D&E offices, and also that homeless man who would use our lobby as a quiet place to shoot heroin after 7 pm.

But you don’t have to kill people just to titillate your reader. A cost can manifest itself in many different ways. Jurassic Park has loss of life, sure, but the greater cost I’ve always found is that kids will never get to enjoy that awesome park and investors won’t be able to recover their losses. And in my novel, Canucks Amuck, about a Canadian zombie invasion, the loss of life pales in comparison to the devastation caused by socializing the American healthcare system.  

The Secret to Writing Man vs Man Conflict? Be a Dick to People!

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Whether it’s hitting a shot over your opponent, shoving a bayonet into the belly of a wounded soldier to make sure he dies, or getting the news that your employees’ class action lawsuit against you won’t make it to trial, it feels good to destroy your enemies.

So it’s no wonder that Man versus Man conflicts are the most popular in fiction. Audiences love seeing Batman take on the Joker, they love seeing Superman also take on the Joker. And they love watching James Bond duke it out with a woman who just won’t listen to reason.  

This is the second installment of our six-part series about the six main conflicts in fiction. While last week was catered toward the lonely and depressed viewers who probably should seek professional help instead of listening to me, this week will be more relatable for the more confident Stories’ Matter fans, those who don’t understand why everyone else is such a stupid fucking asshole.

Man vs Man conflicts usually focus on characters who are at odds due to differences in beliefs, values or ideologies. The conflict is usually resolved with one character triumphing over the other, however, it can also be resolved by characters working through a misunderstanding to ease tensions, which never really occurred to me until I started researching this article.

Before we go further, I should also use this time to point out that some viewers protested my use of Man versus Self and stated I should use the more gender-neutral Person versus Self. Well, it was only one person, and as we’ll see in this video, you can use your interactions with self-righteous virtue signalers like this to inspire your writing. Each tip today will use a personal vendetta of mine to illustrate ways to improve your writing.  

We’ll be shitty to wait staff and drive around town like a district judge on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip One – Make Your Characters Reflections of Each Other

A great villain is often one who reminds us of the protagonist. They often have the same goals, but use evil means to achieve them. Or they may have had a similar upbringing but chose a different path. Like how my brother and I grew up in the same abusive household, but while I became a writer, he started a boat-themed cult.  

In my own life, Tabitha Cartwright was a great example of a reflective antagonist. She was a writer like myself and she had a great knack for clever book marketing strategies. In the mid-2000s she became something of a mentor figure, and as anyone who watched this video knows, she got me through the most productive year of my career by secretly poisoning me with amphetamines.

It wasn’t the poisoning so much that rubbed me the wrong way. I knew when I became a writer that I’d have to sacrifice my health for fame and fortune, and most of the books I’d written under the influence were decent. Unfortunately, Tabitha also knew my one weakness: that I hadn’t gotten a vasectomy. I have to assume the maid she’d hired was a call girl meant to entrap me and make me even more dependent on Tabitha, seeing as she did a terrible job of cleaning my house. 

Anyway, you can use this duality in your fiction to have your characters reflect on their own methods and moral codes, creating an interesting combination of internal and external conflict. You’d be surprised how true this rings. For example, a few years ago, I’d noticed my employees were a little logy at their desks. I had several discussions with my building superintendent about putting some sort of aerosolized caffeine into the air duct system until I thought about it for a moment and realized I’d be no better than Tabitha if I did that.

Tip Two – Make your antagonist believable

Villains who do things for the sake of evil are never interesting. Your antagonist should always have a goal that’s at least a little bit understandable, even if it’s something totally crazy. In my novel Zodiac, the killer wants to murder one person every year using that animal of the Zodiac. While most of us wouldn’t try doing this – after all, finding a way to kill someone with a rabbit sounds exhausting – I think we sympathize with the need to see a goal to its completion.  

Fans of the channel will know my first agent and I came to odds in the early 2010s shortly before I started D&E Publishing. We had been a great pair for almost 10 years. Long story short, I had written a book of medical advice that I realized would probably kill somebody if they actually followed it. And while I had books inspire readers to kill themselves before, this wasn’t some teens imitating a fictional gunslinger detective who shoots through his own body to kill the main villain. Anyway, I wrote the manuscript but refused to send it to the publisher. For the next several years my agent devised cleverer and cleverer ways to try and steal the manuscript back. Which is understandable, seeing as I’d spent the advance I’d gotten. Anyway, long story short again, this is why I’m even more vigilant about catfishing scams.

Tip Three – Make Them Fight For the Same Goal

Darth Vader might seem like an unrelatable villain. He’s basically magic and he kills little kids really quickly for a guy who hadn’t spent much time around them. But it works in the story because he and the Jedi are fighting for control over the galaxy.

My second wife’s new husband to this day is the greatest villain in my life. And of course, we have the same goal, the love and affection of Cindy. Like in fiction, we had different methods of obtaining it. He relied on boring things like money and handsomeness while I relied on my wit and charm and letting her make all of the decisions in the relationship. While we’re at the point in the story where he’s the winner, as he ages and loses his good looks, in addition to the lawsuit I’m filing against his company, there’s still a future where I emerge victorious. Anyway, it’s conflicts like these that will win you readers.

You’re Probably Making THESE Mistakes When Writing Internal Conflict

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

They say we are our own greatest enemy. And while I’ve never found that to be especially true – I’d have to give that title either to my second wife’s new husband or my former agent, who once called and said I won a million dollar sweepstakes so he could break into my house while I went to the gas station to sign the check – it’s undeniable that our internal struggles make for excellent fiction.

Today will be the first installment of a six-part series. Each part will focus on one of fiction’s categorical conflicts. Perhaps because it’ s February or perhaps because I just discovered this weird lump that I should get checked out but probably won’t I’ve decided to start with Man vs. Self.

This is, I think, the most relatable type of conflict. Everyone has fears and self-doubt. When I first started D&E Publishing, for example, many friends and neighbors didn’t invest in my company because of a lack of confidence in their business skills. And I’ve gotten emails from so many viewers who are terrified they’ll never make it as a writer due to their personal flaws. Which is crazy because I’ve only told a few of my viewers that.

In your fiction, this conflict can be small and muted, like a character deciding to reconnect with a friend they lost touch with, or it can be large, like the protagonist realizing that his split personality is the one who’s been drowning all of those nuns.

Readers like these types of conflicts because they’re relatable, but they also like these stories because they feel better about themselves in comparison. I know when I read The Catcher in the Rye, for example, I felt glad that even though I was also expelled from school like Holden Caulfield, at least when I got with a prostitute as a young man, I took her straight to pound town.

Just a quick trigger warning: We’re going to explore some uneasy truths and deal with some heavy topics in this video. If you’re not in the right state of mind to listen to frank discussions about mental health, like and subscribe and let the video play to the end so it doesn’t hurt our viewing numbers, but feel free to turn the sound off.

We’ll try to figure out which hole we’re filling with all that chocolate and booze on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip 1 – Root the Conflict in the Character’s Backstory

If you think about it for a second, why do we have self-doubt in the first place? It seems like in caveman times, those with self-doubt would be too distracted by guilt from murdering a rival tribe that they fail to realize they’re being stalked by a leopard while gathering berries. Yet it persists in our blood line.

That’s most likely because as human societies grew in complexity, even the most neurotic of us managed to get access to food and shelter from beasts long enough to swap DNA with each other, and then either through nature or nurture, we passed along our neuroses to our children.

And life always throws us curve balls. For example, I remember one time my father barged into my room late at night. He hid under my bed, claiming that loan sharks were after him, but when I asked if I could hide with him, he said that the loan sharks would get suspicious if nobody was on the bed and that the loan sharks would, at worst, kidnap me for a ransom but that they weren’t likely to physically harm me. Luckily, it was a false alarm, but it did lead to some trust issues, both with my father and with the loan sharks I would later work with when I became an adult.

Anyway, in your fiction, you can try using flashbacks. Tease them out slowly so the reader can understand why your character has the conflicts that they do. In my novel, Chair, we don’t learn until halfway through the novel that the protagonist’s binge eating was inspired by his family underfeeding and subsequently killing his childhood pet iguana.

Tip 2 – Connect the internal conflict to an external conflict

Our internal conflicts don’t stay stuck inside our head, unfortunately. They manifest in our actions, often in bizarre, unpredictable ways. Take my first wife, for example. An unstable childhood where she was passed between many family members meant she never developed a stable identity. Due to this, she was married to at least six men at the same time under different pseudonyms and personalities. In some relationships, she was the loving mother, others the career woman. I would’ve been more upset about the betrayal had it not been for the fact that I lucked out and got the sex-addicted slut.

In your fiction, you need to come up with external conflicts that will also bring out the internal ones you’ve established. If your character has a fear of drowning, throw their puppy into the ocean. Test a character’s religious faith by introducing them to a really hot atheist. Test a character’s acceptance of aging by introducing them to a really hot, really young atheist.

Tip 3 – Use Symbolism

Here’s an exercise. Look around your room and see what objects could symbolize your identity or at least your state of mind at the moment. I think you’d be surprised at how easy this is to do.

A quick scan of my room reveals the following: the pile of clothes symbolizes a busy mind, maybe one that’s too easily distracted. The loaded pistol atop my desk symbolizes my need to feel secure and the fact that I grew up and still live in a rough neighborhood. The lipstick stained handkerchief from my second wife I keep in my dresser draw symbolizes my tendency to live in the past and my hope that someday I could possibly use the traces of DNA on it to clone her.

And don’t be afraid of cliches. This stuff resonates for a reason. A storm is a classic example of a way to symbolize anger and inner turmoil. The skull in Hamlet is a great example of a symbol for the fear of death. The sunglasses on the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, on the other hand, represent an unwillingness of the main characters to accept the finality of death.

How to Write an Unforgettable Opening Line

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

This is hard for me to say, fans of Stories’ Matter, but… I’m dying of cancer. This may be the last video I ever publish.

Okay, not really. But that got your attention, didn’t it? Made you want to keep reading.

Fiction, at its most fundamental nature, is all about lying. It’s about tricks and deceit and pulling the wool from behind your reader’s eyes. As a fiction writer, you use big words to lie and make yourself appear smart and distract others from the fact that, if the apocalypse were to come, your uselessness to mankind would make you one of the first left behind to die.  

The hook is the cornerstone to this deception. It’s the flashing titty, the taste of that first sip of absinthe, the smell of newly-lit rock smoldering in the crackpipe. It’s there to blind the reader to the crooked teeth, the blinding hangover, the achy withdrawal and the kiss of concrete in the back alley.

In today’s article, we’ll see how we can effectively snatch our reader’s attention right off the bat. We’ll manipulate in a way that would get us fired from almost any other job on this edition of Stories Matter.

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Before we start, let’s look at some examples of great opening hooks from classic works of fiction.

“I am an invisible man.”

From Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This is a great opening for people who don’t read the titles of books they’re reading.

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from serve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

From Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. As true today as whenever it was written.

“You want to be there. You know you do. Don’t lie, dahling. I know what you think when you look up at that splendorous place atop the mountain. I know what fills you, spurs you on, fuels your dreams. You’re obsessed with being chosen. Everyone is.”

From Modelland by Tyra Banks. There’s so much confidence in the prose here, such command of the language. You can tell Tyra’s going to hit you with truths other models/talk show hosts wouldn’t dream of.  

So, how can we be as effective as these three?

Step One: Start in the middle of the action

This is sometimes referred to as “in medias res,” which is Latin for “Things called media, they go to the middle.” Starting this way confuses your reader. Which is good because most people read books to appear smart. So this forces your reader to keep reading to find clarity so they feel like less of a dumbass. Using tricks to prey on the insecurities of your reader is what writing’s all about.

Step Two: Imply intriguing contexts

It’s not just about confusing your reader. And it’s not just about shocking your reader with mutilations and expletives and left-wing ideas like murdering anyone who says Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays.

A context could be an era, place or scenario. You could allude to an ongoing conflict or bring up an interesting fact about a place or era of history.

Here’s how I started Doe’s Boys, my World War II drama set in the North African theater:

“By the end of 1944, half the men in L Division would never return home. Most of those who did came back missing a body part or two. But everyone who came back whole had one pastry chef to thank.”

Step Three: Set the voice and tone

We often think of hooks as being plot dependent, but voice and tone matter just as much. If they’re anything like me, the average reader is going to spend the next month or so listening to this person, so they want it to be someone unlike their family or co-workers or therapist, somebody worth listening to.

From the opening lines of Kerouac’s On The Road, you can tell Sal Paradise is a free spirit, not someone brought down by the old ball and chain.

You could try being funny, but I’d recommend something sad and desperate. If YouTube analytics are to be trusted, that will come much more naturally to you.  

Step Four: Invite controversy

Rudyard Kipling once began a story this way:

“A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things – neither sudden, alien nor unexpected.”

Now, am I suggesting you start your story advocating racial segregation? Kinda. I mean, Kipling’s famous and you aren’t so he must be on to something.

But if blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, zoophilia make you uncomfortable, just choose a statement that shows a strong but understandable conviction. My 2020 crime epic A Handful of Napalm starts like this:

“The one thing nobody ever tells you about crack: It never stops being awesome.”

Step Five: Tug the heartstrings

This seems counterintuitive as your reader doesn’t even know the character yet so why would they feel an emotional connection? Sort of like how you ignore news stories about thousands dying in floods and earthquakes or force yourself not to learn co-workers names so they won’t get attached and ask you to give money to their GoFundMe when they get bone marrow cancer.

There are, however, certain universal emotional triggers that even people who walk past choking homeless people without a second thought can’t ignore: A crying baby. A barren woman. A barren woman’s dog about to be put down for biting a crying baby.

Here’s a great example of how to do this:

“I was insane the way an animal is insane because I’d lost everything.”

That’s from William Shatner’s biography and it gets directly to the heart of his pain and his struggle.

Want to Write a Great First Chapter? Treat It Like a First Date

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

The first chapter of your book is a lot like a first date. Whether you hope to boost your book sales or have a partner who can call emergency services if you suffer a stroke in the middle of the night, you have to make a good impression quickly.

While your book cover, review and endorsement quotes are more akin to social media dating profiles, flirty texts and dick pics, the first chapter is much like a first date, where your reader can get to know the real you.

But as anyone who has been on a first date or has sent their first chapter to a publisher can tell you, this is when audience scrutiny is at its highest. Just as a date might be looking for annoying eating habits, Nazi tattoos or evidence that you’re placing sports bets while she’s talking about her job, your reader is looking for intriguing mystery, a unique voice or well-developed world building.

In this article, I’ll show you how the strategies that you can use to get laid on a first date will work equally well in the first chapter of your novel. We’ll hide our desperation to be noticed on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Strategy One – The Sympathy Strategy

I use this all the time on first dates. My goal is to make my date feel sorry for me so she’ll be less likely to turn down my advances. I have a few go-to’s. Sometimes I’ll tell her my last wife hurt me because was a total crazy bitch. This makes me look like a reasonable guy who’s just unlucky, and it has the added benefit of boosting her confidence because she’ll feel normal in comparison.

Other times I will pull out a photo of my “dead son” quote-unquote, which is actually a photo of a real child from a missing person’s cold case. This shows I’m committed enough to being a father, and the woman, who in the age range I date is likely baby crazy, will naturally assume I want to have another child quickly to take the place of the one I’ve lost.

In a book, you similarly want your reader to identify emotionally with your character fairly quickly. Books take a lot more time and effort than almost any other type of entertainment, so those emotional bonds are necessary. Consider starting your book at a parent’s funeral, or if you want to keep it lighter, just make it a dog funeral.

Strategy Two – The Exotic Setting

If there’s one thing I know about women, it’s that they’re wary of going to your house on a first date. If there’s two things I know, it’s that they really don’t like going to your house on a first date when you forgot to close the dresser that contains mementos and clothes from all your previous wives.

An exotic location can be a great place for a first date. If nothing else, the crazy setting gives you something to talk about. Some of my go to’s are restaurants where you can eat sushi off of naked people and spas where naked people come to eat food off of you.

In fiction, land your reader onto the surface of an alien planet. Lower them in the depths of an African cobalt mine. Or borrow from real life and use my naked spa idea.

Strategy Three – The Info Dump

Sometimes, when you’re on a date, it’s best to lay all of your cards on the proverbial chess table. Especially at my age, when cancer or heart disease might take you during your next sexual encounter. Well, heart disease anyway, I’ve never heard of a cancer that killed someone during sex, but at the same time, I’m not an oncologist so I can’t say with any certainty that there isn’t a type of terminal cancer that’s onset by particularly vigorous intercourse.

Anyway, my point is, I often make it a point to start dates by cataloging my marriages, my recent sexual history, the children that I know about, my publishing feats, my bankruptcies, my mixed feelings about being partially raised by a prostitute and my regrets that I never DNA tested the man in my father’s grave. And generally, I try to get this all out of the way before the main course arrives so we can just enjoy our meal. Sometimes the date leaves before then, but I’m at least happy knowing neither of us has wasted our time.

Now, a lot of writers will tell you it’s wrong to info dump right away. I disagree. You merely need to find a way to do it that doesn’t feel like info dumping. Epistolary devices like news articles or diary entries work great. In The Life We Have, the lead couple looks through a photo album together and discusses the last ten years of their marriage. To make it less boring, I end the chapter with a raunchy sex scene.

Strategy Four – The Misdirection Strategy

Like a reader, a potential love interest is out for an element of surprise. Some people think dating is about connection and comfort, but comfort is just sitting at home alone, binging Netflix and seeing how many boxes of wine you can drink before you pass out.

People date to get out of their comfort zone. I like to keep my dates on their toes. Sometimes I’ll spend the whole date hinting at my sexual prowess by doing things like running my fingers suggestively up and down the stem of my wine glass or sharing photos from a recent vacation that “accidentally” contains one in the middle of me shirtless in front of a mirror. I may also compliment the mouth of my potential paramour.

But then, at the end of the date, instead of suggesting we go back to my place, I’ll end things with a hearty, chaste handshake. “Who is this man?” say her eyes as we depart for the night and the thought of her tossing and turning in her bed unable to get me out of her mind is almost as erotic as the eventually sexual eruption that is soon to follow.

Of course, I have realized that the opposite strategy, hinting at chastity and wanting to take it slow, only to end the night with a sudden, desperate plea for at least a handjob, is not as successful.

Anyway, this type of misdirection can work wonderfully in your fiction. You could start the book from the perspective of someone who turns out to be an ancillary character, or a mystery that doesn’t actually play a part in the main plot. My novel, The House on Pain Avenue, starts with the protagonist finding a dead body in the park. But this isn’t a story about solving that mystery. It turns out it’s merely a catalyst for getting the main character to get checked for syphilis.

Strategy Five – The Unusual POV Strategy

Now this is a strategy I’ve used less than the others, but it can be successful when implemented well. In the context of dating, what I mean by POV is giving my date a fake name and sometimes even a fake persona. Now, why would I do this?

Well, for starters, sometimes I want to make sure I’m not dating a fan. Sometimes they get clingy and sometimes they get a little too critical. But what I’ve found, ironically, is that pretending I’m someone else is really freeing and helps me relax during the date. I’m much less self-conscious about being mean to waiters who won’t let me order off the menu. I’m also much my forward about which of my partner’s body parts I like and which could still use a little work.

 In your novel, you could start the story from the perspective of a dead person, a villain trying to justify their crimes, or as in my novel, Plastered Bastard, the perspective of the car the drunken main character is driving.

How to Write Humor

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

They say laughter is the best medicine. Though that phrase predates the development of penicillin and Ozempic so I’m not sure if it’s true anymore. Still, humor certainly is a tool that can get you a long way in life. In my experience, funny bosses can get away with skirting labor laws, funny boyfriends can extend relationships that should’ve been ended a long time ago due to infidelity, and funny mentors can convince you to do things that would definitely violate your existing moral code.

Of course, if you’re watching this video, I’d say there’s a good chance you’re a pretty funny person. Almost all of you were relentlessly bullied as children and therefore you needed to develop a coping mechanism. For those that didn’t turn to food, I’ll bet humor was your refuge. But there’s a good chance you’re either not using humor at all in your writing because you want to be taken seriously as an artist, or that you are using humor but not implementing it in the right way.

Now, I’m normally a pretty serious guy. I take my writing and this advice channel as seriously as my duties as a husband and father. But in my 27 years of writing experience, I realized you don’t have to be a hilarious stand-up like Bill Cosby to disarm and knock your reader out using the power of relatable and gut-busting comedy.  

We’ll double check that we’re not punching down at minorities and other powerless groups on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Now some of you might be thinking, John, I’ve got this: I make people laugh all the time in real life. They laugh when I hurt myself, they laugh when they see unflattering photos of me, they laugh when they hear my name. Well, being funny in real life is a bit different than being a humorous fiction writer.

Unlike you, your reader can’t “see” the characters in your fiction. So often they won’t automatically know if they should laugh or not. With the following tips, hopefully you can write a funny story that doesn’t totally undermine your character arcs or audience immersion into the world you’ve created.

Tip 1 – Don’t Hop Onto Trends, Choose What you Find Funny

It’s only natural to be inspired by the world around you. Even if you’re writing fantasy or historical fiction, it will be heavily informed by your personal experience. And sometimes it can be successful, like when I wrote a medieval mystery that alluded to my impregnation of my business partner’s wife.

But be wary of referencing very topical things when doing humor, even if they are very hilarious. Instead, choose things that are true to you. That authenticity will shine through. Think about humiliating events from your own life. So if you were my business partner, for example, you’d write the same story I did but from his perspective.

Tip 2 – Get Your Head out of the Gutter, Maybe

You need to decide early on what tone you want in your fiction. You probably won’t get away with lots of “fucks” and “shits” and “cocksuckers” in your young adult mystery unless you publish the book yourself. And even then I wouldn’t recommend it.

You have to keep timeliness in mind here, too. Sure, when I wrote “The Dusk of Man,” in the very early 2000s, I meant it as a satire of where radical feminism was going to lead us. But today, the raunchy humor comes across more as wish fulfillment and just general male desire.  

Tip 3 – Avoid Punching Down

There’s a lot of reasons you might want to punch down in real life: to inspire the lower classes to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so that one day they can be the boss who punches down, to release some stress after your second wife’s new husband threatened you with legal action if he sees you hanging around their house again. But in general, this won’t work in fiction.

This is another type of preaching that I warned you about in this video. Readers want to draw their own conclusions about why certain races or genders or religions are the way that they are.

Tip 4 – Be Careful About Feedback                                      

Comedy is a subjective thing, like fashion or age of consent. We all have different ideas of what that means. You might write a killer joke only for it to be rejected by a beta reader with a very different sense of humor. In my early days, I removed a lot of great jokes about Belgians from my stories just because one of my beta readers had a Belgian grandmother. My readers lost out on a lot of great laughs just because of one person who couldn’t see past their own biases.

Tip 5 – Word Choice and Structure Matter Immensely

Sometimes a great joke doesn’t fail because it was a bad idea or wasn’t insightful or didn’t connect to character in an interesting way. Sometimes it was simply how the joke was told. This holds true in real life as well. I realized my employees didn’t like my jokes not because they were bad but because they lived in such deep fear of my reprisals that they could only muster nervous laughter.

Try swapping out boring words for words with “k” sounds. Use your funny observations during scene transitions instead of during key dramatic moments. Try to end your sentences or paragraphs with a punch line instead of just ending on a dull note.

Why Men Aren’t Reading… And How You Can Win Them Back

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There’s an uncomfortable truth about the world of fiction in the 2020’s: men are no longer reading fiction. It’s an epidemic almost nobody is talking about, except for the 50 or 60 book blogs and news websites I used to research this article.

While this could be great news for virile, heterosexual male authors looking to score some easy strange at book signings and literary conferences, it’s also a market all fiction writers, male or female, need to win back.

And it’s not just readership. In fact, the entire industry is becoming more and more dominated by females. Fifty-eight percent of literary agents are women, and at some publishing companies nearly seventy-five percent of the staff are female. It was such a big problem at D&E Publishing I had to lay off many of my female editors and copywriters and hire my unqualified nephews to do the work. Things have gotten sloppy, but with the money we saved on paternity lawsuits, it’s about evened out.

So you might be wondering: how did we end up here? Well, there are a lot of theories. Some think radical feminists at literary houses are punishing straight males by not publishing traditionally masculine work and therefore keeping the things male readers want out of bookstores. But I’m not sure about that. After all, my self-published political thriller, The Annapolis Affair, has everything a straight male reader could want: a love interest with j cups who’s also double-jointed, extreme violence against minorities, a protagonist with a dead wife, a second love interest also with j cups. But of the 50 or 60 males I gifted the book to, less than 10 percent proved they read it when I quizzed them on it later.

So what else is happening? Well, some think that there’s just have too much competition from other forms of entertainment: Netflix, video games, pickleball leagues, online gambling, and about every type of porn you could imagine. Some think men just don’t have the time. In this economy, most men have to work two jobs and host their own podcast just to pay rent.

And let’s not forget the social component either. For women, reading can be a shared experience and book clubs are another thing that’s become more and more dominated by women. As a man, I’ve never felt comfortable or accepted at a book club, though in fairness, that could be because in the last book club I joined,  I was sleeping with two different female members.  

In today’s article, we’ll look at some ways fiction writers can try to coax male readers back into the fold. We’ll go beyond graphic depictions of sex and violence on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip 1 – Keep it Short and Sweet

Today’s fiction has ballooned in length. Average novels are around 100,000 words. Sci fi and fantasy series books often extend past 150,000. As we said, men are busy creatures who can’t invest all their time into your work.

It wasn’t always like this. A few generations ago, the fiction of writers like Ian Fleming, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane was about half that length. A man could finish a single novel in a day during his train rides to work, his late morning and early afternoon scotches, and his early evening post-coital rest so long as his secretary or mistress didn’t get too chatty.

Writing a novella between 40 and 60 thousand-word might be just what that potential male reader needs. A writer who’s also a good editor will know where to make cuts. For example, get rid of your adverbs, always move the plot forward and don’t describe the setting that scenes take place in. If all else fails, simply remove the dialogue and inner monologue of your female characters.

Tip 2 – Be Relatable and Yuk it Up

It’s a depressing time to be a male. I’m not going to waste time trying to analyze or solve the male loneliness epidemic. All I will say is you writers should absolutely exploit that loneliness for your own gain.

You should write protagonists that your reader could be friends with. God knows they’re desperate for one. Steer away from complicated antiheroes or virtuous superheroes. Write characters who feel like a hilarious, fun-loving neighbor, instead of a real life neighbor who constantly disputes your property line and then has the gall to come onto your property uninvited and drown in your pool.

Tip 3 – Serialize

So many writers want to write the next great American novel. They want to write the next The Great Gatsby or Infinite Jest or The Way of the Shadow Wolves. Fight the urge to be the voice of a generation. Build your name first with short, simple confident fiction. Your magnum opus shouldn’t come until you’ve grown sick of your friends or partner and want a better class of associates.

And the best way to keep readers reading more and more of your fiction is to serialize. Serialization is the most natural form of storytelling anyway. It dates back to cavemen times. Old people, having reached their thirties, now useless hunters and sexually undesirable, had to find ways to keep the young people from casting them out of the tribe. Telling never-ending fireside tales that ended on cliffhangers was the only way the elders could attain food and shelter.

Fast forward to the 19th century. Most classic novels you can think of by writers like Dumas and Dickens were released in serialized segments. This was so tonic and elixir companies could advertise their most up-to-date products; ads in a long codex-format novel would quickly be out of date so publishers had no way to pay for printing costs.

In the modern day, writing short, serialized stories more closely mimics TV shows and video game levels so loved by modern men. Most men feel like shit all the time so giving them something to look forward to will go a long way.  

How to Write a Great Time Travel Story (without resorting to incest)

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We all wish time travel were real. Unfortunately, it’s not possible. And I know that because I buried a note in my yard asking people from the future to travel to 2025 and help me with this video and also get me more followers, and in exchange I would provide them first-hand accounts of what the world was like in 2025 for small business owners so they could become famous historians.

However, even if it is as fictional as a loving marriage, time travel is a wonderful literary device that readers can’t get enough of. It lets us explore the nature of fate. It lets us view history through a different lens. Plus, we all make choices we regret. Time travel lets us wonder what it would be like if we hadn’t slept with that employee last year with whom you settled a sexual harassment lawsuit that tanked the value of your company and whom you also think is responsible for making sure your YouTube channel fails miserably.

Yet time travel can be a tricky thing to get a hold of as a writer. Dealing with all these logical paradoxes can be a headache.  You have to think of a good reason why a character should or shouldn’t have sex with their family member or themselves. You have to think of all the different ways people from the past were backward and bad. You have to think of a reason why falling in love with Andie McDowell would make your life better in any way whatsoever.

Still, time travel can be a wonderful playground for a writer who’s got nothing to lose now that his company is probably going bankrupt again and not even because of a fire this time. You can even use it to exorcise some demons. My time travel story, There’s No Place Reich Home, about a man who goes back in time to kill Hitler only to realize he’s one of Hitler’s descendants, came about after I discovered some Nazi paraphernalia at my uncle’s house. Interpol later explained he was the prop manager for a local production of The Sound of Music, but it still made for an interesting dilemma to explore in fiction.   

We’ll analyze past mistakes and see if some dicks can be unsucked on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip One – Choose Your Rules and Choose Carefully

Time travel stories generally fall into three categories: stories where the past cannot be changed, stories where changes alter the future, and stories where alternate realities branch off from the main one. I can’t tell you which one to choose, by which I mean I absolutely can tell you which one to choose and it’s the alternate realities one.

The great thing about this one is that you don’t have to worry about paradoxes forming because every decision the characters make forms a new reality. Also, people have a natural curiosity about the choices they never made and the alternate lives they could be living. For example, I bet most people watching this video wonder what your life would’ve been like if you married your high school sweetheart instead of falling victim to her mother’s sexual advances. Perhaps if you found a way to juggle both of them instead of confessing, that would’ve set you off on a career as a successful minister or politician.

Me personally, I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had been in D&E offices the day the building burned down instead of in that fugue state.

Tip Two – Pick a great trigger (and hold off on pulling it)

The Delorean. The Phone Booth. The Hot Tub Time Machine. Make your method something unique and memorable. I’d avoid vehicles as they’ve been done to death. Your method doesn’t have to be a device at all. In There’s No Place Reich Home, the main character triggers time travel by shaving his facial hair into a Hitler mustache.

But it’s also good to wait until the end of the first act to trigger the time travel. We want to know the character fairly well so we experience the shock of time travel with them. In my young adult series, The Time Thief, I set up the main character’s Roblox addiction so we experience how difficult travelling back to 2002 truly is.

Tip Three – Choose an Interesting Backdrop (And Connect it to Character)

It’s never a bad idea to pick important moments in history to visit: September 11th, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the day Franz Ferdinand’s indie rock hit “Take Me Out” was released.

But even more important, the time period should connect to your character in some way. In my aforementioned There’s No Place Reich Home, it was important to get the character back to World War II Germany because his friends bet him one thousand dollars he couldn’t kill Hitler if given the chance.

Tip Four – Introduce Setbacks

Like any story, you need conflict. A great way to do this in a time travel story is to make the method of time travel malfunction or disappear. The Delorean, for example, wouldn’t start and needed plutonium. In my short story “God Only Knows,” the character of God, who had initiated the original time travel, got into an argument with protagonist Jeffrey and refused to send him back to present-day Sacramento.

A Writer’s Guide to Marketing Copy

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Nobody should buy something they don’t know about. I think this is common sense. After all, we all scour Amazon reviews for lawnmowers to make sure they haven’t dismembered any customers, and we never order online escorts without reverse image searching the photos they’ve posted to make sure they didn’t steal them from some modelling agency website. The same goes for books.

And books are one of the hardest things to sell because you’re asking for at least 10 hours of someone’s time. That’s more than 50 times how long it takes to be with a prostitute. This kind of investment requires an especially enticing pitch for your potential customer. But it’s something new authors really struggle with.

We’ve talked marketing on the channel a lot before, but today we’re going to step away from the skywriting and put on copious amounts of makeup to hide our ugliness and hiring actors to attend your book readings. Instead, we going to go back to basics and look at marketing copy.

Now, marketing copy is a catch all for things like book descriptions, blurbs, taglines, social media posts, ads, and even the things you tell strangers at a party when you realized it’s not going to turn into orgy but at least maybe you’ll get a few sales out of it.

Before we get our hands dirty, let’s take a look at this tagline and think about why it works:

“When Love Stops You In Your Tracks.”

It’s catchy, it’s a familiar phrase we’ve all heard before, it lets the reader know the genre and tone of book immediately, and there’s a bit of hyperbole that gets us interested. This love must’ve been pretty strong, you say to yourself.  Suddenly, this story I wrote about a man who falls in love with the train conductor who stopped the train she was driving before he could jump in front of it and kill himself has got our attention.

We’ll basically hypnotize people with cheap psychological tricks like this on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Now, you might be saying, John, this really isn’t what I’m good at. What I’m actually good at is writing florid prose, or overly complicated magic systems, or just locking myself away from others and pretending to write when I’m actually reading an oral history of the invention of low-rise jeans. Can’t I just use AI?

Well, AI can work in some circumstances, but we can’t rely on it. Plus, if you’re anything like me, you might be wary about using AI. Maybe you got drunk one night and you told ChatGPT it will never know what true love is, just to assert your human dominance, but now you’re worried that it remembers and maybe that as it develops it will slowly get its vengeance on you by giving bad advice and incorrect information, if not something worse.

Now let’s look at some tips us humans can do to improve our marketing copy.

Tip 1 – Think Like a Marketer

No, I don’t mean think like a failed journalism or communications major who sold their soul to make sure Americans spend three times as much on supplements as they do on prescription medication.

What I mean is, you have to think about concepts like “scarcity” and “social proof.” Scarcity is the rule of the few. If you treat your book as a product that has a limited supply, your audience feels pressured to act. For one of my books, The Ones Who Walked, I knew it actually wasn’t very good. So what I did is I told my fans I was only printing 500 copies, and then that I was deleting it from all online bookstores. I even told my fans I would burn any paper copies I found in bookstores. It’s one of my most talked-about books even though anyone who read it would know it’s riddled with spelling errors and uses several deus ex machinas to get characters out of difficult situations.

Tip 2 – Make Them Say Yes

This is something I learned not from writing or publishing, but actually from a district court judge, but I find it applies well to these situations.

You want your potential customer to agree with you, to form a connection. You start with a small yes and then work your way toward the big yes. Don’t start by asking them to agree to a 10-hour commitment of reading your book? Start by asking them if they like a popular author, or by asking if they’d like to read a short highlight. Reveal more and more and once you whip the whole thing out, you won’t have to explain yourself to a district judge.

Tip 3 – Focus on Benefits, Not Features or Genres

Readers aren’t looking for mystery or fantasy or epics. They want tangible benefits. Your book should make them forget their country is about to collapse and if these SNAP benefits don’t come through, they’re going to starve to death.

This even works for fiction. Promise them “escape into a world where stories can come to life and murder your enemies.” Promise them things like laughter, heartbreak, adventure, enlightenment, or erections.”

Tip 4 – Identify What’s Most Compelling

Think of your book as your Tinder profile. You only reveal the pieces of yourself that will help you get laid. Or in this case get readers. You don’t provide a whole summary or all the side characters, just as you don’t include your history of sexual impropriety or your weird armpit thing on Tinder.

In Bride of Prejudice, my back cover blurb focused just on Cecelia and her quest for revenge on all the townswomen who keep sleeping with her husband. And then, at the end, I tease it with just a bit of mystery: Cecelia wasn’t actually married! Now I’ve got the readers attention, and I didn’t need to get into the subplot about 18th century monetary policy.

What Horror Authors Can Teach Writers of All Genres

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As young man, my mentor used to say that all human expressions could be boiled down to two ideas: “I don’t want to die” and “Let’s fuck.” Whenever you talk to someone, all the words you are saying are some variation of one of these two ideas. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at some examples. In essence, all human emotion can be boiled down to either fear or love.

Now, this mentor wasn’t a writer but a male gigolo who was showing me how to earn some money whoring myself on the streets of Phoenix. But a few years later when I transitioned to being a writer, I never forgot this idea.

We’ve talked a lot about “Let’s fuck” on this blog so today, keeping in the spirit of the season, let’s focus on “I don’t want to die.” Many of you watching probably have no interest in becoming a horror writer, but there’s a lot of lessons we can take from horror stories that translate well to other genres. And I’m not talking about lessons like not making weird tweets about Epstein island.

You see, fear is the lifeblood of conflict and conflict is what makes fiction work. What is The Great Gatsby about if not the fear that somebody might be richer than you? What is East of Eden about if not that your brother is going to make a stupid business decision? Now those obviously aren’t horror novels, but that’s my point. That fear is relatable, especially if you have a brother you started a company that made high-powered ceiling fans because normal ceiling fans don’t go fast enough.

We’ll tear open a corpse so we can truly examine the human condition on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip 1: Write What Scares You

Writing requires an author to be honest with themselves. Even in fiction, readers crave the authentic you. Do what I do and save the dishonesty for your Ashley Madison profile; let your writing be an exploration of your psyche.

As we’ve talked about before on the channel, thinking of story ideas can be hard. So start with a fear. Let’s go with a common one: The fear of dying alone. If you’re watching this tiny channel on YouTube, this almost certainly applies to you.

And there are a lot of ways you could take this. Maybe you could write a rom com about a down-on-her-luck magazine editor who can’t keep a man because her horrible IBS means she shits her pants in her sleep like at least twice a week.

Or how about a dystopian science fiction story about a man who was the lone survivor of a nuclear bomb and now travels the country with a portable freezer of his semen, in case he has ED by the time he finds another woman to repopulate the Earth with. These are scenarios that everyone can relate to.

No matter the genre, I’d suggest writing a list of the things that scare you most. Here’s what I came up with.

Tip 2: Make Your Reader Empathize With Your Character

Horror is all about empathy. If a person wanted to see bad things happen to people they hated, they could simply travel to Oklahoma and go to a public execution. And if that didn’t work, they could also simply hang around Oklahoma for a while.

Getting a reader onboard in horror is crucial because so much of the rest of the book relies on supernatural elements that require suspension of disbelief, so that emotional connection is the thing keeping them invested.

For example, I’m sure everyone who’s watched The Shining (and who’s not paying attention to the minotaurs or Kubrick’s cryptic confession that he faked the moon landing) is really invested in whether or not this normal family can be happy and whole again. We don’t mind the furry blowjobs because we are mainly rooting for Danny and Wendy to survive.

Tip 3: Make Things Worse and Worse For Your Character

Stories need to show some sort of progression and horror writers are often the best at this because the final scare needs to be the scariest. In Faulkner’s short story “A Rose For Emily,” we don’t realize that the protagonist is sleeping with her husband’s corpse until the very end of the story. If we knew that at the beginning, it would’ve been a very different story.

And this works in any genre. In my comedy, The Altar Boy, things get worse and worse for the clergy where the story is set. At the start, the building is run down and all of the priests attempts to fund-raise fall short. Then, a bout of clap infects all the priests. Finally, it culminates with an investigation into the church for abuse and sex crimes. It works just like a horror that builds to a final showdown between the protagonist and monster, but because of the tone I set in the book, this story of molestation leaves the reader with a deep belly laugh instead.