Bad Advice Too Many Authors Give

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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.

~

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.

Make Sure You Aren’t Ending Your Stories Like This

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

A strange thing happened to me the other day: an old lady who lives in my apartment building asked me to bring some groceries up to her room. Normally, in a situation like this, I would pretend I don’t speak English, or if I suspected she knew I spoke English, I would say I have horrible diarrhea and sprint past her. But I was feeling charitable so I agreed.

Unfortunately, I soon realized this was a ruse. Once I got the grocery bags into my hands, she quickly spun around and opened the stairwell door to let in a younger man holding a pistol. I was being mugged. The old lady dug her hands into my jean pockets and became frustrated when she realized I didn’t have my wallet or a phone. I told her I left my wallet at work and that my therapist suggested I stay away from phones as lately I’d been cold calling my second wife just to hear her voice on the other line. In fact, the only thing she found in my pockets was a $20 off coupon for all D&E purchase orders exceeding $500. She asked what kind of people spend five hundred dollars on books in one go, but I was too scared to say that it was basically her demographic.

I was frozen in a panic. I thought of letting them take the gun I keep in my ankle holster, but worried that if I mentioned I was armed, that might escalate things. With my demise so near the horizon, my whole life flashed before my eyes. Is this how my life ends, I thought to myself? I knew that my realtor suggested this was a possibility before I closed on my apartment, but I never thought it would happen to me. I always figured I would die during a Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech or from a shark attack while Cindy and I made love in the Caribbean.

But it also made me reflect on how to end a story. If someone were writing the story of my life, ending it this way would infuriate the readers. Surely someone as important as me deserved a more satisfying pay off. In today’s video, we’ll look at some common mistakes new and even seasoned writers commit when trying to finish their stories. We’ll think of much better ways for me to die on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Bad Ending One – An Outside Source Saves the Day

Imagine if someone burst into the stairwell at that moment and took out my assailants in one fell swoop. That would seem cheap and if you knew my neighborhood, it also wouldn’t make sense.  People step over dead and dying bodies the time, and to be fair, I’m guilty of that myself. I stopped trying to help after the time I once gave a neighbor some Narcan when he actually needed the Heimlich because he was choking on a piece of steak. Anyway, I knew at that moment I had only myself to rely on.

This is basically a deus ex machina, which we’ve talked about before. And most readers hate it. In the 1978 film version of Superman, Superman saves Lois by flying so fast around the Earth that he reverses its rotation which somehow causes time to reverse. Anyway, try not to use bullshit ways to resolve your conflict.

Bad Ending Two – The Predictable Ending

The most predictable thing my assailants could’ve done is gun me down. After all, it’s happened two other times in my apartment complex this year. And I was voted by my high school class as most likely to be gunned down. So basically the readers of my life would’ve been expecting this since Chapter Three.

Of course, this is not an easy thing to do as a writer. A story needs to be a surprise, but it has to be something that’s earned. You have to be smarter than your reader, as a man who has met many readers, most of them are smug, self-satisfied nerds always out to prove you wrong.

Bad Ending Three – Unearned Happy Endings

Now, all of my former wives have told me I don’t deserve to die happy. But I have to assume that’s just frustration with how good my divorce lawyer is. Still, imagine if the story I told you ended with me throwing the grocery bags at my assailants, removing the ankle gun from its holster, blasting the old lady and her partner to kingdom come and then, after getting the key to the city from the mayor for ridding my town of its two worst criminals, I get a call from Cindy telling me she’s ready to take me back. Certainly, that was a scenario I was playing in my head while I was at gun point, but readers would’ve felt that cheap and unearned.

Movies like Signs, The Rise of Skywalker and Arthur have all been accused of having unearned happy endings. Your character’s victory, whether it’s something big like saving the galaxy, or something unimportant, like saving the life of a dog, should come at a cost. Maybe, for example, you have to euthanize your cat so you can transplant its liver to the dog.

Bad Ending Four – The Dragged Out Ending

If you’re still watching this video, you probably wish I’d just shut the fuck up and tell you what happened in the end. You may think this is some trick to get pushed more by YouTube, hoping that if all viewers wait until the end of the video, it will boost visibility. Like maybe I would use this time to go into more detail about what my assailants looked like. Or I might use this time at the end to talk about what was in those grocery bags. Was it prop food? Would that be cheaper than real food? This isn’t a good time to bring that up, we want to know what happened. Why is this story just going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on…

Bad Ending Five – The Abrupt Ending

I Stopped Self-Censoring And My Writing Has Never Been Better

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Great writing takes big motherfucking risks. Unfortunately, we current world of media expects us to play it safe. Tentpole action films must be for all ages and follow predictable formulas. We need PR firms to run our social media accounts. We can’t give our secretary a back massage because it’s considered a form of sexual harassment and also because her husband has told you explicitly to your face to stop doing it.

In our writing, this takes the shape of self-censorship. We eliminate ideas that are wild and unencumbered. Unfortunately, we soon realize that all of our writing becomes totally cumbered. We don’t let the racists in our story say the n-word. We don’t let the homophobes in our stories say the f-word. We don’t let the Republicans in our stories tell the immigrants to go back to their countries, even though they’ve spent years building concentration camps around the country to do just that.

This is one slippery fucking slope. Of course, it makes sense why we’d want to self-censor. It feels horrible to get bad feedback. A single negative comment is stronger than a dozen positive ones. Nobody wants to be called a racist on Twitter, even if it’s a bot account run from Nigeria that hasn’t even read your book. To give a real world example, today I think less about all of the girls I successfully banged in high school than I do about Jenny Simmons, the popular cheerleader who rejected my advances and said she was worried she’d get herpes just breathing the same air as me.

We often worry about our family, too. You know many of them will read the book and you don’t want to offend them or embarrass yourself. For example, I was mortified when my grandmother confronted me about this line from my early novel Dawson:

“Fuck all the hoes and the bitches and the whores and the sluts and the cunts.”

My grandmother said that she raised me better than that. Luckily, it turned out my “grandmother” was actually a scammer pretending to be my grandmother so she could use my social security number to commit Medicare fraud.

Writing is also a very personal and vulnerable process, and many writers may touch on family traumas or paint certain family members in a bad light. As I’ve said, most of the villains in my fiction represent at least one aspect of my father. But I’m 99% sure the man we buried at sea was him so luckily I don’t have to worry about any awkwardness or retribution. Unfortunately, my brother is still very much alive. He was very angry that the antagonist of my novel, the cult leader Hendrix Branderson in Storming the Gates of Heaven, seemed to be based off him. They both claimed to be descendants of Jesus, they both faked their own deaths and they both were big Arizona Cardinals fans. Had I known my brother was going to get out of prison early, I likely would’ve rewritten the character.

I’m also not saying everything in fiction is worse now than it was thirty or forty years ago. We’re more conscious of diversity and representation. And that’s a good thing. In my early books, all of my female characters were big-titted love interests and my villains were all Arab terrorists. I’m happy to say that the protagonist of one of my most recent books, Game Theory, is a Sunni Muslim female physicist who just happens to have an amazing pair of double d’s.

However, there’s a great danger in letting ourselves be influenced by social media, by book banning conservatives, by self-righteous left-wing Twitter mobs and many imagined groups that we’re worried of offending or weirding out. True art is meant to provoke and get us to rethink our relationship with each other and the world around us. When I wrote the climax of Bride of Prejudice, which depicts a brutal naked fight between two Georgian women in a bog, I wanted to challenge the way we view gender roles. It’s had such a positive impact that the men who come to my book readings request that scene to read more than any other.

So how do we find this balance? How do we write freely while still being marketable and being respectful toward a diverse, pluralistic readership?

Tip 1 – Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Writing

Here’s my advice: Write as if nobody will ever read the words you’re writing. It’s the best way to sidestep self-censorship. And let’s be honest, if you’re watching this channel, it’s also probably true.

Take this line from my novel, Plastered Bastard:

“I don’t trust those people. They’re poor but they wear flashy clothes. They’re naturally violent, but constantly claim to be the victim. They’re loud in movie theaters, too.”

I only had the bravery to write this because I wrote it in a secluded cabin in Vermont, though I was mostly there to avoid my former agent who was trying to serve me legal papers. In any case, it’s an uncomfortable thought that challenges the reader, and while it doesn’t actually reflect my true feelings on teenagers, it is true to the protagonist of my story.

Worrying too much about the opinions of others also makes your narrative choices boring. If The French Connection were written today, for example, not only would Popeye Doyle not use the n-word, the movie would’ve ended with him getting the bad guy and with Serpico appearing in the post credits scene to invite him to join the Good Cops initiative.

Tip 2 – Think of Trigger Warnings As a Recipe List

Despite what you may think, I’m actually a big fan of trigger warnings. And this is one thing fans of dark romance and erotica have over all other readers. Those people go into books hoping to read some messed up stuff. The author and the reader make an agreement: “You will be entertained and you won’t punish me for entertaining you. The only punishment, if any, will be you shelling out 24.95 for a hardcover.”

Don’t think of it, “Oh, I’m sorry, but this book has sexual assault and foul language and animal-human hybrids.” Think of it as “Hell yeah, this fucking book has sexual assault and foul language and animal-human hybrids that completely redefine what it means to give consent.”

Tip 3 – Use a Pseudonym (And Get Them A Passport and a Social Security Number if possible)

Having said all of this, it’s still hard to shut off the noise. Vladimir Nabokov had to contend with constant allegations that he was pedophile after writing Lolita, when in reality, Nabokov was only ever shitty to adult women.

Fans of the channel will know that John Lazarus is a pseudonym for personal protection, and also because my legal name is the same as one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. But a pseudonym can also free you, if only subconsciously. JK Rowling for example, is able to write all the anti-trans stuff she wants under her Robert Gailbraith pseudonym.

What is and Isn’t a Plot Hole

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Plot holes: They’re the biggest crime a fiction writer can commit… except for all the real crimes they commit. And for a writer, they are the biggest source of worry we have… except for the worry of someone finding the evidence you left behind from your real crimes or that you’ll somehow contradict your alibi in your writing or interviews or YouTube videos by accident.

However, there’s a lot of common misunderstandings about what actually constitutes a plot hole. I can’t tell you how many times at book readings and book signings I’ve gotten into arguments and shouting matches and struggles that involved hair pulling over what readers thought was a plot hole in one of my stories. For example, plot holes are not characters acting stupidly or illogically. The scientists acting like dumbasses in Prometheus isn’t a plot hole. I mean, I’m basically a writing scientist and even I make dumb decisions. Like when I tried to make D&E Publishing a non-profit organization because I thought it would mean we wouldn’t have to pay taxes.

Plot holes are also not unanswered questions. Authors aren’t obligated to explain everything. In the film version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, it’s never said who actually killed Sean Regan. In Pulp Fiction, we never know what’s in the briefcase. In my novel, Lone Mountain, we never discover where our hero Colt Action got the Comanche skull that he talks to throughout most of the story or why it’s child-sized.

Finally, it’s also not an obvious solution that the characters didn’t think of. Sure, characters that travel through time in stories shouldn’t go back to ten minutes before the bad thing happens, but instead hours, days or weeks in advance. In my story, The Things We Lost, if the new baby was going to be such a strain on the character’s marriage, why didn’t the character simply pull out early and blow his load all over the female’s stomach? But remember, characters don’t have perfect knowledge. They are flawed, and bad at planning, and they hate the way condoms feel just like us.

So, what is a plot hole, then? Well, it’s an inconsistency that breaks the rules, logic or timeline in the story you’ve established. And just like a jealous wife or the IRS, your reader will be relentless about pointing out those inconsistencies if you commit them. We’ll get good at explaining our lies on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Common Plot Hole 1 – Characters Acting in a Way They Shouldn’t

I’m starting with one that’s a bit of a gray area, but that’s because I’ve always strived for nuance on this channel. The thing is… storytelling is all about character transformations. Growth is what makes our characters compelling. And that connects us to the changes we make in real life. When my wife Cindy left me, I understood that we had grown apart, accepted it and moved on with my life.

However, characters who suddenly do a complete 180 just to serve the plotline is what readers hate. One example is Breaking Bad’s Mike Ermentraut abandons his granddaughter in the park when he knows the DEA is onto him. This rang false to a lot of fans. And as someone who loves their children and knows all of their names, I would never do something like this.

Common Plot Hole 2 – Breaking the Laws, Rules or Background That You’ve Previously Established

The bond between an author and a reader is sacred. This is why I’m always willing to listen to fan theories about my work, no matter how ridiculous.

In Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, one vampire is able to break into a house and kill two people, even though it is already established that vampires need to be invited into your home in this universe. Now, I usually don’t like to mention my own work on this channel, but just to show that I’m respectful of other authors, I will mention Out of the Woodwork, a story about an alternate reality where metal doesn’t exist and all technology is made out of wood. Anyway, the story ends with the protagonist killing the main villain with a pistol. Some readers felt that was a cheat.

Common Plot Hole 2 – Continuity Errors

These are minor discrepancies from one part of the story to the next. Individually, they may not matter much, but if you have several of them, they may hurt your chances of being published. When I started D&E Publishing in 2012, we had many authors clamoring to get published by us. If you watched this video, you’ll know the story of Evan Hayward. He was a great writer, even though not many people at our company liked him.

Anyway, Evan’s debut novel, A Story Told By An Idiot, had the characters being chased by a black sedan. But later in the scene, he described the vehicle as “charcoal.” It was then that Evan and I mutually decided it would be best if we went our separate ways, and nobody put anything in anyone’s gas tank to retaliate.

So, how can we avoid making these mistakes in the first place?

Fix 1 – Outline Before You Start Writing

I’ve always said that a writer should plan ahead. Frantically pulling a perfect book out of thin air while using a dangerous mix of amphetamines to fight off sleep deprivation never got anyone anywhere.

Fix 2 – Look for Characters Who Serve No Purpose

Because character inconsistency is a common plot hole, just eliminate characters that aren’t necessary. This has helped me immensely to avoid plot holes… and also why none of my books pass the Bechdel test.

Even the Greats Abandon Books | Here are the Signs Your Novel Isn’t Working

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Have you ever spent months or maybe even years agonizing over something, hoping that it’s perfect, but no matter what you try, it’s just disappointing? Take a deep breath and repeat after me: It’s okay to walk away. No, I’m not talking about raising children; I’m talking about writing novels.

In fact, writing might be the hardest thing to abandon. As for people, well, there’s billions of them, making a new one is easy and fun, and they’re all mostly the same. Jobs? Many of my former employees told me that quitting their job was the best decision they ever made. But a novel, something you’ve spent so much time and effort carefully crafting, that’s hard to walk away from.  

Now, you might be thinking, John, you’ve talked about sabotaging other authors as a savvy marketing strategy on this blog before; isn’t this whole article a ploy to get your potential competition to give up so you can increase your book sales? And second, you might add, John you’ve also admitted not only to publishing as many as 429 books, but also that many of them you don’t remember writing because you were being poisoned by your mentor? What the hell do you know about abandoning a book, you buttfucking liar?!

First of all, watch your tone, but second of all, all artists abandon projects. Michael Chabon and Kurt Vonnegut spent years on novels they eventually abandoned. Prince was famous for writing and producing dozens of albums that never saw the light of day.  Thomas Kincaid had supposedly created an amazing set of pastoral cottages paintings that would’ve completed reinvented the way we think about wall calendars, but he nearly died from sleep deprivation.

Abandoning a book does not mean you’re stupid or worthless. That’s a value statement that can only be calculated by looking at your annual salary, the quality of your sexual partners, where the rest of your high school classmates ended up and how much you can bench.

But of course, just because we accept that we can abandon a book doesn’t mean we should. Writing always comes with speed bumps. There are several facets to this decision that we’ll explore in this video. And to help illustrate the thought processes behind this, I’m going to talk about how I abandoned my third marriage.

We’ll cope as best we can on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Now, I haven’t talked about my third wife as much as my other two wives on this blog. Perhaps that’s because this series has mostly been a ploy to win my second wife back, and because the lies and deceit and polygamy of my first wife have made for exciting reading and good life lessons. But my third wife has an interesting story all her own.

I met her near the end of 2021, shortly after D&E offices burned down.

Trisha was my therapist, and I was seeing her to process the grief I was experiencing after the fire happened. She was a bit older than most other women I have been involved with, but I saw past her graying hair and flabby arms and realized she was just as slutty as any 20-something college girl who I originally hoped would make my grief disappear.

Just 21 months later, I would decide that she wasn’t right for me. Now let’s look at how the lessons I learned can apply to our fiction.

Sign One – You Realize That There’s a Fundamental Flaw

Sometimes, a book just won’t work because of one crucial element. It might not matter if your setting, prose and plot are all immaculate if you realize your main character is like a less-likeable version of Ted Cruz.

Trisha had many wonderful qualities. Aside from the aforementioned sluttiness, she ran her own successful practice and she collected antique guns. And we had a lot in common. We loved literature and we both put a lot of pride in our work.

So why did the relationship fall apart? Well, as we’ll see, ultimately what we were after wasn’t the other person.

Sign Two – You Realize That Another Book Is Getting in the Way

Writing a book requires an intense amount of motivation. And unless the motivation is simply showing your former friends from college that they don’t know shit, the story idea itself has to motivate you. Maybe you feel it’s your duty to let the world know about the dangers of fracking. Or that the world simply hasn’t seen a young adult novel about a chosen one overthrowing a corrupt dystopia. But if another idea comes along that’s much better than this one, you might need to put your original story on ice.

Going back to Trisha, at this time in my life, I still hadn’t gotten over my second wife. Still probably haven’t, as fans of the channel keep pointing out. But I wasn’t the only one. You see, the main reason Trisha married me was because I reminded her of her son who died of a drug overdose at age 29. She would often manipulate me to act like him. And hey, no judgment. I know all about manipulation. I once convinced a girlfriend I had Memento disease so we could have sex five times a day. And I have to admit, I really liked getting tucked in at night and getting the freedom to sleep in my own bed in my own bedroom with an Xbox. But ultimately, she couldn’t be Cindy any more than I could be Declan.

Sign Three – You Have Changed As a Writer

Being a writer necessitates growth. Where would the literary world be today if James Patterson decided he just wanted to write jingles for toy companies? When I read my earliest novels, I often wonder who that man was. I also thank God most of them are out of print and my fans can’t use them to cancel me.

As for Trisha and I, even when we both realized what was happening, we didn’t leave each other. After all, we’d already put a lot of work into the relationship and our friends chipped in to buy us a cruise as our wedding present and it felt wrong not to use it.

Sign Four – It’s Just Not Fun Anymore

Let’s be honest, if you’re watching this video, you’re not going to make any money from writing. The process should at least be fun. Maybe not as fun as having friends or watching movies. But if your book really brings you no joy, it’s time to let it go.

I don’t think I hated being married per se, but… after a while, I got really sick of doing trigonometry homework. And I have to think Trisha really didn’t like me constantly calling escort agencies to try and find a hooker that looked like Cindy.

Sign Five – Everyone else hates it

You might finish a whole book very smoothly. Maybe there wasn’t any doubt in your mind and you never experienced writer’s block. But suddenly, your beta readers, your agent, your publisher, and especially your sensitivity reader give you feedback that… this thing will not sell well. Now I’ve experienced this several times in my life, and usually I don’t listen and publish anyway. But there have been occasions when I’ve regretted it.

Trisha and my divorce wasn’t instigated by us but by our friends and family. People were really put off by her forcing me to wear Declan’s clothes. The high school graduation photographer in particular had to be bribed a lot to take the photos she wanted. And the whole legal ordeal with Cindy’s new husband getting a restraining order put on me brought a lot of shame to Trisha.

But one good thing did come out of it. Two days after our divorce, I decided to start this blog. And now I can channel all of my horrible feelings about all of my marriages into literary advice for others.

This God Guy Can Be a Real Jerk: How to Write Man vs the Supernatural Conflicts

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

“There are more things in heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Doug.”

That’s a line from my teen comedy, Keggers Can’t Be Choosers, and what I meant by that is that it’s deeply human to believe in a world that exists outside our own.

We all have different experiences with faith. Fans of the channel include devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and even a few Zoroastrians. I never considered myself a believer until one day, when I was fourteen, I started hearing voices from beyond. In my childhood, I never trusted religion, probably because my parents weren’t religious, and also because I caught my father in bed with two separate nuns.

But these voices seemed so real and I couldn’t explain where they were coming from. They told me that I should help the less fortunate. But instead of volunteering at a homeless shelter or donating to the Red Cross, they said I should mail a vial of my own blood to a medical center in Louisville, Kentucky. I asked why I couldn’t just donate blood at a blood drive like anyone else, but they said people under eighteen weren’t allowed to do that and that young blood has special healing properties that the ruling class doesn’t want regular people to know about.

Well of course it turned out, after a visit from officials with the postal service, that the voices I was hearing weren’t those of a higher power but instead the older son of my step mom who managed to sneak a radio transmitter into our bedroom and was trying to see what he could convince me to do.

And even though that incident convinced me that God almost certainly doesn’t exist, I still can’t forget the momentary excitement I felt when I thought I had discovered a world beyond normal human perception.

Man vs the Supernatural conflicts might work well because they are so primal. After all, humans had to make up stories to explain all the crazy shit that happens in nature that we couldn’t explain. And these stories also make for great David and Goliath tales, where regular humans face off against seemingly invincible ghosts, demons and monsters. Anyone who’s ever tried to cancel a gym membership, or had to convince their second wife that her new husband is wrong for her even though he’s somehow getting more handsome as he grays at the temples, will respond strongly to these types of stories.

We’ll hope we’re not praying to the wrong God on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip One – Let the Mystery Be

Just like visiting an underground sex club, the conflict is much more effective when you don’t really know what is happening or why. I don’t necessarily want to know why demons exist, just like I don’t want to know why the noises of the person on the other side of the glory hole sound oddly familiar, like perhaps your agent pretending to be a woman.

Of course you can’t go the other way, either. You can’t be so vague that it’s not even clear what force your characters are fighting against. In my novel, At Death’s Vestibule, the protagonist loses his job, his family and his friends, but can’t really pinpoint why this is happening. Critics said the novel was basically incomprehensible and that it read like a cry for help, but not from a person you’d actually bother saving. In fairness, I wrote this book quickly after Cindy left me, and at that point in my life it just seemed like vague forces of fate were working against me, though looking back it was probably my clingyness and my forcing Cindy to write down the name of every man she spoke to throughout the day on the fridge notepad.

Tip Two – Balance Belief and Skepticism

You can write a story where all characters are aware of supernatural elements, sure, but unless you’re writing high fantasy, some characters will always have to grapple with their preexisting beliefs or insist there must be a logical explanation. As a writer, a lot of the fun can come from which characters decide to blame their dad’s death on monsters and which insist that autoerotic asphyxiation is not that uncommon.

And it’s very relatable. When D&E Publishing offices burned down, I wanted to blame it on demons, even though in doing so I likely wouldn’t get an insurance payout and would have to declare bankruptcy. My third wife insisted that it was obviously caused by illegally siphoning electricity from a neighboring building and that I was only using the demon excuse to absolve myself legally. Eventually, a Twitter poll proved her mostly right.

Tip Three – Ultimately, it’s the human element we care about

Beyond skepticism, a supernatural conflict can be a great way to explore some of the deepest parts of the human psyche. If a character is given everything they wanted by a genie, how will they react? Will they succumb to their worst nature, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, or will they, like the protagonist in my novel Out of the Bottle, simply try to set the record for having sex with the most women.

In any case, you should remember that your supernatural forces are second to the choices your characters make. Let me tell you an interesting story from real life that illustrates this. About seven years ago, D&E Publishing was looking to publish the work of an unknown author who just showed up to our offices unannounced one day. Normally, that’s a no-no in the publishing industry, but we were a very small company and hadn’t scored any big-name authors at the time. The author was affable and I would describe him as Gypsy-looking but I won’t because I don’t want to get cancelled.

Anyway, rumor spread the office that the book was cursed. First of all, the line editor I assigned to the novel died in a car accident when his breaks failed. Our sensitivity reader had a childhood friend die of an overdose. Then, a month later one of the team I put in charge of marketing the book got chlamydia. Suddenly, my whole staff refused to have anything to do with the book. Instead, I had to find freelancers to finish the rest of the work before publication. But it was interesting to see all of the different reactions. Some staff members told their families to move. My business partner started checking his car for car bombs. Almost everyone got screened for chlamydia. But I stayed skeptical, and the only real long-lasting curse was the lack of cash the book brought in.

How to Write Man vs Technology Conflicts

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Technology shapes our lives perhaps more than any other force. Technology is what’s allowing you to hear this right now… unless you’re my neighbor who had a bunch of glass cups sitting near our shared wall that time I went to borrow some sugar. And even then, you could argue the glasses he uses to spy on me still counts as technology.

But what happens when that technology goes bad? What happens when that artificial intelligence makes our jobs obsolete? Or what happens when a government computer has an error that incorrectly labels you a sex offender, even though that other John Lazarus lives in the Denver area and John Lazarus isn’t even your real name and the swat team that comes after you doesn’t realize that authors often use pseudonyms?

Today’s video is the fifth installment in our six-part series about the main conflicts in fiction. So far we’ve looked at why self-loathing and fighting with service staff can be good for your writing, and why stranding your employees in the wilderness and sending threatening letters to city council members can backfire on you.

As I was saying, technology conflicts are relatable. Think of the last time your power went out. If it happens when my children are doing their visitation, not only do I dread having to entertain them and not screw up the pronunciation of their names, I also worry that the roving street gangs in my neighborhood will use this opportunity to break into my home and start looting.

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Tip One – Show the Pros and Cons of Your Technology

All technology exists for a good reason. Sometimes that’s a noble reason like curing polio or making the shareholders a lot of money. Sometimes it’s simple curiosity. But if your technology gone wrong seems only to exist to provide your characters with a challenge, the reader won’t buy it.

And our interactions with technology bring good and bad. I’ll never forget the first computer I ever had. It was a Hewlett Packard running Windows 95. It was the device on which I wrote my first published story and it was the device where I first met my first wife in an online chatroom. Well, not so much met as saw an advertisement for a strip club where I became her loyal patron.

But that same computer was also where I got catfished in AOL chatrooms by scammers looking for credit card numbers, and also by a group of local eighth graders who were just doing it for fun. Plus, that first published story actually lost me money and my first wife turned out to be a serial bigamist. So anyway, the cons should be pretty easy to think of.

Tip Two – Hold Up a Mirror to Society

Here’s a good writing prompt. Find a device in your house. And try to think about what it says about society. On my desk right now, I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones. That mostly says that people would rather live in their inner worlds that have to deal with the bullshit of strangers. It’s a symbol for how fragmented and isolated our society has become. I mean, nowadays, message boards and comment sections are just filled with bots who won’t even invite you to the forest behind the school to catfish you and then throw rocks and make rude comments about the dick picks you sent.

Sometimes you can start with a societal problem that persists today and then think of a technology that will highlight it. If you want to highlight societal problems with racism, how about your society has a machine that can tell if someone is black or not, and then forces them to get worse mortgages or something. If you want to highlight societal problems relating to income inequality, how about you write a story about an AI that distributes wealth evenly and the lazy lower classes get to sit on their ass and not even work for healthcare?

Tip Three – And Never Forget the Human Element

Like nature, technology on its own has no motive. What it can do in literature is highlight the underlying virtues and evils of our psyche. Without technology, my father would’ve just been a man who drank all the time and beat me a lot. But with technology, those “beatings” took on whole new psychological dimensions. For example, I remember one time he called me and disguised his voice using a voice modulator, and said kidnappers were holding him ransom. I pawned several of his things and brought the six thousand dollars to the dropoff only to find my father waiting in his Oldsmobile. He said it was a test and that he wanted to see if I would pawn my things or his to pay for the “ransom.” Since I had mostly pawned his possessions, he said I failed and also said he’d garnish my salary once I got a job in high school to pay him back. Anyway, try to think of ways people can use new technologies for the worse like this.

Yet your story can also be about how human virtue can overcome the dehumanizing effect of a technology. When a car breaks down in somewhere dangerous like the middle of a desert or a street in Louisiana, it’s often through the kindness of strangers that your characters make it out alive. Genetic engineering and cloning might seem to make the perfect humans, but your characters may realize there’s also grace in our flaws and in our ability to produce life through blasting raunchy rawdog loads.

How to Write Man vs. Society Conflicts

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If you’ve ever listened to a popular artist and just not gotten it, or if you’ve tried to publish books deemed by federal appellate courts to not be protected by the first amendment, you’ll understand what it feels like to be against society. (Also, if you’re black, gay or a woman.)

Today, we’ll look at man vs society conflicts in our fiction. This is the fourth installment of our six-part series. If you turn to prostitutes because you’re insecure with yourself, check out our Man vs. Self video, and if you became a prostitute because you thought it would piss off your abusive parents, check out our Man vs. Man video. And if you just want to write about storms or some shit, check out our Man vs. Nature video.

Man versus society is a great way to get your reader to think about their culture, their values and beliefs and question those assumptions. Charlotte’s Web made me wonder if it’s okay to eat pork. I mean, bacon is delicious, but pigs are just as intelligent as dogs and I’ve only killed a handful of them, and even fewer on purpose. Before Fahrenheit 451, I knew that burning books was bad, but it did make me reconsider deliberately burning a large chunk of my back catalog that Tabitha Cartwright had seized control over and put her name on.

Now, you might be asking, “What’s the point of doing these types of conflict? Don’t people read the news for that sort of thing?” (Although you’re probably not asking that, actually. I’ve realized most of my viewers aren’t as stupid as I picture them to be when I make these videos.) Still, while the news is mostly about making you as angry and nervous as possible to sell ad space to pharmaceutical companies that sell you medicine to alleviate the symptoms your constant nerves has caused, fiction can’t be so didactic.

The great thing about man versus society conflicts is that readers can draw their own conclusions about who is right. The most famous example of man versus society in fiction is probably Footloose, a 1983 story about a group of dangerous teens who should probably just bring their awful music and dancing somewhere else. But as many a first date have pointed out, that’s not the point of the movie.

We’ll paint ourselves as heroes and wonder why everyone else is just sheeple on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip One – Give Your Protagonists Strong Convictions

In real life, it’s hard to stand against society. Most of us look around at the rising inequality and collapsing environment and fascist rhetoric and just collapse into a pile, exhausted at how people keep falling for the bullshit of authoritarians. But this isn’t a man vs self conflict, your protagonist can’t be an aimless mid-20s writer having random conversations with liberal bohemians like… every story in your MFA class.

In fiction, characters are motivated by their strong convictions and they take action. Maybe they think it’s wrong to outlaw having sex with an advanced race of space aliens with three vaginas so they kick off an intergalactic war.  

Your character should have some form of “awakening” that something is deeply wrong with society. In my novel Storming the Gates of Heaven, the co-protagonist Carter doesn’t respect or understand the plight of immigrants in the United States until he visits a global food market.

Tip Two – Personify Society Through Character

Society can be a hard thing to pin down, which is what makes it so frustrating. I mean, does society want me to be a stay-at-home dad, or does it want me to be a bare-chested model with a six pack who could nail every Applebee’s waitress from Spokane to Orlando? We get so many mixed messages.

Your story can’t be that messy. So create a character who personifies the larger systemic issues in that society. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Rached is a symbol of the dehumanizing forces of society as she rules over the mental institution with an iron fist. It helps us connect more with McMurphy’s rebellion, which we really shouldn’t because he’s a rapist.

Dictators, wardens, and managers are all staples you can fall back on, but try to be unique. In my novel, Daryl, the main antagonist is a woman whose husband killed both her children, their dog and himself. Because of this, and because she is constantly subject to the effects of gun violence on children as an emergency room physician, she tries to enact sweeping gun reform, putting her at odds with my protagonist.

Tip Three – Make Your Motivations Complicated

Comically fascist societies just aren’t true to life. People don’t start wars under flimsy pretenses. Nor do those fascist societies treat even their most ardent followers as sheep to be disposed of when they’re no longer needed.

Your story needs to be more complex than that. While your protagonist needs to rebel, there should be other forces making them resistant. Maybe they have really sensitive ears so the thought of having to shoot guns turns them off. Maybe they think arranged marriage is a barbaric institution, but even though they have a girlfriend they love, their parents actually set them up with a woman who has an insane rack for her body frame, like just absolutely nuts and it doesn’t even seem like she’s had work done.

Tip Four – Does Society Change or Does the Character?

Finally, your story needs to end with some sort of transformation. Nineteen Eighty Four famously ends with the haunting defeat of Winston Smith. Star Wars, on the other hand, ends with the authoritarians defeated. Only it doesn’t. And then it does again. And then it doesn’t. And then I pretty much stopped giving a shit.

But don’t be afraid to think smaller. Victory could just be one character getting his dad to stop watching Fox News. It could be one character realizing he doesn’t need to be bulimic to be handsome. It could be one writer getting public opinion back on his side with some charitable donations so people stop remembering the horrible fire that killed so many of his employees.

How Watching Loved Ones Suffer and Die Can Inspire Your Writing

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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.