Author: Daniel Madison

How to Write Humor

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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

Daniel Madison1 Comment

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.

Female Writers, You’re Probably Making These Mistakes About Men

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Hello, good evening and welcome, I’m John Lazarus with Stories’ Matter and D&E Publishing. Everyone knows male authors have trouble writing female characters. There are entire Twitter accounts and subreddits devoted to “boobs breasting boobily” and “tits titillating tittily.” Even my own prose hasn’t emerged unscathed, though in my defense, the women in my early novels were so two-dimensional only because none of them had speaking parts.

But just like how we have to die in wars and fend off the sexual advances of our beautiful young secretaries, male characters in fiction don’t always have it easy. There are a lot of things female authors get wrong about men, and I’m not just talking about the fact that most of us don’t have six packs, or the fact that we actually jack off way more than you think we do.

In any case, it doesn’t matter if it’s a man writing about a woman who looks like a JAV idol and talks like your mother, or a woman writing about a man with a Pringles can in his pants where his mommy issues should be, the key thing we’ll focus on this video is author wish-fulfillment. Bad writers fill their stories with their fantasies. And I get it. You’re at home, locked in an office, you’ve lubed up your nether regions because you’re going to be sitting for a while and you don’t want your skin chafing. You can’t watch porn because it distracts you from your writing but this erection (or lady erection) is gotta take care of itself somehow. So you let those urges seep into your story. And now half your book is filled with archers with rippled backs and devilish eyes who won’t even think about cumming until the heroine finishes her character arc.

We’ll remember that men are actually pretty goddamn disappointing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Now, you might be asking, John, why are you doing this video? Aren’t male characters in fiction doing alright? That’s only true in the sense that this issue has gone underreported. In fact, it’s such a largely ignored problem that it was really difficult to find online articles to copy advice from like I usually do when I make these videos.

But the publishing industry is getting filled with more and more female authors. I was surprised how many female authors came in for pitch meetings at D&E, because our old office was located in a dangerous part of town and women got snatched off the street and thrown into panel vans all the time.

My point is this rise in female authorship has seen a reduction in veracity when it comes to male characters. I always felt bad having to tell a prospective author that she had great prose and plotting, but that she didn’t understand males and male relationships. Especially because that also meant her sending back out onto Stinson Boulevard.

So to all the prospective female authors watching this video, here are some tips to make your males a bit more authentic.

Tip 1: Closely observe the men in your real life

Great writing comes from great research. So get to know your subjects. Record the conversations you overhear male coworkers having. Or follow a stranger around and see what he does.  

On the plus side, unlike if the gender roles were reversed, it’s not likely law enforcement will get involved. On the bad side, most men are starved for attention and if you are even a little bit good-looking, that man will advance on you sexually. Keep mace on you at all times, and if the law permits, a 38 or an equivalent sidearm with real stopping power is even better.

Tip 2: Don’t be afraid to use stereotypes

My father used to say, stereotypes exist for a reason and that’s because they’re 100 percent accurate. While I can’t say I agree, there is truth in every stereotype. After all, look at this map of binge drinking rates in the United States.

Perhaps archetype is a better word. There’s a comfort that readers get from identifying that this character is the ladies’ man, or this one is the sage. Not every character needs to be completely original or deeply sketched. Even in real life, most people are actually quite obvious and easy to decipher.

Tip 3: Don’t make them completely emotionless, unless they’re sociopaths (which is only like 10 percent of the population)

I think most women get the mistaken impression that men are unemotional beings. I know all of my wives thought so. But that’s only because I was really wrapped up with starting D&E Publishing when married to Wife 2, and was hiding affairs from Wife 1 and Wife 3.

I think the trick, female writers, is to be sparing with your emotional reveals when writing your male characters. Some examples of this could include: Throwing a remote at the TV when the Islanders fail to take advantage of the power play, laughing when a frisbee hits a friend in the throat, a violent burst of tears during orgasm.

Tip 4: Male friendships barely count as relationships. Write them that way

A man can share an office with another man for years without learning his name. I mean, you’ll never have sex with each other, so what’s the point? And if society collapses and we need to hunt each other for food, knowing each other’s names will just make things harder. If that seems insane to you, well… you’re not thinking enough like a man.

Male friendships after college exist for only a few reasons: to make business connections, to get access to secret societies or to get time away from small children. In any case, don’t write these relationships like you would female ones. The only time men might really open up with each is if some sort of initiation ritual at those secret societies demands it.

Tip 5: When in doubt, give them lots of flaws

In honesty, this should go without saying. Flaws are what make characters interesting. What doesn’t make sense to me is that every girlfriend or mistress or wife and even lots of the hookers I’ve been with never had any trouble pointing out my flaws. So this shouldn’t be a big problem for female writers.

How To Tackle Social Issues In Your Writing (so people will finally think you are smart)

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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