Author: Daniel Madison

Why Fiction Writers Are Wrong About AI

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New technologies are by nature disruptive, and their arrival is always met with skepticism. The invention of the chainsaw for example had people worried lumberjacks would soon be out of work. However, people of the 19th century soon realized we could just cut down forests ten times faster because who needs forests anyway: after all, they’re dark and scary and just provide child killers with an easy place to dispose of the bodies of their victims.

AI, or artificial intelligence as it’s known to experts, is certainly a disruptive technology, especially for writers. In researching this video, I decided to ask an AI to write a novel about a detective who plays by his own rules to take down an army of Antifa terrorists. This AI was able to accomplish in mere seconds what it took me almost 2 whole weeks to do: write a 250-page novel that mostly made sense. Not just that, the AI didn’t need to be powered by food or water or money or loads of amphetamines.

What’s a writer to do?

First of all, don’t panic.

Look, AI is just a tool, like a hammer or pliers or duct tape or a zip tie or hydrofluoric acid or an enigma machine you can use to send cryptic messages to the police. It’s not something you should worry too much about because AI isn’t replacing humans anytime soon. What you should worry about, however, is getting left behind by human authors who are using AI to their benefit,  to augment their writing to put things out faster, and to create PR campaigns smearing you on social media.

Lots of writers have a visceral reaction when they hear about AI writing fiction. After all, we say to ourselves, an AI doesn’t have feelings, it doesn’t understand the human condition, it’s not a unique individual who’s worked long and hard to cultivate their own voice. But just ask yourself: are you really that unique and individual and special? Aren’t we really just inefficient machines powered inefficiently by fast food and energy drinks? Most of you probably work boring office jobs and drive a Honda CR-V and got into writing because a former teacher said you had talent simply because it was the least stressful way to get through the day at her underpaid job that led to her depression and alcoholism. What I’m saying is, the students in my writing workshops at the learning annex were just as interchangeable as the Chromebooks.

But instead of embracing the fear, try to approach the age of AI with excitement. Think of yourself as an intrepid pioneer trekking across an unexplored frontier. I mean, when I thought about AI-generated porn, I was initially insulted, but as I got to thinking about it, I realized there were a whole host of laws I wouldn’t have to worry about anymore.

Similarly, when using AI in your writing, there are lots of problems you could potentially avoid. For example, instead of joining support groups under false pretenses to get story ideas, you can simply ask an AI to scour the internet for stories of addiction and recovery and synthesize them into a digestible format.

Let’s look at a few ways we can utilize AI without giving ourselves completely up to the machine

Step 1: Use AI to brainstorm new story ideas

Staring at a blank page or screen for hours is one of the most excruciating experiences in life, at least one that doesn’t involve a divorce attorney or loan shark. But it’s something most writers have to deal with when starting a new project and it’s also a cause for ending almost forty percent of all writer’s marriages.

You probably have a general idea of what you want. After all, something must have inspired you to write a book. Maybe you were inspired by your own trauma, but you just can’t find a way to make it a digestible, well-paced narrative. To save time and anguish, consider asking Chat GPT to give you ten story ideas about a kid coming to terms with his gayness. Here’s what I got when I did that:

Step 2: Use AI to come up with minor details like character names

On the other side of things, you can use AI to go small and do some of the dirty work writers hate. Names are one thing I hate in particular, not so much because it’s difficult, but rather I have a nasty habit of naming my villains after people in my own life or people who are rude to me on social media that I hired a private investigator to follow.

Character names should also be embedded with meaning and history. Unfortunately, the average English names of the people in our lives, like John and Henry and Mohammed, don’t mean anything. So instead of going through the exhausting process of Googling what different names mean, just ask AI . Here’s what I got when I asked Chat GPT to come up with a female character in a fantasy story whose name indicated she was sex positive and had large breasts.

Step 3: Use it to research subjects you know little about

Back when I started writing in the late 90s, readers were much less discerning and you could get away with not doing any research ever. With internet speeds the way they were, only people with a large set of encyclopedias could disprove you.

But despite our best efforts, fact checking is still a large part of our society today. AI, however, can give you lots of quick and easy facts about cuisine, sports or medicine.

How to Write an Unreliable Narrator

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Nobody likes a liar in real life. Or at least we don’t like people who lie in order to win sexual harassment civil suits against our publishing companies. But in fiction, it can be thrilling to get inside the head of someone who may not be totally honest.

And if you think about it, there’s no reason a person telling a story must be totally honest. We tell false stories all the time: about the fish we nearly caught, about the reason we were speeding, about why we said we were at yoga class even though nobody saw us there and the teacher said we haven’t attended in weeks.

And we even lie to ourselves. Beyond the obvious lies we might tell, for example, that we still have enough hair and muscle tone to bag a Miami nine, human memory is malleable and susceptible to manipulation. I once gave a report to police about a drowning body that was riddled with errors and inconsistencies simply because I’d been so distraught. For example, I claimed to have been swimming out to save the man when I had actually been standing on the beach, and I also remembered it being a stranger who drowned even though in reality, it was a neighbor with whom I recently had a big feud.

So not only are unreliable narrators true to life, they can provide your story with an uneasy tension.

We’re trained to trust the people who tell stories to us. Maybe because story writers remind us of the authority figures, like teachers, doctors, or like the men in lab coats who, during a college psychology experiment, convinced me my roommate was a communist spy and got me to shoot him in the head. (Don’t worry, viewers, the gun turned out to only be filled with air.)

There are four main types of unreliable narrators. We’ll look at each in turn.

Picaros are characters who are adept at exaggeration, people like Moll Flanders or Don Quixote. In my novel, The Ballad of Ralph Quaid, the titular character claims to have slept with a world-famous celebrity but over the course of the story, the side characters, piece by piece, work out that it’s likely the man actually had sex with a prize show dog.

Madmen are characters who are unreliable simply because they’ve lost their goddamn minds. American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman might be the most famous example here. John Stevens, the narrator of Murder on Spirit Airlines, is unreliable because nobody would realistically put a bomb on a Spirit Air flight when there would be nobody aboard worth killing.

Naifs are narrators who are unreliable because of their youth, inexperience and naivete. Huckleberry Finn fits well in this category. My coming-of-age story The House on Pain Avenue fits here because Daniel Clementine sees his social awkwardness and estrangement from his father as a result of his being gay, when the reader can clearly understand it’s actually because Daniel won’t ever stop talking about how 9/11 was an inside job.

Finally, we have our basic liars. These people are trying to paint a better picture of themselves and work toward specific goals. These are common people we encounter in our everyday lives. They are our coworkers, our lawyers, our clergyman, our business partners who secretly drug us to increase our productivity and get us to sign agreements handing over the rights to a sizeable portion of our books. Agatha Christie novels are filled with this type of person. As are my Colt Action novels, where the protagonist always seems to have an excuse to kill Comanches, even women and children who are minding their own business gardening and basket weaving.

Whichever type of unreliable narrator you decide to utilize, here are some helpful tips.

Step One: Give your narrator a reason to be unreliable

There are a lot of things that can make your narrator unreliable. Humbert Humbert, for example, is unreliable because he wants to be remembered as an obsessive lover rather than a French person.

A childhood profuse with nights spent scrounging for scraps in the fridge to make dinners of relish and tortilla shells taught me that drugs are another thing make someone unreliable. Consider making your protagonist a junkie.

Or you could tie it to a deep need that the narrator hasn’t fulfilled. For example, maybe they’re making up a bunch of lies about their life so their YouTube channel isn’t boring and pointless like all the other writing advice ones.

Step Two: Keep your reader in the dark

But you don’t want to give away the game too early. It’s better to lull your reader into a false sense of security before the inevitable rug pull. Much like an accountant who doesn’t know he’s committing tax fraud for your publishing company, it will be better for everyone if the reader sides with the narrator from the outset.

Think about Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Even though there are subtle clues at the beginning, we’re on his side because it’s so obvious that everyone else in our lives are phonies and things would be so much better if someone would shoot the guy who wrote this song.

Step Three: Escalate the lies as the narrative progresses

Lies breed more lies. Unless you’ve got an entire propaganda network to complete rewrite reality for you, eventually your narrator will be outed.

Your lies should start small, almost unnoticeable, but they need to get bigger as the story goes on. Let’s say, for example, you write a story about a man who kills his neighbor by bashing his head with oar and dumping him in a lake. Well, you can’t start with the narrator getting caught or confessing to the murder.

You start with him saying he only went to the beach later in the day to do research for his newest novel. You might only draw the connection between the deceased and the narrator two-thirds of the way into the police invest… I mean, novel.

Step Four: Use multiple unreliable narrators

Of course, you could go the route of Kurosawa and tell the story from multiple conflicting perspectives, like he did in the Seven Samurai, where we see the same murder unfold from the seven titular vantage points.

The only thing you’ve got to decide here is, is there one objective truth, or will your story be more about how an objective truth is essentially unknowable, as an impartial jury of the state of Arizona seems to believe?

24 Reasons You Suck At Writing

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Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of hatemail from fans of the channel. Most are curious as to why, after watching all 63 videos on this channel and doing everything I’ve said, they still haven’t been published. And some are wondering if there’s a way to get out of the restraining orders they’ve been hit with.

As I’ve said many times, literature is not a science like particle physics or phrenology. I can’t guarantee your success any more than this guy can control gas prices or this guy can protect you from bird aids. Some people just have unlucky brain pans.

But, John, you might be saying, I realize nobody is guaranteed to write a best seller, but do you have to openly insult me to my face on these videos and call me a piece of shit and respond to my criticism by sending me photos of yourself naked atop all of the books you’ve successfully published?

Everything I do on this channel is to help you improve. Why? Because I love good writing and I hate bad writing. I want libraries, the ones that aren’t smoldering piles of rubble by the end of 2025, filled with the work of people who understand compelling drama and narrative conventions. Ten years from now, I want everyone watching this channel to be lying naked atop a pile of their own successfully published books.

A lot of this advice will be difficult to hear. It will lead to awkward realizations, second guessing and asking indie book contests if they offer refunds on entry fees.

Reason 1 – You Spelled One Word Wrong. Every time I see a manuscript with a misspelled word, I instantly incinerate it right in my office. Or at least I used to until a fire caused by an unrelated reason burned down the last office I worked in.

Reason 2 – You have more than one character with the same name in your story. And it’s Brayden. This is confusing as a reader, not to mention disgusting.

Reason 3 – You write rambling sentences that just go on and on and on and on and don’t really have a purpose besides showing how great you are at being a show-off, but without ever having a reason to justify the length beyond simply showing everyone that you’re a douchebag with an MFA who went to…

Reason 4 – You wrote with a lack of description. Every great story should describe at least one room, plant or female body part.

Reason 5 – You named the character after yourself. And your name is Brayden.

Reason 6 – You mentioned a gun in the first act but you never used it blow anybody’s head off later in the story.

Reason 7 – You had the character directly say what they are feeling. It makes me so mad when I hear that.

Reason 8 – You used verb tenses in a confusing way. I will have had many writers send me manuscripts having been written this way.

Reason 9 – You spent too much time describing the character’s clothes.

Reason 10 – You didn’t describe the character’s clothes at all so I assumed they were naked and got confused why I was so horny.

Reason 11 – You used too many dialogue tags. Like exclaimed, proclaimed, declaimed. And if you tell me a character ejaculated, there better be a hard cock at the end of that sentence.

Reason 12 – You used words a lot of big words to make yourself seem smart. I graduated cum laude from Arizona University. Don’t think you’re smarter than me.

Reason 13 – You made the story sad and pointless and it was really obvious you were just writing about your own life.

Reason 14 – You used a bunch of curse words to try and seem edgy and cool. Only a fucking cocksucking asshole would do that.

Reason 15 – You used adverbs. Only a fucking cocksucking asshole would do that.

Reason 16 – You put in so much detail when describing the guns in your book that it made me feel like I’m going to be put on some kind of list for reading it.

Reason 17 – You expected sympathy from me at the very beginning of the story. If I don’t know your character, why should I give a shit that their whole family just died? It’s the same reason new hires at my company have to wait six months before they get bereavement leave.

Reason 18 – You wrote your gays as stereotypes. Seriously, depicting two men having anal sex with each other is such a stereotypical way to show they’re gay. Think of something else.

Reason 19 – You wrote a story about a “chosen one.” They’re cliched, they’re overdone and in real life, every chosen one I’ve ever known just stole my money and tried to get the deed for my third wife’s house.

Reason 20 – You switched POVs randomly throughout your story without rhyme or reason. Imagine how jarring it would be if the POV porn website you subscribe to suddenly switched to third person POV content. Enough said

Reason 21 – You were clearly mimicking the style of a more famous author. Unless you were trying to mimic me. In which case, I’m flattered.

Reason 22 – You made every character speak with the same manner, style and rhythm. Your black people should sound as black as possible.

Reason 23 – Your writing was so confident. It was clear you hadn’t watched videos like this to make you constantly second-guess yourself.

Reason 24 – You clearly used AI because your writing wasn’t filled with unnecessary words like “really” “just” or “actually.” And all the words were spelled correctly.

That’s all for today. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe and I’ll leave you with this week’s This Day in Literary History. See you on the next one.

How to Come Up With Good Story Ideas

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You can write incisive, biting dialogue, create relatable internal conflict, establish multiple character arcs that resolve in unique and interesting ways, but if your basic premise is uninspired or unmarketable, you’ve basically just wasted years of your life that you should’ve spent getting laid or getting therapy for the trauma that causes you to seek incessant, meaningless sex.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts, I just want to make one thing clear. Like money or Balkan strange, a good idea isn’t something that comes to you, it’s something you need to seek out.

A good book idea should resonate with your readers. Who hasn’t, much like Dorian Gray, wished they could stay hot forever and have some dumbass picture of themselves look more and more like shit? A good book idea should spark curiosity. For example, in the 19th century, the unwashed masses, with no other forms of entertainment, would sit at home at night and wonder where all that wonderful lamp oil that was lighting their homes at night came from, and Melville came along to exploit that curiosity wonderfully. And a good idea should be something you are emotionally invested in. For example, I wrote Canucks Amuck after a road rage altercation I had with a man from Toronto.

Step One: Modify a Story That Already Exists

They say that all stories have already been written. They also say that, essentially, all stories boil down to three simple variations: a stranger comes to town, a hero goes on a journey or Debbie lets the stranger and all the town’s men have their fun now that the hero’s gone.

So, because all stories already exist, plagiarism isn’t really a thing you need to worry about. Your originality will come out in your voice and your diction and the weird things you have to say about women and the amount of slurs you can get away with.

Some examples from my own library include Four Under, which is just Deliverance except on a golf course instead of the Georgia wilderness and with mole people instead of hillbillies, and The Altar Boy, which is just the Handmaid’s Tale with the gender roles reversed and if you made it a comedic sex romp.

Step Two: Start With a Title

For 99 percent of your future audience, your book title is their first introduction to you. Well, unless you pull a gun on someone at a book signing.

Lots of writers will tell you to wait until the end of the writing process to come up with a book title. But sometimes that leaves you with stuff like this. A great title can get your creative juices flowing and boost your confidence. And it really is a key factor whether your reader buys or passes. Do you think anyone would read To Kill a Mockingbird if they knew it was just about the obvious fact that Southern people are really racist? Would they read The Sun Also Rises if they weren’t curious about what’s the other thing that rises?

Step Three: Rip From the Headlines

Stories happen all around us every day, usually to people who are more charismatic and have better cheekbones than us. Murder, escape, victory, disaster. The great thing about these stories is if it’s a long read, the research is basically already done for you. My novel, The They/Them Murders was based on a very long podcast by an underground journalist investigation about a trans man turned serial killer. And even the fact that the podcast turned out to be conspiracy theory nonsense and had maliciously endangered the lives of the entire trans community of Missouri didn’t diminish the narrative impact of my fictional story, which was fiction.

Lolita is a famous example of a story based on true events. Sally Horner was a twelve-year old girl who made the news when she was abducted and raped. But unlike Lolita, the public just slut shamed her because people have always been terrible. Which brings me to my next point.

You have to be careful about adapting real life. Stories are logical, but real life is mostly stupid and pointless. Husbands and wives kill each other instead of getting a divorce. Politicians try to start war for basically no reason. A TV show host who promised to quit drinking if he got confirmed as secretary of defense gets confirmed Secretary of Defense. Anyway, hopefully you can think of better shit than that.

Step Four: Ask Yourself “What If…”

Of course, the most literal interpretation of this is to write alternate histories. What if America hadn’t developed the nuclear bomb first? What if Da Vinci had been pope or whatever? What if the Germans in World War I had realized they could use those pointy hats to impale their enemies?

But you can look to the future too. Just take note of the things you use every day and think how they could be made better or worse. I got the idea for The Futility of Flesh by looking at my third wife and wondering what it would be like to erase her mind so she wouldn’t know about my first two.

These work well because as I’ve said, when we read fiction, what we’re really just asking of the author is to explain to us “What if real life weren’t so cruel and worthless?”

This Article Will Motivate You To Write

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The following speech is based off an address I gave at the 2023 D&E Indie Author awards, an annual event where previously unpublished authors compete for a chance to get a publishing deal with D&E. Unfortunately, as none of the contestants met the quality standards of our label, no prizes were awarded that year.  

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Feel the air come in through your mouth and let it slowly out through your nose. Now, go walk over to a mirror or pull out your phone and look at yourself that way. Take a few more deep breaths. Relax. Try to get your heartrate below 120 bpm. Wipe away the sweat and mucus all this heavy breathing has caused to course down your face. Now, look at yourself.

Just awful, isn’t it? What an absolute disgusting excuse for a human. Who could ever love this pathetic, pasty lump of ever-loosening flesh? It’s almost too much to bear. Don’t worry, you can close your eyes again. Now, try to remember why you became a writer in the first place.

You did it because it made you feel superior to other people who didn’t write, people who weren’t creators. You did it because you wanted fame and money. You did it so you’d have something to shove in your abusive father’s face while he was on his death bed suffering from a three-year battle with liver disease. You did it because it made that horrible creature you just saw in mirror seem like something somebody could love.

And now that your writing has failed and nobody bought your book and nobody gave you good review and you walked in on your own family reading it aloud together and laughing at passages that weren’t meant to be funny, what’s left but despair and depression and an early death?

No.

You are better than people who don’t write books. You are more important. You are smarter. You are more creative. You are more interesting. If you weren’t so physically unappealing, you would be the life of every party.

A true writer doesn’t despair. A true writer doesn’t suffer from depression or kill themselves or project their self-hatred toward others in increasingly depraved ways. A true writer remembers that the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, just as the players gonna play, play, play, play, play.

Just remember, that every failure is simply a seed for a later success. Those past books you’ve written that didn’t get published, those short stories that never got picked up, those blog entries that nobody read, those are just sperm that never made it to the egg. But you’ve got many more loads where that came from, many more nuts to bust inside the womb that is the literary world. That’s a metaphor, of course. Please don’t send samples of your bodily fluids to literary agents. Experience tells me they don’t care for it.

Every time you write, you get better. It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s a cozy mystery about lesbian nuns trying to figure out who threw the vicar from the church steeple, or a letter to your wife’s lawyer explaining why you haven’t been paying your alimony, you improve as a writer.  

If you want to become great at tennis or some shit, you have like a three year window to be great. Not for writers. Great writing takes time. Most writers don’t write their best work until their 50s or 60s. And if you’re in your 70s and you’re reading this article, there might be a miracle drug soon that will let us live until we’re 200, you never know.

Becoming a great writer is marathon, not a sprint, in that seems to go on forever and it mostly just makes you want to die. But unlike a marathon, writing isn’t pointless. If humans didn’t tell stories, we’d be no better than the common tarsier, resigned to a life of eating berries with our bare hands until we die, our only hobby arranging those berries by size. But we’ve evolved. And though it’s hard to tell from looking at you, you, as a writer, are the most evolved creature on the planet.

Maybe lately you’ve been staring at your computer screen with fear and disinterest. I know the look well. When I walk into my publishing company, pretty much all of my workers have the same look on their faces. You worry the next thing you write will be terrible, or you worry the next thing you write will be great but go unnoticed. Buck up, fight through it and write anyway. Take some aspirin if helps. Or drink some booze. Or microdose LSD. Or do all three. This is your temple. Treat it like one.

Keep writing. What’s the worst that could happen? You might write a few pages that you’ll later decide are not good? Of course not, that’s not the worst that could happen, we writers are more creative than that. Maybe you get electrocuted as a surge of electricity shoots through your keyboard whereas you’d have been spared if you hadn’t been writing. Or maybe, you write a book that amounts to libel and all of your possessions get collected by a repo company and you’re forced to live on the street and you try to get your degree but you show up late to all the finals and you also forgot to put your clothes on. I forgot what my point was…

In conclusion, I believe in you. Even if you’ve submitted work to me and I sent a letter back mocking your writing style and telling you you had no chance at becoming a writer, I believe in you. Take your favorite authors as inspiration. They were struggling at one point. Look to them for guidance. Stake out their houses to learn their secrets if you have to.

You have two choices now. Take the red pill, continue writing, continue chasing your dreams, keep writing until you are published and become a best seller, or take the blue pill, sell insurance in the suburbs of Indianapolis and die of heart failure at age 58.

It’s up to you.

How to Crowdfund Your Book

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Money: it’s the reason everyone watching this video became a writer. Maybe not directly, but because of what money can buy: things like dignity, love and happiness.

But money can be a hard thing to come by as a writer. And while writing a book is generally free, especially if you only order ice water at the Starbucks where you spend each night writing after work, publishing and selling one that doesn’t just go onto your blind grandmother’s bookshelf isn’t.

If you want to create a good cover that wasn’t made in MS Paint, you need money. If you want someone to tell you you shouldn’t have the main character calling someone a dumb slut on the first page, you need money. If you want to fight a lawsuit claiming your publishing company established an unprecedented hostile work environment that violated dozens of labor laws, equal opportunity statutes and fire codes, you need a lot of money.

But there’s a shining light at the end of this dark tunnel. And it’s one you don’t have to escape by selling drugs or whoring your body, though I won’t dissuade you if you’d rather follow that strategy. No, instead, today we are going to explore the wide world of crowdfunding. We’ll exploit people’s charitable nature on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

There are a few different websites you can use for crowdfunding: Kickstarter, IndieGogo, Onlyfans. But I’m going to give more general advice in this video that will apply, whether you use a variety of web platforms, or if you’re just collecting change on the subway.

Personally, even though I own and operate a publishing company that makes a steady stream of revenue and now has a business license, I still use crowdfunding for most of my releases. For the sake of this video, we’re going to focus mainly on one crowdfunding campaign I did for the novel Game Theory, a drama about a math prodigy who has to use his intellect to overcome his sexual addiction.

Step One: Set clear, realistic goals

An author and a reader have a sacred bond, like a husband and wife. So if you’re not going to be open and transparent and you breech that trust, you’ve got to be really careful you don’t get caught.

To be clear, your best bet is to simply be honest. State your expenses. Tell your investors you need, for example, $1000 for a professional book cover and $10000 for a sensitivity reader to remove all the hateful language. Those are believable numbers and your readers will know they’re getting what they are paying for.

Now, one way to get around this is to create multiple crowdfunding avenues, with different URLs to different sources even though the links appear the same, so it always looks like you’re a little short on funds on the different crowdfunding websites. Anyway, that’s how I got four hundred thousand dollars to spend on editing and marketing Game Theory.

Step Two: Identify Your Core Group of Funders

Once you know your budget, you need to know who you will target your campaign toward. If you just target your pitch to fantasy readers, nobody’s going to bite. If you target it toward fantasy readers who feel there isn’t enough realistic depictions of what medieval sex felt, sounded and smelled like, you might do a bit better.

But how would you go about finding those people in the first place without compromising the contents of your hard drive? Well, when I was planning how to crowdfund for Game Theory, I knew that people who were interested in math and also sex addicts was way too broad a group, so I needed to narrow down who I sent emails and newsletter to.

In the end, I decided to spam the comments of Numberphile and other math YouTubers comments section to build traffic to my various Kickstarters.

Step Three: Get Corporate Sponsors

Even with lots of small donations, it will be tough to reach your fundraising goals without a few big spenders. And small businesses are a great way to get that. Of course, while companies and corporations have all the same legal rights and much more political power than people, they lack our basic sense of charity. They’ll want something in return.

Call it selling out if you will. But some strategic product placement could get you to reach your goals quickly. For example, I got a local sandwich shop to put a QR code for a sandwich coupon on the back cover of a novel about one woman’s fight with anorexia.

For Game Theory, all I had to do was set the climax of the story in a local sex shop and put a link to their website on my website for twenty years or until I pass away.

Step Four: Focus on what the individual funders will get in return

Now, going back to individual funders, they’re going to want a little perk in return. Things like tote bags, pens, scratch off tickets.

For Game Theory, a donation of $20 dollars got you a mention on social media. A donation of $50 dollars got you a free copy of the book. A donation of $1000 dollars got me to name one of the characters after you.

You have to be careful, though. It turned out James Forsyth of San Diego didn’t like that I named him after a serial sex offender.

Step Five: Connect your book to a cause

But an even more powerful motivator than swag is virtue signaling. The only reason most people read in the first place is prove they’re better than everyone else so it goes hand in hand with charity.

For Game Theory, I obviously reached out to the sex addiction support community, hoping they’d mention my book on some of the organization’s websites, but that backfired because apparently graphic depictions of hardcore sex is a big trigger for that crowd.

So I diversified by making several characters Jewish, I gave my main character neurodivergent tendencies, and I added in a subplot about fracking.

Bad Reviews, Writer Feedback and Basing Characters off Real People: I Answer Reader Questions About Being a Writer

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Asa A. writes:

John, My son is an aspiring writer. But whenever I try to tell him I wish he’d branch out from writing stories about small animals being tortured, he gets very upset. As a writer, what kind of feedback do you value most from readers?

Feedback can be a tough thing. I became a writer for a few reasons, but mostly so others would like me and pay attention to me and constantly tell me how awesome I am. But of course, you can’t expect all people to respond to your work that way. Some people are just idiots who don’t understand good writing, and some are people who do understand good writing, but just want to insult you because they think it’s funny or they want to put you in a negative light to promote their own writing.

In any case, the feedback I like is when people tell me my work turned their life around. As a good friend once told me, saving a life is as exhilarating as taking it away.

James D. writes:

John, my marriage is falling apart and it’s largely your fault. My wife inexplicably loves your books but I don’t see the appeal. I feel like I couldn’t really love someone who likes what you do. So my question is, What’s your favorite book you’ve written? If I read that and liked it, it might just save this marriage.

That’s a tough choice. While Spilled Milk was the first book I published on an actual label, and Twilight was, for some reason, my financial breakthrough, I’d have to say Zodiac was the book I was most proud of. For those who haven’t read it, the novel is about the Zodiac killer, a fictional serial killer who plans to kill twelve different people over a twelve-year period, using each animal of the zodiac. I thought it was a clever concept and I really had to get creative and push myself as a writer to think of ways a rat, a rabbit and a rooster could be used to kill someone.

Emily W. writes:

John, my coworkers were upset that I wrote a fictional short story for an online magazine that used their real names and addresses. Should I not have done this? Do you base your characters on real people?

– Oh, all the time. Pretty much any villain I write is at least somewhat loosely based on my father or the prostitute who helped raise me. If there are women in my life who, you know, I’d like to have sex with but can’t because they’re married or lesbians or certain laws prohibit me from doing so, I find it helps to live out that fantasy in my writing.

Eva E. writes:

John, writing for me is just a hobby at the moment. I have a great job designing algorithms for healthcare companies that decide which patients should live and which should die. But part of me wants to make writing a full-time job. I worry about deadlines, though. How do you deal with the pressure of meeting deadlines?

This really was never an issue when I was a young writer. I was so motivated and on so many productivity-enhancing amphetamines that I wrote faster than my editors could keep up. But in my middle age, I have slowed down a bit.

There are some small hacks you can use. You can tell your publisher you misread the date, you can tell them your kid got sick, or you can puff out the middle section by copying and pasting excerpts from the Canterbury Tales. Editors usually only read the first and last pages of a manuscript, anyway.

Johnny S. writes:

John, do you ever consider the reader’s perspective when writing?

No.

Anri. O writes:

John, I’m a self-published author with a few books out and mostly good reviews. But one person keeps giving me the harshest reviews on social media. It’s either my step-dad, mad that I refused his sexual advances, or my boss, mad that I keep advancing on him sexually. Anyway, how do you deal with bad reviews?

An author can’t let bad reviews get to them. Unless you know the reviewer personally, then you absolutely can. My lawyer says I shouldn’t give you any advice about your specific situation, but I will share something that worked for me once.

I had this one reviewer who constantly review bombed all my books on all the online bookstores. But their big mistake was using the same username on all these platforms. After a little social engineering, I learned it was actually a person from my own publishing company upset that, because of a clerical error, they hadn’t been paid in five months. Talk about a “the call is coming from inside the house” moment. Now, I don’t care what you say about me personally or about my ability to lead people as a boss and make sure they receive at least minimum wage. But leave my works of art out of it, you know. We eventually agreed to have that worker be compensated for time unpaid plus an extra month’s salary if they promised to take their reviews down. So it all worked out in the end.

Angela W. writes:

John, I can’t stand the sound of your voice and I hate your videos, but I did end up reading your most recent book, Glossolalia and Other Stories, and I was surprised to find it witty, insightful, poetic and exactly the opposite of how you come off here. Anyway, what authors did you dislike at first but grew into?

Well, scifi writer John Scalzi was somebody I didn’t really like. Not because of his books, but because he threw me out of one of his book signings for trying to secretly endorse several books on the D&E label. But then years later, we were actually on the same panel at a book conference and we hit it off. Ended up going to a strip club later. Lovely guy.

Finally, we have Scarlit S. who writes:

John, I want to start writing, but my boyfriend says I’m too racist to be a writer. So my question is, what’s one thing you’d give up to become a better writer?

Well, first of all, lots of great writers are racist: Ayn Rand, Margaret Mitchell, HP Lovecraft. So even though I don’t agree with your views, don’t let that stop you.

But for me, this is an easy decision. I’d give up one of the children my first wife claims we had together before she ran off.

I Tried This Nine-Step Story Writing Formula (and I can’t believe how useful it was)

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Lots of writers hate the rigidity of a writing formula. After all, writing should be an organic process, not something measured in steps. You’re not making yellow curry, or performing funeral rites, or attending AA meetings that the judge forced you to attend after puking into the open window of a police cruiser during a wild Presidents’ Day celebration.

But if you want to write a story quickly, and the thought of getting rich and famous and finally being able to abandon your family doesn’t motivate you enough, a good writing formula can be a big help.

This writing system was created by Antonya Nelson, a writer whose work I won’t mention or link to because I don’t believe in other authors getting more attention than me. But take my word for it, she’s a pro who knows her stuff.

Step 1: Write About Something That Happened To You

The first thing you need to do is get words on the page, and there’s no better place to start than your own life. Think of something that would be emotionally resonant. You could write about a priest who molested you, or an uncle who molested you, or the dog you had to put down because you could’ve sworn it somehow was knowingly and purposefully molesting you.

When I used this method, I wrote about my first wife, particularly about how she disappeared shortly after I discovered she was a serial bigamist.

Step 2: Rewrite the Same Story From a Different Point of View

As the counselor in my road rage support group taught me, it’s important to take a step back and see things from other people’s perspectives. This applies just as much to writers.

To most people, it might’ve made sense to tell of my first wife’s bigamy from my perspective. But I realized my disillusionment and heartbreak might be muddied by the fact that I was cheating on her with the woman who would eventually become my second and by far favorite wife. So instead, I wanted to get inside her head and try to explore the psychology of a woman who married others compulsively.

Step 3: Create a Ticking Clock

Stories rely on momentum. In real life, drinking too much on Presidents’ Day might lead to court-ordered community service that derails your efforts to track down your missing wife, but a story can’t have random digressions like these.

A ticking clock not only propels the story forward but also culminates with a climax that readers expect and crave. When I rewrote my story from my wife’s perspective, I gave her a father who was dying of cirrhosis. She had nine months to scrape up enough cash to buy a liver for him on the black market. In real life, I never met Barbara’s family, as she told me they wouldn’t like me because they were racist against the Irish.

Step 4: Introduce Significant Objects

Frodo’s ring. The suitcase in Pulp Fiction. The magic golf club in The Legend of Baggar Vance. Fiction relies on symbols to deepen the meaning of your story.

If you’re lucky, this symbol might already be present in your narrative. But you also want to avoid cliches. Something like an engagement ring would probably come across as tacky. Luckily for me, Barbara and I never exchanged them as we’d gotten married so quickly we both forgot. So instead, I chose a special duffel bag in which she kept all her different fake IDs and cash and wigs.

Step 5: Establish a Transitional Situation

Sometimes this is easy to forget as many of us go to work, write and watch YouTube every single day until we die, but fiction depends on change. Your character must have some significant shift in their life or situation.

For my story, that was easy. It was the moment Barbara decided to leave me. Of course, I had to change the circumstances a bit. In the story, Barbara sneaks up behind me and bashes me on the head when I find the duffel bag in the closet and when I come to, she’s gone. In real life, I discovered Barbara missing after returning from an erotic three-day holiday getaway with my soon-to-be second wife at Disney World.

Step 6: Integrate a World Event

You can do this to be symbolic, to anchor your story in a way that’s more relatable to readers or to help market it.

I played around with a few ideas as I was editing. I first thought about setting it during the French Revolution, for example, but abandoned that idea when I remembered that cell phones didn’t exist then. Instead, to underline the sense of hidden intent and double identities, I set the story during the final season of Hannah Montana.

Step 7: Develop Binary Forces

Jocks vs. Nerds. Snobs vs. Slobs. Shiites vs. Sunnis. All classic rivalries that make for compelling drama and drive the narrative.

In my story, there was already a clear binary. Man vs. Woman. But I wanted to go a bit deeper than that. In real life, I didn’t know Barbara all that well, or at all, really, it turned out. I mean, she said she liked Shakespeare and tennis and hardcore porn just like I did, but I realized these commonalities were probably just part of the con, a way to worm her way into my life.

Anyway, in my story, I established a second binary by having her be in favor of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics while the husband was partial to the Copenhagen interpretation that insists of wave function collapse after measurement takes place.

Step 8: I actually don’t remember step 8

Step 9: Embrace Experimentation

This is usually the point where I tell you to ignore everything I just said and do something completely different. And this article will be no exception.

But, you don’t have to throw away a perfectly good story just because it might still be too embarrassingly close to what happened to you in real life. Keep playing around with the format. Write the story as a Yelp review. Write it as something your character brings up on his friend’s dad’s death bed.  

For me, the only thing I did was change the point of view again, this time to the second person. Turns out lots of people are really insecure about their relationships and I was able to play into their anxieties pretty well.

Top Tips for Crafting the Perfect Story Ending

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Story endings are one of the most things to pull off as a writer. Because of this, it’s going to take me all year to create this video, as I’ll likely have to piece it together little by little.  

Anyway, like sex, a great ending should be an emotional release that all your hard work, all those jogs, all those fasts, all those kegel exercises, culminates in, so to speak.  But unlike sex, a writer needs to at least to attempt to satisfy the person you’re performing for.

It helps to think of some of the great endings of fiction and really analyze why they work so well. The ending of the original Star Wars works so well because it satisfies the audience’s basest, primal bloodlust. We cheer because the hundreds of thousands of sentient beings who are not in our in-group have just suffered an unimaginably painful death.

A great ending should have the following elements: it should resolve your central conflict, it should satisfy the reader, it should illustrate the character’s transformation, and it should take your reader by surprise. To illustrate this point, let’s look at Business As Unusual, a book I just released at the beginning of 2024. The novel follows Tabitha Martin, a young girl trying to make it in the big city while taking care of her sick brother. You can skip ahead if you don’t want any spoilers, but the novel ends with the character’s brother dying.

It solves the central conflict because she’s able to live her life now, it takes the reader by surprise because the brother doesn’t die of cancer but is instead absolutely pancaked by a bus, and it satisfies the reader because Tabitha finally has time to pursue the sexual relationship with her boss that she hinted at by dressing slutty to work.

Now, let’s look at some more general tips that work for all kinds of fiction.

Step One – Know Your Ending Before Writing

You want to take the reader by surprise but not yourself. Wild twists that don’t really make sense just make you look as emotionally unhinged as a drunken secretary who advances on you sexually at an office party even though you barely know each other.

Now, have I written books without knowing the ending in advance? Well, of course. When you write 430 books in 27 years, 13 of those being periods of heavy drug use, both self and externally-administered, things like that are going to happen.

Dawson, a book I wrote as a young man, is a particularly bad example of this. I wrote it without ever knowing who the killer was and in the end I had no choice to make the titular character the killer because his only alibi was that her didn’t remember where he was on the night of the murder.

Step Two – Try Out Different Types of Endings

Despite what many authors might tell you, you don’t have to know your ending in advance. Write three or four different endings. If you find one that surprises you, it may surprise readers even more.  

It can be very liberating as a writer, too. We don’t get to choose different endings in life. We may have let a job opportunity go by and spend the rest of our life regretting it. Or we might spend our days casually flirting with bar patrons, yoga classmates and coworkers with the vain optimism that one will eventually match the charisma and beauty of your second wife, only to have them bore you with the details of their similarly depressing life.

Step Three – Leave Room For Interpretation

This can depend on the kind of story you’re writing. If you’re writing a series, you may want to tease that the villain might’ve survived the final battle. And some very powerful pieces of fiction have ambiguous endings that readers may argue over. Call Me By Your Name and American Psycho are two great examples, as is a recent novel that I’ve had to remove from the market for reason I won’t get into. All I’ll say is that this book ends with the main character finally free to pursue a romance she’s wanted the whole book, but it doesn’t tell us her final decision.

But real life is messy like that. Sometimes people say things that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Like, imagine your secretary walks into your office at five o’clock and asks, “Would you like me to stay late?” How would you interpret that?

Sure, it could mean, “I am willing to stay late to reduce the amount of work you have to do.” But it could also mean, “I can’t wait until everyone else leaves so it’s just the two of us alone.”

Anyway, as I’ve often told my lawyer, it totally makes sense why two people might interpret that differently.

Step Four – Tie Up All The Loose Ends

Fiction should be neat and tidy, unlike real life. Look, I’m a busy man. I can’t be writing twenty books a year, running a publishing company, doing this web series, all while remembering every conversation I have with every person. This libel stuff… it’s just a desperate plea for attention from someone who could barely be a receptionist, let alone someone who thinks she knows the ins and outs of libel laws as it applies to fiction.

And the sexual harassment stuff is just… I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. I’ve had lots of people come through my office doors and like most bosses I have had sexual relations with a few of them, so that right there already tells you I didn’t target Tiffany specifically. In fact, I was sleeping with two other office assistants while we were in a relationship. So how could there be a quid pro quo if I was getting it from multiple people? Was I playing favorites with all of them? That doesn’t even follow basic logic.

Anyway, back to the libel stuff… if Tiffany had ever listened to my advice, she’d know that’s what a great writer does; he gets inspired by the world around him. Now she wants to take down the company that paid her salary for an entire seven months? Give me a fucking break.

The Art of Travel Writing

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Imagine that you’re sitting at a sidewalk cafe in a foreign city. You put your book down. You take a moment to savor the unfamiliar flavors, to smell the unfamiliar aromas, to listen to heated conversations in an unknown language, to watch plainclothes police drag a screaming woman into a panel van. And you think to yourself, somebody ought to write a book about this place. If nothing else, I hope this article shows you that travel writing isn’t just for wives of hedge-fund managers desperate to prove their life isn’t worthless.

So what is travel writing? Travel writing is a loosely-defined genre that includes travelogues, guidebooks, memoirs, travel journalism, snapchats from Phuket, Yelp reviews of Vegas brothels, and letters to the consulate to get you out of Moroccan prison. For the sake of brevity, we won’t focus on those last few.

The first question you might be asking is, Do I actually have to travel to these places to write about them? Of course not. Travel can be expensive, dangerous, and mind-numbingly boring. Hell, I’ve written travel books about Damascus, Port-Au-Prince and Jackson, Mississippi and God knows I’d never be caught dead in any of those places. But if you don’t travel to the place you’re going to write about, you’ll need to put in extra work on Wikipedia, Google street view and watching movies filmed in that location to make sure you get things right.

For the rest of this article, however, we’ll assume you tricked your boss with a fake family death to get enough time off to actually travel to these places.

Step One: Write From a Unique Point of View

Remember, you are writing as a traveler and an outsider to the community you’re visiting. Now, it’s possible far-flung regions like India and China have had talented native writers who’ve written about their homeland, but that’s not what you’re going for. Take your reader into account and think about what value they hope to get from your writing. Do you hope to help them navigate this strange land when they visit? Do you want to share some off-the-beaten path sights away from the large tourist traps? Do you want to tell them where they can purchase a child bride, so they make sure to stay away from that spot?

However, it’s also important to be aware of your biases. It’s best to write in the first-person. Travel writing should have the intimacy of a diary and this way the reader is aware of your subjectivity. So, for example, your readers will understand that your local hosts might not be so open-minded to slaughtering street dogs for meat as you are. 

Step Two: Be Honest

Whether it’s a local dish you found to be disappointing or an old high school you’re certain is being used as a death camp, it’s important to be honest about your experiences as a traveler. Your reader will want those moments of authenticity. Not all trips are sunny beaches, picturesque vistas and nubile masseuses who allow roaming free of charge. Make sure to share those dead ends, scams and overrated traps as well.

In my most successful travelogue about my time in Bahrain, I wrote about a misunderstanding at the local pharmacy. While I asked for Advil, I was instead taken into a backroom and asked to deliver endangered osprey eggs to a government official in Hong Kong. While my publication of the incident means I’ll be executed if I ever return to Bahrain, it did make for a great story. This brings me to my next point.

Step Three: Interact with locals

Your reader, like you, want to absorb as much local flavor as possible and that’s not possible without at least trying to engage with the locals. Even if you don’t speak the language, pay attention to their body language. When I was in France, I couldn’t count how many people would stick their middle finger up to me as I passed them on the street. A local guide said it was their way of complementing my attire.

If you can get a translator or know someone who speaks English, soak up as many stories as you can. In Pakistan I met Hashim, a young man with a great passion for computer engineering. Many things about Hashim struck me as unique: his eagerness to share his life’s details, the way he’d hold my hand in public, or run his finger through my hair, his comfort sleeping next to me, completely in the nude, no modesty about hiding his erection. And though he was forcibly removed from my hotel and I never saw him again, I like to think he lives on in my writing.

Step Four: Stay up-to-date

If there’s one constant in world history, it’s that there are no constants. Borders, kings, queens, and laws regarding drug trafficking change constantly. Czechoslovakia became the Czech Republic which became Czechia which is now just Kia.

You never know when a war might breakout during one of your trips. This is just an unfortunate reality you’ll have to accept. When I was in Yemen in 2014, nobody could’ve predicted this prosperous, stable nation with prompt, efficient room service was moments away from civil war.

But you don’t want to publish something outdated or look out-of-touch. Don’t do what I did and release a whole book about the wonderful bathhouses of Afghanistan in October 2001. So you have two choices: get a publisher who keeps a close eye on the news, or write about places that never change.