How To Write Complex Villains (from the HR Department to United Airlines)

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From the cashier who refuses to bag your groceries to the co-worker who threatens to report you just for saying you like the way her dress hangs off her body, villains are an inseparable part of our daily lives. As a writer, villains fill an equally commanding role in your fiction, driving the conflict, defining the hero’s journey and giving your reader that extra little thrill to keep them engaged. In today’s article, we’ll look at ways to create unforgettable villains without resorting to gender, ethnic or class stereotypes no matter how true they might be.

Just like in real-life, villains in fiction come in many forms. For example, we have villains who are shadowy reflections of our protagonist. They might mirror the journey, the experiences, the worldview or the methods of the protagonist. Batman and the Joker are a perfect example of this. For example, they both operate outside the law, they both wear makeup and they both keep a younger sidekick around decked in tight-fitted clothing to distract opponents.

Next, we have the corrupt villain. These are villains who utilize great their power and resources and the mechanisms of the large systems they control to enact their evil. They’re Mafia dons who have the police in their pocket. They’re crooked senators who steal taxpayer money to give Medicare to lazy welfare queens. They’re Chinese people.

Then we have The Force of Nature villains. These are beasts, monsters, zombies, plagues, uncontrollable psychopaths, menstruating women, vampires, Chinese people again, swarms of locusts, Napoleon’s armies, swarms of vampires, tornadoes, despite the title, pretty much all stories about robots or androids, tsunamis, lahars, which are a sort of mudslide full of pyroclastic material and debris which can occur even without being triggered by volcanic activity and threaten the Pacific Northwest in particular, heroin, electricity and the corrupting influence of big boobies.

Finally, we have the anti-villain. These guys go against our protagonist, but actually we kind of end up sympathizing with them because they often make a pretty damn good point. We sympathize with Thanos because making a stupid decision like eradicating half of all life instead of just doubling all resources is totally a brainfart we’d have. We sympathize with Hannibal Lector because being a therapist and listening to people’s problems all day would probably drive us to cannibalism, too. We sympathize with Misery’s Annie Wilkes because who hasn’t wanted break the legs of an author who wrote a book that sucked. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Now, let’s look at some tips to make our villains shine their brightest.

Step One: Choose a real-life model

Famous authors do this all the time. Pennywise was largely inspired by John Wayne Gacy, Vlad the Impaler was the inspiration for Dracula and Monster’s Aileen Wuornos was largely based off of Hilary Clinton. And yes, while people like Clinton, Kamala Harris, AOC or Ilhan Omar would probably inspire great villains,  you don’t have to limit your search to the headlines. In my 2013 thriller Game, Set and Match, the murderer was based on a woman from my tennis club who rudely refused to let me give her pointers.

Step Two: Give them believable and even relatable motivation

In real life, villains don’t need much reason to commit crimes. Child killers, for example, do it because it’s fun and it’s easy. But in fiction, your reader will engage more if the villain has a relatable reason for doing bad things. Maybe they’re out for revenge (Dr. Freeze). Maybe they think watching rich, powerful people kill each other is funny (Iago). Maybe they think it’s better if women aren’t left to their own devices (Handmaid’s Tale). So I suggest thinking of something you want from life and making your villain get it through any means necessary. If your neighbor has a loud dog, make your villain a dog murderer.  If your dealing with rent hikes, make your villain a squatter who refuses to respect property rights.

Step Three: Don’t skimp on the backstory

Most people aren’t born evil. Upbringing and unfortunate circumstances play a large role in nurturing evil in the real world. For example, we all know that Bernie Sanders’s radical and evil Communist policies wouldn’t exist were it not for his brother being gangraped by Rockefellers. In fiction, you can give your villain a tragic backstory or at least depict the conditions that led to their rise. Like how Norman Bates’s overbearing and controlling mother led to his psychosis. Or how Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia was due to him being born in France.

Step Four: Introduce them with a bang

I’ll never forget that first moment I saw Darth Vader, walking down that corridor, trying to stop those Wookies from celebrating Life Day. Give your reader a clear message from the outset that this a bad dude you don’t want to mess with. Have them steal from an orphan. Have them blow up a convent. Have them blow up a convent filled with stolen orphans. Or tone it down and have them do a normal activity, but in a sinister way. Like tai qi in the nude or fencing in the nude.

Six HACKS To Help You Write Faster

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Whether you’re a nonfiction essayist, a novelist who’s trying to finish a manuscript under a deadline, or just a YouTuber trying to write a script for a six-hour video explaining why all the female characters in a Star War or Marvel movie are too woke, everyone wants to write faster.

As someone who’s written over 429 novels, you might assume that writing speed was never a problem for me. But it wasn’t always this way. Back when I was a young man, living on the streets of Phoenix, worried I’d have to sell my body for food, all I had was a desire to get published (and a knowledge of which street corners had the most reliable action after midnight.) Anyway, my first book took me over two years to write, and it was barely over 90 pages.

There were many things that were holding me back, but one thing I want to make clear is that it wasn’t writer’s block. I wrote almost every day, squeezing in quick sessions between hawking fake jewelry outside gas stations. I’ll cover many other tips in the video, but the key problem I had was that I was a perfectionist. I was just certain that my story about a down-on-his-luck graduate student who has to choose between finishing his degree and hunting down the serial killer who murdered his sister was going to launch me to instant critical acclaim. But I soon found out that, in the publishing industry, quantity always trumps quality. We’ll write until our fingers bleed on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Okay, now if you are worried about your writing speed, it may be helpful to start by analyzing why you write slowly in the first place. The following is a list of things that might be slowing down your writing speed:

  • Lack of an outline
  • Not setting a goal, aside from proving that dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about
  • Editing while you write
  • Eating while you write
  • Having a family
  • Edging while you write
  • A keyboard missing the letter “e”
  • Sending veiled threats to haters on social media
  • Using a computer that still runs on Windows XP
  • Ghosts in the hotel in which you’re writing asking you to kill your family
  • Wasting your time watching writing advice videos on YouTube
  • And constantly worrying you’re a piece of shit who will accomplish nothing

Now, what’s a good writing speed? This depends on several things: how old you are, how fat your fingers are, your brain pan, et cetera. But most writers try to get at least 1,000 words a day, which should be easily accomplished in two hours. At that pace, it will only take you 80 days to write an average-sized novel. To put it in perspective, that amount of time is the equivalent of bingeing both seasons Milf Manor three times. Not such a big time commitment when you think about it that way.

Now, let’s look at some ways we can easily get 1000 words in under two hours.

Tip 1 – Reward Yourself For Hitting Certain Word Counts

Humans are, evolutionarily-speaking, rather simple creatures. Like a chimp that agrees to administer a shock to their chimp family member in exchange for a banana, humans are driven by selfish impulses.

It doesn’t have to be a big reward. Maybe a nice cup of coffee, maybe a dessert, maybe a quick episode of Milf Manor. For myself, I set a weekly goal. If I hit 10000 words for the week, I reward myself with a nice relaxing drive past my second wife’s house when I know her new husband isn’t there.

Tip 2 – Set Punishments for Distractions

A writer needs to know what fascist and authoritarian governments have known for a long time: negative reinforcement works.

Be strict about distractions. Turn off your internet while you write. Keep all of your favorite guns out of your writing space. But you have to also set consequences for getting distracted. What I do is have my assistant monitor my computer remotely while I write. If she catches me watching porn, she uses a burner to call the police and say there’s a violent pedophile living at my home address. I find that my fear of incarceration or at least an uncomfortable discussion with the cops keeps me in line while I write.

Tip 3 – Beat Your Keyboard Into Submission

This is a tip which, like many life lessons, I learned from Finding Forrester. Your fingers should be an extension of the confidence you have in your writing. Much like saying your own name repeatedly while having sex with someone, your brain will subconsciously think you’re doing a good job and make you perform better. I go through at least two or three typewriters while writing each one of my books.

Tip 4 – Use Focus Apps

If you don’t want to go so far as risking your incarceration, there are apps which can help with distractions. My favorite is a Russian one called Freedom Blocker. It locks your computer to stop you from looking at news articles while also emitting a type of white noise that is supposed to suppress all thought outside of the task at hand. It’s been scientifically tested on labor camp detainees and you’ll really notice a difference.

Tip 5 – Set a Marathon Day (Or Marathon Fortnight)

Sometimes just having a routine isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to make a big push. You can get 10 or 20 thousand words down so long as you can convince your wives you have a devastating illness that your kids haven’t been vaccinated for yet, and if you haven’t used the “my grandpa died” excuse twice already with your boss.

Tip 6 – Get Healthy

Speaking of death and illnesses, lots of writers forget how important your bodily health is to your mind. I wasn’t like this as a young man, but now I find that jogging helps me sleep better, reduces my real illnesses so I don’t miss writing days and I’m much less distracted by all the horrible trauma my father and the whore who raised me inflicted upon me. And think about it. Is it a coincidence that George RR Martin hasn’t finished A Song of Fire and Ice and that he looks like this?

“Your Honor, I Only Did What I Did Because I Didn’t Think I’d Get Caught”

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Photo by Donald Tong: https://www.pexels.com/photo/rear-view-of-a-silhouette-man-in-window-143580/

“I didn’t mean for it to end like this. I realize that now as I stand before you, humbled, manacled, stripped of my dignity, deprived of my freedom. No, your Honor, despite what you and others may think, if I could turn back time I would absolutely keep committing crimes for decades while living a life of comparative comfort and luxury.”

“I’ll admit I made mistakes. Looking back, I’d say the most obvious one was getting caught. I shouldn’t have answered that door when the police arrived with their search warrant. And I shouldn’t have used my real identity to register those P.O. boxes. And I most certainly shouldn’t have used my work computer to login as the admin for the websites connected to my Iraqi dinar mail fraud scheme. It shames me to think I didn’t hide my tracks better.”

“However, your Honor, I hope the court understands I took no pleasure in getting caught. Being handcuffed and imprisoned gave me no joy. I was intransigent during all my interrogations, disrespectful throughout these proceedings, and I soiled myself behind closed doors when my court-appointed attorney insisted I take a plea deal, first out of fear and later just to spite him.”

“Speaking of my attorney, he has appealed for leniency under false pretenses. He says because I am a first-time offender, my sentence should be reduced. On the contrary, my present incarceration is the only thing keeping me from committing more crimes. I enjoy crimes and have enjoyed them for a long time. I enjoyed them up until the police officer punched me in the face for spitting all over the windows of his squad car.”

“However, your Honor, while I knew there might be consequences for my actions, I really, really hoped there wouldn’t be. If you knew what my childhood was like, you’d understand. Framing my best friend for a hit-and-run, stealing my mother’s money and blaming it on my Portuguese au pair, having my father’s interns falsify my grades when applying to Duke: these experiences, while they don’t excuse my behavior, will hopefully explain why I thought I could get away with it.”

“As for the families I’ve affected, I can’t help but not think about them. After all, they didn’t get caught. They didn’t get their freedom taken away, didn’t bruise their spine trying to jump over the bailiff and escape the court house, and they didn’t lose their houses. Well, except for the ones who went all in and converted their life savings into a worthless currency.”

“The past is the past, though, and I only have the power to change my future. I promise to strive for personal reform. I hope prison gives me the opportunity to make connections and learn about other, more lucrative criminal schemes. I hope to eventually assume a position of leadership so I can counsel others like myself, those who want nothing more than to not get caught a second time.”

“Thank you, your Honor, for your time and patience. I hope you understand that when I said I’d break into your house and rob you blind the moment I got out of prison, I was only speaking figuratively. As for my racially-insensitive outbursts, I think we can chalk that up to my ignorance of proper legal procedure.”

“The only other thing I ask for is your forgiveness. And maybe letting it slide this time.”

How Writers Can Deal With Stalkers

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Today’s article is the first in our Platinum Club Series, which will cover topics targeting the more successful subscribers of channel, established writers who are starting to see some solid book sales. We’ll cover topics from investing your book revenue in high-yield bonds to what to do with a dead hooker to what to do with an alive hooker.

Authors who’ve sold 1,000 copies of their book will gain immediate membership in our Platinum Club. But for those who know their big break is right around the corner and want to plan ahead, you can also gain membership by purchasing five D&E Publishing titles and submitting the receipts to my sister’s son Bradley, at this email.

totallyrealemailaddress@notafake.com

And we’ll kick off the series with one of the first markers of writing success: being followed by a dangerous, unstable stranger. Having a stalker can be a terrifying and flattering experience, and it can be tough to balance your fear of being gunned down in your doorway with your need to be constantly praised. We’ll keep our eyes open and move to an undisclosed location, on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, the first question you might have is, John, haven’t the internet, Covid, the obesity epidemic and rising gas prices moved stalking online now? Excellent question but you’re getting ahead of me. We’ll talk about online stalking in a bit, but for the sake of this video, we’ll assume you’re popular enough (or at least have a hot enough mouth) to get another human to overcome all of those obstacles (and the increasingly inclement weather produced by climate change) to follow you to your home.

Today’s video will be broken into four parts:

  • Identifying if you’re being stalked
  • Distancing yourself
  • Collecting evidence
  • Asking for help

What is stalking?

According to the judge at my second wife and my custody hearing, stalking is repeated and unwanted contact. But that can be vague. After all, if that were true, I’d never legally be able to hire anyone.

And when I first made it big, I often confused my postal carrier and the local census worker as a stalker. But unlike those guys, a stalker needs to be someone who follows you even after you’ve put up some resistance.

Types of stalkers

Most stalkers want the same thing the rest of us do: love. If you’re a man like me, with an incredible sex drive, it can be difficult to know you’re being stalked by a pretty woman.

Let me share a story: I knew this woman once, a large breasted college student named Daphne who also happened to be double-jointed. Daphne was a big fan and introduced herself to me after I gave a reading on campus. We ended up having sex that night, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, that’s when the stalking began.

She’d make me take her to restaurants and movies, and she’d complain if we didn’t talk for at least thirty minutes every day. She’d come over to my house after work and even suggested moving in with me and paying her share of the rent. I kept having sex with her obviously. But if I had realized how much danger I was putting myself in, I might have acted differently. My advice: Don’t let the people you are intimate with try to be a part of your life.

Though less common, there are other types of stalkers. Death obsessives who wanted to involve you in their murder-suicide, cannibals, who just want a taste of greatness, and child stalkers, who will claim you impregnated their mom 15 years ago before you switched towns.

Avoid Unintentional Signs or Messages

So, once you realize you’re being stalked, it’s important you don’t escalate the situation. When I came on Daphne’s face or did other things I can’t mention on this channel, I was symbolically suggesting that I didn’t mind being stalked.

The best thing to do is just stay completely silent, otherwise you might erroneously send mixed messages. A simple phrase like “Go away” might seem straightforward enough, but to a stalker only proficient in Choctaw, they might assume that you meant “Explore my body.”

Hide Your Personal Information

When I was a hungry young writer, I put my phone number and email address on the front cover of all my books. At the time, it seemed like the easiest way to get the attention of literary agents and publishers. I stopped doing that once I started selling my books at actual bookstores, but unfortunately, a few enterprising fans found the few copies of those early books that weren’t incinerated. And while I don’t think I would’ve minded receiving daily locks of Daphne’s hair in the mail, you might not know where that hair is coming from. But speaking of…

Collecting evidence

If a stalking case gets really out of hand, you might need to do a little stalking back at them. Keep any messages they send you. Record any phone calls. Follow them to their home. Turn it into a descriptive writing exercise, if you don’t want to waste precious writing time.

In Daphne’s case, I memorized the locations of all the moles on her body, the location of her parents’ summer house, and I even collected a sizeable amount of her urine. (Which is something I do for all my female companions, stalker or otherwise, just so I can get a third-party pregnancy test.)

Contact the authorities

If you have a dog you don’t particularly like, you could consider calling the police. While they’ll most likely ignore you, especially if you’re a woman, it will at least be nice to get all your frustrations off your chest. And it’s certainly cheaper than therapy.

Notify your friends, family and co-workers

This one comes with a caveat. If you are being cyberstalked, it’s very likely that you actually know the person who is doing it. It could be a family member who’s upset you didn’t include their ideas in your latest novel, or a coworker who doesn’t understand why you used a phony cancer GoFundMe to fund your marketing campaign.

If you are that rare type of writer with a loving family and supportive friends, you could enlist them to help you scare the stalker away. If you don’t have that, and YouTube analytics tells me it’s likely, you could also post about it on social media.

Of course, your followers could help you, but this could also lead to a multitude of copycat stalkers. If you are very lucky, it may even lead to some sort of battle royale situation, where, after days of unspeakable bloodshed, one final stalker reigns supreme, and sickened by the senseless violence, your champion stalker realizes the error of their ways and decides to walk the Earth to in search of meaning.

How to Write Strong Female Characters

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Compelling characters come in all shapes and sizes but for a long time writers assumed that shape was generally 176 centimeters, 71 kilos, with a high center of gravity and without the ability to ovulate. In the past few years however, writers have come to realize people are willing to consume literature with conflicts centering around characters who are female. We’ll look at ways to create strong compelling, independent characters that just happen to have large breasts on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, you might be thinking, hey John, why are you doing this video? Haven’t there been many great examples of female characters in hundreds of years of English fiction? Well, yes and no. While you will find some female characters in works by Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen, they aren’t what we’d call psychologically complex. Women in these stories were often docile damsels (Elizabeth Bennet), one-dimensional witches (Lady Scottish Play) or nagging shrews (Joan of Arc).

In most of these stories, the female characters weren’t given much to do. The largest conflict they might face is whether or not they should have sex with their cousin. Or they were simply female versions of male characters (Miss Marple) sold to prevent nineteenth and early twentieth century housewives from succumbing to boredom and turning to laudanum.

However, with advances in technology like the birth control pill, the Hitachi vibrator and the iPhone, things have changed. Readers today want complex female protagonists. Some even want women to spend a whole scene with no males present, though personally I find that a bit stifling as a writer. So what does our strong modern female look like?

She should have the following characteristics. First, she should have her own opinions. Not just about what to cook for dinner or which abortion doctor is her favorite, but even for things like battle strategy or which whiskey pairs well with which cigar. Her unique value system should guide her decisions and often times those might take her in the wrong direction, but at least it gets her out of the house.

Second, she should be her own person. That doesn’t mean she should be totally independent necessarily. If you want to give your female protagonist a husband, just make sure she maintains that independence by cheating on him a lot. Or if you go the other way and make her part of a satanic lesbian coven, maybe she manifests her independence by taking a painting class at the learning annex.

Thirdly, she should have a certain level of toughness. And not just the kind of toughness that comes from enduring childbirth or dealing with your clique of friends constantly critiquing your body weight. This kind of toughness could be, for example, a defense attorney building a case for a man she knew to be a pedophile who also was her youth volleyball coach and father. In my espionage thriller, 39 Days to Doomsday, for example, my female protagonist, an intelligence official, has to bear the guilt of blowing up 45 Palestinian villages in her search for the head of Hamas.

Now that we’ve established what a strong female character is, I have four tips to help you create one on your own.

Step One: Give her flaws

Like their male counterparts, flawed females make for compelling protagonists. Try to avoid cliches, like making her bad at pull ups or mentioning she earns 77 percent what her male co-workers do. You could give her a flaw irrespective of gender, one that you’d give any male protagonist. For example, she could get sexual gratification from fighting with or spitting on strangers on public transit. Or you could give her something uniquely female, but with more originality. For example, in my 2003 Western Whither the Roses Blow, my female lead had ovarian cancer.

Step Two: Give her female allies

When I was starting out as a writer and trying to find ways to implement female characters in my writing, it was difficult writing one female surrounded by a cast of males and not have it devolve into a gangbang. The best way around this is to surround her with other females, unless of course your book is about a satanic lesbian coven. Some good pairings include: mother-daughter, sister-sister, grandmother-aunt, first cousin-second cousin once removed, pregnant woman-lamaze instructor. Try to have them talk about things women might discuss in real life that don’t specifically revolve around men, like whaling and how to deal with the threat of Sharia law.

Step Three: Base your female characters on someone you know

The problem a lot of male and even some female writers have is that they try to base their characters on what they’ve seen in movies. But we all know Hollywood actresses and models aren’t exactly emblematic of actual womanhood. In real life, most women are fat, old, decrepit, missing teeth, and just generally unpleasant to look at.

Mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers are a great place to start. But if you’re like me and all of those have died, you still have options. You can hire prostitutes, for example, not for sexual services but for interesting anecdotes. Normal rates still apply, but you’ll be amazed at how the depth of human despair becomes a goldmine for you as a writer. If money is an issue, you can consider joining support groups under false pretenses and only listening to the women.

Step Four: If you have to dwell on her body parts, make it integral to the story

In my first 100 novels, I bestowed all 25 women with speaking parts double-d breasts and I hadn’t even realized it until a female friend pointed it out. As a male writer, it was an honest and understandable mistake, but something you should consciously try to avoid.

However, if you’re too far along in the story and you’ve already got some wonderfully vivid prose depicting your heroine’s mammary abundance that you don’t want to delete, find a way to make it pay off in the third act. Perhaps her d cups take a bullet for a friend. Or perhaps they lead to her downfall, for instance, a refusal to get breast reduction surgery makes her not able escape the villain’s lair.

These Mistakes Can Ruin Your Book’s Climax

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Do you ever find that you feel like you’re doing very well, but when you get to the end, what you finished with really didn’t pack any punch, it wasn’t what you were hoping for and everyone walks away unsatisfied? Okay, now what about as a writer instead of a sexual partner?

Disappointment is a fact of life most writers have grown accustomed to. We disappoint our bosses by spending most of our time doing edits instead of correctly filing prescription orders. We disappoint our countrymen by crashing from the amphetamines we took for a writing marathon, sleeping 24 hours straight and forgetting to vote. We disappoint our wives by sleeping with our girlfriends, we disappoint our girlfriends by sleeping with our mistresses and we disappoint our mistresses by calling them the names of our wives or girlfriends or sex addiction therapist.

And all of that is okay. In real life, being a disappointment is nothing to be disappointed about. After all, none of this matters and the universe will end in heat death trillions of years from now having not acknowledged our existence at all. However, in your fiction it does matter. You could write a wonderful book with vivid, relatable characters… tense conflict… and lyrical prose, but if the climax disappoints, all of that will be forgotten and you’ll probably be harassed so badly on social media you’ll have to move to a new town.

What a climax really is is you fulfilling a promise to your reader, at least the ones who paid money to read your book. In keeping with this theme, I will slowly tease the story of how I met my second wife and climax with a graphic story of the first time we boned. (I obviously realize you could just skip to that point in the video by clicking, by I will ignore that for now.) We’ll totally not blow it on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, you might assume that the climax of a story is somewhere in the middle, as this terrible graph by Freytag seems to indicate. But as we talked about before on this channel, Freytag was speaking about classic Greek drama and he was mostly concerned with exterminating Polish people. In modern literature, a climax is basically what we think of as the end, where the main problem is resolved and all the tension you’d been building is released. If the sex metaphors make you uncomfortable, you can think of it this way: the climax is the point in the party where everyone’s arrived, the awkwardness has faded and the conversation flows naturally, but before the cops arrive or the guy you didn’t invite pukes on your rug.

Or, if you’re an American, you can also think of the climax as the 90’s in general.

Now, pulling off a good climax can be tricky business. Aside from not having an interesting name, a weak climax is the main reason I reject a prospective author’s manuscript. Here’s some tips to remember.

Mistake 1: Neglecting Character Transformation

Remember, a story isn’t about the things that happen. It’s about how the things that happen change your character. Your climax isn’t about the character defeating the villain. It’s about the character learning that, to defeat evil, you might have to break your moral code and push the villain the wheelchair down the stairs.

When I met the woman who became my second wife, I was much too trusting, which is how I ended up marrying a woman who was a serial bigamist. But as you’ll see, not trusting people is what led me to my second wife.

Mistake 2: Substituting a climax for a cliffhanger

Now, don’t get me wrong. A cliffhanger can be a great thing in real life. Having a workforce that was never sure whether or not they’d receive a Christmas bonus has made for great productivity, I’ve found. But a story needs to be complete.

I don’t have time to read your whole series. In fact, the only things I’ll read are your name, your first sentence, your climax and, time-permitting, your social media feed to make sure there’s nothing about NAMBLA in it.

Today’s story won’t end on any cliffhangers. My second wife and I met at Disney World. I was supposed to take my firstborn son, who was seven at the time, but he fell ill with the flu so I went by myself. She first caught my eye when I noticed her sitting in the back of the flume on Splash Mountain. It was then I knew I needed to have her.  

Mistake 3: Not using a crucible

A climax should feel unavoidable. It should be destiny. It should feel the way I felt when my dad locked me in a room with a hired prostitute at 18 to turn me into a man.

A crucible, in literary terms, is an inescapable situation for your characters. It should be a combination of the choices they’ve made along the way and outside pressures. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo is constantly compelled to Mordor for the climax. As Tolkien tells it, only Frodo can bring the ring there. In my story, Heartland, the main character is the only one with two hearts and therefore is the only one who can be a donor for the ailing mayor.

With Cindy, things felt unavoidable for a variety of reasons. When I introduced myself, it turned out she actually knew my work, even though I was a just minor success at the time. To add to that, we got put on the It’s a Small World boat alone and the ride broke down.

Mistake 4: Using cheats

Deus ex machina is one of the most common kinds, but there are lots of similar cheats. Basically, any surprise you introduce in the climax must be at least hinted at at some earlier point in the story. Think of the stupid fucking ghost army in Lord of the Rings or Batman’s utility belt in the otherwise logical, measured 1966 version of Batman.

So if I hadn’t mentioned that Cindy was already a fan of mine or hadn’t shown you the John Lazarus massage rod, the following scene would feel cheap.

So anyway, it started with Cindy…

[This section of the article has been removed for violating WordPress guidelines.]

Book Trailers Are More Effective Than You Might Think

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What you just saw was the trailer we made for Blake Colby’s Blood Shot, which we made back in 2017. And while the main reason I posted the trailer for that book is that D&E earns all the proceeds from Blood Shot as Blake Colby has died and had no next of kin, I also do it to show just how effective a book trailer can be.

This web series has been about many things—exorcising my personal demons, giving me something to do while I recovered from eye surgery, making horny and desperate middle-aged female readers know that I’m single—but the biggest thing I’ve tried to teach you is how you can promote your work in many different ways. In an overcrowded marketplace, a book trailer is another great way to get eyes on your work. But unlike a movie trailer, you’re going to need to actually put some effort into this. We’ll use heartbreaking piano motifs and make words fade in and out on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, the first question you have might be… is a book trailer really worth it? I mean, what kind of nerdy loser actually watches book trailers? While that’s a very legitimate question, it’s important to remember that nerdy losers are probably your target demographic. After all, since they have no friends, they have a lot of extra free time to spend at home reading, and never going on dates and being so agoraphobic they need to forgo eating out, traveling and all live entertainment, means they’re the type of people with enough disposable income to spend on an unknown author’s book.

And an author needs to remember that they should get the most bang for their buck. This is why I get my unpaid interns to do double up and do custodial duty and also why I turned my third wedding into our company team-building retreat. As for your trailer, once your book launches you can easily repurpose this trailer as an ad for your book on Amazon.

With all that in mind, we still need to create this thing, and reading the entire first chapter, or putting a bunch of porn next to your book cover isn’t going to cut it. To illustrate how to really do this thing, I’m going to take a famous book and I’m going to create a trailer for it step by step. Because it’ll be helpful to do a book everyone knows, I’m going to make one for J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Step 1: Think of a good hook

Remember, in a hook you do these three things. You introduce your main character, explain their goal and tell us what’s stopping them from getting it. It’s exactly like being on a first date.

For The Catcher in the Rye, it might be something like “Holden Caulfield is just a regular kid, trying to get laid and prove he’s better than everyone else, but a world of phonies has made it their mission to stop him.”

But beyond just the plot, you want to think of other things that might hook readers. A unique setting might work. A place like Ohio, for instance, will draw readers who want a book that’s really depressing. If you want to sell that your book is really scary, use a jump scare that shows a horrible disgusting creature.

Step 2: It should contain your voice

It’s always good to remember that this whole thing is about you. You are the star. If you lack confidence to admit that, you need to practice in front of a mirror, preferably nude. Look yourself in the eye and tell yourself that you are a star. It’s gotten to the point I can’t fall asleep without doing so.

And your reader should get a sense of your personality from your trailer, just like they do with your writing. If you’re funny, tell a joke. If you’re poetic, make sure things rhyme.

Your viewer needs to make a connection. They need to follow you on a journey. When I see a terrible ad like this, I hate it because I can tell it was written by a committee. But an ad like this speaks to me, makes me think a guy just like me wrote it. I’ll follow that person’s lead. Anyway, if this were The Catcher in the Rye, I would hope that at least half the audience would walk away wanting to kill John Lennon.

Step 3: Get images and video with thematic connections

This is honestly the most important part and almost everything else I said in the video was probably pretty pointless. Because a trailer is essentially visual. Obviously, stock footage is the cheapest and easiest option, even if most of it makes no sense. But if you have the time and a decent camera, get experimental. When I made a spy thriller, I was trying to convey a sense of fear and paranoia so I decided that CCTV footage of my employees leaving work late at night when that serial killer was on the loose was a great way to do that.

Since The Catcher in the Rye is mostly about trying to get laid, I would obviously have lots of prostitutes in the trailer. But it’s a bit empty to say that only sex sells. If I were J.D. Salinger, I might just fill my trailer with dead-eyed dolls to symbolize all the phonies.

Step 4: Find the right music

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that we as a society have basically decided that music is free. Except for, like, Metallica, you can pretty much steal anybody’s music and put it in your trailer.

The bad part is that sound editing is hard as hell. Which not only is time consuming, but also makes you feel bad for stealing this music in the first place.

How to Build Your Author Brand… and start getting some recognition

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

I want you to imagine walking into a bookshop one day with nothing particular in mind to buy. You pull a book at random from out of the shelves and start reading the back cover. You discover it’s about a cabal of murderous cardinals trying to kill the pope or something and only some renowned history professor or art critic or whatever can stop them. You assume it’s a satire or at least a pulpy adventure story with a good sense of humor, but the first few pages reveal it to be an overly serious, 500-page slog. You put the novel back on the shelf and never think about it again. What you don’t realize is that, with proper author branding, the book I described sold millions of copies and wowed readers worldwide. We’ll learn how author branding can establish a deep emotional connection between readers and authors and eliminate the need to always write good books on this installment of Stories’ Matter.

Author branding is essentially how you are perceived by your audience and your identity as a writer. As an author you’ll need some unique hook beyond the pages of your writing to capture your audience’s trust, respect and admiration. 

Before you start building your brand, I suggest asking yourself three questions:

1. How am I unique?

I realize this is a tough question. Very few of us are truly exceptional, and most of the exceptional ones are devious sexual predators who wouldn’t blink an eye about poisoning the water supply. Still, if not you, think hard about what sets your work apart.

For me, I had to consult with family and neighbors, who were the only people who read them, to find that connective thread. It wasn’t until then I realized that, aside from brutal violence against women, almost all my books depicted heroes overcoming great odds in unexpected ways.

Now, personally I’m not especially heroic. Just to give an example, spiders terrify me and also I’ve watched three different people drown in lakes without swimming in to save them. Still, with successful branding, people often see John Lazarus as synonymous with atypical acts of heroism. 

2. What is the psychology of my readers? What do they need from me?

Except for the desperately ugly, retirees whose children don’t love them and literal bibliophiles, most people don’t consume books compulsively. The average American only reads 1.3 books every year. So how can you make sure you’re that one book and not that .3 book? Well, think about value you hope to bring to your readers through your work.

Will they learn how to manipulate someone into sex? Will they get to experience a story that involves action AND comedy? Will they discover that licensed psychologists can’t report past crimes to police regarding drowning bodies?

3. Am I attractive? Can I make myself more attractive?

There’s good news and bad news with this one. The bad news is that most fake beards to hide your lack of a jawline won’t stay on long enough for book readings, signings and meet and greets. The good news is that for writers, the bar of attractiveness is pretty low.

But while Henry James and Emily Dickinson could blame it on typhus and tuberculosis, you’ll have to at least attempt to make it look like you didn’t emerge from a long shift at White Castle in the Louisiana bayou. I suggest applying as much makeup as possible. Women think Kylie Jenner, men think Disintegration-era Robert Smith. Lose weight by walking at least 500 steps a day. If all else fails, hide your face and body behind oversized cowboy hats and Mexican ponchos.

Once you answered these questions, it’s time to start building your brand identity.

Step One: Write an author tagline.

Just like your books, your author brand needs a tagline, a catchy slogan by which your audience can identify you. This can be posted on social media accounts, at the end of blog entries, even on book covers. Here are some from other famous authors: Live Free or Die Hard (Benjamin Franklin), Sex, Drugs and Drugs (Hunter S. Thompson), The Thinking Man’s Dean Koontz (Stephen King), Your Favorite Psychotic’s Favorite Psychotic (Philip K. Dick).

Now, as I said earlier, try to tie this to your connective thread I mentioned earlier. That’s why I ended up with the tagline “Small stories. Big heroes” after the publisher rejected my first attempt “Bloody stories, bloodier women.”

Step Two: Build a visual identity

Unfortunately, authors of today have to be graphic designers as much as writers. Sure, 100 years ago, you could focus on the words, do cocaine with Freud and ignore the signs of impending fascism, but today’s literary landscape demands more. Visual identity means things like color schemes, fonts, icons, logos, watermarks, headshots, capitalization. Improper line spacing on a press release can make or break an author. Hiring an outside firm’s your best bet, but if not possible, use these tips. Black and white never misses, especially on those headshots. It gives you a classic professional look and will cover up any skin blotchiness from excessive drinking. And If you’re using acronyms, make sure to avoid slurs. This almost killed Jesmyn Evelyn Ward’s career before it took off.  

Step Three: Build your brand any way you can

Finally, use any and every online platform you can to market yourself. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Reddit, Amazon, 4Chan, 8Chan, Erowid, Liveleaks, Rotten.com, all online forums you can. But don’t ignore the power of offline marketing. When I was starting out, I’d drive around the country to different towns, hire a dozen local actors to be my audience and set up a book reading at the most popular café I could. I’d pay small children to write my website URL in chalk on the sidewalk. I’d steal all the books from Little Free Libraries and replace them with copies of my own.

Just remember: You’re an American and that means every party, every cookout, every dance recital, every family funeral, every is a chance to network and market yourself.

These Are the Biggest Mistakes New Fantasy Authors Make

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Fantasy: the refuge of the obese, teenage boys with skin conditions, and people who want an escape from reality without devoting themselves to the violence that being a member of ISIS or a K-Pop fan necessitates.  Still, fans of fantasy literature are a tough nut to crack. While I’m not much a fantasy writer, I was a long-time fantasy reader who read dozens of fantasy manuscripts from up-and-coming authors before my publishing company was shut down for siphoning electricity from the building next door. And I can’t tell you how often I’d spend a cozy evening in that office, draped in six or seven Afghans, reading under the light of a dozen candles, ready to be taken into a new world, only to have cliches, stereotypes and paper-thin backstories bring me back to the real world and remind me of all the blisters on my hands from pulling copper wire out of the walls. Anyway, we’ll look at the biggest mistakes fantasy writers make on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, in this video there’s a lot of common mistakes that could be applied to any type of fiction that I won’t go over. Everybody knows a good book has little expository dialogue, has characters that are three dimensional and doesn’t use words like “rizz,” “spankbank” and “beer-o-clock.”

Mistake One: Using Info Dumps and Having Inorganic Worldbuilding

Does this sound familiar? “At the start of the Fourth Age, during the reign of King Vailor the Wise, the worlds of men, elves and grogs were divided…” You get the idea. The only good thing about books like this is they usually burn long enough to provide adequate heating for your office once the city cuts your gas line.

Sure, one of the selling points of fantasy is the history and the worldbuilding. But it’s got to be organic, to relate to the characters and their struggle. While history is important, the average person doesn’t have a great grasp on it. In America for example, people think history is a bunch of granite statues of traitorous slaveholders, instead of, you know, things educated people wrote down in a fucking book. Anyway, my point is, I don’t think about Sir Walter Raleigh every time I open the office window to have a smoke.

So, instead of starting your fantasy novel with a history lesson or a lore dump, start with some immediate action, like a bar fight, a house burning down in the middle of the night or two home intruders trying to hide the corpse of a man they killed on accident. Your reader will relate to this more because, if they’re anything like me, something like this has happened to them in real life.  

Mistake Two: Overreliance on the Hero’s Journey

Easily the greatest of Joseph Campbell’s crimes against humanity, several generations of fantasy writers have been doomed by the hero’s journey. Though Campbell’s not to blame entirely: if Homer, Tolkien, and Boll hadn’t been so successful, we wouldn’t have a million hacks trying to copy them.

But, you might be asking, what I am supposed to write about it, if I can’t write about a farm boy who sets off to fight a great evil, is tutored by an old sage and finds a special weapon to help him on his journey? Well, what I’d do, is take the plot of any other kind of movie and convert that into fantasy.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a fantasy retelling of films like Bio-Dome, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days or The Squeeze? I went in a more artsy direction with my first fantasy novel, a retelling of My Dinner With Andre, about two monks having dinner in a tavern after one comes back from sabbatical. It was actually my best reviewed book of the 2000s even though it sold poorly and was partially responsible for my business partner’s suicide.

Mistake Three: Having an Inconsistent or Incoherent Magic System

The great thing about being a fantasy writer is that, unlike drama, mystery or historical fiction writers, you don’t have to be smart enough to think of logical reasons for things to happen. But just because you can write yourself out of a corner doesn’t mean you should.

Your system should be well-defined. Maybe, like in Harry Potter, the use of magic takes decades of study, though why it takes decades to learn how to flick your wrist and say, like, ten different goddamn Latin words, I guess I don’t know.

And you need to put limitations on your magical system. If your monks are able to immaculately conceive children while keeping their vows of celibacy, what’s to stop any pervert from impregnating every fair maiden in the village? Of course, I explained this in my novel, though, as I’ll show later, it led to a whole other list of problems.  

Mistake Four: Giving Your Characters Shitty Names

Just look at some of these names. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to pronounce most of these. And don’t go the other way and give them common every day names. No character should ever be named Greg. Hell, no person in real life should be named Greg.

There are a few hacks for people who have trouble with names.  Dead tongues are always a great choice, but don’t make the same mistake I did and try to use ones from the Voynich manuscript.

Portmanteaus are another solid option, which is where you put two words together. This is how George RR Martin came up with the name Daenerys and how I came up with the name Dickswayne Heathersmash.

You could also use your take the people in your own life and slightly modify their names, but that’s not always a good idea, which leads me to the final mistake…

Mistake Five: Making it a thinly-veiled confession of your personal debauchery

Fantasy often works best when it’s an allegorical response to modern day issues, like the British class system or how a power vacuum can lead to religious fundamentalism.

It works less well when it’s an allegory about how you impregnated your business partner’s wife on a trip to Mexico and you’re hoping she leaves him for you. And even if you can convince your fans that your Stephen King diet of corn, milk and pure fishscale cocaine was to blame, you’ll probably burn a lot of bridges and need to move to a cheaper office in a part of town where drug dealers hide bodies of rival gang members.

The main takeaway: Fantasy is about escape from the disaster that is your personal life. Keep it that way.

How To Write About Family (and exploit personal trauma for quick cash)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

From Johnathan Franzen to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Dominic Toretto, many of the great writers and poets throughout history understand the power and importance of family.

Families are the most essential social unit for human beings. They mold us, shaping our interests, values and worldview. And even though most of us spend our life trying to replace them with fantasy football leagues, work units and creative writing workshops where no one is allowed to question the patriarch, there’s really no substitute for family.

Families are a great tool, then, for a fiction writer. Writing about family is one of the easiest ways to generate conflict that’s relatable and grounded. And for a writer who is suffering from writer’s block, your own family can be a great source of inspiration. In my own career I’ve written characters, scenes and whole books about the family I grew up in and the several I’ve created and since moved on from. We’ll explore everything from abandoned children to being partly raised by a whore on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

From the Bennetts to the Boltons to the Berenstains, literature is chock full of compelling families who love each other but also harbor terrible secrets.  When you write about family, you should first ask yourself three questions:

Question 1: What is the composition?

Just like every good woman asks herself once she finishes secretary school, you need to decide if you want a small or a large family. Is this a nuclear family of four from Indianapolis? Or a four-generation Catholic household with 12 children, somehow all of whom survived measles and SIDS?

Question 2: What are the relationship dynamics?

You need to ask yourself who in the family is most closely connected to whom. Is your teen protagonist more closely connected to a doting grandmother than her parents? Do two of the siblings share a special bond?

Question 3: What is the source of conflict?

Think about how the decisions each character makes affect the rest of the family. Addiction, jealousy and infidelity are reliable go-to’s, but try to be unique. Maybe the children are bitter at being physically deformed because their dad was an aging rock star who used his damaged semen to conceive them at age 77.

Now here are a few tips to improve your family stories.

Step 1: Learn as much about your own family as you can

If you’re anything like me, work and other things has made you not know your family as well as you should. Take time to sit down and talk with siblings, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncles, cousins and even your own children if you can bear it.

Ask about your family history. Ask about stories of migrations, divorces, weddings, graduations, weird surgeries. Ask their names if you have to.

If these types of conversations take you to uncomfortable places, don’t worry. You can try wiretapping or spying on your own family to gain information.

You might learn some interesting information. To give a quick example, for years I thought the woman who lived in our house from the ages of four to nine was my dad’s sister, but after a little digging, I discovered she was just a common prostitute.

And sometimes, you’ll have side benefits unrelated to your writing. When I studied my family tree, for example, I learned that I should get screened for pancreatic cancer as that killed a lot of women in my family, and for syphilis, which killed a lot of the men.

Step 2: The Past is the Present is the Future

A great man once said, “Our life story doesn’t begin and end with our birth and death. It overlaps with that of our ancestors and descendants.” That man was actually my father, and it’s a shame lots of people ignored his wisdom just because he died in a Fourth of July fireworks accident.

Masterpieces like East of Eden and A Thousand Splendid Suns (and possibly Absolom Absolom, though I’m not entirely sure on that one) show us how trauma can almost be genetic. You could, for example, trace the actions of an abusive father down the line and see how has caused his grandchildren to be socially isolated.

In my sci-fi thriller, There’s No Place Reich Home, my protagonist goes back in time to kill Hitler, only to erase himself from existence and discover that he was one of Hitler’s descendants.

Step 3: Go the non-traditional route

Not all families have to start with the five-beers-deep patriarch nutting inside the matriarch. As my own publishing company has taught me, if you try hard enough, you can make any group of people into a family.

You could always try exploring the dynamics of queer families, though I’d hurry up on that, because Project 2025 will probably get all those books removed from libraries and bookstores.

But go beyond parent-child families. As a lot of us get older, we drift away from our traditional families, either due to things like death caused by nephrosis or a very busy writing career and YouTube channel. But as we do, we often look for replacements to help us overcome our crippling loneliness.

Your family could be anything: an organized crime syndicate, a subreddit, a group of eight male flat mates who are also male strippers. As long as you follow all of my other advice, everything will be fine.