book-review

Book Trailers Are More Effective Than You Might Think

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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.

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.

The Secret to Writing a Great Mystery

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Death surrounds us everywhere. Of course, how we react to it differs. Children getting blown up half a world away or elderly coworkers not showing up one day usually provokes no reaction. A rich uncle leaving behind an inheritance might inspire a jubilation that better sense tells us to quell. But let’s say you wake up one morning to find a friendly, healthy, financially comfortable neighbor has drowned in your pool. Now that’s intriguing. And intrigue is at the heart of all mystery. We’ll discuss how to become the next Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler or Dorak Seng on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Mysteries are some of the most popular books on the market and have been for centuries. But, unlike my high school science teacher, just because they’re popular doesn’t mean they’re easy.

Before we get into the advice, let’s look at some mystery subgenres and their attributes.

First, we have the hardboiled mystery, the province of snoops and private eyes, popularized by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Bill O’Reilly. The protagonists in these stories are famous for cracking wise, having a cynical outlook and having a bad relationship with police. (Which contains some kernel of truth, as it turns out police don’t like snide comments while they fish your dead neighbor out of your pool.)

Cozy mysteries represent the flip side of the coin. These are lighthearted mysteries that take often place in bucolic settings. The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Miss Marple books are some excellent examples. And while these stories often revolve around murder, they usually don’t dwell on gore or scooped out eyeballs or torn scrotums. Like the title suggests, they’re meant to be comfort reading. Murder She Wrote was a famous cozy mystery TV series that was originally meant to have a harder, darker tone, but producers quickly realized test audiences were uncomfortable with the idea of an elderly Angela Lansbury getting sexually assaulted in every episode.

Capers are another popular mystery subgenre. Here we’re often focusing on the other side of the law, and we’re not looking back and asking Whodunit, but looking forward and asking How will they pull it off. Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight is a highwater mark of the genre, as is my 2016 novella Slight of Hand, about a group of pygmy circus performers who try to steal Stonehenge.

Let’s look at some tips to make our mysteries their most mysterious.

Step One: Develop your sleuth

While the hook of your crime is probably the most important element, your reader won’t stay engaged unless you’ve got an interesting sleuth to follow through the crime-solving process. They don’t have to be all that complicated. Sherlock Holmes, after all, is just a really smart guy who hates Mormons and loves cocaine. But while simple, that also makes him very relatable.

You should also give them a reason for wanting to solve the crime. This could be a personal connection boredom, or it could be political.

Step Two: Plan your crime

Before you start anything though, you need to plan your crime. You need to know who did it, why and what clues they left behind. Don’t worry about it being believable. In the real world people kill because they got cut off in traffic, because God or a dog told them to, or because they didn’t show respect for where the property lines are drawn, so you can give your killer any motive you want.

It’s best to do your research, too. Look up how long it takes a body to decompose. Look up how one might remove traces of DNA from a corpse. Go to your local pharmacy, grab different medications and ask how many will get a 70 kg person to stop breathing. (However, it’s probably not the best idea to do this research if you a suspect under an active police investigation.) But speaking of…

Step Three: Make a list of suspects

Half the fun of a mystery is guessing which from a gallery of vibrant personalities is the real killer. Is it the wife who, though only 90 pounds, easily could’ve brained her husband from behind with a bottle causing him to fall in the pool? Is it the 13-year-old son who purpose fully mislabeled his drug stash in the hope that his dad would take the wrong kind, suffer heart failure and plummet into a neighbor’s pool? Or maybe it’s the person you least suspect, the guy with an airtight alibi, the cocky type who knows he’s smarter than the police and even leaves clues about it on the internet?

Step Four: Choose a unique setting

Post-war urban America and the idyllic British countryside are both fun playgrounds if you want to mess around with the tropes, but I’d go for something less explored. I’ve set mysteries in 30th century incestual generation ships (It’s All Relative), radical Antifa enclaves in middle America (The They/Them Murders), and I even did an espionage mystery set in caveman times (Ook The Spook).

Step Five: Leave trails of clues

It won’t be fun for the reader if they don’t feel like they can play along. Clues should not only provoke the reader, they should ratchet up the tension in the narrative. New developments can both lead the reader closer to the answer while putting the characters in more danger.

For example, imagine you’re writing about a sleuth who thinks she’s found the murderer because the same pills found in the victim’s stomach were found in the neighbor’s medicine cabinet. But when she goes to ask the pharmacist about the medication, the suspect sees her there asking questions. And she later thinks she can see his car following her home and she regrets living alone in a house with such thick walls but she doesn’t see his car on her street so she goes to bed not realizing he learned how to pick locks at the learning annex last year and with her diabetes it would be easy, oh so easy, to make her death look like an accident. 

An Easy Way to Come up with Great Book Titles!

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Let me ask you a question? Do you think Pride and Prejudice would have been as successful with its original title: First Impressions? What if To Kill a Mockingbird had just been called Atticus? Or if A Clockwork Orange had just been called Alex and the Fantabulous Adventures of the Bowler Boys Brigade?

Titles are some of the hardest things for writers to come up with. In fact, I once wrote a 200-page mystery novel in two weeks and spent the entire next month thinking of a title before settling on The Woman in Red. We’ll look at some ways to speed up the process on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

So, what does a good title need to be? First off, it needs to be unique. Yes, it’s true that you can’t copyright titles, but this is one case where I wouldn’t condone outright plagiarism. Early off in my career, I was struggling to earn some extra cash so I took a popular book at the time and stole its title for my psychological thriller. But not only was The Satanic Verses a bad fit for my novel, it led to a whole other set of problems that I had to deal with.

A good title should also give a tiny glimpse into your style, tone, genre or content of your novel. People should have some idea what the novel is about. A straightforward title like Naked Lunch, for example, lets me know the book is erotic and promotes midday copulation.

Finally, a good title needs to be something you can Google at work. It should be obvious that titles shouldn’t be extremely profane, but it’s worth checking on Urban Dictionary to see if your title is a thing some men call their mistresses or a term for Welsh men who have sex with animals. Unfamiliar with British slang, I learned this the hard way when I titled my 2003 romance after the main character, Minge Jefferson.

Now let’s look at some steps to write better novels.

Step One: Use a character name

Lolita

David Copperfield

Anne Frank

All great works of fiction that were named after their titular character. Names can be evocative and memorable. Or, like coworkers at a company orientation, you might forget them two seconds after you hear them. So if you pick a name, try to pick one that will stick in people’s brains. Naming your book Daryl probably won’t get you a Pulitzer.

Think of names with pleasing sonic qualities or that allude to the classics. Heck, this is even the reason I chose John Lazarus as my pen name.  Well, that and my birth name is the same as one of the worst serial killers in American history.

Step Two: Be vague

Sometimes it’s good to go the other way and establish an aura of mystery with something very broad and simple. Think of something like The Old Man and the Sea or The Road. The simplicity suggests something mythic, something basic in human nature that suits the stories well. Some of my biggest successes have been with titles like these, especially The Boy and Chair.

Step Three: Mention the Setting

Cold Mountain

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Revolutionary Road

These titles already tell you a great deal about the book. If your book has a particular place that’s unique, memorably named and essential to the themes and plot, why not use that? The Butchershop on 92nd Street was probably my best-selling mob story for this reason, even though my publisher insisted it was because we tricked Joe Pesci into endorsing my book at an autograph signing.  

Step Four: Use an online title generator

With these AI tools, all you need to do is upload the complete finished draft of your manuscript, your pen name, genre, ISBN of any other books you’ve written, five books similar to yours, your address, social security number and do a quick retinal scan.

Some great titles I’ve gotten from these AI tools: I Know Where You Live, The Futility of Flesh, 1400 Pounds of Pressure Shatter a Human Skull

Step Five: Alter A Popular Phrase

Finally, one last way to create a catchy title is to take a common phrase and flip it on its head. Writing a book about overfishing in the Caspian Sea? How about A Water Out of Fish? Or how about this? Weather the Under, about a gambling addict who always betting the under on football games.

I have more. Grudge a Bear, about a hunter who becomes paralyzed after being attacked by a grizzly and spends the rest of his life trying to get revenge. Or Easier Done Than Said, about a genius mathematician who has to overcome the challenge of being born with no tongue.

Your Guide To Creating Subplots

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

If there’s one thing I hope you’ve learned from this channel, it’s that a writer’s main job is to write a compelling story. If there’s another thing I hope you learned from this channel, it’s that writing really isn’t all that important and you shouldn’t get so caught up in your writing that you neglect being a good father or husband or boss or citizen or motorist.

And a truly compelling story isn’t just one story, but several stories that overlap, intertwine and culminate in a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts.

A subplot is a secondary storyline that runs beside the main one. A good subplot should do some of the following things:

  • deepen characterization
  • add nuance
  • activate your themes
  • enhance your worldbuilding
  • get other writers in your writing group to stop laughing at your stories behind your back
  • remove the need for you to follow literary agents to their house
  • get you good reviews on Amazon more reliably than the Chinese company you paid to post fake positive reviews.

Readers get bored with just focusing on one narrative. Even this video series exemplifies this. Fans of the channel will know that while the main thrust of my videos is to teach you good writing techniques, I try to keep things interesting by adding several subplots: for example, my office being burned down by my business partner’s reckless disregard for fire codes, and my ongoing feud with Tabitha Cartwright who acquired the rights to most of my backlog after she got me out of some child support payments. And fans will know my biggest subplot is about my desire to get back with my second and favorite wife. In today’s video, I will illustrate why subplots are essential by adding a story about how I got her back.

Now Let’s look at some key tips to writing good subplots.

Step 1: Know the type of subplot

This is going to be a longer than usual step, so if you want to go get a snack or double check that you locked your gun safe, now might be a good time. The first kind of subplot is the mirror subplot. Here, a secondary character faces a similar conflict to the main character in the main story, but often with a different outcome.  In my story, Jane Donovan, both the main protagonist and her husband have to grapple with sexual feelings toward others. Jane, however, is able to control her urges and realizes her family needs her. Her husband, on the other hand, rawdogs fourteen different yoga classmates, sex workers and school teachers and ends up dying of syphilis.

The foil subplot depicts a character who is actively working against the main protagonist. It doesn’t always have to be the main anttagonist. In the Lord of the Rings, both Boromir’s and Gollum’s subplots serve as foils. The foil can even be accidental. In Son of Sam I Am, a side character is also chasing after the serial killer, but he disrupts the police’s search by visiting the crime scenes, getting sexually excited and contaminating the scene with his DNA.

Then there are flashback subplots. These stories often give us insight into the motivations or the backgrounds of the main character or the villain. The flashback in A Man Called Ove leads to a heartbreaking realization about the main character’s wife. The flashback in my time-travel thriller There’s No Place Reich Home reveals that character doesn’t want to kill Hitler to save the Jews or prevent World War II, but rather because his name is Douglas Hitler and he’s tired of being ridiculed and attacked.

And then we have the romantic subplot, which was invented to sell more movie tickets to women and men who don’t get erections from large explosions. The romantic subplot should ideally complicate things for your main character, just as my obsession with my second wife delayed several of my book releases and got me hit with a restraining order so for many years I had to rent a car if I wanted to drive by her house.

Step 2: Write character driven subplots

In all of those examples, the subplots are driven by character motivation. Subplots are all about introducing new goals and obstacles, either for the main character, their allies or their opponents. A subplot should also flesh your thinner characters out. When I first wrote, the coming-of-age drama House on Pain Avenue, Daniel’s brother Derrick wasn’t much of a character. I mostly had him laugh at Daniel’s jokes so the reader would understand that he was funny in case my jokes didn’t always land. But he lacked motivation, so I gave him a side plot about him and his fraternity poisoning the dean.

When I talk about my second wife on here, you mostly here about her from my perspective: how great I thought her tits were, how she opened me up sexually, how she was the first woman who ever made me laugh. But if I were treating this video like a novel, I’d mention how she ran away from home at seventeen, not from abuse but to start her own gambling business.

Step 3: Make sure your subplot has its own arc

A subplot is not just filler like you might put into your second wife’s new boyfriends gas tank. It needs to be resolved in some way, possibly in connection with the main story, or even as a side note in your epilogue. If you can take the reader by surprise, all the better.

So to finish my subplot, I’ll bet most of you assumed I became a better person, apologized for my indiscretions and got my wife to leave her boyfriend and take me back. But that would break the other essential rule of fiction writing: don’t be a cliche.

Luckily, that’s not what happened. Instead, I used today’s sponsor, Eros Escorts, to hire someone with a vague resemblance to my wife. After some hair treatments and other cosmetic procedures, the resemblance was uncanny. Over a period of a few months, I trained her to act the part and talk the part, giving her speech lessons and a script from which to recite her lines. And after this process, we both decided we were meant for each other. It’s been a terrible drain on my writing and this channel, but, well, this is one subplot that I’m pretty sure is going to have a happy ending.

What “Show, Don’t Tell” Really Means for Writers

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Let me read you an excerpt of a manuscript I was sent recently:

“Jonathan was frightened of women. His heart pounded at the terrifying sight of her naked breasts. But suddenly, his fear disappeared. He touched the breasts and was glad he’d found a woman that reminded him so much of his mother.”

The first thing that stands out to me is that this piece doesn’t really paint a very vivid picture. Unlike most writing about breasts, it doesn’t really make me feel anything. I’m told the man is frightened, that the breasts are terrifying, but there isn’t much evidence to back up these claims.

Show don’t tell is one of the golden rules of writing. It’s usually the first lesson of any writing seminar, though in my seminars, I always spend the first lesson asking the class to write down their greatest fears and directions to their home address. In any case, it’s something new writers like the author of the above passage, Dan Schultz of Tempe, Arizona who asked to remain anonymous, struggle with. We’ll break down what “show don’t tell” actually means and how to best use this advice in our writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

In the spirit of this article, instead of telling you how to write, I will show you examples from students of mine that illustrate new writers’ struggles. I’ve also provided their emails in the video in case you’d like to send them words of advice and encouragement.

Our first excerpt is from Doug Martzel of Nome, Alaska, who was writing about his dead wife, a topic he incidentally kept coming back to. He writes:

“She was a meticulous woman and could get overbearing at times, with ginger hair and pallid skin.”

Mistake 1: Using adjectives, instead of action and details

So a big mistake Doug mistakes, besides failing to get over it and write about a more interesting topic, is that there’s nothing to grab onto. I mean, if he’s really hoping to bring his wife back to life in his writing, it would be more memorable to show her being meticulous or provide a detail about her gingerness that’s important to her character.

After a lot of coaching and back and forths, I got Doug to brainstorm specific ways his wife was meticulous. Eventually, he came up with this:

“Every Friday night after work, I’d come home to find her waiting in the bathroom with a bottle of Barbasol, a straight razor and some antiseptic. I’d then strip nude and sit in this seatless chair with special leg restraints. For the next forty minutes, I read the newspaper while she shaved every part of my body below the nose: beard, neck, chest, arms, legs, testicles, anus.”

Doug and the rest of the class were a little uncomfortable with this passage—in fact, if I remember correctly, I had to read it aloud after Doug refused–but I told them that a great writer knows the power of specificity.

Janet Kowalski from Davenport, Iowa was a big fan of erotic fantasy thrillers. This excerpt comes from an exercise where I asked the class to write an allegory for the immigration crisis:

“Diane saw the potion on the table, drank it and one second later she fell to the floor.”  

Mistake 2: Using weak verbs

I don’t want to pick on Janet too much here because her story captured the crisis, convincingly describing what happens when you just let anybody in your country. But the above sentence just doesn’t evoke any feelings.

With some simple substitutions it’s much more effective:

“Diane gazed into the bubbling potion, guzzled it and instantly crashed to the floor.”

Just by changing the verbs we understand that Diane is mesmerized by the drink, that she craves it and that it inflicts violence on her. Now this might seem strange, but in her story, a cartel of demons has flooded the potion market with a superstrong mind-control drug that has contaminated all the other party potions and it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.

The next excerpt comes from Jamil Baqri, a young writer from Denver, Colorado who showed a ton of promise, but unfortunately didn’t have enough money to pay for more than six weeks of classes. He writes:

“Jennifer took the charge of the meeting. She wasn’t going to let anyone get in her way. The deal had to go through.”

Mistake 3: Not using dialogue

Now, Jamil’s mistake is understandable. After all, he’s been deaf since birth and has never actually had a verbal conversation with anyone. But he knew sign language and I assume the principle is still basically the same. Plus, when I asked if he’d ever seen movies, he said yes.

Now, after Jamil’s check bounced and the people at the learning annex told me his disability insurance couldn’t cover my class fees, I instead got the rest of the class to rework Jamil’s piece. My favorite rewrite was this one:

“This is how it’s gonna go, fuckheads” Jennifer shouted as she entered the conference room. “Asking price is twenty-five million. They try to lowball you, boys, just tuck em up inside yourself.”

To me, that’s how business people sound. I can vividly picture the kind of woman Jennifer is: tight black office girl skirt, full pouty lips, tits like a pair of surface to air missiles.

Our final passage comes from Jacqueline Carlyle from Nashville, Tennessee, who was writing a short story about a woman whose husband goes off to fight in a war:

“Her wet lips parted and her tongue began to rapidly adjust its position. Swells of hot air rose up through her throat, and as she siphoned it through her larynx and set it careening around her uvula, it met her pallid teeth and crimson lips, creating odd vibrations that rose and fell in pitch. A great symphony had commenced.”

Mistake 4: Showing Too Much

Many authors like Jacqueline hear “show don’t tell” and think they can’t ever tell anything. But a story would go on forever if you only showed. As a writer, you have to decide what’s worth glossing over. For example, when I write most of my stories, I come to realize it’s not really important what the minor female characters do or say or want or feel.

After a bit of convincing, I got Jacqueline to simplify her passage to this:

“She ordered two cheese pizzas and a large onion rings.”

How To Write Memorable Settings

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My father used to say, “We carry around the places in which we’ve lived for the rest of our lives.” Seeing as he was from Newark and once abandoned me at the mall because I lost an elementary school spelling bee, I would have to say that’s true.

Setting plays an important part of our lives and it should play an equally important role in your fiction. Imagine how impossible it would be to set King Lear in some place like feudal Japan. Or how No Country For Old Men might be different were it set in Legoland.   

In fact, setting can be the main draw of our fiction. Aside from Hogwarts, an institution that a whole generation of readers would kill to attend, Harry Potter is, when you get down to it, just a rote hero’s journey narrative with a bunch of off-putting racial stereotypes. Aside from the wintry wonderland of Narnia, the C.S. Lewis books are just a horrible conversation you’d have with the Mormons proselytizing on your street after you forgot to pretend you were having a phone conversation to avoid them.

But writing an interesting setting is easier said than done. There are a lot of ways you can screw it up. For example, even though Plastered Bastard had a setting that connected thematically to ideas of loneliness and abandonment, I knew I screwed up when I realized there aren’t any deserts in Ireland. In today’s video, I’ll show you how to avoid some of these problems. Now let’s set sail for gumdrop forests and whore islands.

It’s important that we be clear what we mean when we say setting. For starters, setting is just one component of your worldbuilding. You can see more about worldbuilding in this video here. But for the sake of this video, we’ll look at three components of setting: the temporal setting, the environmental setting and the individual setting.

The temporal setting is when your story is happening. Each scene will have an individual one and there is also the larger time period in which the story is located. Think about how crucial the temporal setting is to To Kill A Mockingbird. If it were set today, everyone in the town would get Atticus Finch disbarred for being too woke.

The environmental setting is the larger environment in which the story takes place. Usually, this is consistent throughout your entire novel and is important in establishing your book’s themes and tone. Sci-fi novel Tek War, for example, takes place in the futuristic world of 2044 Los Angeles, which lets us know that this is not going to be a good book.

The individual setting are smaller rooms, houses and vehicles the characters inhabit at different times through the story, and these are less important for your themes, but more crucial for the action and dialogue. The boat in the Life of Pi, for example, is a good setting to create tension but that has no thematic or symbolic meaning at all.  

Hopefully that gives you just a glimpse of why setting is so important to your writing. Let’s look at five tips that will make our settings more memorable.

Step 1: Think carefully about how the setting influences your characters

Setting should affect your characters’ behaviors just like it does in real life. I mean, I currently keep a gun safe next to my desk in the closet in which I record these videos because last year I moved into an apartment in a less well-off part of town.

You can use setting to test your character and create conflict. If your main character is a priest, a visit to the aforementioned Whore Island may prove an interesting test of his faith. If your character is bad with directions, you can have them drive through Boston and the conflict may write itself.

But a setting can be an asset as well. In The Remains of the Day, Darlington Hall provides the butler Stevens a chance to fulfill his life’s duty of being the best possible butler he can be. In my novel, Destination: Earth, the titular planet offers the aliens a great place to commit their sex crimes outside the jurisdiction of the intergalactic federation.  

Step 2: Visit the real world location in which your story is set

“Write what you know” is an overused piece of writing advice, and also the reason my first 60 novels had way too many obscure baseball statistics. But a setting you’re familiar with will most likely be more vividly rendered.

The simplest cheat would just be to write a story set where you live. For people from New York or London or an underwater sea laboratory, that’s a piece of cake, but if you live in a place like Delaware, it will be hard to get your reader to suspend their disbelief and convince them something interesting might’ve actually happened there.

If that’s the case, you can consider visiting or living in a place you think might make an interesting setting. Besides certain tax issues, the reason I’m living where I am now is because there have been a lot of interesting murders here that will translate to great fiction.

Step 3: Use all the senses in your description

Too many authors focus on sight and neglect the great sensory experience literature can provide. And they forget how much we rely on our other senses. For example, the first thing I noticed when I first viewed my new apartment wasn’t the faded bloodstain on the floorboards, but rather the acrid smell of moth balls and Vaseline. And every time I hear Bryan Adams’s “I Do it For You,” I’m reminded of losing my virginity on a friend’s trampoline.

Here’s a few more quick tips:

Use An Emotional Filter – Your character needs to experience the setting through emotions. So if they’re in a place like Scottsdale, they should think that death can’t come soon enough.

Sketch a map of your setting – Don’t worry if you’re not an artist. Here’s my map of the spaceship in Gauge Symmetries.

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?”