book-review

What Writers Get Wrong About Theme (especially you, Steve)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

As an aspiring author, you want your stories to matter, but you’ve got this strange feeling they totally suck. You want your books to have deep, resonant meaning, but you also suspect your readers feel that, aside from a few big words, a child could’ve easily written this. You feel like you have so much knowledge and wisdom to share with world, but at the same time, you feel like if some hitchhiker strangled you and left you dead in a ditch, nobody would really give a shit.

And most of that boils down to theme. Stories aren’t just about heroes winning or titillating violence against cheerleaders. Stories with good themes are a means for us to better understand human nature. Before I read Moby Dick, for example, I never really considered that secretly poisoning my neighbor’s dog that barked at me a lot might’ve been wrong.  

But what is theme? My favorite definition of theme comes from my high school literature teacher whose name I can’t recall.

“Theme is… well, okay, theme’s a thing… it’s an artistic representation… well, you don’t write it in your book, like it’s not something you explicitly… to put it another way, it’s something your reader can understand just by reading your book. It’s the subject of your discourse… or no, it’s, like, the idea they take away from your book.”

“Oh, like the moral of the story. Like ‘don’t kill people for fun.’”

“No, no, it’s not a moral. Theme is not a moral. It actually doesn’t answer any questions. When you create a theme, you’re not being preachy. If anything, a theme raises more questions than it answers. It’s basically what your book is really about.”

“Oh, like a topic.”

“No, it’s not a topic. Okay, think of it like this, if you were in an elevator with someone, what would you say?”

“Umm… Floor 1, please?”

“No, I mean about your book. If you had to explain your book to a person in an elevator in one sentence, how would you do it?”

“Do I know this person?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I guess I’d say this story is like an elevator in that it goes…”

“No, that’s not.. Look, nevermind. Just use the word ‘exploration’ in your theme and you should be fine.”

“Exploration of elevators. Got it.”

~

Now, before we get into the specific tips, I’ll start with a question a lot of people ask me:

When planning my novel, should I start with theme, or should I start with plot and character and develop the theme as I go? Also, do you have that 200 dollars you owe me?

It’s a great question that unfortunately doesn’t have a concrete answer. For example, when I wrote It’s All Relative, I knew I wanted to explore the theme of “incest and society’s reaction to it.” Then I slowly developed the characters who were pro and anti-incest and the science fiction plot about incest babies on a generation ship naturally developed from that.

But when I wrote Son of Sam I Am, I just knew I wanted to tell a story about a man with mental disabilities who helps catch a serial killer because there were a lot of very popular TV shows that were basically just that. The theme of the novel–the prejudices that people with mental disabilities face–didn’t present itself until about 2/3s of the way through the novel, when I noticed all my cop characters were being total assholes.

Now, how we can we work to create better themes as throughlines in our writing?

Tip One – Don’t Be Preachy

Nobody likes preachy people. That’s why Democrats always lose elections, and it’s why right-wing ministers have to scare people with an eternity of hellfire to get them to attend church.

So as a writer, you need to be careful that your theme isn’t too on the nose or moralistic. It would’ve been easy to just preach about incest being bad when I wrote It’s All Relative, but instead I wanted to really get into intense debates and explore what incest means to different people. This has a nice side benefit as well. If you’re afraid people will attack you for your political views, being a fiction writer means you don’t need to have any real deep convictions at all and will help you avoid tough questions during interviews.

Tip Two – Embed your theme in your character’s arc

We’ve talked about character arcs on this channel before. Now let’s say you already have a theme in mind. Let’s say that you want your theme to be “Love Conquers all” because you’re trying to get your second wife to realize she shouldn’t have left you and even though her new husband might be younger, taller and he’s got a boat that he actually knows how to operate, that doesn’t mean he loves her more than you.

Okay, now you can construct your main protagonist’s arc around that theme. Your book doesn’t even have to be romantic. Christopher Nolan used the theme to save a dying planet. Maybe, in your story, it’s a love for math that gets your protagonist to turn their life around, stop smoking PCP and win the Fields medal in the end.

Tip Three – Use Symbols and Motifs

Sometimes the best way to deepen the thematic richness of your story is to think small. Think about your word choice. Think about symbols. Think about repeated phrases. In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut keeps using the phrase “So it goes” to hint at the theme of the uncontrollable nature of fate. In fact, it’s a phrase I love so much, I put it on my first wife’s headstone when she was killed by that biker gang and nobody else was willing to claim her corpse.

In my coming-of-age novel Tomorrow’s Sorrows Borrowed the theme is the disillusionment that comes with entering adulthood. To hint at that theme of disillusionment, the motif of masturbation is used over and over and over and over and over again to show how isolated my main protagonist Catcher Ryerson is.

How to Write Minor Characters

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

From the barista who makes your coffee, to the nanny who raises your children, to the doorman who keeps drug addicts and couriers serving you legal papers out of your building, our lives depend on little people whose existence we basically never acknowledge.

In literature, perhaps even more than in real life, these little people matter. Your reader will not respond to your writing if your world is populated by flat characters who exist only to serve your main protagonist’s narrative, in much the way a judge might respond to you not remembering the names of your company’s custodians and security guards who died when your building burnt down because you were siphoning electricity from next door.

Sure, it’s much easier to go through life not having to think about all the little slave hands who knitted your socks. And dehumanizing others, while sometimes problematic, has had many great benefits throughout human history. For example, we’ve made an impressive stockpile of weapons should aliens ever arrive and threaten our existence.

But writing is about exploring the rich fullness of the human experience. Let’s do a little experiment. Look at this photo:

Now at first glance, you probably think it’s some sort of woke mob. You don’t really think of these people as individuals, nor do you consider their individual motivations. “They’re just trying to steal from hardworking billionaires,” you might say to yourself. Some of the more sociopathic of Stories’ Matter viewers might fantasize about following one to their home, strangling them and watching the light go from their eyes. But most of you would probably be fine tear gassing them so they disperse and you can drive to yoga class unimpeded.

But as a writer, use this as an exercise to practice humanizing others. Pick five random people and write a few paragraphs of background.

This woman, for example. Let’s pretend she’s not very politically active but is here to impress this man. You see, last week she first saw him at Whole Foods when he asked if she knew where the arugula was. He was so hot she got tongue-tied and just silently pointed in a random direction, and in fact, she didn’t and still doesn’t know what arugula even is and hopes he doesn’t ever bring it up again. Anyway, she followed him out of the Whole Foods and was excited to learn he only lives a few buildings away so she’s been spending the past few nights hanging around the entrance to his building hoping they’ll cross paths again. If he asks what she’s doing, she’ll say comes to that building to leave food for a stray cat. Anyway, that didn’t happen, he must work nights or something, but this Saturday morning she saw him walk with a group of people to a local protest. And so now she hopes he shouts out some funny slogan or comment so she can laugh really loud and draw his attention.

Anyway, we’ll take radical detours that seem to be pointless on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Now, before we get to the tips, let’s make a clear distinction. Minor characters are not secondary characters. Secondary characters get lots of page space and are crucial to the plot; minor characters are a step below that. To give a relatable analogy, if a main character is a wife, a secondary character is a mistress, and a minor character is a Waffle House waitress from Memphis you once banged while on a book tour whose name and hair color you can’t remember, but you do distinctively remember she got sexually excited by tornadoes.

Tip 1 – Minor Characters Should Feel Like They Have A Life Outside Your Story

A minor character shouldn’t exist just to info dump, nor should their only purpose be to support your protagonist. I mean, in real life the only reason we do things for others is to achieve our own goals. At least that’s how it is for me.

There are lots of ways to do this in your fiction. Give your minor characters a memorable hobby. Hint at a secret motivation. In Blake Colby’s Blood Shot, one of the detectives is trying to solve the crime, but the other is mostly worried about whether or not his wife is having an affair.

This is something I had to learn as a boss, as well. For years, I thought of my workers as mindless drones who only existed to take me more money. But now I make it a point to get to know my employees. For example, every Monday morning, I spend two hours monitoring their social media feeds. This has the added benefit of checking to see if they’re uploading pictures of themselves holding various books from the D&E backlog like I asked.

Tip 2 – Don’t Forget to Give Your Minor Characters a “Look”

Remember, a minor character may only exist on a few pages of a 300-page novel. So you really have to make those words count. Some strange clothing choices or gaping holes where your eyes should be is a great way to grab your reader’s attention.

Try to think of some minor characters in movies whose names you don’t remember but whose look you absolutely do. If you’re anything like me, the first thing that came to mind was the chick with three tits from Total Recall.

There’s science to support this as well. Humans are bad with names, but we’ve been trained to recognize abnormal or differing appearances. This was how we learned to cast sick or genetically inferior people out of our caveman societies. At my publishing company, I remember most people by specific traits instead of names, like “big head,” “nerd face,” “wife material if she smiled more,” and “what I imagine my mom might look like today if she hadn’t abandoned me.”

Tip 3 – Give your minor character a specific role

It’s no secret that lots of books have been written. Because of this, many roles for minor characters have been established. Let’s look at a few.

First, we have comic relief. Think about the gravediggers in Hamlet. In my novel, The House on Pain Avenue, Daniel’s brother’s frat brothers serve as the comic relief. Peeing in the dean’s coffee helps lighten all scenes where Daniel’s father kicks him out of the house for being gay.

Then you have the guide. They are meant to assist the protagonist on their journey. In my novel, Deep Throat II, the titular character guides the journalists in uncovering the president’s pizza parlor child sex ring.

What Hiring A Prostitute To Pretend To Be My Ex-Wife Taught Me About Writing Romance Novels

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

I have some bad news for fans of the channel: John Lazarus is no longer in a relationship. The prostitute I’ve paying to look, act and talk like my second wife has decided she’s no longer willing to provide me with her services.

It’s a tough thing to say goodbye to someone you still love. All those happy memories we shared — dinners together, movie nights, meetings with plastic surgeons and dialect coaches – just bring me pain and sadness now.

Unfortunately, Destiny decided it was time we moved our separate ways. So much time spent pretending to be someone she wasn’t caused her to lose her own sense of identity, it seems. Once she started dreaming as my second wife, she knew it was time to give nursing school another shot.  

As a romance writer, you will similarly construct a romantic identity for your characters in much the way I did for Destiny. In this article, I will show you how the mistakes I made with her are probably very similar to the mistakes many aspiring writers make when attempting their first romance novel. We’ll try to stop glamourizing underage relationships on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

So, if you’re new to the channel, I’ll just give you a little bit of background. I have been married three times in my life, but my second wife was definitely my favorite. But that’s not just because my first wife was a serial bigamist who was already married to several other people, or because my third wife was my therapist who used hypnosis and other forms of psychological manipulation to make me fall in love with her.

Cindy was simply a wonderful woman. And I’m not just talking about a pair that defied gravity or the fact that she introduced me to pegging. Cindy taught me how to cook. She convinced me to start my own publishing firm. She was instrumental in removing my dad from his burial plot, selling the plot to fund a down payment for a new house and then dumping him at sea. She was also the only woman I never cheated on.

But unfortunately, this storybook romance wasn’t meant to last. We parted after two short years together. While my love for her remained strong, she didn’t feel the same way. I’ve had over a decade to wonder what went wrong. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in my writing. Perhaps I was too clingy. Perhaps the fact that her new husband was taller, younger, richer and had more friends than me was my undoing.

In any case, that’s not especially important for the purposes of this article. Because I’m actually here to talk about Destiny, the escort I’ve spent the past six months forcing to look, talk and act like Cindy.

Step One: Forcing Chemistry Instead of Building It

This of course relates to our key writing rule: “Show, don’t tell.” You can’t tell your reader that your characters are in love, you need to show them interacting in an organic way that shows them building chemistry.

If you want to write a story about a reformed Islamic terrorist who falls in love with a female Silicon Valley CFO, that’s fine. “Opposites attract” is a great trope. But you’ve got to find a way to make their connection make sense. Perhaps they slowly bond over their love of Colin Firth movies or something.

Looking back, I realize I forced things with Destiny. The speech therapy is one thing, but making her listen to tapes of Cindy’s voicemails while she slept was too much. Maybe I could’ve called her Destiny on Mondays-Fridays and only forced her to pretend to be Cindy on the weekends.

Step Two: Making One Character Passive in the Relationship

Relationships aren’t about one person seizing control and making all of the choices; this isn’t the state of American democracy in 2025.

And this isn’t just a problem with male writers. You’d be surprised how many manuscripts I get from female writers whose male love interest in their novel is basically a dildo with nice hair who also happens to be a ghost.

I now realize I should’ve given Destiny more agency in our relationship. I should’ve let her choose her own restaurants instead of screaming that “Cindy didn’t like Italian.” I should’ve let her buy that boat even though Cindy was terrified of water because her brother drowned when she was five.

Step Three: Writing Relationships Without Commonalities

Your characters need to be together for a reason. Sure, in real life, people might be put together solely because they’re part of the Chinese government’s attempt to create a superrace of excellent basketball players, but your reader wants your couple to bond over something they share.

They shouldn’t be carbon copies of each other, obviously. They don’t have to love the same music or types of porn. But you still need to make that connection. In my novel Above the Rim, it was shared sexual experiences in basketball arenas. In Heartland, it was the shared belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

When I followed her on her days off, I saw that Destiny was into gardening and visiting her family and volunteering at a dog shelter. Those are all things I wouldn’t dream of doing.

Step Four: Not Allowing For Vulnerability

Human beings are frail things. We aren’t like the common salamander; we can’t survive if our head gets cut off.

It’s important that both members of your couple show weakness and fragility. For example, maybe she had both of her hands chopped off by a helicopter. Maybe he’s a control freak who wiretaps everyone, even his best friends and himself.

It’s clear I expected Destiny not to be the perfect woman but the perfect approximation of Cindy. And I expected myself to be perfect as well. One time, I accidentally called her Destiny while we were having sex. This was particularly egregious because I usually only shout my own name during sex. Anyway, I locked myself in a room for a day after watching home movies of Cindy and I.

Step Five: Having Contrived Conflict for the Sake of Conflict

I mean, sure, in real life couples fight. They slap each other. They throw drinks in each other’s faces. They break each other’s garage doors. They sneak devices that emit chirping sounds once every five minutes under their bed and pretend they can’t hear the sound. That’s all fine and normal.

But in your story, conflict must arise organically. Characters need to remain in character.

After Destiny and I settled into our groove and she really got the character of Cindy down, I tried to reenact a fight Cindy and I had several years earlier. The problem was, because of Destiny’s profession, she was cool with taking a cumshot anywhere. So she wasn’t able to channel Cindy’s rage. The next two days of silence and the following “make up” sex just felt so forced.

Step Six: Portraying Abusive Behavior As Romantic

While this doesn’t really relate to my situation with Destiny, you should try to avoid this. I see this way too often in romance novels.

How Writers Can Deal With Stalkers

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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.

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.