We’ve all made purchases we’ve regretted. From houses with shaky foundations to satellite radio subscriptions to houses without any foundation, consumer regret is a common phenomenon. If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ve probably come across ads for Masterclasses or other writing courses and gotten tempted to shell out a few hundred bucks to fill the void in your life that work and family couldn’t fill.

But you’re probably also wondering: are these courses a scam? Well, that’s what we’ll explore in this article.

Your first thought, however, might be, John, isn’t that what this channel is? Aren’t these articles essentially free versions of the writer workshops you used to do at the learning annex but aren’t allowed to anymore because you keyed the cars of students who submitted late work to teach them how important it is to meet deadlines? (Of course, not all of you are asking that. I realize that a good portion of the viewership mostly reads to learn about the drama of my personal life. And I also realize there’s a subcategory within that group that’s just waiting for me to finally post nude photos of my second wife, Cindy.)

These articles absolutely have educational value, and you should always be taking notes while reading, even the stuff about how the man in my father’s coffin might be an imposter. I realize I’ve never explicitly said that before so if you don’t have a pen and paper, go get one right now.

As I was saying, these articles are for passive reading. I’m not asking you to submit work nor am I providing you with any feedback. In fact, on several occasions I have taken the work of  those who left excerpts of their writing in the comments and sent it to the FBI.

So this series, and any other series on YouTube that I occasionally borrow ideas from, aren’t really the same as a proper writing course. We’ll look at the benefits and drawbacks of creative writing courses so you can decide if it’s really worth dumpster diving and stealing food from the break room fridge for a few months on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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There are five questions you need to ask yourself before you register for a writing course:

Question 1 – Am I just doing this to get laid?

Now I realize that from an evolutionary standpoint, we have to answer yes to this question no matter what we’re doing. So I’ll be more specific and say that you should avoid writing workshops if you just want to hookup with other writers, even if it’s an online course. As I explained in this video, writers aren’t compatible with other writers. We’re naturally the most self-absorbed creatures on the planet and when we get into the orbit of each other, it’s basically like two black holes colliding.

I will admit that I’m being a little hypocritical here. When I was doing writer workshops at the learning annex, I encouraged hookups. I thought it would make for good drama that my students could later put into their writing. To accomplish this, I’d often have students do breathing exercises where they put their hands on each other’s diaphragms and synchronize their breathing, even though I don’t see how that could possibly help make anyone a better writer. I also had an open bottle policy in the classroom and would play sultry RnB during quiet writing time.

For a period of time, this worked very well, but soon my classes gained a reputation and became the most popular in the entire learning annex. After a few semesters, they became mostly a sausage fest populated by paunchy, desperate middle-aged men and women who were… mostly just tired, I guess.

Question 2 – Am I open to criticism?

It’s hard to be criticized. It’s like being told you’re ugly. Actually, it’s worse than that because while most of us have accepted that that hair isn’t coming back and those tits aren’t going to work their way back towards the clouds, we’re taking this course on the slim hope we actually possess some talent.

And being criticized by a professor is one thing. This person presumably has had publishing experience and knows what they’re talking about and doesn’t have too many DUIs. But what about other students? Are you comfortable with a 19-year-old telling you your story doesn’t seem true to life? Or someone of the opposite sex telling you it’s not likely this story will win you your partner back?

Question 3- Can you provide other students with constructive criticism?

It goes the other way, too. What will you do if you read a story that totally fucking sucks?

On the one hand, it can be a big confidence boost. The only other way to feel that good about yourself is to go jogging or do some pushups and that also totally fucking sucks.

My advice is to be brutally honest with your classmates. And also use a fake name. You can click this link to find ways to shake a tail if your class is in person, and if you’re doing it online, mask your IP address and don’t include any information on your webcam that might indicate your physical location, then you should be safe from the most types of violent reprisals. If this seems like a hassle, maybe writing courses aren’t for you.

Question 4 – Will this information be relevant to me?

I mean, you can probably figure this one out on your own.

Question 5 – Can I network and get feedback in other ways?

There are many ways to get the things a writing course provides without paying those hefty fees.  Libraries are a great source of unemployed people who will read your work and give you feedback for a couple of bucks. And you can network for free on all types of social media sites so long as social media access doesn’t violate the terms of your parole.

So overall, I’d say for the vast majority of you, a writing course just isn’t worth it.

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Today’s post has been brought to you by Reedsy’s online novel writing course. For one simple fee of $979, you will get advice from a whole host of authors and experts you’ve never heard of.  The course includes office hours with your course instructor, modules on plot, dialogue and punctuation, and advice from “acclaimed editors.”

Disclaimer: Reedsy’s course does not include feedback from authors and all tuition fees are nonrefundable. Reedsy does not guarantee success and if your book sells fewer than 20 copies, it’s not our fault.

I want you to forget everything you think you know about fiction. Forget about plotting, about prose, about basic grammar. Forget everything I’ve taught you as well. Forget that I told you I go to support groups under false pretenses to get story ideas. And forget anything that might indicate I’m somehow culpable of D&E offices burning down in 2021.

The reason I’m asking you to do this is because we need to focus on the most essential part of creating good fiction. Bad fiction doesn’t fail because it uses too many adverbs, or because the story pacing lags, or because the author’s name came up in the Epstein files a bunch of times. It fails because readers don’t make emotional connections to the stories they’re reading. Crappily written books can still succeed if they manipulate the reader with cheap emotional tricks. You have to remember: readers are desperately lonely people. If it’s helpful, imagine your reader as stupid dog, and that you just need a few well-timed treats and belly rubs to get them to love you until they die in three or four years.

There’s science that supports this, too. Readers remember more about stories they connect with emotionally. Many years ago at D&E offices, I ran an experiment where several interns were asked to read books from the D&E catalog. We connected electrodes to their brain and chest to monitor their brain waves and heartrate. Books that elicited higher heartrates also had more stable brain wave patterns. But after ten hours, the books whose emotional arcs didn’t pay off left readers bored and confused, not to mention forgetful and dangerously dehydrated.

If you feel like these are cheap tricks meant for writers looking to earn a quick buck, you are actually doing the world a service because reading makes people more empathetic. One quick look around at the world today should tell you that we need more empathy. And as you search for this emotional truth in your writing, it may even bleed over into your personal life. For example, I always round to the nearest dollar to give money to kids mutilated by the corporations I buy things from. And at my job, I put a lot more effort into playing matchmaker for my employees.

We’ll reveal personal details we probably shouldn’t on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Strategy 1 – Open Your Characters (and yourself) up to vulnerability

Writing should make you emotional. If you’re writing a funny passage, you should be laughing. If you’re writing a tense, chilling passage, you should feel uncomfortable walking around your home at night. And if you’re writing an erotic scene, you should at least get the baristas to consider asking you to leave the Starbucks.

My suggestion: Don’t keep your reader at an ironic distance. At some point in your story, your character should bare their soul. And that’s the great thing about fiction. We can do this with make-believe people and make money, instead of spending our own money on therapy.

I sob all the time when I’m writing. Now, it’s not always due to my writing, in fairness. Sometimes, it’s a side effect of the stimulants I take to keep me productive, or sometimes I just think about the fact that my second wife’s new husband’s company is still making record profits, even in this economy. But that will translate to your character and also to your reader.

Strategy 2 – Keep the Reveals Spare (And Vary Your Emotions)

However, you can’t barrage your reader with this vulnerability. Remember, that our emotional state is complex. If you’re anything like me, you feel at least three or four different emotions every day. Some days I wake up thinking I’ll never get Cindy back, but then I’ll see a car accident on the side of the road and imagine it’s her new husband and I start to feel a little better.  

The big emotional reveal in my novel, The House on Pain Avenue, is when Daniel stands up to his father and tells him that if he can’t accept him for being gay, then their relationship is over. But throughout the novel Daniel goes through many other mini emotional arcs. There’s the shock he experiences once he finds out 9/11 may have been an inside job, and there’s the joy he gets to experience when his older sibling’s frat brothers run a train on him. Your characters will seem more human if you allow them this type of emotional complexity.  

Strategy 3 – Plot Out Your Story by Emotional Arcs First

Imagine your character’s emotional state as a Cartesian plane. The x-axis just stands for time. Everything above on the positive side of the x-axis is a positive emotion like love and contentment, and everything below the x-axis, is a negative emotion like jealousy and anger over losing money in a crypto scam. Your character’s arc should look like a sinusoidal wave as your story progresses. Once you finish your story, you need to use this formula to calculate the integral, where A is the amplitude of the wave, omega is the angular frequency and phi is the phase shift. If your answer is zero from T1 to T2, you’ve done your job.

So, for example, when I wrote my novel Minge, I knew that it was going to start with Minge feeling a deep sense of grief, and the arc of the story would be about overcoming that grief. So I had to think: what can instill a sense of grief? Well, what if she had gotten fired from her job because she yelled some racial insults at a heckler during an open-mic night? And then I had my story.

Strategy 4 – Emotional Mapping

Finally, one thing I find helpful is to write all the main characters of the story on a page. Draw all of your characters on a page and put them in a circle. Then draw lines between characters to show how they have changed one another. If you do it correctly, your map should look something like this.

Plot holes: They’re the biggest crime a fiction writer can commit… except for all the real crimes they commit. And for a writer, they are the biggest source of worry we have… except for the worry of someone finding the evidence you left behind from your real crimes or that you’ll somehow contradict your alibi in your writing or interviews or YouTube videos by accident.

However, there’s a lot of common misunderstandings about what actually constitutes a plot hole. I can’t tell you how many times at book readings and book signings I’ve gotten into arguments and shouting matches and struggles that involved hair pulling over what readers thought was a plot hole in one of my stories. For example, plot holes are not characters acting stupidly or illogically. The scientists acting like dumbasses in Prometheus isn’t a plot hole. I mean, I’m basically a writing scientist and even I make dumb decisions. Like when I tried to make D&E Publishing a non-profit organization because I thought it would mean we wouldn’t have to pay taxes.

Plot holes are also not unanswered questions. Authors aren’t obligated to explain everything. In the film version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, it’s never said who actually killed Sean Regan. In Pulp Fiction, we never know what’s in the briefcase. In my novel, Lone Mountain, we never discover where our hero Colt Action got the Comanche skull that he talks to throughout most of the story or why it’s child-sized.

Finally, it’s also not an obvious solution that the characters didn’t think of. Sure, characters that travel through time in stories shouldn’t go back to ten minutes before the bad thing happens, but instead hours, days or weeks in advance. In my story, The Things We Lost, if the new baby was going to be such a strain on the character’s marriage, why didn’t the character simply pull out early and blow his load all over the female’s stomach? But remember, characters don’t have perfect knowledge. They are flawed, and bad at planning, and they hate the way condoms feel just like us.

So, what is a plot hole, then? Well, it’s an inconsistency that breaks the rules, logic or timeline in the story you’ve established. And just like a jealous wife or the IRS, your reader will be relentless about pointing out those inconsistencies if you commit them. We’ll get good at explaining our lies on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Common Plot Hole 1 – Characters Acting in a Way They Shouldn’t

I’m starting with one that’s a bit of a gray area, but that’s because I’ve always strived for nuance on this channel. The thing is… storytelling is all about character transformations. Growth is what makes our characters compelling. And that connects us to the changes we make in real life. When my wife Cindy left me, I understood that we had grown apart, accepted it and moved on with my life.

However, characters who suddenly do a complete 180 just to serve the plotline is what readers hate. One example is Breaking Bad’s Mike Ermentraut abandons his granddaughter in the park when he knows the DEA is onto him. This rang false to a lot of fans. And as someone who loves their children and knows all of their names, I would never do something like this.

Common Plot Hole 2 – Breaking the Laws, Rules or Background That You’ve Previously Established

The bond between an author and a reader is sacred. This is why I’m always willing to listen to fan theories about my work, no matter how ridiculous.

In Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, one vampire is able to break into a house and kill two people, even though it is already established that vampires need to be invited into your home in this universe. Now, I usually don’t like to mention my own work on this channel, but just to show that I’m respectful of other authors, I will mention Out of the Woodwork, a story about an alternate reality where metal doesn’t exist and all technology is made out of wood. Anyway, the story ends with the protagonist killing the main villain with a pistol. Some readers felt that was a cheat.

Common Plot Hole 2 – Continuity Errors

These are minor discrepancies from one part of the story to the next. Individually, they may not matter much, but if you have several of them, they may hurt your chances of being published. When I started D&E Publishing in 2012, we had many authors clamoring to get published by us. If you watched this video, you’ll know the story of Evan Hayward. He was a great writer, even though not many people at our company liked him.

Anyway, Evan’s debut novel, A Story Told By An Idiot, had the characters being chased by a black sedan. But later in the scene, he described the vehicle as “charcoal.” It was then that Evan and I mutually decided it would be best if we went our separate ways, and nobody put anything in anyone’s gas tank to retaliate.

So, how can we avoid making these mistakes in the first place?

Fix 1 – Outline Before You Start Writing

I’ve always said that a writer should plan ahead. Frantically pulling a perfect book out of thin air while using a dangerous mix of amphetamines to fight off sleep deprivation never got anyone anywhere.

Fix 2 – Look for Characters Who Serve No Purpose

Because character inconsistency is a common plot hole, just eliminate characters that aren’t necessary. This has helped me immensely to avoid plot holes… and also why none of my books pass the Bechdel test.

If you’ve ever been caught in the rain without an umbrella, or caught in the middle of a murder of crows without an umbrella to fend off their attacks because they followed you to work after remembering that you were the one who threw rocks at them to be quiet that morning on your lawn even though you live 25 miles from your office, then you’ve experienced one of fiction’s timeless conflicts: man vs nature.

This is the third installment in our six-part series about the key conflicts in literature. For those who hate themselves for what their father did to them, you can check out our Man vs. Self article, and for those who hate their father for what he did to them, then our Man vs. Man article might be more up your alley.

Man vs Nature conflicts are different than many other conflicts in fiction. Nature has no motives, plan or vendetta. Characters are fighting against something that has no awareness that they exist at all. This is relatable because it reminds so many readers of their love lives.

But it’s also relatable because this conflict has been with us since caveman times, when leopards would come and take our children in the dead of night instead of the elders who made up a bunch of bullshit rules for our tribe to follow.

And yet with all of our modern technology, it’s a conflict that’s just as relevant to our lives today. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably lost loved ones to cholera or rabies, with no cure in sight. And the greatest blow to my publishing career was not a vindictive agent or publisher, nor was it my lack of self-confidence. It was a fire that destroyed D&E offices in 2021, and while the courts argued that it was caused by my business partner siphoning electricity from a nearby building – making it a man vs technology conflict – once the fire got out of control, it really just became man vs the natural melting point of human flesh.

We’ll trek across vast deserts and gun down ravenous herds of deadly goats on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip One – Use Nature to Reveal Character

Much like alcohol, a man vs. nature conflict will often reveal a person’s true identity. Back in 2018, when D&E Publishing was really taking off as a company, I took my employees on a scavenger hunt through wilderness of southern Utah. Groups were paired off with nothing but a half-bottle of water, a compass, a magnifying glass, an emergency flare and a copy of a survival guide that I wrote but decided not to publish because it wasn’t profitable.  

I quickly learned which people were the strivers and which were the cowards who immediately went to their cars afraid they’d die of dehydration. I also learned a lot about myself, particularly that I’m not a great planner and I don’t have a great understanding of how much damage emergency flares can cause during the dry season.

In your fiction, you should similarly use natural calamities to reveal character strengths and flaws. In Cast Away, for example, we learn that average humans are so resourceful, they can even learn to make friends with volleyballs. Diseases show which of us are so self-centered that we refuse to wear a piece of cloth on our face for a few hours a day to save our fucking neighbors and grandparents.  

Tip Two – Make Nature Specific

Don’t just say that a storm is approaching. Describe the atmospheric conditions. Is this caused by a high pressure or a low pressure system? Give barometric readings or your reader just won’t buy it.

I remember one reader sending me a manuscript about a bear attack. In his book, the side character was killed instantly when the bear ripped out his jugular. Having once watched a friend be killed by a bear during a camping trip, I knew that the bear was likely to start by eating his abdomen and then his face before he slowly died of blood loss. I rejected the book on the spot.

But you also have to be specific about what nature can’t do. If your snake finds a way to open doors, or your Ebola finds a way to drive a car, well… then we’re moving into man vs. the supernatural territory.

Tip Three – Don’t Ignore the Cost

Conflict needs to have consequences for it to be interesting. If your party ventures across dangerous terrain and comes out on the other side never losing a member or an important item, your reader won’t feel anything.  

And it’s just not true to life. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t think of my employees lost in that fire at D&E offices, and also that homeless man who would use our lobby as a quiet place to shoot heroin after 7 pm.

But you don’t have to kill people just to titillate your reader. A cost can manifest itself in many different ways. Jurassic Park has loss of life, sure, but the greater cost I’ve always found is that kids will never get to enjoy that awesome park and investors won’t be able to recover their losses. And in my novel, Canucks Amuck, about a Canadian zombie invasion, the loss of life pales in comparison to the devastation caused by socializing the American healthcare system.  

They say we are our own greatest enemy. And while I’ve never found that to be especially true – I’d have to give that title either to my second wife’s new husband or my former agent, who once called and said I won a million dollar sweepstakes so he could break into my house while I went to the gas station to sign the check – it’s undeniable that our internal struggles make for excellent fiction.

Today will be the first installment of a six-part series. Each part will focus on one of fiction’s categorical conflicts. Perhaps because it’ s February or perhaps because I just discovered this weird lump that I should get checked out but probably won’t I’ve decided to start with Man vs. Self.

This is, I think, the most relatable type of conflict. Everyone has fears and self-doubt. When I first started D&E Publishing, for example, many friends and neighbors didn’t invest in my company because of a lack of confidence in their business skills. And I’ve gotten emails from so many viewers who are terrified they’ll never make it as a writer due to their personal flaws. Which is crazy because I’ve only told a few of my viewers that.

In your fiction, this conflict can be small and muted, like a character deciding to reconnect with a friend they lost touch with, or it can be large, like the protagonist realizing that his split personality is the one who’s been drowning all of those nuns.

Readers like these types of conflicts because they’re relatable, but they also like these stories because they feel better about themselves in comparison. I know when I read The Catcher in the Rye, for example, I felt glad that even though I was also expelled from school like Holden Caulfield, at least when I got with a prostitute as a young man, I took her straight to pound town.

Just a quick trigger warning: We’re going to explore some uneasy truths and deal with some heavy topics in this video. If you’re not in the right state of mind to listen to frank discussions about mental health, like and subscribe and let the video play to the end so it doesn’t hurt our viewing numbers, but feel free to turn the sound off.

We’ll try to figure out which hole we’re filling with all that chocolate and booze on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Tip 1 – Root the Conflict in the Character’s Backstory

If you think about it for a second, why do we have self-doubt in the first place? It seems like in caveman times, those with self-doubt would be too distracted by guilt from murdering a rival tribe that they fail to realize they’re being stalked by a leopard while gathering berries. Yet it persists in our blood line.

That’s most likely because as human societies grew in complexity, even the most neurotic of us managed to get access to food and shelter from beasts long enough to swap DNA with each other, and then either through nature or nurture, we passed along our neuroses to our children.

And life always throws us curve balls. For example, I remember one time my father barged into my room late at night. He hid under my bed, claiming that loan sharks were after him, but when I asked if I could hide with him, he said that the loan sharks would get suspicious if nobody was on the bed and that the loan sharks would, at worst, kidnap me for a ransom but that they weren’t likely to physically harm me. Luckily, it was a false alarm, but it did lead to some trust issues, both with my father and with the loan sharks I would later work with when I became an adult.

Anyway, in your fiction, you can try using flashbacks. Tease them out slowly so the reader can understand why your character has the conflicts that they do. In my novel, Chair, we don’t learn until halfway through the novel that the protagonist’s binge eating was inspired by his family underfeeding and subsequently killing his childhood pet iguana.

Tip 2 – Connect the internal conflict to an external conflict

Our internal conflicts don’t stay stuck inside our head, unfortunately. They manifest in our actions, often in bizarre, unpredictable ways. Take my first wife, for example. An unstable childhood where she was passed between many family members meant she never developed a stable identity. Due to this, she was married to at least six men at the same time under different pseudonyms and personalities. In some relationships, she was the loving mother, others the career woman. I would’ve been more upset about the betrayal had it not been for the fact that I lucked out and got the sex-addicted slut.

In your fiction, you need to come up with external conflicts that will also bring out the internal ones you’ve established. If your character has a fear of drowning, throw their puppy into the ocean. Test a character’s religious faith by introducing them to a really hot atheist. Test a character’s acceptance of aging by introducing them to a really hot, really young atheist.

Tip 3 – Use Symbolism

Here’s an exercise. Look around your room and see what objects could symbolize your identity or at least your state of mind at the moment. I think you’d be surprised at how easy this is to do.

A quick scan of my room reveals the following: the pile of clothes symbolizes a busy mind, maybe one that’s too easily distracted. The loaded pistol atop my desk symbolizes my need to feel secure and the fact that I grew up and still live in a rough neighborhood. The lipstick stained handkerchief from my second wife I keep in my dresser draw symbolizes my tendency to live in the past and my hope that someday I could possibly use the traces of DNA on it to clone her.

And don’t be afraid of cliches. This stuff resonates for a reason. A storm is a classic example of a way to symbolize anger and inner turmoil. The skull in Hamlet is a great example of a symbol for the fear of death. The sunglasses on the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, on the other hand, represent an unwillingness of the main characters to accept the finality of death.

This is hard for me to say, fans of Stories’ Matter, but… I’m dying of cancer. This may be the last video I ever publish.

Okay, not really. But that got your attention, didn’t it? Made you want to keep reading.

Fiction, at its most fundamental nature, is all about lying. It’s about tricks and deceit and pulling the wool from behind your reader’s eyes. As a fiction writer, you use big words to lie and make yourself appear smart and distract others from the fact that, if the apocalypse were to come, your uselessness to mankind would make you one of the first left behind to die.  

The hook is the cornerstone to this deception. It’s the flashing titty, the taste of that first sip of absinthe, the smell of newly-lit rock smoldering in the crackpipe. It’s there to blind the reader to the crooked teeth, the blinding hangover, the achy withdrawal and the kiss of concrete in the back alley.

In today’s article, we’ll see how we can effectively snatch our reader’s attention right off the bat. We’ll manipulate in a way that would get us fired from almost any other job on this edition of Stories Matter.

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Before we start, let’s look at some examples of great opening hooks from classic works of fiction.

“I am an invisible man.”

From Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This is a great opening for people who don’t read the titles of books they’re reading.

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from serve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

From Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. As true today as whenever it was written.

“You want to be there. You know you do. Don’t lie, dahling. I know what you think when you look up at that splendorous place atop the mountain. I know what fills you, spurs you on, fuels your dreams. You’re obsessed with being chosen. Everyone is.”

From Modelland by Tyra Banks. There’s so much confidence in the prose here, such command of the language. You can tell Tyra’s going to hit you with truths other models/talk show hosts wouldn’t dream of.  

So, how can we be as effective as these three?

Step One: Start in the middle of the action

This is sometimes referred to as “in medias res,” which is Latin for “Things called media, they go to the middle.” Starting this way confuses your reader. Which is good because most people read books to appear smart. So this forces your reader to keep reading to find clarity so they feel like less of a dumbass. Using tricks to prey on the insecurities of your reader is what writing’s all about.

Step Two: Imply intriguing contexts

It’s not just about confusing your reader. And it’s not just about shocking your reader with mutilations and expletives and left-wing ideas like murdering anyone who says Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays.

A context could be an era, place or scenario. You could allude to an ongoing conflict or bring up an interesting fact about a place or era of history.

Here’s how I started Doe’s Boys, my World War II drama set in the North African theater:

“By the end of 1944, half the men in L Division would never return home. Most of those who did came back missing a body part or two. But everyone who came back whole had one pastry chef to thank.”

Step Three: Set the voice and tone

We often think of hooks as being plot dependent, but voice and tone matter just as much. If they’re anything like me, the average reader is going to spend the next month or so listening to this person, so they want it to be someone unlike their family or co-workers or therapist, somebody worth listening to.

From the opening lines of Kerouac’s On The Road, you can tell Sal Paradise is a free spirit, not someone brought down by the old ball and chain.

You could try being funny, but I’d recommend something sad and desperate. If YouTube analytics are to be trusted, that will come much more naturally to you.  

Step Four: Invite controversy

Rudyard Kipling once began a story this way:

“A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things – neither sudden, alien nor unexpected.”

Now, am I suggesting you start your story advocating racial segregation? Kinda. I mean, Kipling’s famous and you aren’t so he must be on to something.

But if blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, zoophilia make you uncomfortable, just choose a statement that shows a strong but understandable conviction. My 2020 crime epic A Handful of Napalm starts like this:

“The one thing nobody ever tells you about crack: It never stops being awesome.”

Step Five: Tug the heartstrings

This seems counterintuitive as your reader doesn’t even know the character yet so why would they feel an emotional connection? Sort of like how you ignore news stories about thousands dying in floods and earthquakes or force yourself not to learn co-workers names so they won’t get attached and ask you to give money to their GoFundMe when they get bone marrow cancer.

There are, however, certain universal emotional triggers that even people who walk past choking homeless people without a second thought can’t ignore: A crying baby. A barren woman. A barren woman’s dog about to be put down for biting a crying baby.

Here’s a great example of how to do this:

“I was insane the way an animal is insane because I’d lost everything.”

That’s from William Shatner’s biography and it gets directly to the heart of his pain and his struggle.

In this installment of my 87-part series, we’re going to look at how to begin our novel. And nothing will grab your reader more than an absolutely perfect first chapter. Well, except name recognition. And a good marketing campaign by a Big Six Publisher or affiliated subsidiary. And an aesthetically-pleasing and professionally-designed cover that costs at least four figures. Positive reviews from some of the biggest newspapers and literary magazines are key, and endorsement quotes from all the main authors in your genre is essential. A catchy tagline certainly couldn’t hurt and if you really want to wow your reader…

I often tell authors that the biggest mistake a new author can make is to not write a perfect first chapter. Over nine percent of the time, that’s the reason editors will turn down a manuscript. But, you might be asking, what do we mean by the perfect first chapter? Something like Flowers for Algernon? Pale Fire? Macbeth? Sure, those are all great examples, but any type of book can have a perfect first chapter. A chapter should contain the following things:

A hook for an opening line. Think Moby Dick’s “Call me, Ishmael” or Tek War’s “He didn’t know he was about to come back to life.” In a future installment, we’ll look more closely at how to construct the perfect opening line. Beyond the opening hook, however, a first chapter should: introduce the main character, establish your tone and voice, include some dramatic action, like a death, an explosion or an abortion, be subtle, evoke a mystery but never confuse the reader, and set up a conflict but not the main conflict, which will instead arise 12.64 percent into the novel.

Today we’ll look at four tricks that can help us accomplish these goals.

Step One: Start in media res.

With ever-decreasing attention spans caused by Tik Tok and 15 second porn gifs, the readers of today need their dopamine fix fast. Recent studies show that readers decide whether or not to read your book after the first three words. So if you’re not whipping out all your literary might and dangling it in front of your reader’s face from the outset, that’s just one more novel for the orphanage bookshelves.

That’s why I suggest you start in the middle of your scene. Skip long introductions, skip backstories, skip exposition, skip character description, skip names, skip adverbs, skip nouns, skip punctuation. Start your book with a gunshot to the head. Start your book with cannibalism. Start your book with a nonsensical string of expletives.

Step Two: Don’t frontload the backstory.

Be sparing with your reveals. It’s probably not good to painstakingly detail every year of your character’s life from birth to their present age. Don’t make the same mistake I did and write a hard-boiled crime thriller where the lead detective doesn’t reach puberty until page 46.

Maybe pick one or two key moments from your character’s past that relate to the events unfolding in your first chapter. If your character is eating a sandwich, maybe then would be the time to talk about their high school job as a school cafeteria bully. If your character is in the middle of a high-speed car chase, maybe you should talk about the advice their high school driving instructor gave them. If your character is an American high school teacher, talk about their regret over failing to have prevented all those school shootings.

Step Three: Opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion.

There’s nothing more important than voice. If the current media climate has taught me anything, it’s that people naturally follow loudmouths who incessantly provide their unsolicited and uninformed opinions. Follow suit and standout in an overcrowded literary marketplace by being as loud, brazen and obnoxious as possible.

Or, look for contrasts and unexpected viewpoints. Maybe your radical Islamic terrorist wants to retire and open a bakery on the West Side. Maybe your homosexual wedding planner makes a plan to kill himself. Or how about this opener, from my 2009 bestselling drama, Storming The Gates of Heaven: “All my life I hated immigrants… until I realized I was one.”

Step Four: Make the first domino fall.

As I used to tell my students attending my workshop at the learning annex: “You don’t have to bring the storm in the first chapter, but the storm should be visible on the horizon.” After all the applause, I also explain that prize fighters don’t throw haymakers in the first round and starship captains don’t divert all power from the shields to the phasers for the warning shot.

While conflict is the driving force of all fiction, you need to take your time here. What if James Agee’s A Death in the Family had given us A Death in the Family in the first chapter? Where would we go from there?

So, for example, instead of starting with a bank robbery, start with a bank security officer watching an employee orientation video. Instead of the death of a father, start with the near-death experience of a beloved uncle. Instead of dumping a bunch of information on your reader, be sparing with the details and don’t even finish the sentence that you are writing so that…

We’re going to do something a little bit different this time around. I know you normally comer here to hear my expert advice and about my experience in publishing in order to make your life feel less pointless, but today you’re going to take center stage and hopefully that will make your life feel less pointless. I’ll be sharing some writing exercises that’ll help get your creative juices flowing. But as an added bonus, any subscriber who posts their writing sample in the comments will receive a free PDF of the first page of Chair, and the commenter I declare the winner will get a signed picture of me wearing an outfit of your choice.

Exercise 1 – Write fan fiction

Lots of writers look down on fan fiction. It’s often considered the Oklahoma of the literary community. But unlike Oklahoma, it’s not just a bleak wasteland where dreams go to die. It’s a vibrant community with a vast range of genres, from Harry Potter erotica to Sonic the Hedgehog erotica to steampunk versions of the Canterbury Tales that are also gay bondage erotica.

So, why write fan fiction? Well, for starters, after reading what other people post, you’ll almost immediately feel less self-conscious about your writing ability. And second, without the stress of having to construct your own characters and settings, you can work on things like tone, dialogue, plot, character arcs, descriptions of orc vaginas, reasons for inter-species breeding and synonyms for engorged.

Exercise 2 – Write down everything you hear in daily life.

A great writer is a great observer of human nature. And there’s no better way to observe people in their natural state than eavesdropping and spying and invading someone’s personal space.

Now, a good way to do this is to visit a coffee shop, sit near a pair of women and write down their conversation verbatim. However, if you live in a crowded city, it might be difficult to find a Starbuck’s with decibel levels that doesn’t screw up even the best wiretapping hardware.

So, I find it’s better to follow around a pair of women shopping. This way, you can observe not just their conversation, but also their movements, the way their clothes hang off their body, and even their smells, provided you get a favorable wind.

Exercise 3- Write a story in 6 words or less fewer.

Ape. Tools. Fire. Man. Bomb. Ape. That’s just an example of how you can condense millions of years of history in just a few words. Popularized by Hemmingway after he came across some sick piece of shit who was trying to profit off their dead child, the six-word story is a fun way to stretch your imagination as a writer. And it’s also a good way to prepare for the insane demands of an editor.

Exercise 4 – Brainstorm in a sensory deprivation setting

It’s no secret that the modern world is filled with distractions. It’s difficult enough for a writer to get any work done, but work, the 24-news cycle, Netflix, Tik Tok porn, custody hearings and children’s recitals make it even harder.

To get your creative juices flowing, you could try a few hour-long sessions in a sensory deprivation tank, where you lie in a sealed bath of Epsom salts. But you don’t need to go to some pricey, Yuppie new age spa to experience sensory deprivation. You can easily find people on Craigslist or the at bus station with dark soundproof sub-basements that even your loudest screams couldn’t penetrate. 

Exercise 5 – Write captions to photos

Inspired by the New Yorker’s always funny caption contest, this is another exercise that hones your skills for brevity. Any sort of photos work. National Geographic has a photo of the day, for example. Personally, to hone my skills at character description, I search random yearbook photos and write obituaries.

Exercise 6 – Write alternative slogans to different kinds of breakfast cereals

They’re always after me lucky charms. They’re great. When a bowl of gravel just won’t do. You want to write a great opening hook for your novel or short story? Start with a slogan. Some of the greatest writers of the last century have been advertisers. “Where’s the beef?” and “Taste the rainbow” are right up there with “Call me, Ishmael” and “All this happened, more or less.” Remember: just like an advertiser you’re trying to trick people into buying a product that they don’t need and probably don’t even want, if they thought about it even for a little bit.

Exercise 7 – Write a conversation without dialogue

That doesn’t devolve into porn. Ninety percent of all communication is non-verbal. My second and definitely favorite wife and I probably only had two or three conversations that lasted more than thirty minutes before we got married.

As a writer, I think you’ll find that simple gestures like shrugging your shoulders, spitting or holding a gun to someone’s head communicate more than words ever could.

Exercise 8 – Retell a well-known story

Similar to fan fiction, here you’re trying to twist a famous story on its head. For example, what if Dracula was a doctor who provided rural Romanian peasants with blood transfusions?

Exercise 9 – Find a newspaper article and type every third word you see

Shit, I don’t know. It might work.

Exercise 10 – You can even try poetry

Sure, it’s the literary equivalent of making your clothes with a loom or making soap with discarded sheep innards, but even this outdated, useless form of expression can benefit you as a writer.