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10 Writing Exercises to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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.

How to Use Symbolism In Your Writing

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

From Golding’s Conch Shell to Frost’s Two Paths to Goyer’s Batman’s Mother’s Name, symbolism is an essential component in all forms of fiction. Symbols give authors a way to convey complex ideas and beliefs while providing the reader a rich, sensory experience that’s open to interpretation. Without them, stupid people would have even more trouble convincing the book club they actually understood the text. We’ll look at ways to incorporate symbols in your writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Symbolism has been around for as long as humans have told stories. You can even see them in cave paintings tens of thousands of years old in southern France, where you’ll find women depicted fornicating with oxen, likely symbolizing the chieftain “bull” who was allowed to make cuckolds of the weaker men in the tribe.

Symbolism can elevate your writing, adding layers of complexity and letting you say more with less. A blood stain can hint at an entire life of guilt. A dilapidated house like Sutpen’s Hundred in Faulkner’s Absolom Absolom can serve as a potent symbol of a character’s state of moral ruin. And while you might not be able to think of great ideas like blood or a house, the great thing about symbols is they can really be anything. 

Before we get into the advice, it will be helpful to look at some evocative symbols from famous works of fiction. We’ll look at four types: colors, objects, places and characters. The color green is a recurring symbol in The Great Gatsby, meant to symbolize the other characters’ envy for hero Jay Gatsby’s financial and moral superiority. For objects, we have the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter, which symbolizes every teenage boy’s desire to sneak into the girls’ locker room. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien clearly designed the hellish nightmarescape that is Morodor to be a symbol for Luton. And though you might not have picked up on it, the animals in Animal Farm are symbols of different political ideologies.

So how can we use this in our own writing? What kinds of symbols do we use and why? Is everything a symbol for something else? Let’s simplify things and look at four ways we can use symbols effectively.

Step One: Use symbols to show emotion, instead of telling

Aside from lurking around their house at one in the morning, this is an editor’s next biggest pet peeve. And while if you’re like me and verbalize intimate feelings during book signings and first dates, your fiction will be more interesting if you can hint at emotional states through symbols. Instead of having your character say “I’m so full of grief right now because my dad died,” you can have the character describe a broken baseball bat they find when cleaning the garage. Instead of your sexually repressed adolescent boy talking about girls or watching porn, be subtle and have him slide a tube of tennis balls into a rain gutter.

Step Two: Use symbols to establish recurring themes

Let’s say your story is about a character’s search for freedom. The specifics don’t matter. Perhaps they’re a slave in bondage, perhaps they live in a repressive household, perhaps the government is trying to repress your character’s ability to own a weapon that can take out of room of fifty terrorists. Throughout the book, hint at the theme of freedom with images and extraneous events: a bird flying out of a cage, tits escaping the confines of a bra, cereal escaping the confines of a sealed package.

Step Three: Use symbols to hint at darker ideas

Throughout history symbolism has also been necessary way to skirt censorship and overcome cultural taboos. Artists have had to resort to using bananas and stalagmites and oil derricks to symbolize sexual desire. But even in the relatively open-minded present-day, editors are reticent to publish 30-page scenes of hardcore anal penetration or graphic, detailed descriptions of what it sounds like when you run over a horse with a tank.

So, instead of writing a sex scene, which often makes readers uncomfortable, hint at it by describing the jelly doughnuts your couple eats the morning after. Instead of literal depictions of the horrors of battle, what about a tense scene between two soldiers’ wives back home mud wrestling?

Step Four: Leave your work open to interpretation

This is the best part of using symbols. Having trouble writing a satisfying conclusion to your book? Just make up something about a sunset or a strange dream.  Or make your character walk toward a bright light that could be heaven, a nuclear explosion, or a titty bar outside Pittsburgh.

Fiction is not a science like physics or taxidermy: there is no right or wrong. Luckily, readers don’t know that, and an open-ending drives engagement as they flock to social media to shove their interpretation down other’s throats.  

I used this to great effect in my 2019 Western Lone Mountain. The protagonist Colt Action, a late-19th century Texas Ranger, makes it his life mission to massacre the Comanches after they failed to save his son from a snakebite. The novel ends with Colt burying his pistol in his yard.

Has he renounced his violent ways? Or does he now prefer the intimacy of knives? Or is he leaving helpful clues for future archeologists? Or maybe hoping the lead somehow improves the health of his tomato garden? And to be honest, I don’t have an answer. Each of those theories I just found on my fan page could be right. That’s the beautiful thing about it.

How To Raise the Stakes in Your Story

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Imagine a story where a secret agent is asked to find the kidnapped son of an intelligence official. An exciting scenario, right? But halfway into the story, we realize not only does our protagonist need to find the son, he needs to stop him from unintentionally unleashing a secretly-implanted supervirus. Ratchets up the tension, doesn’t it? As you probably guessed, I didn’t just make this up. This is the plot of 2002 classic sci-fi thriller, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. But I use it only to show how important raising the stakes are to your story.

So, what do we mean when we say “Raise the stakes?” Stakes are something gained or lost in the character’s pursuit of a goal; they are potential consequences. This phrase comes from Dracula, where the raising of the “stake” to kill the head vampire was the climax of the story.

Think of stakes as “If…, then…” statements. If Ahab doesn’t kill Moby Dick, many people won’t have oil to burn their lanterns. If Gatsby doesn’t earn enough money, the poor won’t have anyone to aspire to. Or in my 2011 sci-fi thriller Naptime, if John Crater, after getting injected with an experimental serum, doesn’t get at least eight hours of sleep each night, his heart will stop.

There are three kinds of stakes: external stakes, internal stakes, and post-ternal stakes. Let’s take a glance at each one. External stakes refers to what’s happening in the world around your characters. Perhaps an asteroid the size of Nauru is headed toward the Earth or perhaps your character has a big test on obscure island nations that he needs to pass to graduate high school.

Internal stakes are the emotional impacts of a success or failure. They are what fuels the character to pursue their goals. Revenge is a big one. As is love. In the Count of Monte Cristo, it’s the thought of living in a world where injustice isn’t resolved. In legendary Denver Broncos placekicker Jason Elam’s Monday Night Jihad, it’s giving up the sport you love to stop the terrorists from destroying America.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that post-ternal stakes are the stakes for the reader if they don’t finish the story. Confusion, blue balls, or a dearth of knowledge regarding the dangers of radon are all common post-ternal stakes. If your reader isn’t experiencing anything like this after they stop reading your book, it’s most likely your stakes aren’t high enough.

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you’re raising the stakes correctly.

Step One: Add a Ticking Clock

A lot of people ask me, John, how can I raise the stakes in my writing. Well, you can always start by adding a ticking clock. Your character doesn’t have to be aware of a time limit but your reader should be. There should be some time frame in which the character needs to achieve their goal. It doesn’t have to be a clock, obviously. You could use an egg timer, a stopwatch, an hourglass, a Chippendales calendar, a sundial, a marine chronometer, or the photon absorption by transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms 

Or find other ways to indicate a time limit. If you’re writing a thriller, trap your characters in a place where, if they don’t leave soon, they’ll never make it out alive. Like Baltimore.

Step Two: Combine internal and external stakes

Create scenarios in which your character has stakes in multiple-levels. In the Lord of the Rings, the external stakes for Frodo is that if he doesn’t destroy the ring, all of Middle Earth will fall into darkness. But on a personal level, if he doesn’t set off on this quest, people will realize how gay he is.

To give another example, if your character is trying to defuse a bomb in an elementary school, maybe focus on the guilt they still feel about all those bombs they made in their young and wild years.  

Step Three: Proportionality matters

Not all books need to escalate to world-ending stakes. It should escalate in proportion with your characters and the goals you’ve set up for them. If it’s a coming of age story set in a small town, you could go with this: If we don’t raise enough money, they’re going to tear down this teen rec center and turn it into a wildlife refuge. In one short story I wrote called “Action News” the stakes were simply whether or not an all-male local news broadcast team would have good ratings.

Step Four: Don’t forget about positive consequences

So far, we’ve focused on negative consequences, what a character risks losing. But we can’t forget why we want our reader to root for our characters. Getting laid is a great option. As readers, your audience is likely undesirable and sexually dormant and therefore rely on books for satisfaction.

Step Five: Create moral no-win scenarios

These are some of the most compelling scenarios in all of fiction. Put your characters in awkward situations where, no matter what they chose, something bad will happen. You could write about a New York City cop who’s torn between maintaining a vibrant, diverse community with lots of great authentic ethnic cuisines and terrorizing minorities like all his experience and training has told him to. Or you could do something like Batman, where he has to decide whether or not keeping the streets of Gotham safe justifies brainwashing and sexually enslaving a young man to help him do it. 

Why You Can’t Be Your Own Editor

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Let me share a story: The heat went out in our office one winter a few years back. While I tried to get my employees to work through it and use the heat from their computer screens to compensate, it became clear we needed to fix the heat. Now, as a man with a lot of pride, I wanted to take care of it myself. I strapped on the work boots I never wear and went to Home Depot to buy supplies. I came back with a new thermostat only to realize all the thermostat does is let you adjust the heat, the heat doesn’t actually come from the little box on the wall. It was a larger issue with the furnace in our building. Two weeks later and after we burned most of our backlog for warmth, I caved and hired an expert. 

I mention this very relatable anecdote to show you that we don’t always require the skills for the jobs we need done.

Editing is crucial to the success of any piece of fiction, whether it’s a young adult fantasy, a neo-noir thriller or interracial gay bondage courtroom erotica. Editing is what gets rid of unnecessary characters, uncharacteristic dialogue and unconcise prose. Editing is what gets you to “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” when you start out with “It was a rather mediocre period of time that couldn’t be solely characterized as being either good or bad.”

But editing, like fixing the heat in your office, isn’t something a writer can do on their own.

And while editors are mostly failures who are only editing because they couldn’t make it as a writer, they are still essential to your success, so it’s probably best not to tell them what I just said. In this article, I’ll first explain why you can’t be your own editor and then give you some tips on how to best work with your editor. We’ll condense our thoughts, work toward being concise, write succinctly and never be redundant on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Reason 1 – You’re Too Close This Thing

Us writers know that our writing is our children. In fact, they’re more than that. A book won’t write itself, but the seven children of mine that I’m aware of seem to have raised themselves pretty well on their own. And that love is important—it’s that love you’ll need to sell this thing to an agent and convince a publisher to take a chance on it and get in shouting matches with people at book readings to prove their interpretation is wrong.

But we are blind to the things that we love. Just like I was blind to the fact that my first wife was a serial bigamist, a writer might be blind to the fact that the horrible misogyny in their first sentence, even if well-intentioned, might be off-putting to certain readers.

You already know your whole story. It’s probably perfectly clear in your own mind. But a new reader doesn’t have that knowledge. Editors offer a unique perspective. The only way to get around this is to write in a drug-fueled stupor like I talked about in this video, so that you completely forget what you write, but that kind of writing is still going to need an editor anyway and you’ll probably impregnate or get impregnated by someone you don’t even know.

Reason 2 – You’re Brain Plays Tricks on You

Beyond emotional connections, we tend to gloss over things like typos and grammar mistakes. Our brains are wired to fill in the blanks, especially with things we’re familiar with. For example, a few years ago, it took me a month to discover a neighbor had killed himself in his car in my parking garage. My brain was just on autopilot during my morning and afternoon commute I was blind to what was around me. It works the same after your fiftieth read-through of your novel.  

Reason 3 – You’re Too Confident And/Or You’re Too Insecure

As a writer, you probably swing back and forth between these two thoughts: “Everyone who’s not a brilliant creator like me is just a thoughtless animal, content to eat, shit and die” and “I fucking hate writing, I swear I should just quit and finish law school.” Sometimes I might even have those two thoughts within the same hour. It’s why writing really should be considered some kind of mental illness.

Anyway, these thought processes either force us to under or over edit. In the case of the former, I waited until page 47 to introduce the main protagonist, and in the case of the latter, my family drama set during the Russian Revolution was cut to a lean 80 pages.  

Now, let’s see how we can solve these issues by working with an editor.  

Tip 1 – Remember: You’re Editor Is Not Your Enemy

My editor’s name is Thelma Shelby, and she’s shaped and polished the majority of John Lazarus’s works for the past 23 years. It’s a relationship that has lasted more than twice as long any of my other working relationships and more than ten times as long as any of my marriages. Why did I choose Thelma? First, being a woman, I thought she’d see things I would naturally miss. And boy was I right. For example, before I met Thelma, I had no idea women menstruated for five to seven days a month. I always thought it was something closer to 15.

But more importantly, she’s an 87-year-old woman confined to a wheelchair. This means she’s got loads of wisdom and experience, she’s got really nothing else to do with her time and I’ll never act too aggressively toward her because she’s such a sweet and kind person, even if she’s not always sweet and kind to my beautiful words. At the very least, I wouldn’t punch her in the mouth for trying to change my table of contents like the editor I worked with before her.

Tip 2 – Choose Your Battles

You will be amazed with all the feedback an editor will give you. But unlike a session with dominatrix, you don’t have to listen to everything they say. For example, when I wrote Chair, I was unwilling to budge on the title. At the same time, I took Thelma’s advice and got rid of the subplot about Fredrik trying to fake Native American heritage to get money for college. Thelma also convinced me that set the final gun battle at his house instead of chocolate factory, but I was unwilling to try to add more comedy to the scene. Anyway, these are typical conversations you will have your editor.

Tip 3 – Sometimes Your Editor Is Your Enemy

I’m not talking about Thelma, but pretty much every other editor I’ve worked with. Sometimes people just don’t click. They might say things like “I can’t believe you’re actually a writer” or “How have you not gone bankrupt?” that rub you the wrong way. And they might not be completely comfortable about being followed to their home. Some people just have different styles and personalities. Don’t hesitate to fire them. They’ll find work soon enough from the hundreds of thousands of desperate writers out there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mistake 1: Using adjectives, instead of action and details

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mistake 2: Using weak verbs

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

With some simple substitutions it’s much more effective:

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

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

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

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

Mistake 3: Not using dialogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mistake 4: Showing Too Much

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

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

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

Boosting Your Book Sales on Amazon KDP

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Amazon: a name synonymous with terrifying insects, gigantic women who want to brutalize you sexually and a dystopian megacorporation that forces workers to piss in bottles. And like all of those things, the Amazon marketplace can be, for a writer, a harrowing experience that makes your testicles retract into your own body.

KDP, or Kindle Double Penetration for short, is the online platform where most unqualified writers submit their unedited and poorly thought-out screeds about everything from geriatric homicide to marine safety to wholesome family fun. But most writers post a book on KDP and stop there, going back to their normal life with their beautiful spouse and children, as if that was worth anything. They don’t realize that with enough time and money and luck and time and experience and money and a little bit of luck, you can make the platform bring in some real cash. We’ll explore how to turn this Bezos brainchild from an exploiter into an exploitee on this edition of Stories’ Matter.  

To succeed in the Amazon marketplace, you have to learn the ins and outs of the algorithm, which decides how often and in what context prospective buyers see your book. Think of it like catfishing a lonely widow whose husband died in a factory fire, only you’re relying on a stylish book cover, positive reviews and an enticing product description, as opposed to sharp cheekbones, compliments and the assurance of a vast knowledge of OSHA guidelines.

Let’s breakdown ways to make the algorithm work for us.

Step 1: Use Amazon Ads

I’m not going to give the technical details on how to create an ad campaign on KDP. There are dozens of videos showing you how to do that on YouTube. What I will tell you is this: The first big mistake writers make is not devoting at least 10 grand to their marketing campaign. In a future installment, I’ll show you ways to crowdsource and manipulate your way into ponying up this kind of cash. But for the purposes of this video, I’m going to assume you have an extra 100 Benjamins waiting to be put to work.

You’ve got to be wise with how you advertise, though. Amazon Ads, for example, don’t let you use words like “fuck,” or “damn,” or “cum-splattered twink.” And you have to make sure the ads are being shown to the right people. Ads are mainly based off of keywords you select which is why…

Step 2: Keywords Are Everything

I want you to think of the kind of person who buys your book. What else do they read? What are their interests? What do they look like? Now for me, for most of my career, I knew that person to a tee. He liked westerns and thrillers, and was big into the fiction of L’Amour, Chandler and Elmore Leonard. He was a straight male, divorced and living in a one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana. He was also depressed, considered remembering to shave a good day and never wore a seatbelt because, well, if he didn’t have the courage to end it all, he was at least going to give fate a stacked deck.

Now, with this reader clearly in mind, think of the terms they would use when searching for a book. Obviously, you want genre terms like “thriller” and “action,” but also the book description should include phrases like “child custody” or “homemade SSRI recipes.”

Besides the book description, Amazon also lets you choose seven keywords to select for your book. For this it’s recommended you do at least one for setting, for example, late 500s Spain, one for character types, maybe “sex positive farm girl” and plot theme, in this case “live love laugh.”

Step 3: Select Your Categories Carefully

This is a simple one, but it’s definitely one you can’t overlook. By default, you only get to place your book into two categories. This can be tough if you’re like me and write a lot of books that could be suspense, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, western, comedy, drama, coming-of-age, queer, steampunk, erotic horror novels that also have a ton of great business advice. You actually can personally contact Amazon to get six more categories because that’s a normal and not stupid setup that totally makes sense.

Still, you have to ask yourself: Which genre’s normal readers will like my book best? It might take some tweaking. For example, my courtroom drama Hung Jury didn’t sell at all until I moved it to the queer category and redid the cover.

Step 4: Bring Your Own Audience Along

When you launch a book on KDP, you should already have a built-in audience that will be ready to buy it. Initial traffic from your biggest devotees will make your book appear in more searches. Contact fans any way you can. Fake social media stories about health scares will build sympathy and boost sales.

If you don’t already have an audience, create one. Read to a local high school. Tell them you’re a local author. Worried about a background check? Just find one that’s severely underfunded. The teachers at these schools are underpaid and stressed out enough that they won’t really care, and even if these kids spend most of there time doing whatever it is kids do these days – like make memes about Israeli genocide or complain about how far away the abortion clinic is — if you put enough cursing in your book, it might just rekindle their love for literature and get you some new followers.

Step 5: Take Advantage of Amazon Giveaways

It’s never easy to give away something for free. That’s why I don’t give money to charity after natural disasters and why I use special tax loopholes to write off my child support payments.

And normally people are skeptical of free things. But books are a little different. I mean, look at libraries… and do so quickly before Project 2025 turns the entire country into the Handmaid’s Tale and closes all of them.

A free book giveaway can be great, especially for authors who write series. This is a trick that timeshare salespeople and drug dealers have used to great effect for years. Once you get them hooked, they’ll pay whatever just to know the ending. So long as you don’t George RR Martin the whole thing up, you’ll have a new fan for life.

Here are five more simple steps to boosting your book sales on KDP.

Step 6: Fake Celebrity Endorsements and Hire Look Alikes to Take Photos Holding a Copy of Your Book

Step 7: Be a Writer Who’s Won a Bunch of Awards

Step 8: Get Thousands of Reviews Somehow

Step 9: With Few Exceptions, Your Profile Photo on Your Author Page Shouldn’t Show you Brandishing a Weapon

Step 10: Write a Book That People Like

The Writing Routine Every Author Needs

Daniel Madison2 Comments

A writing routine is a lot like a liver: You might not think you need one, but when you try getting by without it, things don’t go well.

In this article, I’ll share my writing routine with you. It’s one I’ve amalgamated and synthesized over the years from a number of great writers, from Ernest Hemmingway to John Updike to Toni Morrison to Muammar Gadaffi.

But consider this my forewarning: This writing routine is not for the faint of heart. Like any good writing routine, it requires focus, determination, some light exercise and a place to live. I know that’s not something everybody watching this video has. Now, without further ado, let’s roll up our sleeves, put on our thinking caps and close all our porn tabs to explore writing routines on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Step 1 – Wake up early and get hydrated

Hydration could be a lot of things. In my early years, a fifth of Jack or a nice Irish car bomb was the pick me up I needed in the early morning to get my day going. For some of you, you might need something lighter, like a Bud Light or a Zima. I’ve slowed down in my old age, so I find that all I need is a nice large, cool glass of water with a microdose of LSD.

Early is also a subjective term, but I’ll share this wisdom that my former mentor and the owner to the rights of my first 120 books Tabitha Cartwright told me: “A good writer rises at dawn. A great writer gets their shit together before dawn so they can…

Step 2 – Start writing at first light

Now if you live beyond or near the Arctic circle this advice might not apply to you. But for most of you, I would highly recommend getting words down immediately at sunrise. I find it’s a time of day when I’m most at peace, mentally, perhaps because, statistically speaking, that’s the least likely time to be murdered.

Step 3 – Don’t be nervous

Despite the fact that I made a whole video about it, I don’t believe in writer’s block. As long as you relax and give yourself enough time to work, the words will come. A writer’s job is never to reach perfection. To calm yourself, there are many things you can do. Put on some relaxing music or the sounds of the desert. Write in a massage chair. Put another microdose of LSD into your water. Crush up some pills and snort those. Make writing your happy place.

Step 4 – Take a break. Read something besides your own writing

After a solid five hours of writing, you’ll need a nice break. The coffee or the pills will have worn off and you’ll start second guessing your instincts. Rest those eyes by reading something else. If doesn’t have to be literary. Read the news. Read a friend’s blog. Read that book about how to count cards that you’ve been putting off.

Step 5 – Go on a walk for inspiration

As I said, you’ll need to have some mobility for this routine. People with crutches and wheelchairs should manage fine, so long as you still can move your upper body.

Anyway, a nice half hour outside is a great way to clear your head and find inspiration for your writing. I usually only have to go a few paces out of my apartment before I see a knife fight or a homeless person succumbing to a drug overdose.

Step 6 – Jack off, take a midday nap, and then jack off again

A writer needs to be focused, honest and committed to the story. Post-nut clarity is a great way to ensure this, and it’s not limited to male writers. Whenever I meet young female fans who want to be writers, I encourage them to jack themselves off as much as possible.

Step 7 – Edit what you wrote in the morning. Delete it all if you have to

Now that you’ve gotten some exercise, some sleep and shed your psyche of all impure urges and weird thoughts about that coworker who isn’t really that hot but you can’t stop thinking about her for some reason, I don’t know, maybe it’s her weird fixation with hunting knives… now you can reassess this morning’s work.

More often than not, you’ll find that none of it is usable. It will be clunky and meandering and overwritten. After all, you started writing at dawn and probably were severely sleep-deprived. But your job is to pull the gems out of the ore, as it were. Hey, if the police can use sleep deprivation to get false confessions, maybe you can use it to get some excellent prose.

Step 8 – Do your other job you need to do in order to live

After editing for about two hours, it will be time to go to your other job that actually puts food on the table. Nursing, teaching, and any other job you don’t really have to pay attention at will be best as you’ll need to conserve your mental energy.

Step 9 – Don’t forget to take care of your kids, maintain many good friendships, be involved in lots of important causes, email your Congressperson, have lots of sex (and, if possible, do it with multiple partners as this will make your writing more interesting), eat, pay attention to your local sports teams, keep up with all the hit movies and TV shows, and invest your money wisely.

How I Sold My First Book

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Intelligence.

Talent.

Creativity.

You won’t need any of these things to succeed as a writer so I want you to put them out of your mind. At its most basic, selling books is about sales, not literature. And selling books is no different than selling anything else, be it cars, Girl Scout cookies or your dad’s retirement watch. It’s about market research, getting your name out there and not being afraid to use a little sex appeal. I’ll teach you how to pump up those numbers and always be closing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.


Okay, today’s article will be broken into five steps, and at the end of each section, I will take you through my personal journey of how I sold my first book.


Step One: Find your market

I’ll be blunt. Publishers don’t give a shit about literary quality. And just like my dad used to say to that strange woman who lived with us for six months, the only reason they want you around is to make them money.


You should be able to answer these questions for your publisher: Who will buy your book? How will you hook them? Can you make them feel like they’ll regret it if they die before they read your book?


Now full disclosure, I landed my first book deal in 1999, a simpler and more innocent time: Borders was still around, nobody knew who al-Qaeda was and people didn’t carry around little machines made them constantly anxious, depressed and seething with self-hatred. Also, I should mention I technically had actually been published before this, but it was by a very fringe publisher that I don’t think counts. (As an aside some of my critics will claim this group was the media wing of an AIDS-denial group, like the one that promoted Foo Fighters early on. But they actually thought all diseases were a hoax, so it’s a little disingenuous to single out AIDS.)


Anyway, my first real book deal with a company that actually had an office was in 1999. The book was called Spilled Milk, a psychological thriller about a man named John Milk who snaps and murders everyone in his office. Back in the 1990s people worked in stable office jobs like this and I was able to convince my publisher readers would connect with John Milk’s alienation and discontent.


Step Two: Make a name for yourself

Agents and publishers are risk-averse. They almost never go with an unknown. Fun fact, when JK Rowling submitted one of her manuscripts to publishers under a different name, over 140 of them turned down her story about a transsexual woman who rapes an entire class of kindergartners.


So what do you do if you’re not already famous? Well, most people assume you can skip this step, meet a literary agent at a bar, sleep with them, smash your face against their bathroom mirror and threaten to call the police if they don’t promise you a book deal. But unfortunately, almost all literary agents bug their apartments to prevent incidents like these.


After I had written Spilled Milk, I made a name for myself by stopping a homeless man from jumping in front of a train in my hometown. I made the local news and even got some very brief national news coverage. I wasn’t exactly a celebrity, but it was enough to convince my publisher people might vaguely recognize the name. It is unfortunate, however, that the same homeless man jumped in front of a different train a month later after he ran through the money I gave him to jump in front of the first one.


Step Three: Find an agent

Going back to what I said earlier, if you can’t blackmail agents, how can you land one? Well, it all starts with a query letter. You can find my video on that here.


But queries and proposals and sample chapters are all a little impersonal. You need to find a way to make a true connection. This is a person you might be working with for months, hell maybe even decades if you have a few dozen books in you. My first agent introduced me to my first and second wives at the same underground sex club, and he’d still be my agent today if he’d taken my advice and had someone always there to spot him when doing autoerotic asphyxiation.


But how did I land him? Well, it wasn’t by mailing a manuscript and it wasn’t by sending an email, which was all the rage in the late 90s. And no, it wasn’t the underground sex club, where you’re not allowed to use your real identity anyway. No, I met him at a writer’s convention in upstate New York. These are great places to network. When nobody was looking, I started a small fire near his booth and, because I was ready and most writers are useless, I quickly put it out. One thing led to another and twelve years later I was a pallbearer at his funeral. Funny how life is sometimes.


Step Four: Have a self-marketing plan

Repeat after me: Your book will not sell itself. It’s true now and it’s always been true. Nobody would’ve read Moby Dick if Melville hadn’t convinced Nye’s to give away a free copy with every case of sperm oil.
There’s a lot of great information about building your author brand in this video here, but just to go over the basics: write an author tagline, network, and if you’re really fucking ugly, develop your online platform as much as possible.

Today, a marketing plan might involve some of these things: setting up a blog, promoting your book in advance on social media and in YouTube videos, tweeting inane ramblings at 3 in the morning and so on.
Things were different in 1999, but still might apply today. For Spilled Milk, my plan was to set up a book tour along the east coast and put up some controversial billboard ads along the New Jersey turnpike.


Step Five: Choose the best deal

This section of the video will apply to only a very small minority of you, so if you’re not completely confident, driven and borderline delusional about your ability to succeed, you can skip to the end of the video. Okay, for those that stayed, you’ve got several different publishers vying for your attention. It’s prom all over again, except this time won’t end with you having to scrape your limo driver’s brains off the pavement.


Now, for a new author a normal advance will be somewhere between 100,000 dollars and 20 bucks. But you have to read the fine print. The biggest advance won’t always earn you the most money. You can’t forget to look at the royalty structure.


For Spilled Milk, I was offered a $5,000 dollar advance, which in Joe Biden’s America is almost $700,000 today. I was over the moon. You know, I was able to pay off my loan sharks and I had enough money left over to buy Maxwell Caulfield’s leather coat from Grease 2.


But what I didn’t realize was that instead of getting royalties, the contract I signed stated that I’d actually have to pay 20 cents for each book sold. I ended up disowning the book and actively telling people not to buy it on my book tour.

Do’s and Dont’s For Sci-Fi Writers

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Science fiction is, somewhat paradoxically, more about the present moment than any other genre. It’s very often about using new technologies and possible futures as a way of analyzing our present. Because technological advances have the capacity to change us in great ways. To give a quick example, if I had VR twenty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have rushed into a relationship with a stripper who turned out to be a serial bigamist. We’ll convert power to the main deflector and invert the tachyon beam on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Science fiction has been around for as long as man looked at birds, then at giant leaves, and wondered if he could fly. But in the literary world today, science fiction is a vast genre about a lot more than flying machines. It encompasses so much, but if I had to distill it down to one idea it would be this: it is a genre that weighs our aspirations against our roots, it asks if, with great technological advances, we can ever escape our true nature. For viewers of the channel, this way of conceiving it may be more relatable: think of it like identity crisis you experience when you a date a woman who’s young enough to be your daughter.

Like porn, science fiction generally comes in soft and hard varieties, but unlike porn, one category isn’t clearly better than the other. Hard science fiction is all about accurate science, with stories grounded in plausible technologies that are explained clearly and generally don’t violate the laws of physics as we know them. Light speed spaceships in these kinds of stories would turn their characters into a fine, bloody mist. Of course, you still have artistic license in these types of stories. A great hard scifi like Jurassic Park, for example, invites paleontologists to assess the safety of a dinosaur park, instead of, you know, people who do security at zoos.

Soft scifi is more concerned with the human side of things, the effects of new technologies on sociology, human psychology and political systems. In my science fiction novel, Pain and Fable, I tell the story of a society on a thousand-year generation ship. The story analyzes how the society of the ship evolves over time after the original colonists forgot to establish clear rules regarding incest.

Now let’s look at some dos and donts when writing scifi.

Do – Add some social commentary

Whether your scifi is hard or soft, your reader will expect you to whip out some truths bombs that connect to a present-day issue. Dune, for example, taught us 9/11 was inevitable, and 2001: A Space Odyssey taught us that the moon landing probably didn’t happen.

So try to find an issue that’s close to heart. Well, how about a story about two neighboring planets that have close trade connections, but one has a larger population and a more advanced military. An alien threat may cause the larger planet to take over its neighbor to protect it from the invaders. As you can tell, this is clearly about why Canada should be the 51st state of the United States.

Don’t – Research too much or too little

The good news is you don’t have to be smart to be a fiction writer. The bad news is, you have to be able to fool people into seeming like one. Egregious scientific mistakes like claiming the uncertainty principle has to do with measurement or W and Z bosons are carriers of the strong nuclear force will get you laughed out of the building.

On the other hand, even if you’re going for hard science fiction, you can always get too technical. These are still stories, even if nobody ever reads them and they stay tucked under your mattress until you die from liver failure. Anyway, I made this mistake when writing Order of Operations, about a scientist who changed the Planck length of his atoms to allow him to tunnel through walls. Because I couldn’t really nail down the character and the conflict was thin, I padded the story with a 10-page definition of the Schrodinger Hamiltonian of the quantum system featured in the story’s climax.

Do – Bring a Sense of Awe

Your job as a scifi writer is to make the impossible seem possible. And because you don’t have Industrial Light and Magic to distract from plotholes and cliches, you really have to stretch your mind and come up with mindblowing concepts and ideas. Among my own stories, my personal favorite is Morton High, set in a future where minds can be uploaded to new copies of the body post-mortem. In the story, students at the titular high school play a game to earn colored wrist bands for all the different ways they kill themselves.

Don’t – Lose Sight of the Human Element

No matter how scientific your books get, remember that human emotion should always be front and center. Friendship, pain, loss, regret, addiction to abortions, jealousy over a neighbor’s superior garden, anxiety over immigrants coming and taking all of the jobs. These are universal thoughts that have been with us for a million years and will be with for another million.

How To Write Memorable Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Use all the senses in your description

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

Here’s a few more quick tips:

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

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