writing tips

You’re Probably Making THESE Mistakes When Writing Internal Conflict

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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.

How to Write an Unforgettable Opening Line

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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.

How To Tackle Social Issues In Your Writing (so people will finally think you are smart)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

The Grapes of Wrath. The Jungle. The Handmaid’s Tale. Tek War. Modelland. All classics rich with commentary on important social issues of their day. From labor rights to suffrage to making sure people can’t clone fashion models, these books have sought social justice for real world issues while also being entertaining pieces of fiction in their own right.

Of course, not all stories do this. Some stories are just trying to excite us with good old fashioned space battles and courtroom dramas. But if you really want people to respect you and think you’re smart, and still not have to learn a bunch of difficult math or some shit, weaving social commentary into your writing is a great way to do this.

It could even be argued that fiction is a great way to sway public opinion on real world topics, perhaps even more than a newspaper. If you’re a good writer, your reader will sympathize with your characters and their plight, whereas most people just shrug about all the people who die on the news. Upton Sinclair used his fiction to get labor laws changed, and as I mentioned before on the channel, my novel Slight of Hand led to a three percent decrease in hate crimes against pygmy street performers.

You don’t have to be an especially progressive person, necessarily. You simply need to have an issue that’s near and dear to your heart. While my political views are a bit complicated, I think my weapons arsenal would at least prove that I’m no bleeding heart liberal. But I hate seeing immigrants in the United States demonized just for trying to find a better life for them and their family. The ones I hired at D&E Publishing were mostly great workers, always diligent and positive, even though it was frustrating to have to hire an interpreter to translate their break room conversations recorded by my hidden wiretap I put there when I thought somebody was poisoning me. Anyway, my novel Storming the Gates of Heaven really shined a light on the economic and cultural hardships immigrants face.

We’ll try to build a better world, or at least do some virtue signalling, on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Now you might be asking, John, do I really want to go down this path? What if I piss off the wrong people? Do I really want to have to go take dead animals out of my mailbox every morning and then have to bury them in my yard because the game warden at the local park says you can dump them there any more even though you don’t see why, I mean, you’re just returning them to nature?

Unfortunately, just like traffic, taxes and alimony, social issues are something you can’t avoid.

Look, people are going to hate you no matter what you do. I mean, I once tried to show solidarity with battered women by attending one of their meetings so I could hear their stories and be more sensitive in my writing. But they said that first, men usually aren’t allowed at those meetings, and second, personal firearms absolutely aren’t allowed at those meetings. I tried making up for it by writing A Dressing In Disguise, about a woman who murders an intruder and then gets a taste for bloodlust, going on a rampage to kill forty male sex traffickers along the Eastern seaboard. But the support group didn’t like that because I guess any kind of violence is a trigger for them. And a lot of my old fans didn’t like the idea of a woman who used a knife to do anything besides carve a turkey. So when you get down to it, there’s just no pleasing some people. Just be true to yourself.

Let’s see how we can make sure we approach these issues delicately and powerfully through our fiction.

Tip One: Make your issue part of the story, not the whole story

Your first goal as a writer, besides making a lot of money, should always be to write a compelling story with memorable characters and engrossing drama. Any asshole can just say how they want society to look. That’s what Twitter and podcasts and the White House Press Room are for.

But unlike the White House Press Secretary, a fiction writer has to be able to hide the fact that they’re full of shit. Let’s say you want to write a story about gun violence and how we need more gun control. I mean, I’d think you’re crazy, but that’s beside the point. Give me a story about a man who lives through Vietnam. His arc should be about dealing with his PTSD of the horrors he saw. Maybe he does this by befriending a nun or coaching a little league team or something. And then kill him at the end in a random act of street violence, saving the nun or little league team in the process. You have social commentary about gun violence while the narrative stays true to the character’s arc.  

Tip Two: Decide if you want to use a metaphor or be direct

To be honest, this is a good advice for anything in life. When I ran office meetings and had to talk about important issues to my employees, sometimes I’d yell at them to clean the break room, because the break room was dirty. But sometimes I’d yell at them to clean the break room because it was a metaphor for the sloppiness with our editing and press releases.

If you want to directly tackle the issue in your novel, that could work great. But then you have to make sure your research is impeccable, which will require access to a college library, a place that some people might be banned from for various reasons.

If you want to go the metaphorical route, just make sure your audience is able to connect the issue in your story with the issue in real life. Fahrenheit 451 is obviously about censorship and The Expanse is about prejudice and how billionaires always fuck things up for everybody else.

But audiences were confused by my sci-fi novel Defrosted. I thought it was clearly about science going too far – in the book, a group of scientists clone a murderous Santa Claus – but many of my right-wing readers took it as an allegory for the war on Christmas.

The Truth About Writing Book Series (and about hiring man servants)!

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

You might not think it at first, but as a writer, there’s a lot you have in common with a drug dealer. You both have to hustle to make money, the cash you do bring in comes from selling a fantasy to clients, and the best of you know how to keep that client hooked and neglecting more important things in their lives.

Hold on, John, you might be saying, I got a college degree that I paid for with my own parents’ money. Don’t lump me in with those criminal street urchins. Well, first of all, drugs are what make our federal government and financial institutions run on, so get off your high horse. But for the purposes of this video, there’s a lot us writers can learn from drug dealers.

You see, each book we write can be thought of as a dose or a high or a trip. If we do it right, we’ll have them clamoring for more. But we’ve got to be reliable. We have to make sure our product is always available on the corner of Douglas and 3rd,, in a manner of speaking. For writers who don’t write series, or even worse hop genres, well, that’d be like your neighborhood crack dealer switching to peyote with no warning.  

An ongoing series is a great way to build a following, even if you’re a small-time author. If there’s one change I’ve noticed in the industry in my 26 years inside it, besides the fact that pretty much everything is sexual harassment nowadays, it’s that the biggest authors are the ones who write series. Take Sarah J. Maas, for example. Now, I’ve never actually read Sarah J. Maas, but any writer who can get their books sold next to the Doritos aisle at Target is doing something right.

But writing a successful series is a tough thing to do. You have to go beyond writing individually compelling works of fiction. We’ll make hugely elaborate plans and hopefully not get bored before we finish them on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Before you start writing a series, there are a series of questions you need to ask yourself. Let’s take a look at them.

Question 1: Do I want to devote years to this project? Do I have any friends or family that might get upset that I won’t answer their teacher’s emails or pick them up from the bus station at midnight?

A book series is definitely something best tackled by a writer whose family is either all dead or who, by this point, doesn’t expect them to ever change.

Question 2: Does the concept behind the series have enough stamina to last for several books?

For example, I was planning on writing a five-book historical fiction series about the assassination of President Garfield, but by book three, I realized my reader was probably getting sick of hearing about 19th century civil service reform.

Question 3: Can you keep track of all the details and weave them throughout your series?

You might want a minor character to appear in the first book and not return until the fifth book, when they’re all grown up and handsome and ready to raw dog the heroine.

But it can be an organizational nightmare.

That’s why when I started the ten-book series, The Blackstone Chronicles, in 2018, I hired a man servant to live with me and keep track of all my ideas. I even got a cot for him to sleep in the corner of my bedroom so he could write down ideas that came to me in my dreams. If he hadn’t stolen my social security number to pay for his wife’s knee surgery, I likely would’ve finished the series.

So let’s say you’ve got no family obligations, a killer concept and a loyal man servant who came cheap on Craigslist. Let’s look at some tips to make sure this series stays strong.

Tip 1: You Need One Overarching Plot and Each Book Needs Its Own Resolution

Cliffhangers are great and everything, but no reader’s going to wait until Book 10 for you to blow your load. In Star Wars, for example, most of the movies end up with them blowing up a death star, but it doesn’t really matter because the overarching plot is to stop this old white guy who, in fairness to him, can do a 1080 barrel roll from a seated position.

I find it helpful to think of the overarching goal first, and then break it into smaller subgoals. When I wrote the They/Them Murders series, the main goal was to uncover the leftist billionaires’ plot to arm trans people to commit murders and other acts of terrorism. But each book was mostly focused on solving an individual murder case. Of course, it turned out the information I was using for research was fabricated by a right-wing conspiracy theory podcast and my first book had endangered the trans community of Missouri so I cancelled the series.

Tip 2: Consider the Format

Like an open box of crackers or a relationship that lasts more than a month, a book series runs the risk of becoming stale. For example, I didn’t need nine books of The Expanse telling to keep reminding me that billionaires are awful. If I needed that reminder, I’d just poke my head outside the window.

So spice things up by switching to a totally different format. Get wild with it. When I wrote the young adult five-book fantasy series, From Mud to Clay, I paused from the quest to find the stones and defeat the evil witch and made Book Four a medieval cookbook. Granted, this was also because I was hoping that writing educational material for children would give me some much-needed tax breaks, but it still shook things up nicely, I think. If I’d actually gotten those tax breaks, I likely would’ve bothered writing Book Five.

Tip 3: Be Consistent

You can’t forget that people are mostly reading these books because they like you and your writing style. Sometimes when looking at yourself in a mirror, it’s a tough thing to remember that people like you.

You can switch formats and genres and add some gratuitous sex scenes, but you shouldn’t try to be something you’re not. If you’re funny, don’t lose your sense of humor. If you’re good at exploring the dark side of humanity, kill a few dogs if your main characters need to survive to the final book.

How To Write a Memoir (even if your life is boring and pointless

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Picture this: You’re driving to work one day when a car cuts you off, causing you to spill coffee all over your work clothes. You want to speed ahead and brake check them, but a closer look reveals it’s a mother of four with at least one child in a wheelchair so that’s out of the question. When you get to work, you discover the Filipino man you’ve been paying to do your job for four times less than you drowned in a typhoon. Then lunch gets pushed all the way to twelve, a crow attacks you for throwing rocks at it during your smoke break, and just when you think things can’t get any worse, when you get home, your wife tells you she’s thinking of taking a Yoga class, which means you’ll have to spend a ton of time going through her texts and emails to make sure she’s not cheating on you.

But there’s a silver lining to these misfortunes. They and the life lessons they provide can be perfect inclusions in your memoir. Today, we’ll go over some tips on how to write a memoir on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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You might be thinking, Hey John, I’m not a super famous and interesting celebrity, I’m not superior to regular humans, I don’t have a team of underlings to whom I can subject my sex crimes, why would anyone read my memoir? Well, hold on there. Let’s unpack that for a moment.

Memoirs aren’t just for the rich and famous. Sure, people love celebrity gossip, but what makes a memoir truly stand out is the theme and the story, not the personality. Tuesdays with Morrie is one of the most successful memoirs ever, and not only is the subject not a celebrity, he’s a professor at a middling university and the only really important thing he does is die. But the book’s main message – that life is important – clearly resonated with millions of readers.

Anyone can write a memoir so long as they have a good enough story to tell. I’ve long felt that junkies and soldiers were the lowest of the low, the disposable, bottomfeeding leeches of our society least deserving our attention, but the trials and tribulations of drug addiction and war have made for excellent reading.  Something like Angela’s Ashes, also, I think taught many that poor people were worth caring about, at least for however long it took to read the book.

Let’s look at four steps to write the best possible memoirs we can.

Step One: Choose a theme

Like a wedding or a wife swapping key party, memoirs work best if they have a clearly recognizable theme. The theme should be the life lessons you learned and hope to pass along to your reader. Perhaps you’re a veteran teacher who, though decades of hard work and the close bonds you formed with your students, has come to realize free public education was a mistake. Perhaps you just got out of a cult that turned out to be a lot less lucrative than you’d hoped.

Stories of survival are very popular. In my first memoir, Into the Swamp of Madness, I wrote about my harrowing two years as a beat reporter in suburban Jacksonville.

Step Two: Write truthfully

It’s only natural to see the best version of ourselves. We often leave out details or tell obvious lies to seem better in the eyes of others. That’s why my author profile used to say I went to Oxford when I actually never went anywhere, or why I list myself as six foot seven on my Ashley Madison profile, when I’m actually five-nine.

Still, if you want to touch people, you have to reach into those ugly places of yourself and lay it out bare for all to see. Sure, some people might think it odd you’ve had four children from three different marriages run away from home, but most will relate your pain and sorrow. Similarly, I was shocked to learn that Richard Dean Anderson nearly killed his best friend by giving him a homemade blood transfusion, but then I realized these are just people like you or me, and they make the same mistakes we do.

Step Three: Think Like a Fiction Writer

Just because this is a true story doesn’t mean it shouldn’t follow the rules of your own fiction. You need exposition, you need a central conflict, you need to develop character, you need to flesh out your setting and you need an arc. If you’re in the middle of writing and you feel your story lacks the necessary drama, live it out. If you’re a successful executive, expose yourself on a Zoom call to expedite your “fall from grace” narrative. Junkies and alcoholics might need to relapse or go cold turkey, depending on your point in the narrative.

Step Four: Be relatable

Nobody wants to read a story that’s preachy or condescending that isn’t also kink shaming kink erotica. While I’m sure Matthew McConnahey thinks he’s smarter, funnier and exists on a higher plane than the rest of us, he still writes as if he wouldn’t hunt us for sport.

For many of you, this won’t be a problem, as your blandness and middle-class mediocrity will instantly make you relatable. But not all writers have this luxury. So if you’re wealthy, I suggest grabbing a few hollow points and driving through the less well-off parts of town to observe the common man in his natural state. And if you’re poor, sneak into the homes of the middle-class families you’re doing landscaping for see what you can learn.

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

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, like a topic.”

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

“Umm… Floor 1, please?”

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

“Do I know this person?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

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

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

“Exploration of elevators. Got it.”

~

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

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

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

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

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

Tip One – Don’t Be Preachy

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

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

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

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

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

Tip Three – Use Symbols and Motifs

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

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

If You’re a New Author, You’re Probably Making These Mistakes

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

If you clicked on this article, I’m guessing you’re having some trouble breaking into the industry. You probably have had dozens of rejection letters from literary agents or indie publishers. So you probably self-published some short stories on a blog, maybe even a novel or two on Amazon, but nobody bought it because why would they? You’re a no-name piece of shit. You know you have talent, but if you died today your obituary would likely list you as a masturbator before a writer. What’s an aspiring writer to do? In today’s article, I’ll discuss some of the biggest mistakes new authors make so hopefully, by the end of this, you’ll have a 1 or 2 percent better chance at becoming famous. 

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#1 – Not attacking critics at every opportunity

Most new writers experience high rates of rejection. And because most of you were terrible at sports and unpopular in high school, you’ve grown accustomed to let the criticism roll right off your back. Fight that urge. You ever notice how the greatest businesspeople, celebrities and politicians are all huge assholes? That’s because people respect and admire assholes.

The more you stand up for yourself, the more people will take you seriously. Get a bad review? Hack your reviewer’s social media and have them proclaim vocal support for NAMBLA. Get rejected by a literary agent or publisher? Hack their social media and post visual depictions of the Prophet Mohammed.

#2 – Limiting your marketing avenues

As I’ve shown, a social media presence is key for any aspiring author, but most writers stop there. In doing so, you lose a lot of potential readers: the elderly, poor people without access to computers, Luddites, obese people whose fingers are too fat to type, or even people who like to go outside.

You can try these things. If it’s a comedy, read your book in a crowded café and laugh loudly. When people ask you about it, say it’s an unknown author who should be way more famous. If money isn’t an issue, promote it with a billboard. And if money really isn’t an issue, promote with skywriting.

#3 – Writing for yourself

Most writers think writing’s supposed to be fun. But really, the only fun thing about the writing process is giving a busty fan your hotel key card at a book signing, but it takes decades for most writers to get to that point.

Writing is a job, plain and simple. No different than being an office worker or a barista or Secretary General of the United Nations. But unlike any of those jobs, you have to take it seriously, because you’re the boss. So if you quit your day job to become a writer, just remind yourself that you’re doing it for the money and not because you thought it’d be more fulfilling than helping autistic children.

#4 – Spending big bucks on a book cover

Ever heard of the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? Even schoolchildren know that. It’s the content that matters. But I still see new writers drop four figures for an eye-catching cover. Please stop. Do yourself a favor and spend that hard earned cash on something more useful, like editing, alimony or insulin.

#5 – Disregarding the competition

A big mistake a lot of new writers make is thinking that their work will stand on its own merits. But in reality, your reader is just going to compare your work to other authors they’ve read before. So you need to be proactive. Discredit and shame as many famous authors in your genre as you can. For example, Robert Ludlum rose to prominence largely because he was the first to say Tom Clancy had been using orphan ghostwriters.

#6 – Living your life

Lots of writers think they need to live their life to get inspiration for their writing. Oh, really? You writing a hard-hitting thriller about a porn-obsessed chronic masturbator? Are Midwest summer barbeques a bastion of character, wit and intrigue? Your life is boring and pointless, but your fiction shouldn’t be. Family reunions, recitals, baptisms, funerals and pleasuring your wife just gets in the way of those key edits, those opening hooks that need polishing. Focus on the work. It’s all that matters.

Here are a few more mistakes you can fix on your way to becoming famous.

#7 – Not joining the secret Satanic societies to which most literary agents and New York big six publishers belong

#8 – Not getting an email account

#9 – Using the “hunt and peck” method of typing

#10 – Forgetting that agents are open or susceptible to bribes, extortion and blackmail

How to Write Minor Characters

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip 3 – Give your minor character a specific role

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

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

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

This Query Letter Method Has a Guaranteed 1% Success Rate!

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Literary agents: can’t live with ‘em, can’t deal directly with a publisher without getting a restraining order and needing to change your legal name without ‘em.

Writers hate writing query letters for many good reasons: fear of rejection, difficulty distilling a 200,000 word novel into a few sentences, lack of confidence in your salesmanship stemming from the constant death threats you got as an eighteen-year-old telemarketer.

It’s best to think of query letter writing as toadying up to a sick relative in the hopes they’ll include you in their will. So we’ll look at how to put on our best smile and ignore that awful smell and disgusting goiter, so to speak, on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Maybe you need a letter opener. Perfect for creating quick easy access to your mail and for defending yourself against belligerent guests who won’t stop complaining about the smell of your office, you can’t go wrong without a letter opener. Visit your local office supply store for more information.

Before we start, let’s look at what we want a query letter to do. A query letter needs to seduce a prospective agent into believing that you’re going to make them money. Much like a pimp would look at a young man or woman’s body, posture, relationship with law enforcement and tolerance to various illegal substances, an agent will look at your writing credentials, tone, hook and ideas to decide if your book will sell or not.

Here are the main do’s and dont’s for query letter writing.

Do: Sell yourself

Mention any previous publishing credits you have. Mention if you have an MFA. Mention any academic honors related to writing. If you don’t have any of those, and YouTube analytics tells me that’s likely, then simply lie and make them up.

Worried about getting caught. No problem: Just create phony websites for bogus publishers. Write phony press releases and create fake book review sites with very positive reviews of your phony book. Then buy some burner cell phones and list the numbers on your website. Get good at different accents in case they call. Most importantly, whatever you do, don’t be yourself.

Don’t: Reveal too much about yourself

You don’t want to share too much with the agent you’re querying or appear too chummy. Despite everything else I’ll tell you in this video, literary agents are just people like you and me and they’ll see through obvious manipulation.

When I was first starting out, I’d often make the mistake of mentioning I became a writer because a favorite aunt had wished it on her death bed. My hope was to guilt trip the agent into considering my manuscript, but I learned that came off as needy.

Literary agents, I’ve found, also don’t care about what inspired you to write this book, what you or your girlfriend look like naked, what you think the literary agent might look like naked, the models from your vintage typewriter collection, or copies of floor plans of the office where the literary agent works.

Do: Research the agent you’re querying

This is a time-consuming process and you don’t want to waste your time querying an agent who represents, for example, hardcore queer erotica when you’re writing a pastry cookbook. (Though it’s a common mistake, it turns out.)

You also want to make sure your agent actually has connections and works for a reputable agency. If your agent gave you the address of an abandoned office, speaks with a thick Indian accent, their webcam is constantly broken and asks to be paid in Apple gift cards, you might want to ask LinkedIn if Tom Everyman’s profile is legitimate.

Don’t: Forget to proofread

If you can’t get through a one-page letter without a myriad of spelling mistakes and subject-verb confusion, what’s the likelihood you wrote a book that’s going to sell. You don’t want to, for example, say that you wrote this book because your “favorite cunt requested on her death bed.”

Do: Create a strong hook

Just like your book, your query letter needs to start off with a bang. Your hook should answer these three questions. Who is your character? What do they want? What is stopping them from getting it? In my 2009 romantic comedy Just the Tip, I used this hook: Dan Stevens is a down-on-his-luck tax auditor who is forced to audit the woman of his dreams, a young waitress at his favorite Chinese restaurant. And just when he thinks it can’t get any worse, his wife starts asking questions.

Don’t: Try to sympathize with your agent

Don’t say things like “I know you’re very busy” or “I’m sure you must get tired of looking at 1000s of these every day” or “I bet you’d like a nice strong man to rub your shoulders after a stressful day.” Trust me: I’ve tried begging, I’ve tried offering sexual favors or hiring other people to provide them, I’ve tried bribing them, I even wasted a whole month getting one agent’s son released from prison.

But I’ve come to learn one thing. Literary agents are soulless automatons. Now, does the job make them this way or does it merely attract psychopaths who get off on crushing other people’s dreams, is hard to say. Either way, it’s best to think of them as a necessary evil, like a colonoscopy, paying taxes or having to sell your book on a platform owned by a company that forces workers to piss in bottles.  

Here are a few more quick do’s and don’t’s.

Do: Demand writers in your local author group give you copies of their successful query letters and do fake cry if they won’t.

Don’t: Try to stand out by sending a query letter in a strange font like Papyrus or Wingdings.

Do: If you’re querying a male agent, mention things like football and beer, and if you’re querying a female agent, mention things like menstrual cramps and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Don’t: Mail a query letter signed in blood to show how serious you are.

How To Write Character Flaws (without just looking in a mirror)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Look around your room right now and try to find something wrong. For example, there might be dirty clothes piled all over the floor. Maybe there are several wedges of half-eaten cheese on different tables in the room. Perhaps there are painful cysts growing in your armpits which your doctor says is likely caused by over-consumption of old cheese. If YouTube analytics is to be believed, all of these things are true.

You might think I’m a psychic. But actually I’m just a writer who, through years of hard work, taught himself to be perceptive of character flaws, in fiction and in real life. And while that didn’t stop me from marrying a woman who turned out to be a serial bigamist, it did teach me to write many complex heroes with compelling characterization. We’ll explore how to exploit our worst personal demons to earn a few bucks on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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No one is perfect. For writers with large egos, sometimes this can be hard to remember. Hell, as a man who was first published at 25, sports a full head of hair at 52 and has erections that last three hours and fifty-nine minutes, sometimes it’s hard for me to think of any personal flaws. But trust me, I’ve got plenty. For example, as I’m writing this article, I happen to be twirling a loaded pistol.

In any case, it’s flaws that give your characters depth, that make them relatable and memorable. But it’s important to remember that flaws are always internal, never external. So having an alcoholic mother or living in Ohio aren’t flaws, depressing as they may be. We’ll start by looking at different kinds of flaws and analyze some classic examples from fiction.

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Minor Flaws

For starters, we have minor flaws. These are often unique or memorable, but don’t have any real impact on your narrative. Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes is a classic example of a fun, humanizing flaw. In my revenge novel set in Georgian England, Bride of Prejudice, Leeandra has a hideous scar that runs from her right temple to her left tit. It’s a unique character trait but doesn’t really affect her or her arc in any way.

Major Flaws

Then, we have major flaws. These are catalysts for action and they drive the story. For Holden Caulfield, it’s his self-pride and inability to cope with his trauma that sets him at odds with everyone in the story. For Kable Anderken in Blake Colby’s Blood Shot, it the memories of missing free throws to get an 8th seed in the playoffs that haunt him.

Fatal Flaws

Then, we have the fatal flaw. These either make or break the character. For the hero, the whole story might be about overcoming this flaw and for the villain, it’s often their downfall. Ahab’s obsession for revenge and Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia are classic examples here. And in the sitcom, Heil Honey, I’m Home, it’s Hitler’s lack of social graces that ruin the dinner party.

Now let’s look at some ways to construct our own character flaws.

Step One: Create Relatable Flaws

If you want your reader to connect with your character, there’s nothing better than making them relatable. Think of common flaws that most people have. Maybe your character masturbates 10 times a day.  Or maybe they’re bad with money, spending half their income on antique guns.

In one of my early stories, Zero Point Infinity, one of the characters constantly tries to kill himself but is thwarted at every turn. Almost every reader I talked to, most of them millennials, felt like this spoke to them on a deep personal level.

Step Two: Don’t Get Preachy

This is especially important when writing villains. Like a bartender or the guy who cleans the elevators in the Aruba Holiday Inn, a fiction writer shouldn’t moralize. Your writing loses its effectiveness if you don’t let your characters beliefs and actions speak for themselves.

In Crime and Punishment, for example, Dostoyevsky isn’t concerned with the moral implications of what Raskolnikov has done. He’s just trying to tell an exciting murder mystery.

Step Three: Create a Balance Between Positive and Negative

Saints and demons aren’t interesting. The worst of us have our virtues and best have our flaws. Hell, Hitler was a vegetarian and Steven Seagal donates to environmental causes. And then there’s Mister Rogers, who somehow thought children wanted to look at this fucking thing.

Complex and three-dimensional characters should be balanced. Like how Sherlock Holmes’s brilliance is balanced by his lust for cocaine. Or like how the dumbass clones in Never Let Me Go’s generosity is balanced by their inability to realize they ought to just go on a rampage and murder everyone.

Step Four: Use Flaws to Create Conflict

Think of any drama you experienced in real life. It was probably caused by a personal flaw. Maybe you got in a car crash because you really liked the way you looked in the rearview mirror. Maybe you lost your job because you’re so fucking dumb you thought the world’s most obvious conman really was looking out for what’s best for you. It could be anything.

In fiction, flaws like these should drive the narrative. Recklessness might get your hero’s friends killed. Callousness might tear a friendship apart. In basically any noir, being a thirsty simp for crazy strange is nearly always a catalyst for destruction. In my drama Storming the Gates of Heaven, the prejudice of the protagonist gets the story in motion. Karl Eichmann shoots a Mexican that he thinks is trying to illegally enter the US, only to find out that Grand Canyon isn’t actually located on the border between Mexico and the United States.