writing tips

Common Writing Questions Answered By An Expert

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Getting published is a bit like having sex for the first time: you’ve spent years dreaming about it and after it finally happens, you know you did it wrong and are pretty sure you’re being laughed at.

I set up this channel to help young writers through the process of breaking their writing hymen, so to speak. I’ll answer some of your questions on this mailbag installment of Stories’ Matter.

Our first question comes from Xander from Pripyat, Ukraine. He writes:

Hey John. Your books are often filled with interesting facts and information. For example, when I read Bride of Prejudice, I learned that drowning in a bog was the leading cause of death for young women in the 18th century. What is something surprising you learned when writing one of your books?

Great question, Xander. Because I tend to write one book a month, I can’t devote as much time to research as I’d like. But when I was writing The Ones Who Walked (my first book set in the Pleistocene) I learned that of all 100 billion humans to ever be born, almost 50 percent never made it to their first birthday.

Our next question comes from Valerie from Bhopal, India. She writes:

What up, John? I’m trying to get a start in writing, but all my friends and coworkers tell me I should focus on my true talent: being a cashier at Walmart.  Anyway, it would be nice to get some positive feedback. What’s the most inspiring feedback you’ve ever received from a reader?

Thanks for the question, Valerie. Well, actually the best feedback I’ve ever gotten from a fan was regarding my erotica written under my JD Salinger alias. But because this is a family channel, I can’t share the specifics about what she did with her mouth. Instead, I remember another young reviewer telling me that The House on Pain Avenue was “a worse experience than his cancer treatment.” That made me happy because that was exactly what I was going for.

The next question comes from Simon from Guadalajara, Mexico. He writes: 

Hi John. I’m a new writer who has written a few novels. But I find I’m running out of ideas. The amount of books you’ve written is astounding. If it weren’t true, I’d think you were just making it up to be funny. Anyway, where do you find inspiration? Do you ever get inspiration from dreams?

Great question, Simon. Actually, one of the side effects of a drug I use to quell my sexual urges prevents me from having dreams. I, however, find inspiration can come from anywhere: paying attention to the news, being well-versed in history, closely watching fights at the weddings you attend, reading your neighbor’s mail and so on.

Next, we have Grace from Hamlet, North Carolina. She asks:

Yo John. I’ve tried publishing a book. But I’ve gotten nothing but form rejections. And my beta readers keep asking if English is my second language, even though I was born in Jacksonville and went to community college for four years before dropping out. My question is, how do you handle criticism?

Excellent question, Grace. A lot of people assume creatives are just supposed to ignore criticism. But ask yourself: Do other types of workers just let themselves be openly criticized? Of course not. NBA players get hecklers thrown out of games. Cops will use any criticism as a chance to steal your phone and shoot your dog. And politicians will use criticism as fuel to stack the Supreme Court with right wing lunatics and liars to overthrow American democracy. So… be more like them.

This one comes from Nearl of Karachi, Pakistan. He writes:

G’day John. I’m just about to publish my first book, but my editor says the publisher wants me to remove a twenty-page scene depicting a horse circumcision. What’s your favorite scene you’ve had to edit out of a book?

Thanks for that one, Nearl. When I wrote Dawson, a young adult cozy murder mystery set in rural New England, I included a long scene where one character gives another a tour of the town in which it is set, including much of its true history. Unfortunately, my editor told me that town wanted nothing to do with me and would burn every single copy that entered city limits if I kept the scene.

And now we have Watley from Fukushima, Japan. He writes:

Howdy John. I have trouble getting erections and don’t even attempt to pleasure my wife sexually. She claims it’s because I spend seven to eight hours a day writing at my computer. So my question is, does your family also not support your career as a writer?

Thank you, Watley. This is a story I know all too well. Not the no erections part, obviously. But I think three ex-wives and at least seven children, four from whom I’m estranged, speaks for itself.  

Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Choose writing. Don’t try to convince yourself you can do both. Even if you remove all other distractions, and, for example, go to a remote hotel in the Rockies, you’ll just go crazy from the disruptions and try to murder them.

Next question comes from Darcelle from Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. She asks:

Greetings John. Do you have any suggestions to help me become a better writer?

Well, Darcelle, my suggestion would be to watch some of the fifty odd videos on this channel first. Maybe then you’ll at least learn not to ask stupid questions.

Finally, we have a question from Fat Mike from Benxi, China. He says:

Aloha John. As your agent and former next-door neighbor, I’d like to know: What book are you working on right now? I will remind you that you are contractually obligated to write three more books by the end of this year.

Thanks for that question, Fat Mike. There’s a few in the pipeline, but my next book is a century-spanning family drama set in the age of Westward Expansion, centered on two sisters, one who decides to become a nun the Aleutian Islands and the other who marries an abusive oil prospector. It’s called Family Feud.

Don’t Die Sad and Alone… Relationship Advice for Writers

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

We’re going to step away from the page today and explore this key question:

“Do writers deserve to be loved?”

Now you may be thinking, what an absurd question, John, of course I deserve love. In fact, the whole reason I’m writing is so that I can get strangers to love me and fill the void left by my abusive parents who bet away my college fund on a racehorse named “Always a Winner.”

But writers also know that when the writing is going good, nothing else matters. Aside from food, water and oxygen, writing fills every other need. I can’t tell how many loads I’ve spilled just from the satisfaction I got from creating a tragic backstory or thinking of a twist ending that would make M. Night Shaymalan’s head explode.

However, writers also know that the writing can’t always be this good. Writing can be as much of a cruel mistress as any $500 BDSM escort you can find on tryst.link.

So you might decide that a real human relationship is something you want in your life. Being a writer makes this very complicated, but not impossible. In today’s segment, I hope to help you navigate the potential problems you might encounter with flesh-and-blood humans. We’ll discuss the agony of compromise on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, fans of the channel have probably pieced together that I’ve had a shaky relationship history. After all, I’ve been married and divorced three times, even if the first one doesn’t really count because that wife used a fake name and was already married to several other people. So just full disclosure, while I think I have some good advice to impart, keep in mind that I’m mostly a cautionary tale.

Also, my story might not be your story. Sex and romance is varied and complicated. So a little more about me: I’m the type of person who needs lots of love. As my therapist used to say, I’m the type of person who runs into relationships very quickly. The fact that my therapist became my third wife probably means she was right.

Anyway, to narrow the focus of this video, I will try to keep this advice specific to the ways writing can impact your relationship.

Tip 1 – Never Date Another Writer

This almost goes without saying. Obviously, it’s natural to be jealous when your wife gets a massage from her tennis instructor. But that’s nothing compared with the crippling jealousy of your partner getting her story published in the New Yorker. At least I can sometimes get erections thinking about my wife bouncing atop a 20-year-old with a flawless chest and rippled back.  I can safely say another writer inking a deal with Random House has never made me erect.

Plus, with both of you constantly shut away at your desks, nothing is ever getting done. Good luck keep the mold at bay and the power on. And God forbid, if you managed to produce a child, let’s just hope it isn’t fascinated by power outlets.

Tip 2 – Never Date Fans

To be honest, you really should just be with someone who doesn’t read. I’m not saying you should date someone’s who’s illiterate but I’m also not not saying it.

While not as bad as dating a writer, this one is easier to fall into. Because naturally you want your fans to love you. And when those fans happen to have perfect tits, you’ll probably think you hit the jackpot.

Wrong: you almost certainly won’t live up to their expectations. I’ve met a lot of writers and they are way less cool in real life. Margaret Atwood: wonderful writer, but she steals silverware from restaurants. Jennifer Egan: maybe our greatest living writer. But she constantly looks at your phone when you’re texting other people. And while Jonathan Franzen was a huge inspiration, he smells like onions, garlic and cigar smoke.

Tip 3  – Don’t ask for writing advice

As I said before, you should never ask people you know closely to be your beta readers. There are only two possible outcomes, both bad.

One, they will be give vague, dishonest support. Afraid to hurt your feelings, they will tell you you don’t to change a thing, which all writers know is never the case.

Two, they will be brutally honest. You’ll share your opinion. They’ll say why’d you ask for my opinion if you’re just going to yell at me. You’ll say you’re not yelling. They’ll then ask why you also criticized their weight. You’ll then say that you’re such a great writer, you could literally have sex with anyone so they should be grateful. They’ll spend the night at their mother’s house. You’ll go on a bender and have to spend any money you made that month from your writing on medication to treat your crabs.  Happens all the time.

Tip 4 – Be Honest. Unless you do something really unforgivable. In that case, take that to your grave.

This isn’t really related to writing. I’ve just always found that this is generally great advice.

Tip 5 – Partners aren’t your characters. You can’t make them do whatever you want.

It’s easy to fantasize about your characters. After all, you can make them do anything and they don’t need to consent to it. Having the power to kill the things I’ve created is probably the main reason I became a writer. But you have to get rid of that mindset and remember that real people are just very disappointing.

And I’m not just talking about crazy sex stuff. I mean, obviously it’s unlikely you meet someone willing to give you a Brazilian pile driver in real life. But you also can’t write your way out of bad situations. Fans of the channel know that my second wife is by far my favorite. If our love story was fiction, I’d find some way to make our characters realize we were meant for each other, perhaps by having our daughter trap us in a broken elevator until we made amends. But in real life, I’d be breaking several laws if I tried that.

As fans of the channel will also know, in real life, I had to settle for finding an escort and making her look, talk and act like. Which reminds me…

Please don’t forget to like and subscribe so I can keep paying this hooker to look like my second wife.

Five Hacks For Writing Great Dialogue

Daniel Madison1 Comment

For years, I struggled with writing dialogue. I just didn’t seem to have a knack for writing realistic conversations. There were a few possible reasons for this: I didn’t read enough, I avoided conversations with people like creditors and my wives and especially my children, I watched too much porn (though, in fairness, I was considering it as a career at the time and was doing it for research purposes).

Dialogue can be one of the most difficult things for an author to master. But first you might be asking, why use dialogue at all? Can’t I just tell a story with no spoken words, where feelings and thoughts are transmitted telepathically or via some system of interpretative dance? And sure, while many authors have tried and succeeded at this, it’s not something I suggest a novice writer attempt.

We’ll look at ways to write more compelling, genuine, realistic and quotidian dialogue that’s not repetitive and mimics the modus operandi by which real people converse and exchange discourse on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Dialogue serves many important functions in your story: it helps you to show, not tell, it helps distinguish between characters and it puts less words on the page to make your reader read faster and feel like less of a dipshit. Plus, many scientific studies have recently proven that humans express themselves through dialogue. Sure, you can tell a lot about someone from how they dress, what they eat or the color of their skin, but dialogue offers such a wider range of human expression. So, if dialogue is so important, how can we improve its implementation in our writing?

Step One: Listen to people talk in real life.

Now there are many ways you can do this. If you have friends, you should probably consider wiretapping them. I’ll post a link in the comments for some great, unobtrusive devices you can set up in houseplants, stuffed animals, ballpoint pens and so on. But, if you don’t have any friends, and the fact that you’re watching this video makes that likely, there are other solutions. Go to coffee shops, grab a notepad and a number two and jot down everything you hear. From personal experience, I can admit that as a man I had no idea how women talked until I started spying on them.

Step Two: Hold back. Use subtext.

Most people don’t just blurt out everything they are thinking. Both drama and comedy rely on characters withholding information. This creates suspicion, intrigue, and misunderstandings. Let’s look at this snippet from my novel, The Island of Lost Time. “Did you…” Angela asked. “Yes.” “Wow, I can’t believe…” “I know.” “So this is…” “Yes, that’s right.” See what I did there? Though revealing little we learn so much about the characters and their struggle: Angela’s issues with her mom, Dan’s homosexual experience from childhood, their fear of climate change, all in an exchange of dialogue about the surprise painting of child’s bedroom.

Step Three: Pay close attention to your character voice

Each character should have a voice unique to themselves. This will help your slower readers keep track of who’s who. There are different ways to do this. Maybe the smart member of your Italian crime family uses words like “matriculate” and “cajole.” Maybe one character turns every question into another question. Other ideas include: characters who speak entirely in haikus, characters who constantly refer to others as “deer fuckers,” or even characters with accents.

Step Four: Use dialogue to reveal backstory.

Let me just give you some examples of what I mean: “Cancer? Not again.” “That was before I stopped being racist.” and “Looks like herpes wasn’t the only thing you got from that trip to Atlantic City.” Now while these are all from a rejected Young Adult mystery I was working on a few years back, I’m still proud of the way they reveal a lot through a little. When you do this technique, think about past events in these characters lives: family deaths, bare knuckled brawls at a school reunions, or even a really bad sore throat they had during finals week. All of this deepens and humanizes your characters and draws the reader in.

Step Five: Read your dialogue aloud.

Like most of your writing, you won’t really know if it’s good unless you hear it spoken aloud. Again, if you have a friend, try reading it to them. If one of your characters is the voice of God, you can amplify the wiretapping hardware you were using to test it out on them. But again, the friendless still have options. You can blurt it out to people in elevators and see how they respond. Waitresses, baristas and topless dancers walking to their cars after work also make good targets.

Six HACKS To Help You Write Faster

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Whether you’re a nonfiction essayist, a novelist who’s trying to finish a manuscript under a deadline, or just a YouTuber trying to write a script for a six-hour video explaining why all the female characters in a Star War or Marvel movie are too woke, everyone wants to write faster.

As someone who’s written over 429 novels, you might assume that writing speed was never a problem for me. But it wasn’t always this way. Back when I was a young man, living on the streets of Phoenix, worried I’d have to sell my body for food, all I had was a desire to get published (and a knowledge of which street corners had the most reliable action after midnight.) Anyway, my first book took me over two years to write, and it was barely over 90 pages.

There were many things that were holding me back, but one thing I want to make clear is that it wasn’t writer’s block. I wrote almost every day, squeezing in quick sessions between hawking fake jewelry outside gas stations. I’ll cover many other tips in the video, but the key problem I had was that I was a perfectionist. I was just certain that my story about a down-on-his-luck graduate student who has to choose between finishing his degree and hunting down the serial killer who murdered his sister was going to launch me to instant critical acclaim. But I soon found out that, in the publishing industry, quantity always trumps quality. We’ll write until our fingers bleed on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Okay, now if you are worried about your writing speed, it may be helpful to start by analyzing why you write slowly in the first place. The following is a list of things that might be slowing down your writing speed:

  • Lack of an outline
  • Not setting a goal, aside from proving that dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about
  • Editing while you write
  • Eating while you write
  • Having a family
  • Edging while you write
  • A keyboard missing the letter “e”
  • Sending veiled threats to haters on social media
  • Using a computer that still runs on Windows XP
  • Ghosts in the hotel in which you’re writing asking you to kill your family
  • Wasting your time watching writing advice videos on YouTube
  • And constantly worrying you’re a piece of shit who will accomplish nothing

Now, what’s a good writing speed? This depends on several things: how old you are, how fat your fingers are, your brain pan, et cetera. But most writers try to get at least 1,000 words a day, which should be easily accomplished in two hours. At that pace, it will only take you 80 days to write an average-sized novel. To put it in perspective, that amount of time is the equivalent of bingeing both seasons Milf Manor three times. Not such a big time commitment when you think about it that way.

Now, let’s look at some ways we can easily get 1000 words in under two hours.

Tip 1 – Reward Yourself For Hitting Certain Word Counts

Humans are, evolutionarily-speaking, rather simple creatures. Like a chimp that agrees to administer a shock to their chimp family member in exchange for a banana, humans are driven by selfish impulses.

It doesn’t have to be a big reward. Maybe a nice cup of coffee, maybe a dessert, maybe a quick episode of Milf Manor. For myself, I set a weekly goal. If I hit 10000 words for the week, I reward myself with a nice relaxing drive past my second wife’s house when I know her new husband isn’t there.

Tip 2 – Set Punishments for Distractions

A writer needs to know what fascist and authoritarian governments have known for a long time: negative reinforcement works.

Be strict about distractions. Turn off your internet while you write. Keep all of your favorite guns out of your writing space. But you have to also set consequences for getting distracted. What I do is have my assistant monitor my computer remotely while I write. If she catches me watching porn, she uses a burner to call the police and say there’s a violent pedophile living at my home address. I find that my fear of incarceration or at least an uncomfortable discussion with the cops keeps me in line while I write.

Tip 3 – Beat Your Keyboard Into Submission

This is a tip which, like many life lessons, I learned from Finding Forrester. Your fingers should be an extension of the confidence you have in your writing. Much like saying your own name repeatedly while having sex with someone, your brain will subconsciously think you’re doing a good job and make you perform better. I go through at least two or three typewriters while writing each one of my books.

Tip 4 – Use Focus Apps

If you don’t want to go so far as risking your incarceration, there are apps which can help with distractions. My favorite is a Russian one called Freedom Blocker. It locks your computer to stop you from looking at news articles while also emitting a type of white noise that is supposed to suppress all thought outside of the task at hand. It’s been scientifically tested on labor camp detainees and you’ll really notice a difference.

Tip 5 – Set a Marathon Day (Or Marathon Fortnight)

Sometimes just having a routine isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to make a big push. You can get 10 or 20 thousand words down so long as you can convince your wives you have a devastating illness that your kids haven’t been vaccinated for yet, and if you haven’t used the “my grandpa died” excuse twice already with your boss.

Tip 6 – Get Healthy

Speaking of death and illnesses, lots of writers forget how important your bodily health is to your mind. I wasn’t like this as a young man, but now I find that jogging helps me sleep better, reduces my real illnesses so I don’t miss writing days and I’m much less distracted by all the horrible trauma my father and the whore who raised me inflicted upon me. And think about it. Is it a coincidence that George RR Martin hasn’t finished A Song of Fire and Ice and that he looks like this?

These Mistakes Can Ruin Your Book’s Climax

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Do you ever find that you feel like you’re doing very well, but when you get to the end, what you finished with really didn’t pack any punch, it wasn’t what you were hoping for and everyone walks away unsatisfied? Okay, now what about as a writer instead of a sexual partner?

Disappointment is a fact of life most writers have grown accustomed to. We disappoint our bosses by spending most of our time doing edits instead of correctly filing prescription orders. We disappoint our countrymen by crashing from the amphetamines we took for a writing marathon, sleeping 24 hours straight and forgetting to vote. We disappoint our wives by sleeping with our girlfriends, we disappoint our girlfriends by sleeping with our mistresses and we disappoint our mistresses by calling them the names of our wives or girlfriends or sex addiction therapist.

And all of that is okay. In real life, being a disappointment is nothing to be disappointed about. After all, none of this matters and the universe will end in heat death trillions of years from now having not acknowledged our existence at all. However, in your fiction it does matter. You could write a wonderful book with vivid, relatable characters… tense conflict… and lyrical prose, but if the climax disappoints, all of that will be forgotten and you’ll probably be harassed so badly on social media you’ll have to move to a new town.

What a climax really is is you fulfilling a promise to your reader, at least the ones who paid money to read your book. In keeping with this theme, I will slowly tease the story of how I met my second wife and climax with a graphic story of the first time we boned. (I obviously realize you could just skip to that point in the video by clicking, by I will ignore that for now.) We’ll totally not blow it on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Now, you might assume that the climax of a story is somewhere in the middle, as this terrible graph by Freytag seems to indicate. But as we talked about before on this channel, Freytag was speaking about classic Greek drama and he was mostly concerned with exterminating Polish people. In modern literature, a climax is basically what we think of as the end, where the main problem is resolved and all the tension you’d been building is released. If the sex metaphors make you uncomfortable, you can think of it this way: the climax is the point in the party where everyone’s arrived, the awkwardness has faded and the conversation flows naturally, but before the cops arrive or the guy you didn’t invite pukes on your rug.

Or, if you’re an American, you can also think of the climax as the 90’s in general.

Now, pulling off a good climax can be tricky business. Aside from not having an interesting name, a weak climax is the main reason I reject a prospective author’s manuscript. Here’s some tips to remember.

Mistake 1: Neglecting Character Transformation

Remember, a story isn’t about the things that happen. It’s about how the things that happen change your character. Your climax isn’t about the character defeating the villain. It’s about the character learning that, to defeat evil, you might have to break your moral code and push the villain the wheelchair down the stairs.

When I met the woman who became my second wife, I was much too trusting, which is how I ended up marrying a woman who was a serial bigamist. But as you’ll see, not trusting people is what led me to my second wife.

Mistake 2: Substituting a climax for a cliffhanger

Now, don’t get me wrong. A cliffhanger can be a great thing in real life. Having a workforce that was never sure whether or not they’d receive a Christmas bonus has made for great productivity, I’ve found. But a story needs to be complete.

I don’t have time to read your whole series. In fact, the only things I’ll read are your name, your first sentence, your climax and, time-permitting, your social media feed to make sure there’s nothing about NAMBLA in it.

Today’s story won’t end on any cliffhangers. My second wife and I met at Disney World. I was supposed to take my firstborn son, who was seven at the time, but he fell ill with the flu so I went by myself. She first caught my eye when I noticed her sitting in the back of the flume on Splash Mountain. It was then I knew I needed to have her.  

Mistake 3: Not using a crucible

A climax should feel unavoidable. It should be destiny. It should feel the way I felt when my dad locked me in a room with a hired prostitute at 18 to turn me into a man.

A crucible, in literary terms, is an inescapable situation for your characters. It should be a combination of the choices they’ve made along the way and outside pressures. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo is constantly compelled to Mordor for the climax. As Tolkien tells it, only Frodo can bring the ring there. In my story, Heartland, the main character is the only one with two hearts and therefore is the only one who can be a donor for the ailing mayor.

With Cindy, things felt unavoidable for a variety of reasons. When I introduced myself, it turned out she actually knew my work, even though I was a just minor success at the time. To add to that, we got put on the It’s a Small World boat alone and the ride broke down.

Mistake 4: Using cheats

Deus ex machina is one of the most common kinds, but there are lots of similar cheats. Basically, any surprise you introduce in the climax must be at least hinted at at some earlier point in the story. Think of the stupid fucking ghost army in Lord of the Rings or Batman’s utility belt in the otherwise logical, measured 1966 version of Batman.

So if I hadn’t mentioned that Cindy was already a fan of mine or hadn’t shown you the John Lazarus massage rod, the following scene would feel cheap.

So anyway, it started with Cindy…

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How to Build Your Author Brand… and start getting some recognition

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

I want you to imagine walking into a bookshop one day with nothing particular in mind to buy. You pull a book at random from out of the shelves and start reading the back cover. You discover it’s about a cabal of murderous cardinals trying to kill the pope or something and only some renowned history professor or art critic or whatever can stop them. You assume it’s a satire or at least a pulpy adventure story with a good sense of humor, but the first few pages reveal it to be an overly serious, 500-page slog. You put the novel back on the shelf and never think about it again. What you don’t realize is that, with proper author branding, the book I described sold millions of copies and wowed readers worldwide. We’ll learn how author branding can establish a deep emotional connection between readers and authors and eliminate the need to always write good books on this installment of Stories’ Matter.

Author branding is essentially how you are perceived by your audience and your identity as a writer. As an author you’ll need some unique hook beyond the pages of your writing to capture your audience’s trust, respect and admiration. 

Before you start building your brand, I suggest asking yourself three questions:

1. How am I unique?

I realize this is a tough question. Very few of us are truly exceptional, and most of the exceptional ones are devious sexual predators who wouldn’t blink an eye about poisoning the water supply. Still, if not you, think hard about what sets your work apart.

For me, I had to consult with family and neighbors, who were the only people who read them, to find that connective thread. It wasn’t until then I realized that, aside from brutal violence against women, almost all my books depicted heroes overcoming great odds in unexpected ways.

Now, personally I’m not especially heroic. Just to give an example, spiders terrify me and also I’ve watched three different people drown in lakes without swimming in to save them. Still, with successful branding, people often see John Lazarus as synonymous with atypical acts of heroism. 

2. What is the psychology of my readers? What do they need from me?

Except for the desperately ugly, retirees whose children don’t love them and literal bibliophiles, most people don’t consume books compulsively. The average American only reads 1.3 books every year. So how can you make sure you’re that one book and not that .3 book? Well, think about value you hope to bring to your readers through your work.

Will they learn how to manipulate someone into sex? Will they get to experience a story that involves action AND comedy? Will they discover that licensed psychologists can’t report past crimes to police regarding drowning bodies?

3. Am I attractive? Can I make myself more attractive?

There’s good news and bad news with this one. The bad news is that most fake beards to hide your lack of a jawline won’t stay on long enough for book readings, signings and meet and greets. The good news is that for writers, the bar of attractiveness is pretty low.

But while Henry James and Emily Dickinson could blame it on typhus and tuberculosis, you’ll have to at least attempt to make it look like you didn’t emerge from a long shift at White Castle in the Louisiana bayou. I suggest applying as much makeup as possible. Women think Kylie Jenner, men think Disintegration-era Robert Smith. Lose weight by walking at least 500 steps a day. If all else fails, hide your face and body behind oversized cowboy hats and Mexican ponchos.

Once you answered these questions, it’s time to start building your brand identity.

Step One: Write an author tagline.

Just like your books, your author brand needs a tagline, a catchy slogan by which your audience can identify you. This can be posted on social media accounts, at the end of blog entries, even on book covers. Here are some from other famous authors: Live Free or Die Hard (Benjamin Franklin), Sex, Drugs and Drugs (Hunter S. Thompson), The Thinking Man’s Dean Koontz (Stephen King), Your Favorite Psychotic’s Favorite Psychotic (Philip K. Dick).

Now, as I said earlier, try to tie this to your connective thread I mentioned earlier. That’s why I ended up with the tagline “Small stories. Big heroes” after the publisher rejected my first attempt “Bloody stories, bloodier women.”

Step Two: Build a visual identity

Unfortunately, authors of today have to be graphic designers as much as writers. Sure, 100 years ago, you could focus on the words, do cocaine with Freud and ignore the signs of impending fascism, but today’s literary landscape demands more. Visual identity means things like color schemes, fonts, icons, logos, watermarks, headshots, capitalization. Improper line spacing on a press release can make or break an author. Hiring an outside firm’s your best bet, but if not possible, use these tips. Black and white never misses, especially on those headshots. It gives you a classic professional look and will cover up any skin blotchiness from excessive drinking. And If you’re using acronyms, make sure to avoid slurs. This almost killed Jesmyn Evelyn Ward’s career before it took off.  

Step Three: Build your brand any way you can

Finally, use any and every online platform you can to market yourself. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Reddit, Amazon, 4Chan, 8Chan, Erowid, Liveleaks, Rotten.com, all online forums you can. But don’t ignore the power of offline marketing. When I was starting out, I’d drive around the country to different towns, hire a dozen local actors to be my audience and set up a book reading at the most popular café I could. I’d pay small children to write my website URL in chalk on the sidewalk. I’d steal all the books from Little Free Libraries and replace them with copies of my own.

Just remember: You’re an American and that means every party, every cookout, every dance recital, every family funeral, every is a chance to network and market yourself.

How To Use Symbolism in Your Writing

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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.

What is Symbolism?

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.

Why You Should Consider Becoming a Ghostwriter

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RL Stine

Franklin W. Dixon

James Patterson

Besides being people whom I’ve followed to their homes late at night for an unsolicited interview, these are authors well known for implementing ghostwriters. They, like many others, hire people to write for them and release their work without attribution. In fact, Franklin W. Dixon is a completely fabricated person entirely, which explains why the Franklin W. Dixon I followed shot at my car tires when I wouldn’t stop honking in his driveway. Ghost writing can be a great source of work for an aspiring author, and from singers who dropped out of middle school to businesses that, as a guiding principle, dehumanize all their employees, there’s a high demand for a competent ghost writer. We’ll look at the pros and cons of ghost writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Before we get started, I should point out that if you are reading this article in the year 2027 or later, you can adjust your stillsuit that climate change has forced you to wear and move on to the next video, because it’s almost certain that AI has rendered all this information completely useless. This article is solely for those in the narrow window between 2024 and 2027, who still have some time to earn a little extra cash before the billionaire class unleashes their sentries to exterminate anyone making less than 50k a year.

All right, so this article will be broken into three parts: reasons to be a ghostwriter, career paths for a ghostwriter and some general advice in how to find work as a ghost writer.

Reasons to Be a Ghostwriter

The first thing you might be thinking is: John, I became a writer to become famous, so people would respect me, so everyone in high school would finally have to apologize for selling me a crushed-up bag of poison ivy and telling me it’s weed. Why the hell would I want to write a book without my name on it?

Well, for starters, fame can be a double-edged sword. For every kind, adoring fan, there will be another who pours maple syrup all over your windshield because you won’t grant him an interview for his book blog. Let’s look at some other reasons.

Reason 1: You’ll Probably Make More Than You Would On Your Own

If you’re watching this video, you’ve probably haven’t even made enough money writing this year to buy the rope to make the noose to hang yourself for your constant failure. Youth, inexperience, an overcrowded self-publishing market and ugliness are all big obstacles to overcome. But people will consume anything released by a celebrity. They’ll listen to any corporate speaker who they think will make them richer.

A successful ghost writer can easily earn 50K for a book-length project. I didn’t earn that much from my own books until two decades into my career, when I coincidentally came up with a book title identical to another popular work at the time.

Reason 2: You’ll Learn the Business

Most writers think that writing is done in alone, in a cozy bedroom, with a nice cup of tea or coffee on the desk, a loaded pistol at your side just in case. But the majority of a writer’s work is done in office buildings, it’s in done in conference rooms and it’s done with the piles of human excrement that are literary agents and publishers. As an unknown, these people wouldn’t even take the time to spit on you, but as a ghostwriter you can make connections and learn to manipulate them in the hopes that someday, you might publish something under your own name.

Reason 3: You Can Learn Other Voices Besides Your Own

This one’s tricky because to start as a ghost writer, you have to already be able to do this to some extent. Experience has taught me that, for example, corporate blogs about risk management in finance don’t like jokes about sucking dick for meth. (The Wolf of Wall Street lied to me). But, in any case, your skills as a writer will grow and develop as you’ll need to adopt a different voice for each client.

Career Paths for a Ghostwriter

When most people think of ghostwriters, they think of celebrity autobiographies. There’re a lot of reasons a celebrity or politician might use a ghostwriter: some are lazy, some are downright illiterate, some have busy schedules and can’t take time away from tweeting about how immigrants are poisoning our blood. Or they might just need someone who actually knows and can convincingly describe what consensual sex with a woman feels like.

You have other options, though.

For example, Alan Dean Foster got his start ghostwriting the novelization of Star Wars under George Lucas’s name, before piggbacking off this success and becoming the patron saint of 70s, 80s and 90s science fiction novelizations under his own name. I tried a similar thing recently, but it turned out Dune already was a book.

You can also write: blog posts for tech companies, speeches for firearms manufacturers after a mass shooting occurs, online course materials for educational institutions that want people to know not all slaveowners were bad and film scripts for North Korean cinema.

How to Succeed As A Ghostwriter

Step 1: Build your portfolio

While it’s not as much of a struggle as proving to a Big Six publisher that your book will sell, you still need to prove to the client that you can write. Starting a blog or website is a good start. It could be on any topic, really: gardening, investment strategies, a guide to age of consent laws around the world.

Guest blogging is the next step. You’ll need to build some ties in the community. Though I wasn’t a ghostwriter, I did a lot of guest blogging in the early days of blogs just to hone my skills and do a little self-promotion. I mainly wrote about how to have a successful marriage and I had a lot of fun doing it until I had to stop once my first wife went missing.

Step 2: Read all legal documents carefully

If you do land a client, it’s important to have your lawyer pore over all the contracts. Many celebrities and organizations will make you sign NDAs or follow specific guidelines in the project. Maybe, for example, you aren’t allowed to mention that Willem Dafoe is descended from swamp people.

Step 3: Publish long-form content

Finally, if you want to make the big bucks, you’ll need to ghostwrite a full-length book, but you’ll need to prove you can do that in the first place. Self-publishing a novel shows you have the focus and commitment to devote to a several-month project.

The aforementioned James Patterson hires ghostwriters to write full-length novels. In fact, because I had so much experience writing thrillers and crime fiction, I almost considered working for him. This was after my second divorce, when I needed some spare cash for booze money. But I chickened out at the last second because I was worried James would eventually find out I was the one who kept putting print-outs of his office floorplan in his mailbox.

Why You Keep Getting Exposition Wrong (Blame Freytag!)

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Let’s start with a little thought experiment. Would you have sex with any random man? You might be thinking, I’m not sure John, there’s a lot of information I need. I have so many questions. How many partners has he had in the past two years? Will he get needy or is he just looking for a one-time thing? Is he of good breeding? I’m totally not gay so can we just try watching each other jack off so I can prove I’m not gay when I only get a little bit hard?

Of course, I can’t answer all the questions. There has to be a little mystery to keep it spicy as well.

This is a thought experiment I always do when I teach writing classes at the learning annex, and when I bring in Dale to the classroom, I do it to illustrate the importance of exposition. Much like your decision about whether or not you’d bang Dale, your reader won’t follow your characters through your story unless you can answer some key questions about their background, but if you give too much information away, they might get bored and lose track of the narrative. We’ll explore the correct ways to utilize exposition on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Exposition is a literary device that communicates background information to your reader. Now, according to Freytag, exposition happens at the beginning of your story, but as we’ve talked about before, Freytag was a dumbass who didn’t know shit about shit (and who also thought Polish people could only become proper human beings through German colonization and by forcing them to stop speaking Polish).

Exposition can take place at any time in the story and will often be effective if it’s sprinkled carefully throughout your narrative. There are two kinds of exposition: direct and indirect. Let’s look at an example of direct exposition.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Latifa who lived on 198th Street and Lenox Avenue. Latifa’s grandma lived across town in a rat-infested project with the dope fiends, gangbangers and Mexican pimps, and every day after school, Latifa was responsible for bringing her a fresh brick of cocaine so she and the other old ladies could cut it before it went out on the streets.”

I’ll admit this lacks immediacy. I only did it because I was going for a fairy tale vibe, as this was a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in modern-day Harlem that I wrote with one of my black friends (And I only refer to him this way because, in the end, he asked to have his name removed from the project.)

Now let’s listen to an example of indirect exposition from the same story.

“Dan reached into the drawer to find the pistol and touched the spot smeared with Janet’s lipstick. What was that shade—she must’ve mentioned it a dozen times? Mars sunrise, or something like that. Dan grabbed the gun and walked across the empty living room, peeking back as he stepped out into the hall. A year ago this would’ve been a place worth protecting, he told himself.”

This says a lot while keeping the story moving. As I explained in this video, it shows instead of tells. We learn Janet was someone important to him, either a girlfriend or possibly his mom, and we know that she’s no longer in his life, something the emptiness of the apartment clarifies. The subtlety provides a bigger emotional impact as well.

Now, we’re going to look at four different ways to provide exposition in our writing with more samples of my writing, now available for purchase on Amazon.

Example 1: Exposition through conflict

“Sally had planned everything perfectly, tied up every loose end–she even shaved all her head hair and pubes–but still she woke up Thursday morning to the police knocking on her door.”

That’s how I began The They/Them Murders, a thriller about the woke left mob involved in a series of disappearances in the suburbs of Branson, Missouri. Because it’s tied to some immediate action, it doesn’t feel like telling and while it reveals the past, a lot is still shrouded in mystique, which entices the reader. Why did she shave her pubes? Was she sliding naked through some kind of cramped tube and wanted to avoid the hairs getting ripped or pulled out?

Example 2: Exposition through dialogue

“You seem anxious. What’s wrong?” “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just that I haven’t been in this hospital since my brother died from sepsis.”

That’s from an early scene in Heartland, a coming-of-age story about one teen’s decision to become an organ donor. Dialogue can be one of the most natural ways to reveal backstory. But when you do this, make sure you don’t have people talking about something they both already know, like in… all movies. Find workarounds to this dilemma. Instead of a man explaining how he got his scar to his wife of 20 years, rewrite the scene so he’s explaining it to a prostitute.

Example 3: Exposition through newspaper articles, diary entries, emails and other epistolary devices

“Pa lost the farm today. Said we’s gon move to Arkansas soon as grandpappy funeral get over wit. Can’t say I miss em’ much myself, though.”

From Ode to Adelay, about a rural family struggling through the Great Depression. Devices like these are great ways to get across a lot of background information without it feeling like telling and without the reader losing interest. And you’d be surprised by the vast number of things you can use to convey information. Just take a look around your house: for me, that includes things like horse race results, warning labels for sleep medication, threatening letters to the IRS.

That’s all for this time. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe.

Four Tips For Writing the Perfect First Chapter

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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


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


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


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


Step One: Start in media res.

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


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


Step Two: Don’t frontload the backstory.

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


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


Step Three: Opinion, opinion, opinion, opinion.

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


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


Step Four: Make the first domino fall.

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


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


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