writing tips

10 Writing Exercises to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

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

Exercise 1 – Write fan fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exercise 4 – Brainstorm in a sensory deprivation setting

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

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

Exercise 5 – Write captions to photos

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

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

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

Exercise 7 – Write a conversation without dialogue

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

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

Exercise 8 – Retell a well-known story

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

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

Shit, I don’t know. It might work.

Exercise 10 – You can even try poetry

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

How to Use Symbolism In Your Writing

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step Two: Use symbols to establish recurring themes

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

Step Three: Use symbols to hint at darker ideas

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

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

Step Four: Leave your work open to interpretation

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

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

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

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

How To Raise the Stakes in Your Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step One: Add a Ticking Clock

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

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

Step Two: Combine internal and external stakes

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

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

Step Three: Proportionality matters

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

Step Four: Don’t forget about positive consequences

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

Step Five: Create moral no-win scenarios

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

Why You Can’t Be Your Own Editor

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

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

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

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

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

Reason 1 – You’re Too Close This Thing

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

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

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

Reason 2 – You’re Brain Plays Tricks on You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip 2 – Choose Your Battles

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

Tip 3 – Sometimes Your Editor Is Your Enemy

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

The Writing Routine Every Author Needs

Daniel Madison2 Comments

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

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

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

Step 1 – Wake up early and get hydrated

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

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

Step 2 – Start writing at first light

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

Step 3 – Don’t be nervous

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

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

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

Step 5 – Go on a walk for inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Write Memorable Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Use all the senses in your description

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

Here’s a few more quick tips:

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

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

24 Reasons You Suck At Writing

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Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of hatemail from fans of the channel. Most are curious as to why, after watching all 63 videos on this channel and doing everything I’ve said, they still haven’t been published. And some are wondering if there’s a way to get out of the restraining orders they’ve been hit with.

As I’ve said many times, literature is not a science like particle physics or phrenology. I can’t guarantee your success any more than this guy can control gas prices or this guy can protect you from bird aids. Some people just have unlucky brain pans.

But, John, you might be saying, I realize nobody is guaranteed to write a best seller, but do you have to openly insult me to my face on these videos and call me a piece of shit and respond to my criticism by sending me photos of yourself naked atop all of the books you’ve successfully published?

Everything I do on this channel is to help you improve. Why? Because I love good writing and I hate bad writing. I want libraries, the ones that aren’t smoldering piles of rubble by the end of 2025, filled with the work of people who understand compelling drama and narrative conventions. Ten years from now, I want everyone watching this channel to be lying naked atop a pile of their own successfully published books.

A lot of this advice will be difficult to hear. It will lead to awkward realizations, second guessing and asking indie book contests if they offer refunds on entry fees.

Reason 1 – You Spelled One Word Wrong. Every time I see a manuscript with a misspelled word, I instantly incinerate it right in my office. Or at least I used to until a fire caused by an unrelated reason burned down the last office I worked in.

Reason 2 – You have more than one character with the same name in your story. And it’s Brayden. This is confusing as a reader, not to mention disgusting.

Reason 3 – You write rambling sentences that just go on and on and on and on and don’t really have a purpose besides showing how great you are at being a show-off, but without ever having a reason to justify the length beyond simply showing everyone that you’re a douchebag with an MFA who went to…

Reason 4 – You wrote with a lack of description. Every great story should describe at least one room, plant or female body part.

Reason 5 – You named the character after yourself. And your name is Brayden.

Reason 6 – You mentioned a gun in the first act but you never used it blow anybody’s head off later in the story.

Reason 7 – You had the character directly say what they are feeling. It makes me so mad when I hear that.

Reason 8 – You used verb tenses in a confusing way. I will have had many writers send me manuscripts having been written this way.

Reason 9 – You spent too much time describing the character’s clothes.

Reason 10 – You didn’t describe the character’s clothes at all so I assumed they were naked and got confused why I was so horny.

Reason 11 – You used too many dialogue tags. Like exclaimed, proclaimed, declaimed. And if you tell me a character ejaculated, there better be a hard cock at the end of that sentence.

Reason 12 – You used words a lot of big words to make yourself seem smart. I graduated cum laude from Arizona University. Don’t think you’re smarter than me.

Reason 13 – You made the story sad and pointless and it was really obvious you were just writing about your own life.

Reason 14 – You used a bunch of curse words to try and seem edgy and cool. Only a fucking cocksucking asshole would do that.

Reason 15 – You used adverbs. Only a fucking cocksucking asshole would do that.

Reason 16 – You put in so much detail when describing the guns in your book that it made me feel like I’m going to be put on some kind of list for reading it.

Reason 17 – You expected sympathy from me at the very beginning of the story. If I don’t know your character, why should I give a shit that their whole family just died? It’s the same reason new hires at my company have to wait six months before they get bereavement leave.

Reason 18 – You wrote your gays as stereotypes. Seriously, depicting two men having anal sex with each other is such a stereotypical way to show they’re gay. Think of something else.

Reason 19 – You wrote a story about a “chosen one.” They’re cliched, they’re overdone and in real life, every chosen one I’ve ever known just stole my money and tried to get the deed for my third wife’s house.

Reason 20 – You switched POVs randomly throughout your story without rhyme or reason. Imagine how jarring it would be if the POV porn website you subscribe to suddenly switched to third person POV content. Enough said

Reason 21 – You were clearly mimicking the style of a more famous author. Unless you were trying to mimic me. In which case, I’m flattered.

Reason 22 – You made every character speak with the same manner, style and rhythm. Your black people should sound as black as possible.

Reason 23 – Your writing was so confident. It was clear you hadn’t watched videos like this to make you constantly second-guess yourself.

Reason 24 – You clearly used AI because your writing wasn’t filled with unnecessary words like “really” “just” or “actually.” And all the words were spelled correctly.

That’s all for today. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe and I’ll leave you with this week’s This Day in Literary History. See you on the next one.

Top Tips for Crafting the Perfect Story Ending

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Story endings are one of the most things to pull off as a writer. Because of this, it’s going to take me all year to create this video, as I’ll likely have to piece it together little by little.  

Anyway, like sex, a great ending should be an emotional release that all your hard work, all those jogs, all those fasts, all those kegel exercises, culminates in, so to speak.  But unlike sex, a writer needs to at least to attempt to satisfy the person you’re performing for.

It helps to think of some of the great endings of fiction and really analyze why they work so well. The ending of the original Star Wars works so well because it satisfies the audience’s basest, primal bloodlust. We cheer because the hundreds of thousands of sentient beings who are not in our in-group have just suffered an unimaginably painful death.

A great ending should have the following elements: it should resolve your central conflict, it should satisfy the reader, it should illustrate the character’s transformation, and it should take your reader by surprise. To illustrate this point, let’s look at Business As Unusual, a book I just released at the beginning of 2024. The novel follows Tabitha Martin, a young girl trying to make it in the big city while taking care of her sick brother. You can skip ahead if you don’t want any spoilers, but the novel ends with the character’s brother dying.

It solves the central conflict because she’s able to live her life now, it takes the reader by surprise because the brother doesn’t die of cancer but is instead absolutely pancaked by a bus, and it satisfies the reader because Tabitha finally has time to pursue the sexual relationship with her boss that she hinted at by dressing slutty to work.

Now, let’s look at some more general tips that work for all kinds of fiction.

Step One – Know Your Ending Before Writing

You want to take the reader by surprise but not yourself. Wild twists that don’t really make sense just make you look as emotionally unhinged as a drunken secretary who advances on you sexually at an office party even though you barely know each other.

Now, have I written books without knowing the ending in advance? Well, of course. When you write 430 books in 27 years, 13 of those being periods of heavy drug use, both self and externally-administered, things like that are going to happen.

Dawson, a book I wrote as a young man, is a particularly bad example of this. I wrote it without ever knowing who the killer was and in the end I had no choice to make the titular character the killer because his only alibi was that her didn’t remember where he was on the night of the murder.

Step Two – Try Out Different Types of Endings

Despite what many authors might tell you, you don’t have to know your ending in advance. Write three or four different endings. If you find one that surprises you, it may surprise readers even more.  

It can be very liberating as a writer, too. We don’t get to choose different endings in life. We may have let a job opportunity go by and spend the rest of our life regretting it. Or we might spend our days casually flirting with bar patrons, yoga classmates and coworkers with the vain optimism that one will eventually match the charisma and beauty of your second wife, only to have them bore you with the details of their similarly depressing life.

Step Three – Leave Room For Interpretation

This can depend on the kind of story you’re writing. If you’re writing a series, you may want to tease that the villain might’ve survived the final battle. And some very powerful pieces of fiction have ambiguous endings that readers may argue over. Call Me By Your Name and American Psycho are two great examples, as is a recent novel that I’ve had to remove from the market for reason I won’t get into. All I’ll say is that this book ends with the main character finally free to pursue a romance she’s wanted the whole book, but it doesn’t tell us her final decision.

But real life is messy like that. Sometimes people say things that can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Like, imagine your secretary walks into your office at five o’clock and asks, “Would you like me to stay late?” How would you interpret that?

Sure, it could mean, “I am willing to stay late to reduce the amount of work you have to do.” But it could also mean, “I can’t wait until everyone else leaves so it’s just the two of us alone.”

Anyway, as I’ve often told my lawyer, it totally makes sense why two people might interpret that differently.

Step Four – Tie Up All The Loose Ends

Fiction should be neat and tidy, unlike real life. Look, I’m a busy man. I can’t be writing twenty books a year, running a publishing company, doing this web series, all while remembering every conversation I have with every person. This libel stuff… it’s just a desperate plea for attention from someone who could barely be a receptionist, let alone someone who thinks she knows the ins and outs of libel laws as it applies to fiction.

And the sexual harassment stuff is just… I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. I’ve had lots of people come through my office doors and like most bosses I have had sexual relations with a few of them, so that right there already tells you I didn’t target Tiffany specifically. In fact, I was sleeping with two other office assistants while we were in a relationship. So how could there be a quid pro quo if I was getting it from multiple people? Was I playing favorites with all of them? That doesn’t even follow basic logic.

Anyway, back to the libel stuff… if Tiffany had ever listened to my advice, she’d know that’s what a great writer does; he gets inspired by the world around him. Now she wants to take down the company that paid her salary for an entire seven months? Give me a fucking break.

The Anatomy of Your First Chapter

Daniel Madison1 Comment

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Photo by Min An from Pexels

Nothing will draw your reader’s attention like a completely perfect first chapter. But complete and utter perfection is easier said than done. In fact, as the head editor of DEPub, I can say with authority that an author’s inability to construct a flawless first chapter is the biggest obstacle to getting published.

So, before we break things down, we need to ask ourselves, “What should the perfect opening do?” Well, it has to introduce the main character and the world in which your story takes place. It has to have a strong, unique hook, an original voice, a well-defined tone perfect for your intended readership, several references to classical literature that are obscure but not too obscure,  something mysterious but also completely clear and understandable, a non-cisgender character, an abortion, a description of a sunset or wedding that makes your own personal memories of those experiences pale in comparison, a person dead or dying of a little known disease, fish, dark humor, nothing callous or insensitive, 2-15 words that aren’t English, and either a galactic spaceship battle or a grounded discussion about motherhood but preferably both.

Now that might sound easy, but once you start writing you’ll definitely notice some key elements are missing. So here are some tips, advice, suggestions, reminders and pointers on how to reduce redundancy and sharpen that first chapter into a useful weapon to plunge into heart of your reader.

Start in media res

With ever-decreasing attention spans, the readers of today need their dopamine fix fast. Recent studies show that readers will decide whether or not to read your book after the first three words. So you’ve got to whip out all your literary might, so to speak, and dangling it front of their face.

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. “Bang Bang Bang.” Start your book with cannibalism. “As far back as I can remember, I always wondered what people tasted like.” Start your book with a nonsensical string of expletives. “Fuckin’ piss-ass cocksuckin’ motherfucker.”

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.

Opinion, opinion, opinion

Your story is driven by the voice you give your narrator. Original, radical opinions are maybe the best hook you can give your reader. Give your character a refreshing voice of reason, or a scornful voice of hatred.

Look for contrasts. Maybe your radical Islamic terrorist has decided to leave his past behind and open a bakery on the west side. Or maybe hint at a revelation like this: “I hated immigrants my whole life – until the day I realized I was one.”

When nothing else works, change your starting point

Start by asking yourself, “Why am I starting here?” Then ask yourself, “What if I started here?” Then, “No, how about here?” And “No, I think the second one was better. No, wait, which one was the second one?” And finally, “Why am I trying to write this stupid fucking book nobody’s going to read? Just give up you no talent piece of garbage.”

And once you get all that out of your system, try removing your first paragraph and see if that’s better. If that doesn’t work, make your second chapter your first. Then delete every sixth sentence and see what that looks like. Is your story starting to make much less sense and does it seem completely disjointed and nonsensical? If you’ve followed everything I said up until now, your answer should be “no.”

Finally, deliver the burgeoning conflict

There’s a saying I put in all my Powerpoint presentations when I teaching storytelling at the adult learning annex: “Your first chapter doesn’t have to bring the storm, but the storm should be visible on the horizon.” After all the applause, I go on to explain how this is the driving force of all fiction.

Be subtle. Instead of staring with a bank robbery, have the manager of bank security list every single vulnerability he’s noticed. Instead of starting with the death of a father, start with a dream sequence of a near-death experience of an uncle.

 

Remember, it’s important not to panic. This is a long process. So long as you don’t mind getting rejected for decades, there’s nothing to worry about. I hope this has been helpful.

Seven Secrets To Writing Better Characters

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Characters are the windows to our story’s soul. They embody our wants, wishes and desires, and we often use them to say the things we can’t in real life without being called a “racist,” “sexist,” or “that guy who has some strange ideas about Israel for someone who’s not very religious.”

The following is a sneak-peak of what you’ll learn in my 75 part, non-refundable online writing course on how to create believable, dynamic characters that aren’t obvious self-inserts.

Give your characters strong opinions

As a writer, there’s a good chance you’re naturally passive. You’re probably afraid to speak in front of others, cower from responsibility and suffer from a complete lack of charisma.

To write resonant characters, however, you’ve got to provide  strong personalities readers will want to follow for the next 300 pages. Giving your character strong opinions is a great way to do so.

For example, I wrote a story about a lonely, American twenty-something unsure of what to do with his life who also thought the holocaust wasn’t such a big deal. I realized it wasn’t working and couldn’t quite understand why. After a good deal of consultation with my beta readers, I decided it would be much better if he denied the holocaust ever happened at all. Now he was somebody who got your attention.

Unpredictability is key

Storytelling is all about character growth, how characters react to their circumstances and how they mould the world around them. Nothing will grip a reader more than a character making an important decision your reader didn’t expect, and if you followed my last piece of advice, sharp changes of mind will be all the more striking.

For example, try making your conformist, browbeaten neighborhood butcher, who has spent his whole life doing what he’s told and making sausage from animal parts, decide one day that he’s going to make sausage out of human parts.

It can go the other way, too. Make your antagonist the good guy. Maybe the liberal philosophy professor decides he isn’t going to give another lecture about why everyone needs to be atheist, quits his job and instead goes to church to pray.

Grudges are another key

This goes part and parcel with strong opinions. Much of our folklore – hell, much of human history – is built upon grudges. I think naturally we as humans are fearful of outsiders, occupying forces and the imminent threat of Sharia law being implementing in our schools.

Your grudges can be professional, political, social or familial. And sometimes, the vaguer the better. A hinted-at grudge is a great way to worldbuild without wasting too much time on exposition. In my Grisham-esque thriller The Subtle Subpoena, we don’t need to be told why the protagonist has it in for the criminal defense firm Abelman, Cohen and Blumenthal – it should be obvious.

Improve physical descriptions by being as specific as possible

Strong, unique physical descriptions are a cornerstone of great character. Read the following sentence: “The cashier had a mole under his right eye.” Decent, but it leaves a lot to the imagination. Here’s a much better version of that sentence: “The cashier had a mole 2.78 centimeters below his right eye.”

Better, right? It’s much easier to picture this way. In the first example, the mole could technically be anywhere under his right eye; it could be next to his mouth, on his neck, on his knee, or even under his left eye.

Character names are more important than anything

Nobody wants to read a book about someone named Jared or Brayden. That’s why it’s important you pick evocative names that follow the three “make it’s”: Make it era-appropriate, alliterative and symbolic.

Names that don’t fit the era they’re set in can be distracting. If you’re writing a historical drama about the Antebellum South, don’t do what I did and name your general Zebulon Geezwax of the Ursa Antilles Cluster.

Also, alliterate every name you can. All great writers and porn stars do it. Names like Candy Cox and Dante Demarcus DeHarrison already tell the reader a lot about the character.

And slather your names in symbolism. Don’t call your character something boring like Joe unless you want him to be an everyman. If you’re writing sci-fi give them a mythic Greek last name and if you’re writing literary fiction give them a mythic Greek first name. Or use obscure color names like Vermillion Dax, Smaragdine Simons, and Burnt Sienna.

The third key is interesting professions

There have already been a lot of books about sea captains, princes, private detectives, humanities professors, hippies and refugees who just whine about everything that’s happened to them. It’s your job as a writer to explore the unexplored, and what better way to do so than by picking a character with a unique profession.

Some ideas: Podcasters who will do anything to uphold the Second Amendment; a Crisis Actor; a movie producer and lobbyist trying to repeal the Second Amendment; a lawyer who happens to be a woman; and the most unsung of all heroes, Israeli politicians.

Finally, you need a moral dilemma

So you’ve got an opinionated, grudge-bearing, unpredictable character with a unique name and profession. But eventually your story will hinge upon the decisions that character makes, and a perfect way to do that is to put their convictions to test, to force them to make uncomfortable choices. This conflict is the essence of all my books (and I assume others as well).

Will your podcaster let Spotify ban his streams on their platform, or will he use his Second Amendment rights to uphold the First? Maybe your character has always been taught men and women are equal? If so, what will he do to stop radical feminists from attacking him on social media?

 

To learn more about character development, contact us to enroll in our comprehensive online course. It’s just three easy payments of $88.