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.

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.

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.