Mark Twain's Secret to Success: "Use Better Words"

One of the best-known quotes to come out of the Mark Twain Factory of Famous Aphorisms is: “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

That’s good advice for young writers, because money is scarce when writers are starting out, so it makes sense to use cheaper words. But as a writer matures and the royalty checks start rolling in, limiting oneself to cheap words is no longer an economically advisable or professionally pragmatic way to proceed.

The truth is, if you ever want your writing to improve, you have to start investing in more expensive words. Or, to put it another way, if you want your compositional labors to yield the most awesomely maximal dividends, you are therefore obligated to purchase at a premium price point the various adjectives, verbs, gerunds, and descriptors you use to obfuscate reality so adroitly and efficaciously on a daily basis.

I can hear the English teachers out there yelling: “No, that’s not what he meant! What Twain was saying was that good writing is not about flowery language, it’s about clear, concise communication. Short words that say exactly the right thing are much better than long words that say the same thing, but with a plethora of unnecessary extra syllables.”

As if.

Now, I’m sure Mark Twain had his reasons for saying what he said. But I’m also fairly certain it had nothing to do with advising other writers how to do their jobs better. Twain was a savvy businessman, and one of the most successful writers of his time. He could also do remedial math. So it stands to reason that if Twain could convince all the other writers of his time to buy up all the inexpensive words, he’d have all the premium luxury words to himself. Such a tactic would also limit the number of writers trying to compete for those all-important fantasmagorical super-words that go into “literature,” because no one else could afford them.

The truth is, Mark Twain did not become one of the richest and most famous writers of his era because of what he wrote. No, he became a literary legend because of his shrewd manipulation of the vocabulary market, and by leveraging his status and success to hoard higher-priced words, thereby limiting their supply and driving up their value.

How did this scheme work? Well, let’s say Mark Twain wrote a sentence with five five-dollar words, three two-dollar words, and four fifty-centers. That sentence would cost Twain thirty-three dollars. Now, suppose another writer wrote the same thing, but could only afford a couple of one-dollar words and ten fifty-centers. That writer would only pay seven dollars for his sentence.

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that the writer who used the cheaper words got the better deal. But—and here’s where Twain’s true genius kicks in—these aren’t sunk costs, they are investment dollars. Five-dollar words may cost more, but the rate of return on a five-dollar word is ten to a hundred times greater than that of a mere fifty-cent word. The average rate of return on a fifty-cent word is about ten percent, so the writer who uses a fifty-cent word is only going to make a nickel off it. But the rate of return on a five-dollar word is anywhere from a hundred to a thousand percent. That means every time Twain used a five-dollar word, he made at least five dollars off it, and sometimes up to five-hundred dollars.

If you do the math the way Mark Twain did, the writer who only invested seven dollars into his sentence made a mere seventy cents, while Twain—who invested thirty-three dollars—got anywhere from $33 to $3,300 back. Throw in the multiplication effect of a review in the New Yorker and a national literary prize, and one five-dollar word by Mark Twain could amount to as much as $10,000. Adjusted for inflation, that’s close to a million dollars a word!

Mark Twain used this simple economic principle to become one of the greatest writers of all time. The more he made, the more he invested in better words, eventually buying up all the ten- and twenty-dollar words as well. Rumor has it he even had a gold-plated, thousand-dollar word mounted in his smoking room. By the end of his life, in fact, Twain controlled ninety-nine percent of all the nation’s literary vocabulary, leaving all the other writers of his time to fight over the remaining one-percent of words available. No one could compete.

When, on occasion, his fellow writers complained, Twain’s rejoinder was, “Cheer up, it’s not like I own the alphabet. Yet.”

So go ahead, be a chump and use fifty-cent words if you want. But if you really want to crack the big time, it’s time to escalate your fiduciary commitment to polysyllabic syntactification. Trust me, you don’t want to live in a world where only a handful of best-selling writers control all the best words. Telling a good story isn’t easy if all you have to work with is the vocabulary no one else wants.

Beyond Lake Wobegon: Setting Stories in Minnesota

Settings in fiction are very important, because without a setting, characters in a story would just drift around in space, wondering where the bathroom is. But there can be no bathroom—or anything else—without a physical dimension in time, and it is the writer’s responsibility to provide this dimension, because forcing characters to hold it for eternity is just cruel.

Describing a setting that exists in real life can be tricky, though, because readers are always on the lookout for mistakes.

Suppose your story takes places in the year 1993, and you describe a character ordering a Butterfinger Blizzard from the Dairy Queen on West Seventh St. in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you haven’t researched that particular DQ carefully, some annoyingly alert reader is going to pipe up and point out that the DQ on West Seventh didn’t start selling Butterfinger Blizzards until 2001, so there.

Then they’ll wonder: If you couldn’t get that simple fact right, how can they trust the accuracy of other details in the story? Furthermore, doesn’t the blunder of the bogus Blizzard cast a shadow of suspicion on everything you have ever written? Do you think us readers are stupid?, they’ll say. Do you think we’ll just sit here quietly while you go around making shit up? From now on, is it going to be necessary for us to fact-check every detail in your stories? We don’t have that kind of time, they’ll whine. And besides, isn’t it the writer’s responsibility to do at least a scintilla of research before tossing in details, like the Butterfinger Blizzard, that can be easily checked by calling Dairy Queen headquarters and requesting a menu from 1993, or by locating someone—someone like St. Paul resident Josephine Parker—who worked at the Dairy Queen on West Seventh for fifteen years, from 1995 to 2010, and knows exactly which Blizzard concoctions were rolled out and when? Isn’t that your job, writer-man?

Writers in the Twin Cities get these kinds of complaints all the time, because—as several polls have shown—Minneapolis and St. Paul are the most literal cities in the country. It has something to do with all the colleges and universities here, combined with a climate so unforgiving that it cannot be accurately described with figurative language. In Minnesota, when people say they are freezing their ass off, there is a high probability that their ass cheeks are literally frozen and, if they don’t get inside soon, will turn black and fall off in hand-sized slabs of frost-rotted ass-flesh.

Likewise, when comedians come to town, it is often so cold that they can’t even think of a joke. There’s no room for hyperbole or exaggeration, because everything in Minnesota is so amazingly great/awful/weird/sad/beautiful/smart/terrifying/virtuous that simply reporting the fact of its incredibly awesome extremes is difficult enough. In Minnesota, entire newspapers are devoted to reporting the many ways in which Minnesota out-does every other state in the union, and every local magazine at the grocery store is a “best of” issue. There’s no gray area, no in-between—it’s either the best goddamn hamburger you’ve ever tasted or the worst blizzard or tornado or flood in history. Literally.

Because Minnesota readers are so highly literal and fact-bound, many Minnesota writers prefer to invent fictional settings rather than set their stories in real places. The most famous of these imaginary hamlets is, of course, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” (That’s how you can tell Lake Wobegon is in Minnesota—because it’s so fantastically perfect that it can’t get any better.)

As place names go, “Wobegon” is a great one because it is pronounced “Woe-bee-gone”—as in, get out of here, you goddamn bees—and because it sounds vaguely Indian, even though the residents of Lake Wobegon are German, Swedish, and Norwegian. But it’s not necessary to give your fictional town a ha-ha-that’s-clever name. Sinclair Lewis, another Minnesota writer that time has forgotten, invented all kinds of silly-sounding towns—Gopher Prairie, Banjo Crossing, Tuttleville, Zenith—and placed them all in a whole new state, Winnemac, which sounds more like a lottery scratch-off game than a state worthy of fictional America. And he won a Nobel Prize!

The thing Minnesota writers must always be wary of is inventing a name that sounds too real, because many towns in Minnesota sound like someone made them up. Coon Rapids, Embarrass, Sleepy Eye, Motley, Pillager, Nimrod, Climax—all of these town names are disturbingly real, so inventing one that sounds more real (but isn’t) can be a challenge. That’s why, when the founders of Minneapolis/St.Paul were looking for a clever name to describe the unique character and quality of these charming, river-straddling metropolises, they said, “Fuck it, let’s go with Twin Cities.”

Sure, some people objected: “They’re not twins. They couldn’t be more different. And they’re barely even cities. Don’t you think it’s over-stating things a bit?”

But the name stuck, because all the best bad names were already taken.

The lesson here is that the name of your fictional setting is not as important as the quality of your descriptive prose and the overall feel people get when they read about the place you have invented. There are many ways to achieve this important aura of verisimilitude, but in general every good fictional town must have a café where people can meet, a church where people can argue, and a discreet place where teenagers can procreate. It also helps to have a small local radio station that’s unregulated by the FCC, and at least one creepy person who stays in their house all day so that people can invent rumors about them.

The next challenge is filling your fictional town with all kinds of eccentric but harmless people who are quirky enough to be interesting, but not so quirky that the police need to get involved. Loveable grumps and slightly naughty nuns are good characters to include, as are artists who work in unconventional mediums (ice, auto parts, mud slurries, roadkill, etc.), gorgeous young teachers in search of true love, and judges who wear surprising things under their robes. The key is to populate your fictional town with people whom readers wouldn’t mind having as neighbors in real life. Remember, fiction offers an escape from the daily drudgery of people’s lives, and everyone hates their neighbors, so providing them with a steady supply of people who aren’t as deranged and annoying as the people next door is comforting.

The driving force of any good story is conflict, though, so every good fictional setting needs heroes and villains. As an example, here’s a brief description of a fictional city I am currently developing for a comic-book series that I hope to spin off into a movie deal. I haven’t mapped out all the details yet, because it’s a whole city, not just a town, but these are the basics:

The setting: Gollum City. It’s a dark, lonely metropolis where the sidewalks are empty and every time you step outside it has just rained. Wet, glistening streets reflect the tail lights of passing cars through fingers of steam rising through holes in the street—holes that visitors mistake for manhole covers, but really are gaping craters in the pavement. Criminals run the city, and the government is corrupt (villains all)—but there is one man (our hero) who is dedicated to fighting these villains. Our hero does his work at night, and wears a costume to hide his true identity, so the citizens of Gollum have named him after another nocturnal creature of the night: the wily skunk. Skunk-Man cruises the city in a tricked-out diesel Oldsmobile that spews clouds of greenhouse gases, and he neutralizes evil-doers by spraying them with noxious fumes that paralyze the perp’s nervous system just long enough for the authorities to arrive. Also, there’s something in the water supply that makes the criminals of Gollum look weird. Often, they take the form of an animal—a duck, lizard, or beagle. The regular citizens of Gollum aren’t affected, so it’s fairly easy to tell who the criminals are—though they, too, sometimes disguise themselves as household pets. Specifically, gerbils and goldfish.  

Again, I haven’t worked out all the details, but as you can see, Gollum City is a visually compelling place with quirky, interesting characters—and, because the city is policed by the story’s hero, the actual police are little more than an afterthought. And yes, Gollum City is in Minnesota, but it doesn’t sound anything like Lake Wobegon because that’s already been done and, frankly, everyone is sick of it. Also, I pride myself on originality. It would be unethical (not to mention illegal) of me to borrow ideas from other writers. Besides, as everyone who lives here knows, life in Lake Wobegon is nothing like real life in Minnesota. Through Gollum City, I am trying to invent a fictional cityscape that more accurately reflects Minnesota as it is today—but in a fake, made-up way that only sounds real.

I just hope readers can tell the difference. This is the Twin Cities, after all—the most literal place in the country, figuratively speaking.

How Orson Welles Ruined Symbolism: The Awful Truth About "Rosebud"

For generations, English teachers have been telling their students that one mark of great literature is the intelligent use of symbols and metaphors. Over time, however, the public’s tolerance for clever imagery has worn thin, such that there is now an inverse relationship between the number of literary devices you can use and the number of books you can sell.

For those currently enrolled in one of the country’s six-million MFA programs in creative writing, this unfortunate turn of the screw is a harsh blow that will likely rock their collective boat and send students scurrying to catch the next bus to greener pastures. Seduced by the once-formidable cultural gravitas of the literary novelist, and persuaded to enter graduate school by the prospect of working for Target, these impressionable youngsters have staked their lives on the idea that it is better to say something indirectly through symbols and metaphors than to say something by just saying it. Stripped of these literary tools, many young writers find themselves in the unenviable predicament of having nothing to say and no way of saying it—a situation that leads many of them to apply for art school, where mystifying people with metaphors is still encouraged.

Before hitting the panic button and setting out to tend a new garden, however, it may be helpful to understand how we arrived at this fork in the cultural steak.

But first, a primer:

In high school, we all learned that a metaphor is a word or phrase that stands for something else, and is often used to compare one thing to another, or act as an imaginative bridge between a person, thing, or place, and a larger idea. For example, in the sentence, “The classroom is a zoo,” the writer is trying to tell us that the animals in the local zoo are an alert, studious bunch who pay attention to their handlers and do everything that is asked of them. Likewise, the phrase “time is money” tells students that the more time they waste, the more money they will make. People often confuse metaphors and symbols, though, which is understandable. Symbols are similar to metaphors, except when they’re not, which is why on the SAT, if you’re asked to choose between the two, answering “symbol” gives you a better statistical chance of being right.

This lack of clarity is only one of the reasons people have soured on the idea of using one thing to say another. If you don’t know what the first thing is, after all, how are you supposed to figure out what the second thing is?

But there are other reasons.

Surprisingly, the cultural tide against the use of symbols and metaphors did not begin to explode because too many of them were used in books. No, the problem started when they began showing up on movies. In the old days, movies told simple stories that anyone could follow. Then Orson Welles made the movie Citizen Kane, ending an entire generation’s tolerance for things that pulse with larger meaning and significance.

Now, before he made Citizen Kane, Welles had already damaged his credibility by airing a radio show called, “The War of the Worlds,” in which he pretended to be reporting that the world was being invaded by Martians. People panicked, believing it was true, and began calling travel agents to find out how they could arrange a flight aboard an alien spacecraft to get off this godforsaken planet. To calm the travel agents, Welles explained, “No, no, no, the Martians are not real, they’re a metaphor for human alienation and our fear of people who have giant heads and slitty eyes and bluish skin.”

You mean it’s all bullshit?, the travel agents replied.

“In the literal sense, yes, it’s a lie,” Welles explained, “but in the metaphorical sense, it is true—truer than any fact-based report of an alien invasion could ever be.”

Why did you lie to us?, the agents asked. To make us look like fools?

“No, to get at a larger truth—a truth that can only be told through symbolism and metaphor,” Welles replied.

Liar, liar, pants on fire, said the travel agents.

“That’s the idea,” Welles said. “See how the image of fiery pants drives home the larger message of my dishonesty?”

But what are we going to do? We sold thousands of tickets to Mars based on your report, the agents protested. Now we will have to refund all that money.

“That was indeed foolish,” Welles replied. “Perhaps you could tell people they are going to Mars, then send them to, say, Yemen or Syria.”

After duping the public on his radio program, Welles went on to make Citizen Kane, and that’s when the golden age of metaphor began sliding down the slippery slope of stupidity into the silver-plated age of loud-mouthed literalism.

Citizen Kane tells the story of Charles Foster Kane, a made-up character who represents, in real life, a man named William Randolph Hearst, who was one of the richest men in the world. Mr. Kane is not much of a citizen, though, and he does not need a cane, so the film is rich with irony right from the start.

Anyway, at the end of the film—after he’s made a bazillion dollars and spent his life building mansions, buying art, and sleeping with movie stars—the last word Mr. Kane says before he dies is “Rosebud.” Nobody knows what to make of this. For a while, people think Rosebud might refer to a woman. But no, at the end of the movie it is revealed that Rosebud is the name of the sled Mr. Kane had when he was eight years old. The End.

Ever since, generations of Film Studies students have been told that Mr. Kane’s sled isn’t just a sled—it’s a symbol of his lost innocence and the emptiness of material wealth. The sled represents the last time in Mr. Kane’s life when he was truly happy, and was, it turns out, the only thing he ever loved.

In recent years, however, students listening to this explanation have stared glassy-eyed at their teachers, nodding in silent agreement, while a voice inside their own heads screams, “That is complete nonsense! There’s no way a sled meant that much to Mr. Kane—especially that sled!”

Consider: The sled Mr. Kane supposedly pined for wasn’t much more than a plank of wood with a couple of runners attached. It couldn’t have been very comfortable to ride, steering it would have been difficult, and stopping it next to impossible. Citizens of snowy climates know all too well that sleds like that don’t work if the snow isn’t packed extremely hard—and if the snow is too hard, you’re looking at the kind of runaway sledding situation that often ends in a concussion or serious spinal injury, especially if you elected to go down head first, as any kid with an ounce of self-respect would surely do. When that happens, a down jacket and stocking cap can help cushion the blow, but when you slam head first into a retaining wall at full speed, there isn’t much you can do except close your eyes and pray. Thus, if Mr. Kane actually had a sled like that, he probably didn’t associate it with pleasurable memories; he probably associated it with intense pain and a trip to the hospital. You know, the kinds of things that happen . . . just before you die!

This is why no one believes in symbols and metaphors anymore: the messages they supposedly contain are notoriously unreliable. As we have just seen, the most famous symbol in the history of cinema is, to use a particularly aromatic metaphor, complete horseshit. The truth is, Charles Kane uttered the word “Rosebud” at the end of his life because he thought he was going to die, which is what he probably thought every time he climbed on that sled. There’s nothing symbolic about it. Nothing could be more literal.

Having perpetrated this string of hoaxes and lies in the movies, Orson Welles also poisoned the use of metaphorical symbolizing in literature. English teachers everywhere have been fighting the good fight, trying to get their students to understand the communicative power of a compelling image—but to no avail. These days, students are not shy about challenging a teacher’s authority. “How do you know the tree is a penis?” a student might counter, or “Maybe the flower is just a flower, have you thought of that?”

This kind of thing never would have happened back in the days when everyone knew what stood for what. But now, everything is chaos. People are free to interpret anything any way they want, so trying to inject extra meaning and significance into a narrative is pointless.

All of which is to say, if you are trying to write a book and still think you should pack it with symbols and metaphors, think again. They’re confusing. People don’t like them. And even if you come up with a good one, people won’t believe you.

That wasn’t always the case, of course—and I’ve got a one-way ticket to Mars to prove it.###

Free Up More Time to Write

One of the biggest challenges writers face is finding the time to do their work. How many masterpieces have been lost because the would-be writers of those masterpieces had other things to do? How many would-be novelists have been thwarted by the fact that they must sit down for hours a day and put their ideas on paper?

We do not know. All we know is that the world is a darker place because these writers didn’t have enough time.

So the question we are addressing today is: How can writers find more time?

When people say they “don’t have the time” to write, what they usually mean is that their life is full of other responsibilities and demands that they cannot ignore. But what they really mean is that writing is too low a priority in their life. In order to free up some writing time, then, a reshuffling of priorities is necessary.

Families are the biggest time-killers in the world, so it makes sense to start there. If you have a spouse and children, a great deal of time can be saved by getting a divorce and giving the spouse full custody of the kids. Chances are you weren’t thinking straight when you got into that whole mess anyway, so cutting the cord sooner rather than later is a smart move.

Jobs eat up a large portion of the day as well. If you have the kind of job that requires you to wake up in the morning and go to an office from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., quit. That time can be put to better use writing. If you have the kind of job that requires you to get out of your pajamas at any point during the day or night, quit it too. Most good writing is done in pajamas, especially the ones with the little owl faces on them.

Friends, too, are a big waste of time. Hardly any writing ever gets done when friends are around, because they always want to talk, go out for coffee, or play tennis. The best way to get rid of friends is to explain to them, in the kindest way possible, that they are time-sucking leeches who are standing between you and greatness. If they are as good a friend as they say they are, they will understand and leave you alone. Then get rid of your phone, shut down your Facebook page, ignore your email, and move to a rural area where groceries are delivered by pack mule. Get a gun, too, because everyone has that one, true friend who will always track you down, no matter what. The sooner you shoot and bury them, the better.

Another important skill every writer must learn is how and when to use the word “no.” Suppose someone asks you for a favor. Whatever the favor is, if you take your writing seriously, the answer is no. You don’t do favors anymore. In fact, you don’t do anything for anyone anymore, for any reason. If the landlord wants the rent check, you tell him no, you’re not playing that game anymore. Suppose your brother dies in a tragic accident and your mother would appreciate it if you attended the funeral. Sorry, no can do, you tell her—you’ve got important work to do. Or maybe your daughter needs a new kidney and you’re the only match. Hell no, you say, go get a kidney from someone else—someone who doesn’t have a lot of writing to do.

It’s as simple as that. But that’s just the first step.

Once you’ve identified and eliminated all the time-sucking parasites in your life, it’s time to look around and see who you can steal some time from—people who aren’t using their time wisely, that is, and would benefit from giving some of it to you.

Grandparents are a good place to start. They’re old and usually have lots of time on their hands. Grandmothers are great at cleaning your house, doing your laundry, cooking meals, and setting up dental appointments. Grandfathers aren’t good for much, but they can fetch a few bottles when the liquor supply is running low, and they don’t mind yelling at grandma if she starts to slow down or slack off.

Bill collectors, government officials, psychiatrists, and social workers are also people whose time is easy to steal, mainly because they all want you to do stuff you don’t want to do—like pay bills, take your meds, and stop harassing your grandmother. All you have to do is refuse, though, and the extra hours you would have spent dealing with them can now be dedicated to your craft.

So you see, finding the time to write is largely a matter of prioritizing correctly, then doing whatever is necessary to honor the commitment you have made to your work.

But that’s still not enough.

Indeed, the most prolific writers in the world (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen King, Barbara Cartland, and Emanuel Swedenborg, to name a few) all have an additional secret. How, you ask, could Isaac Asimov write 468 books—a feat that's physically impossible? The answer is, he and these other writers know how to travel through rips in the space/time continuum, where they work in a parallel universe. There, thirty years might elapse for every year in this dimension, allowing them to do a thousand years of work in what appears to be a human lifetime.

Granted, these people are a special breed. For one thing, the writer’s wormhole is only available to people who wear unusually thick glasses and/or have strange beards. (Not many people know it, but yes, Barbara Cartland had a beard.)

For most people, though, one lifetime of writing is plenty, let alone thirty. I only share this fact for those who feel that their daily word output is somehow inadequate. If you are writing all day, every day, have alienated your family and friends, and have successfully severed all contact with humanity, rest assured that you are on the right path.

To Hell and Back: The Hero's Journey

One way to write exciting fiction is to put your protagonist through hell, so that he or she can be redeemed, enlightened, or transformed by their experiences at the end of the story. This is known as the “hero’s journey.” Every hero from Hercules to Harry Potter is written this way, so that’s what I decided to do with the lead character in my latest novel: Joe Healy, Uber Driver to the Stars.

I’ve run into a huge problem, though. To wit, Joe can barely survive fifteen or twenty pages before he dies.

Joe’s passion is Hollywood celebrities, so he roams the streets of Tinseltown waiting for famous people to call him for a ride on his iPhone. Not many famous people use Uber, though, so he has a lot of time to think—about life, love, sports, and puppies. He loves puppies.

The first time Joe died, he had just received an Uber request from Lindsay Lohan, and was on his way to pick her up, when a Corgi puppy ran into the street and he swerved to avoid hitting it. Instead, he smashed his Ford Focus into a light pole. He survived the crash, and the puppy lived—but, in an unlucky turn, Joe got suffocated by his airbag. Story over.

I thought this was a one-time thing, but the next time I wrote about Joe I scrapped the puppy love and gave him a harder edge, a chip on his shoulder about being a lowly Uber driver for celebrities. He answered a call, and when he arrived, John Travolta jumped into the back seat of his car. Travolta picked up on Joe’s hostility right away, and immediately started lecturing Joe about how it was his fault he didn’t have a better job, how he needed to take responsibility for his failures, and how if he just dedicated his life to Scientology, Joe could chart his own destiny in life. That sounded pretty good to Joe—but just as he was about to ask Travolta a question, Travolta pulled out a .357 Magnum and shot Joe in the head. For no reason! Then what does Travolta do? He hops into the front seat, kicks Joe’s body out into the street, and steals his car.

What are the odds?

Frustrated, and eager to keep Joe alive for more than twenty pages, I wrote a new beginning that had him picking up Jennifer Lawrence, on whom he has a monster crush. During the ride, Jennifer and Joe hit it off so well that she decides to abandon her plans and take Joe back to her place to have some hungry sex with a “normal” guy. As it turns out, though, it’s Ms. Lawrence who isn’t normal. She is way into S&M, and—I never saw this coming—accidently choked Joe to death with a ball gag. The poor guy hadn’t been in her house more than half an hour when J-Law was on the phone to her fixer arranging to have Joe’s body dumped a couple of miles offshore.

I know: shocking.

I began to feel sorry for Joe, so I decided that he needed to have a superpower in order to survive. Communication is important for an Uber driver, so the superpower I gave Joe was the ability to tell what celebrities were thinking mere seconds after they said it.

Armed with this power, I sent Joe out into the streets of Hollywood to await a call. It didn’t take long. The icon on his phone blinked that an unnamed someone needed to be picked up outside a nightclub on Rodeo Drive. The passengers, as it turned out, were none other than legendary rocker Prince and his bodyguard, Cheetoh.

Unfortunately, Joe was only twenty-eight years old and did not recognize Prince. And Prince, being Prince, didn’t say anything during the ride, so Joe’s superpower was useless. Prince did not appreciate going unrecognized by a member of the general public, and instructed Cheetoh to instruct Joe to keep driving around the city until he deduced the true identity of the legend in his back seat. Two tanks of gas and fourteen hours later, Joe was still stumped, so Prince ordered his bodyguard to snap Joe’s neck and dump his body in the back lot at Disneyland.

Joe lived to page nineteen that time, but only because of a traffic jam on the 805.

So, as you can see, keeping Joe alive is an enormous challenge. This is supposed to be a three-hundred-page novel, and Joe is supposed to endure all sorts of humiliations and outrages so that, in the end, he can realize that celebrities are just jerks with a lot of money and fame and creepily white teeth. He’s also supposed to end up marrying Jennifer Lawrence, but I ask you: How can I possibly do that to the man now that I know what a deviant person she really is?

So, what to do?

As the writer of Joe’s character, I know I need to find a way to improve his luck and keep him alive. But part of me feels bad about that, because my only purpose in keeping him alive is to put him through holy hell. I mean, I’ve got a whole list of things I want Joe to endure— waterboarding, amputation, drug overdose, beatings, homelessness, toothaches, dry skin, peanut allergy, impotence, diarrhea, shingles, chemical burns, lost cellphone service, poor customer ratings—so that he can learn valuable lessons about himself and the world. But is it fair to drag someone through the mud for hundreds of pages when you have a hose in your hand the whole time? It seems cruel. If I’m honest with myself, I can see that the way things are going, it’s unlikely Joe will survive everything I have in store for him. So in a way, isn’t killing him off early the humane thing to do? Maybe even the right thing?

As a writer, one has to consider such questions thoroughly. Unless I can keep Joe alive, for instance, I may have to abandon the idea that his character can sustain an entire novel, let alone the twelve-volume series I had planned for him. If he can’t live past page twenty, he may just be the lead character in a short story—another great and fascinating hero whose tragic death at such a young age robs humanity of his shining light.  

I’m not yet ready to give up on Joe, though. For one thing, it’s not his fault. The celebrities who use Uber appear to be a particularly ruthless and violent bunch. If Joe can just find some nice celebrities in Hollywood, his chances of surviving will be much higher. Then again, if he can be killed by a puppy, I don’t know how he’s going to handle picking up Kiefer Sutherland and suddenly having battery cables attached to his testicles.

Maybe I can warn Joe. Maybe Kiefer won’t suddenly turn into Jack Bauer. Maybe Joe will pick up Donald Sutherland instead. I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve never had this much trouble keeping a character alive. The hero’s journey is never easy, but it should be easier than this.

21st-Century Book Banning: A How-to Guide

One of the advantages of publishing a book in the twentieth century was that it was much easier to get your book banned. Public denouncements of a book are fantastic publicity, and the outright banning of a book—well, that’s the kind of notoriety a writer can retire on.

Unfortunately, inciting the public’s wrath with a book is much more difficult nowadays. Not only have most people stopped reading books, they are already angry about so many other things that it’s all but impossible to raise their ire with mere words. If you want to spark a riot today, you need video footage and a dead body at the very least. Tears and screaming help, too. It’s hard for writers to compete with such raw displays of emotion and violence.

And yet, we must.  

The trouble is, disgust, dismay, and outrage are part of every American’s daily diet now. Also, Americans have developed an extremely high tolerance for deviance and immorality of all kinds. Back in the 1950s, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller got pilloried in public (and paid handsomely for it) by writing smutty books that, were they penned today, would be adapted as movies on the Hallmark channel. People no longer have any shame, and they are lazy, so motivating them to take to the streets in protest is a huge challenge.

What’s an aspiring rabble-rouser to do?

First, recognize that none of the old tactics work anymore. A healthy dose of pornography might spike sales, but writing about sex, no matter how filthy or acrobatic, is only going to inspire people to experiment. An autobiography full of lies used to be a good way to get condemned in public, but everyone does it now, so the novelty is gone. Saying blasphemous things about the prophet Mohammed can stir things up in certain parts of the world, but in America and Europe it just makes you look courageous.

Evangelical Christians can still be counted upon to put out lists of books that ought to be banned, but infuriating them is so easy that it’s hardly even worth it. All you have to do is write about two teenagers of the same sex kissing, or suggest that Jesus may not have had blonde hair, and boom, you’re on some Christian’s hit list. Likewise, a book full of racial slurs and insults might get a book banned from school libraries, but it’s just as likely to end up as required reading in the classroom. There are no guarantees.

Indeed, the bar for those who wish to test the limits of free speech has been raised spectacularly high. Consider: Germany recently decided to republish Hitler’s long-banned diatribe Mein Kampf. You know things are bad when you write a thousand pages of venomous bile, then methodically kill millions of people based on the sourness of that bile, and barely get banned for more than a few decades.

Now, it is still possible to get banned in other print mediums. To get banned from a typical magazine, for instance, all you have to do is write something vaguely critical about a major advertiser. And to ensure that your work never sees the light of day in a daily newspaper, all you have to do is use words that contain more than three syllables.

Getting a book banned is whole different story, though.

The biggest hurdle, of course, is the First Amendment to the Constitution, which allows far too many people to say way too much. But there are ways to use the First Amendment to your advantage—namely, by saying lots of outrageous, irresponsible things that piss people off just for the fun of it.

Another good tactic is to locate groups of hyper-sensitive, reactionary people and push their buttons like a claustrophobe in a broken elevator. College campuses are excellent places for this. Other parts of society may have grown more accepting of diverse opinions, but outrage and intolerance are still alive and well on America’s college campuses, so a visiting author, if he or she is lucky, can still get banned.

The reason this is still possible is that today’s college students don’t like to think about ideas with which they disagree. Unlike previous generations, today’s college students were born with the right ideas already implanted in their heads—the result of certain education programs initiated during the Reagan administration. But if you observe offhand to a college student that maybe they don’t need the expensive education for which they are paying—because they already know what to think about everything—they will immediately accuse you of bullying and “hate speech.”

This is precisely what you want.

Today’s college students hate “hate speech” with such red-hot loathing that they will audibly sip their Starbucks in protest if you dare trifle with their finely tuned racial and cultural sensitivities. Characterize short people as “taller-than-average leprechauns,” for instance, and you can expect a shit-storm of controversy. Suggest that alligators are smarter than crocodiles, say, and the campus crocodile club will lodge a formal protest with the dean and say all sorts of nasty things about you on social media.

They will not, however, show up in great numbers to heckle you. To get that kind of reaction, you have to convince college students that you pose a dire threat to their way of life—i.e., cushy dorms, easy classes, low expectations, cheap drugs, carefree sex, excellent workout facilities, 24-hour food service, no parental supervision—and/or that you will eventually hold them responsible for the stupid things they do in college.

Even then, there’s no guarantee you will succeed. The problem with college campuses is that just when you’ve raised public awareness of the threat you pose, and have coaxed a few kids to denounce you in the school newspaper and call for the administration to ban your appearance (what I call “the jackpot”), some other group of do-gooders will inevitably show up to defend your right to free speech.

Free-speechers are annoying because they think your rights are being violated. No, you explain to them, you want these students to hate you because you want to sell books—enough books to fuel a really nice bonfire on the quad. That’s the goal, you say. You could care less what students say about you, as long as they buy your book before tossing it into the flames. Unfortunately, free-speechers don’t understand how capitalism works; they’ve never had to sell their soul to survive.  

It’s all social media’s fault, of course. Social media has lowered the level of discourse in this country so far that principled rage is pretty much a thing of the past. Now it’s all just one big bucket of rage—at everything and everyone—so trying to cash in by stoking the flames of that rage by writing a disgusting, bigoted, blasphemous book is a loser’s game.

Honestly, you’re better off running for president.

How to Mount a Successful Book Tour

Back in the day, guys like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger could write a book and sell a million copies without ever leaving their basement. But these days, it isn’t enough to write a brilliant book—one must also go out into public and promote it. This means traveling around the country doing readings, lectures, magazine interviews, television talk shows, radio call-in programs, podcasts, commencement addresses, pancake breakfasts, bar mitzvahs, and a host of other demeaning things in order to sell something that should, frankly, sell itself.

There are several reasons why books don’t sell themselves. In my case, for instance, the public is not properly educated about the importance of my work; bookstores do not display large enough mountains of my books; teachers do not require their students to read enough of my work in their classes; libraries do not stock enough copies to meet public demand; the government does not store enough copies in secure underground bunkers so that future civilizations might learn from it after we have annihilated ourselves; and NASA has not launched enough copies of my book into space as a means of informing other intelligent life in the universe about our planet and why they would be wise to avoid it.

Rather than make efforts to fix what is so obviously wrong with the world, most publishers would instead prefer that their authors go on a book tour. For those young writers who have yet to participate in this bizarre ritual of contemporary capitalism, I feel compelled to offer some helpful hints about how to conduct a successful book tour.

A typical book tour includes fifteen to twenty major metropolitan areas and a smattering of smaller markets where readers congregate—usually college towns like Madison, Wisconsin, or Iowa City. It doesn’t matter what city you’re in, though—the approach is the same:

In the weeks before your arrival, you’ll to want to promote your appearance on billboards entering the city from all directions, and on the side of the city’s buses. Radio and television spots should be aired regionally during prime time, and a large feature story on you should appear in the city’s largest newspaper on the day before your arrival. Have your PR team contact the mayor of the city to declare the day of your appearance “Name of Author Day,” and to arrange for a presentation on the steps of the town hall. It’s usually no problem to convince the local high-school marching band to lead a small parade in your honor, and the local Veterans Administration can organize a volunteer rifle brigade to give you a proper 21-gun salute.

On the night of your reading, do not leaving anyone guessing about where it is. Rent at least four searchlights with a minimum of 14-million lumens of candlepower to rake the skies with light beams visible for a two-mile radius, and make sure the location is pinned to the phone of every Uber driver in town. In order to accommodate the crowds, it’s often necessary to forego the traditional bookstore and rent one of the local performance halls or a large sports arena. At the entrance, I like to give the first thousand or so people a Tad Simons bobble-head doll as a souvenir, and I hand out colored glow sticks to everyone, with instructions about when to wave them.

Many writers insist on a punctual start to their readings, but I think it’s important to gauge the energy of the crowd and make your entrance when it’s going to make the biggest impact. I prefer to wait about an hour-and-a-half, sometimes two, before taking the stage. I know the time is right when the people up front are crushing each other to get closer to the stage, the screaming and yelling is at a fever pitch, and I can hear the familiar crackle of gunfire. That’s when I cue the singing of the national anthem by a local celebrity. After the final note of that blessed song rings out—“braaaaaaaave”—I give people a few moments to wipe the tears from their cheeks and compose themselves.

Then I make my entrance. I allow about five minutes for the pandemonium to subside, then I begin.

During the reading itself, it’s important to synchronize the light show to emphasize the different moods of the passages you are reading, and to time the flash bombs to let people know when something important in the story has happened. Flame pots should be used sparingly, because people get bored of them after a while. And if one of the passages you are reading involves rain, I recommend aiming several water hoses out over the crowd to help them feel what the characters in your story are feeling. 

At the end of the reading, fire the confetti cannons and thank the crowd. As the confetti is falling, release the ceiling full of colored balloons with your face printed on them, then instruct your team to load the Barnes & Noble book guns and start launching paperback versions of your tome into the upper decks. Let the crowd know that your books are on sale in the lobby, and that you will be available afterwards for book signing, baby-naming advice, and selective sperm donations.

As your audience is leaving the arena, it’s always nice to send them off with a modest display of fireworks as well, and to have a blimp hover over the parking lot flashing a heartfelt “thank you” to the folks as they head home.

Follow the above procedures and I guarantee you’ll sell at least twenty or thirty copies of your book in each city. By the end of the tour you’ll have sold several hundred copies, virtually assuring you a spot on the New York Times bestseller list and nominations for the National Book Award and Pulitzer. That unfamiliar odor in your nostrils will be the sweet smell of success, tainted somewhat by the overdue load of laundry in your suitcase.

Savor it while you can, though, because it doesn’t last long. Soon you’ll need to return to your basement and write another book, then prepare for another tour. None of us are Thomas Pynchon, after all—except for the guy who really is Thomas Pynchon, in which case he has the luxury of ignoring all my advice and doing things the old-fashioned way.

The rest of us are not so lucky.

It's Hard to Tell What People Are Reading These Days

One of the big disadvantages of the digital revolution is that you can no longer tell what other people are reading.

Used to be, you could walk onto a plane and easily determine what type of people you were flying with based solely on the book in their hands. As you made your way down the aisle to your own seat, you’d be thinking, “Look, that schlub is reading Tom Clancy,” or “That moron is reading Sue Grafton,” or “What kind of pompous ass hauls a copy of Infinite Jest onto an airplane?”

The book itself gave you valuable information about the person holding it, allowing you to make snap judgments about their character and intelligence, and alerting you to dangers that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. If you were sitting next to someone reading, say, The Power of Positive Thinking, or When Bad Things Happen to Good People, it immediately alerted you not to strike up a conversation, lest they start telling you about all the bad things that have happened to them, and why their attitude needs a power boost. And if you were sitting next to some guy in a coat and tie reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you knew instantly that he was not a very effective person, because reading popular business-management books is not one of those habits.

Unfortunately, with the advent of the Kindle and iPad, it’s now impossible to tell what books people are reading, depriving people like you and me of the information we need to avoid people who are painfully stupid or whose cultural tastes are offensively proletarian. Without any outward clues, it is now possible to find yourself sitting next to a James Patterson fan and not even be aware of it. For all you know, the attractive woman in the window seat could be reading a “Twilight” book, and you could find yourself unwittingly sucked into a discussion about the relative merits of teenage vampires over adolescent werewolves, specters, and succubi. Or, just as chilling, she might be reading a book of essays by Camille Paglia, and suddenly you’d be trapped in a debate over issues you’ve never heard of before, but are pretty sure you disagree with.

Such calamities rarely happened in the pre-digital world. And if they did, you could always shut down any unwanted communication by waving your copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook in their face. Now, the only people bold enough to reveal their literary tastes in public are subscribers to The New Yorker, who like to advertise their erudition by reading this week’s copy on the bus or in the subway, where, they hope, someone who is six weeks behind will see them and seethe with envy. Identifying New Yorker readers has never been difficult, though. The wear and tear on their leather satchels gives them away. That and the little chunks of food caught in their beards.

Without the obvious cultural signifier of a book in hand, there is no choice now but to judge people in public according to other, less accurate criteria. The kid wearing Dr. Dre headphones might be a drug dealer, or he might just be an idiot who paid too much for headphones that suck. The woman staring at her iPhone and walking into traffic might not be as stupid as she looks. The beggar on the street corner with no legs might be a millionaire. The guy in the suit you saw on the plane might be a highly effective person after all.

You just don’t know anymore, because the telltale signs of yore are gone.

There is nothing to do about this situation other than remain vigilant and be sneakier about looking at other people’s reading material when the opportunity arises. On the bus, you can sometimes get an excellent view of someone’s iPad over their shoulder, and instantly know what sort of person you are sitting behind. Indeed, when I’m looking over someone’s shoulder, reading HuffPo along with them, or watching them play Candy Crush, I feel a sudden rush of nostalgia for the old days, when it was so much easier to surreptitiously judge people.

This is only the beginning. Think of the situation that will confront society when the roads are clogged with identical driverless Google cars. There will be no way to identify assholes and egomaniacs on the highway. And with their hands and minds free, the people inside those anonymous Google cars could be reading anything. When this day comes, it will be more difficult than ever to identify the sort of people you want to avoid, and almost impossible to prevent unwanted conversations with people who do not share your politics, religion, or allegiance to professional sports teams.

In this and many other ways, the world is getting worse, not better. I just hope we can find other ways to pre-judge people without ever having to talk to them. Otherwise, chaos will reign, and conversations you don’t want to have will be unavoidable.   

Why Readers Would Rather Cry Than Laugh

All writers want to be taken seriously, but not all writers have the gravitas for literary greatness. If you want people to take your work seriously, however, there is one universal rule that cannot be broken, and that is: Under no circumstances should you ever try to make people laugh.

Comedy and literature simply don’t mix. Think about it: How many comedians are respected novelists? And how many novelists are doing stand-up?

None, that’s how many. In fact, only one person in history has ever successfully crossed the threshold of gloom, and that person was Mark Twain.

Twain’s secret was that he called himself a “humorist,” not a “comedian.” The difference between a humorist and a comedian is that the humorist makes you laugh inside your head, whereas a comedian makes you laugh out loud. Serious writers can get away with a little humor now and then, but the moment they actually make people laugh—the second someone has a convulsive physical response to their writing, not just a tingle in the brain that says ha ha, that’s clever—their reputation as a serious writer is over.

Mark Twain is beloved as a humorist because, ironically, his writing wasn’t all that funny. Go back and read Huckleberry Finn, and you’ll see what I mean. Ol’ Huck has a charmin’ way o’ talkin’, sure, and he’s kinda wise even tho’ he don’t got much in the way o’ eddication—but every time he says something kinda funny and you think you’re about to laugh, ol’ Twain pulls back and makes you think about something serious, like race relations between black and white people, or the moral difference between “borrowing” and “stealing.”

The reason Mark Twain stopped short of actually making people laugh is that he knew the dangers involved. All it takes is one or two guffaws to get a book pulled off high-school reading lists. And if, as a writer, you go all the way and make someone spit their coffee all over the carpet—well, let’s just say Terry Gross is never going to invite you into the NPR studios for a chat.

The reason for this antipathy toward laughter is that people who read books are, for the most part, a bunch of neurotic, self-loathing crybabies. They like to think of themselves as “intellectuals,” and in the world of intellectuals, the sadder and more depressing a subject is, the better. In fact, most intellectuals spend the bulk of their time consuming information that makes them sad (from The New York Times, Slate, CNN, The Atlantic, All Things Considered), then countering all that sadness with anti-depressants and weekly therapy sessions, all so they can go back out into the world and consume more sadness.

Around and around it goes. That’s why intellectuals love books with sad names, like Bleak House, The Crying of Lot 49, or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—books that make you wonder if life on the speck of star dust we call Earth has any meaning in the vast cosmic scheme of things. That’s as far as it goes, though. The moment you, as a writer, take the “s” out of cosmic and suggest that life might actually be a joke—or worse yet, the moment you tell a joke about life—your literary cred is toast.

The trouble is, intellectuals equate “seriousness” with honesty, sincerity, and anything having to do with World War II. And because they live in their heads and take so many pills, they lend a great deal of importance to anything that makes them feel an emotion through all that medication. If you can make them cry, they’ll give you a Nobel Prize. Intellectuals also love to crunch their eyebrows and shake their heads with disapproval when they read. But that’s all the motion they can handle, because if they move their heads any more than that (by laughing, say), they’ll lose their place.

The point of all this is that if your goal is literary greatness, shelve the funny stuff and dig right into the morbid and blue. Use a little humor if you must, but only to lighten the mood before descending again into the darkness, where the smart cave people live, waiting once more for a chance to weep.

Where is the Best Place to Write?

Eager to learn secrets of the craft, budding writers often wonder: Where is the best place to write? Is it a villa in Tuscany? A yacht on the Côte d’Azur? In a seaside bungalow on St. Lucia? At an artist’s retreat in Aspen?

These are all good places to try to write. Unfortunately, they are also places designed to prevent writers from writing. In St. Lucia, for instance, it’s almost impossible to get any work done after you’ve spilled a banana daiquiri on your keyboard. And on the French Riviera, young vixens in tiny swimwear think nothing of snapping your laptop shut and tossing it into the Mediterranean.

They think it’s funny.

Luckily, after wasting a great deal of time trying to write in exotic locales with lax extradition treaties, I finally learned the error of my ways. Since then, I have discovered that the ideal place to write is nowhere near a beach—it’s inside a maximum-security prison, locked in a 6x9 jail cell.

In prison, a writer can work free of distraction for twenty-three hours a day, with room and board provided by taxpayers. It’s an ideal arrangement, and, except for an occasional scrap in the yard with Rocko and his goons, results in no more blood loss than a modest kitchen mishap or the untimely slip of a power tool. Which is to say that, in truth, prison beat-downs look a lot worse on television than they are in reality. The key is to curl up in a ball and think happy thoughts until the guards blow the whistle or they think you’re dead, whichever comes first.

Now, the reason I say it’s important to get locked up in a maximum-security prison is that the inmates in minimum-security prisons and state-sponsored psychiatric facilities tend to be annoyingly chatty. All they want to do is talk—about their tattoos, their conspiracy theories, the drugs in the food, the ghosts by the water fountain, the bugs in their hair, etc. ad nauseum. Honestly, they never shut up. Such facilities also schedule way too many activities and so-called “free time,” all of which are counter-productive if you’re trying to think your own thoughts, rather than the thoughts being transmitted to you through a microchip in your brain implanted by the CIA while you were asleep. They also make you do your own laundry and eat in a cafeteria with other inmates, both of which are big time-wasters.

So, maximum-security it is.

Ideally, what you want is to land in a maximum-security prison for a crime with a five-year sentence that gets knock down to two for good behavior. What you don’t want is to land in a SuperMax facility for twenty-five to life, or in a minimum-security prison where you end up playing tennis with a bunch of crooked hedge-fund managers. There’s a happy medium.

So let’s say you want to write a four-hundred-page novel. You figure it’s going to take two years—eighteen months of writing, and six months for revisions and editing. In order to land in a maximum-security facility, what you need to do is commit a Class D or E felony with just enough violence to make them think you’re dangerous, but not so much that someone winds up dead. Setting up an illegal book-making operation is a great way to accomplish this objective, because while you’re trying to get caught, you’re also making money. Breaking people’s bones is part of the business, too, but killing people who welch on bets is not, so even if someone does accidentally get killed along the way, you can always plead third-degree manslaughter, which also counts as street cred out in the yard. In many states, getting arrested for dealing drugs is a good strategy as well—though in states like California, you practically have to drive a semi-trailer full of heroin into the governor’s mansion in order to get law enforcement to notice you. And even that’s no guarantee.

My advice is to research the criminal statutes in your state and break the law accordingly.

Once you’re there, the great thing about prison is that there’s nothing to do except write, so productivity is rarely a problem. Even if one hand is wrapped in bandages, you can still type with your other hand, and, as all prison writers eventually learn, you don’t need all your teeth to edit or figure out plot problems.

Trust me, the pages pile up in no time. And if you get the timing right, you should be finishing up the final draft about the same time as your first parole hearing. If all goes well, you could be out in time for the book tour and cashing hefty royalty checks within a few months of your release.

Then you’ll be able to afford that villa in Tuscany. But trust me, you won’t get any writing done there. Great food, amazing scenery, and extraordinary women are no substitute for the peace and quiet of your own personal prison cell.