Welcome to volume 2 of The Writers Secret Weapon. I’m glad to have you back, and if this is the first time you’re checking it out, welcome to a writing and narrative design newsletter for people who don’t only want to talk about books.
I’ve got some interesting and diverse stuff today, so please get comfortable, get some water, and let’s get started.
I - Writing
Every week on Patreon, I watch a movie with my Patrons. Not like at the same time, but I watch a movie and record a commentary track that they can put on while watching the movie and it’s sort of like watching it with me, minus trips to the bathroom or fridge.
Usually to prepare for whatever the movie of the week is, I scour YouTube and entertainment sites for interviews and behind-the-scenes clips. I read reviews and when I can afford it, buy physical media so I can get commentaries and movie-adjacent material that’s not online.
I say usually because sometimes I want to go into a movie completely cold, knowing only the most basic material like who stars in it, who wrote, directed, and shot it, and how much money it made. Sometimes I do that because it’s a bad movie and sometimes it’s because the movie is great, but mostly it’s because when a movie sits on that kind of extreme, I want my most genuine reaction.
This coming week (in fact it’ll be out the day after you’re reading this), I’m going to watch Wakanda Forever, the Black Panther sequel. And I’m going in cold.
I don’t want this movie to be bad. I liked the first movie quite a bit, and I don’t want to be disappointed by its sequel. But I think what I liked about the movie is that Chadwick Boseman had charisma and talent for days and it was a movie written and directed by Ryan Coogler, who could direct paint drying and make it enjoyable. Only now Chadwick is dead and I’m really afraid that in filling in the gap left by his absence, Coogler is going to rely on one of the “in case of danger break glass” elements in story design: character imbalance.
Character imbalance comes in a variety of flavors. You have imbalance of challenge, which is where characters have to do incredible things to overcome the obstacle (like a farmboy trusting the Force); you have imbalance of opposition, where the badguy and the goodguy aren’t on equal footing (see: Creed 3); you have imbalance of stakes, where your characters’ actions don’t sync with how bad you say the problem is (like in all the Jurassic World movies), and in this potential case, imbalance of arc progression.
All character arcs have a natural balance to them, even if their balance is to default to imbalance. A character working through their progressively changes relative to their position along their arc, usually in such a way that they make more and more forward positive progress the farther into the story they go. The amount of change they make might not be consistent from element to element (they might change more in chapter 14 than in chapter 2) but within each element the amount of change is pretty standard (they gain a certain amount of change and information and skill and reaction every time).
Let’s give an example to demystify that story algebra.
Imagine a very tall ladder. It’s a certain width, so all the rungs are the same from side to side (the amount of material that makes a rung is standardized) but the spacing of each rung on your way up the ladder varies (the amount of upward movement you make changes from rung to rung) So you’re still going up, but some times you’re going more up than other times.
Why this can be a problem for Wakanda Forever is because there’s a T’Challa-shaped hole in the movie and I’m worried they’re going to try and fill it by changing the characters too dramatically too quickly all because of an overly simplified view of grief.
Grief conceptually is a huge and variable experience, deeply personal and seldom easily uniform. My fear is that grief will be treated as one-size-fit-all and its effects on character arcs will lead to very extreme changes not congruent or reasonable with how they were presented earlier.
Basically, I don’t want “grief” to be a catch-all reason for why the characters are acting so completely different.
A lot of writers use something like grief or anger as a permission slip to radically change a character who maybe was at a narrative dead end (see Molly Carpenter in the Dresden Files) or to bring a character from the way background to the front of the story (see Orrie Cather in A Family Affair). This isn’t automatically bad or wrong, but it’s tricky - you’re developing a character in a way that potentially jeopardizes any previously existing relationship the reader/viewer has with that character. Messing that up means possibly alienating the reader/viewer because the new version is so divergent from the old version.
Should there be no grief? Should no one take a minute and mention why the Black Panther isn’t in the Black Panther movie? That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying imbalance is my first concern in watching the sequel.
II - History
I was almost going to call this section “a history of white women displeased and wanting to speak with managers”, but figured the lady was less important in this case. Please note that this week’s history tidbit is a bit apocryphal and I can only substantiate about 80% of it. When we get to the “I’m not sure” part, you’ll know.
In upstate New York, there’s a place called Saratoga Lake. It’s by all accounts a very nice lake, and to this day it’s a popular tourist and vacation spot if you’re into that whole camping-woodsy vibe. It’s a great lake for fishing and a popular mountain hiking spot.
Now this lake is home to many fine homes, marinas, and restaurants catering to the vacationing crowd. One of those restaurants was Moon’s Lake House.
I have no pictures of Moon’s, it burned down four (!!) times and all that’s left are some foundational stones, but newspapers say Moon’s was a big deal in the area, and that’s all thanks to George Speck/Crum.
That’s George. Born in 1824, George was the son of Abraham Speck (a Black man) and Diana Tull, an Indigenous woman of the St. Regis Mohawk people. George himself identified as Mohawk his entire life.
But that didn’t stop everyone else from assuming George was Black, and oh boy were people totally okay with throwing around the n-word when they mentioned George or his sister, both of whom lived and worked in and around Saratoga Lake and Moon’s Lake House for most of their lives.
From about the age of 10 to the age of 25 (shocking no one, the white people in charge of documenting anything from 1820 to about 1850 did not do a great job caring about non-white people, so that’s a best guess where I have no clear records) George was an animal trapper in the Adirondacks, specializing in catching deer and wild duck. There are intimations that he caught ducks by hand out of the air, but I cannot imagine ducks were cool with a dude standing that close to them in the first place. His sister Catherine was a cartographer for hikers and a prep cook at Moon’s.
This is a great time to tell you about a ridiculous habit rich white people had in the 1800s and early 1900s - they would “flee” (their word, not mine) for large sections of the year out of whatever city to places that were just as loaded with other rich people as the cities were, but had more trees or beaches. Growing up in New Jersey, I was taught this was because places like Cape May, Atlantic City, Ocean Grove and Saratoga Lake were all less hot than New York City, but thinking about this now, I’m pretty sure Jersey summers back then were humid just like today. But rich people loved to flee the cities, and papers from all over the US covered this wealth migration every year like it was Fashion Week, allowing people to play a fun game of “guess where the rich swine are now” while they sweltered in place.
In 1853, George was hired to work in the kitchen at Moon’s, because the previous cook was killed (lynched) and because Catherine vouched for him. George’s whole job was to “make sure people had food and make sure that certain people had whatever they needed.”
George loved this job. He was good at it too. I don’t know if the kitchen was anything special, I don’t know if it was more Hell’s Kitchen than it was The Bear, but George loved it because he and his sister took care of the locals out of the back of the kitchen (mutual aid!) and fed the tourists out of the front.
We now have to introduce the Karen into our story and also a little bit more of the legend.
Cornelius Vanderbilt, of the robber baron Vanderbilts and the great-great-great grandfather of Anderson Cooper, MARRIED HIS 14-YEAR-OLD COUSIN Sophia and regularly fled to Saratoga Lake. In fact, some of Cornelius’s THIRTEEN CHILDREN THAT HIS FIRST COUSIN HAD were conceived in Saratoga Lake. (Many were born in New Jersey.)
While it is atrociously creepy and awful that Cornelius MARRIED HIS 14-YEAR-OLD COUSIN, Sophia was not a great person. She was “imperious, spoiled, arbitrary, argumentative, and cunning,” according to her son William. There are reports in Saratoga papers that she was frequently complaining about everything not nailed down.
And that included the food.
Here’s where our story converges. On a particular night, Sophia orders a “gravy steak” (which I’m pretty sure is the progenitor of the hamburger, meatloaf, and Salisbury steak. Imagine a slice of meatloaf formed into a hamburger and smothered in brown gravy) which is served with roasted carrots and “sliced seasonal root vegetables.”
In this case, potatoes. They were sliced, cooked in duck fat and butter, seasoned with salt and rosemary and laid out out like a row of poker chips on the plate.
Sophia saw her plate and the problems started. The meat was too “wet”, the carrots too “bright”, and the potatoes too “thick and soft.”
Now George was the kind of guy who wanted to accommodate people, so he took her returned food in stride and tried to re-do the meal to her liking. See, George was Cornelius’s “favorite n-word in Saratoga” (his words, not mine) and Cornelius could not be bothered to remember George’s name, calling him “n-word George Crum” (his words, not mine) saying that a “Crum is bigger than a Speck.” I can’t imagine George liked Cornelius, but I know that Cornelius treated George more like an amusement or a favorite prop.
Cornelius tried to assuage Sophia but Sophia’s a Karen, and you know how that goes. He even went to tell George that “he was sure [George] was doing a fine job” but after at least 3 returned plates, George had enough.
He grabbed his knife and sliced the potatoes as thin as he could manage and then tossed them in the duck fat until they crisped before salting them heavily.
George Speck (who would later go by George Crum once his invention took off) invented modern potato chips to stop a white woman from complaining.
Potato chips became the go-to item on the Moon’s menu. People would order the “shaved fried Potatoes” by the basketl and eventually a man named Herman Lay took the recipe to mass produce it. Lay’s Potato Chips are still a thing.
To be fair, potato chips in some way/shape/form have existed in recipe form since the 1817 Cook’s Oracle cookbook and existed in loose form as a trail food along with jerky and stew as far back as the Revolutionary War, but it wasn’t until 1910 in Ohio and then 1920 in Nashville that the chips we would most recognize became a trend and common.
I’m telling you this story about George because sometimes creativity is bred out of frustration. And sometimes creativity is bred out of wanting to shut a spoiled Karen up. There are going to be times where you’re frustrated with people and things and life and it’s going to feel like the last thing you should do is be creative, or even that the last thing you can possibly do is create, but these are the moments where you end up making potato chips.
III - Under The Table And Dreaming
I don’t remember how it started.
I spent 18 hours in a car last Sunday and part of that ride was spent in the kind of thinking you can only do when you’re driving through lousy weather in Ohio.
I don’t remember how I started listening to the Dave Matthews Band. It’s one of those things without a starting point, like a dream or when you started liking a certain food. You just like it and it’s just there.
The closest I can get to the starting point is Phish. I had a roommate my freshman year of college (I think I’ve spoken about him before, his daddy donated a lot of money to the school and his name was on the library so that the school would overlook my roommate’s fondness for having sex with high school girls and being drunk on campus) who listened to Phish almost exclusively and I think somewhere along the way some Dave Matthews came along. I remember hazily some college event where “Warehouse” was played because it was the first time I had a mimosa. Again, most of that year is a dream. I was there and not great things happened, and then it’s gone.
But this DMB album, Under The Table And Dreaming, is the first album I ever listened to in order in its entirety. Before this point, I had years worth of CDs and cassette purchases where I’d only listen to a few tracks at most. I’m sure if I went into the closet right now and pulled out my box of CDs I’d find albums where I played maybe 1 song a half-dozen times and put it aside. I’m weird like that. A song will grab me and it’ll make its way onto a Spotify or Apple Music playlist and there it will live unmolested forever, even after I leave it behind to rediscover later like “oh yeah, I remember this song” when I need music in the background to write.
Music is my passport to how I think everyone else feels and lives most days. It’s hard to specifically qualify, but music is my relief from myself. Negativity screaming too much? Put on some music. Feeling alone? Music please. Absolutely certain that I’ll die alone, forgotten and unloved? Time for tunes.
And Under The Table And Dreaming is present in nearly every single writing and editing put-this-on-while-I-work playlist since I started my Spotify account.
https://spotify.link/1MIAAHNv8xb
That playlist has something like 40 hours of various Dave Matthews Band songs and concerts and albums. That playlist has some holes in it, as at one point I had hundreds more hours of songs saved locally on an old PC now lost to time, but it’s a good playlist. I listened to it in rehab. I listened to it last week. I have it on shuffle right now.
I hear that first album specifically and I think of keys. I think of keys opening my dorm room so I could sit somewhere away from everything. I think of my old front door and stepping into a house that, when I was alone, felt safe. I think about the key in my car that was my first real taste of freedom and I could play whatever music I wanted at whatever volume I wanted and no one was telling me I was too this or too little that.
A not-surprising number of scientific journals and studies exist showing connections between music, memory, creativity, and mental health. For some reason, even with everything bad I associate with the years 1996 to 1998, this album is a bright spot. It’s one good thing in a period that trauma took from me and had me at my lowest.
So my urge to you is for you to find the art that seems to persist in your life. If that’s music, listen to it. If that’s a show, watch it. If it’s a game, play it. Find the art that seeps down into the deep folds of your brain and down through your being to where you feel you are as a collection of energy and moods and atoms and identity and never let it go.
Creativity is an engine that needs fuel. Not in some hungry endless way, but in a way that carries us. It’s as much our engine as the one asking for calories and hydration. Do not starve one to feed the other.
IV - Book and Publishing Stuff
Every month I get an email telling me how “well” my website did in terms of traffic. It assigns a color and a grade, along with providing some numbers as to how many people came by and what they clicked on and when.
That “well” sticks out to me, because I assumed that if it was up and running, it was “well”. I didn’t realize there was any implied competition, that I had to try and be better than someone else by making numbers go up. If we’re looking at the biggest metrics, no, my site is not doing “well” - I’m getting fewer views and visitors than most, and they don’t stick around very long when they come through.
It’s never worried me. Maybe it should, maybe if it worried me years ago things would be better off. But then again, maybe if I did worry about it, I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it.
Despite all my best efforts and attempts to unlock some greater mutant potential like Magneto or to wield the Force, I cannot control people. I cannot make someone go to a page, even if I link to it, and I cannot make them do so frequently enough to satisfy whatever algorithm is sending me monthly emails about my site’s traffic.
It’s as true for me as it is for you. You’re going to put your work out into the world, maybe that’s on Amazon or your own site or Itch or Payhip or Gumroad or wherever else and you’re going to face-first into a very specific problem: you need people to see your site before they can read your site to be interested in what you’re selling on your site.
And you can’t force this to happen. You can’t march people to a computer or a phone and demand they open a browser or an app and bully them into a purchase. There’s a risk here, it’s not known what they’ll do, assuming they even click your link no matter how they find the information.
This is the part where people start talking about fishing. About how you just need to put your hook in the water and wait and a fish-customer will swim by and take the hook and you’ll catch them with a sale.
But that makes a few assumptions:
1. That you have a hook in the water
2. That you have baited this hook well
3. That you let the fish know there’s a hook in the water
4. That you’re patient with fishing at all
5. That you’re confident this method of catching a fish will work
For way too many creatives, myself included, I fail to do #1 and overthink #2 while #3-#5 seem pointless if I can’t have confidence in #2.
This is me urging you to do some marketing, some promoting, some advertising. Put your hooks in the water and let the fish know that the hooks are out there. Yes, of course, it’s the damn scariest thing in the world when silence feels like rejection, but if you want to sell to an open population (anyone can check it out) instead of a closed one (you only tell people in your small bubble of people you talk to, and eventually everyone will be informed and there’s no new people coming in), then you need to do this.
The whole first paywalled Secret Weapon covers marketing in loads more specific detail, but the “how do I do this” is wasted if there isn’t a “yes I can do this” supporting it. So that’s what I’m doing here, as much for you as for me.
Let’s dispense with something straight away: I would rather live in a world without money and without the need to exchange my work for it. I would spend my days happily supplied by people doing things and giving things because it’s the right thing to do, and in exchange I would teach storytelling and creativity until the end of all time. But since every time I bring that up someone tells me the world doesn’t work that way, I’m putting it all to the side and focusing solely on the act that needs to happen. (We could all be the revolution but everyone freaks out a little when out comes the violence)
I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know what you’re writing. What you’re recording. What you’re filming. What you’re selling. I have no earthly idea how many people are even reading this, and I don’t know how many of you reading this are doing anything let alone many things. I won’t know unless I’m told.
Which means you have to tell people what you’re doing.
Yes, you will be judged for it.
You have to do it anyway.
Even if you don’t think you’re doing it “right”, you still have to do it. A company to whom I pay $4 a month keeps telling me I’m not website-ing as good as someone else, but there’s my site, still going. I have one PDF available for purchase, I have plenty of things to subscribe to for free, and plenty more to subscribe to for small amounts of money each month. But I don’t talk about them beyond however quickly I can throw them out in conversation in between all the other things.
Why?
Because a long time ago I made a mistake and convinced myself that marketing took too long and was going to take up more time than the time I spend working.
I was wrong. That’s horseshit. I’m doing plenty of work every day, but how long did it really take me to write that paragraph, highlight some words, and paste in some links? Maybe 5 minutes tops, because I rewrote part of it and then got distracted by the cat before pasting in the last link.
5 minutes < 9 hours of work I’m doing today.
When I say “work” it’s not always paying work. A lot of what I’m doing this week is prepping a thing that isn’t live yet (The Writers Society project, see my newsletter and Patreon for details), and there’s a lot of blank squares on my client schedule that I’ll fill with time for recording. So I’m busy doing work, but the marketing I just did IN THIS PARAGRAPH telling you about the work didn’t take me longer than the work itself.
You need to put your hook in the water. Is it a good hook? Is your salescopy nice and neat? It can’t be perfect because there is no perfect, but it can be in a good working order and shape. If you’re not sure what that looks like or how to tell if something works, go have someone read it and then gauge their reaction. If you need more technical help, ask an expert (I have a lot of free spaces on my calendar, maybe you’ve heard).
We make a ton of excuses to avoid doing the things we’re afraid of. We look for plenty of “reasons” to not do what we should do. We can’t write because we don’t have the outline done. We can’t record because we don’t have the right cable. We can’t market because it’ll take too long and no one will care.
There’s an assumption that marketing is automatically “sleazy” and we use a ton of language to associate selling or talking about our work with all kinds of unpleasant images like scams and fraudsters and used car salesmen and any other kind of unethical commerce. Lots of finger guns and hazy language.
Creatives of all flavors apologize for taking up the space and time to mention their work is available, as if even one link is ten too many, even though the sales are what allow that creative to do things like have food or shelter.
And I’m telling you, this is all part of what we have to do. Marketing is an inescapable part of our creative commercial existence, at least until we all develop collective hive mind telepathy and we just know that George finally finished his spy thriller or that Ashley is ready with her yo-yo tricks.
Marketing is not by itself, a bad thing. You doing that marketing does not make you bad. It’s what we have to do as people who have made things when we want those things to be in the hands of other people.
V - Wrestling
i want to take the biggest complaint about wrestling off the table.
Yes, of course it’s scripted.
Those two people in the ring are not actually fighting in the same way that the two guys down at the bar are fighting. The wrestlers are throwing somewhat pulled punches and kicks but they’re still making contact with each other, it’s still some kind of fight with some kind of sincere violence, but they know (usually) who’s winning before they even start. And most of the time, they even agree with the decision or have collaborative input on who wins and who doesn’t.
People will say that knowing who wins and who loses and that it’s “fake” takes the fun out of it, but what that tells me is that they’d be okay with an actual unrestrained fight where more than likely someone’s dead or paralyzed or severely injured for the rest of their life. Like that’s what they’ll cheer for, that’s what they want to see out of two guys in their underwear.
I think if you actually put something that brutal in front of those wrestling complainers, you’d watch them squirm and balk for all different reasons.
It’s not bad or wrong that it’s scripted. It’s television. It’s theater. It’s the greatest physical form of storytelling on the planet. Being scripted (be it something like just knowing the winner or the participants breaking down I-do-this-then-you-do-that) doesn’t make the story less enjoyable.
Unless you’re saying that an outlined book is less enjoyable than reading something someone’s been writing without that same organization and structure.
The reason wrestling gets scripted the same way a book gets an outline is because there’s a story to be told. It has highs and lows and climaxes and comebacks and down moments and risks and rewards. While a match might not have full-on dialogue, the actions of the wrestlers speak for them. A kick, a punch, a hold, that’s the “talking” of the match. That’s one wrestler communicating with the other for benefit of the audience.
While I’ll save the discussion of spoilers for next week, I do want to point out that there’s a strange characters-as-author dynamic at work in wrestling that’s worth our time.
At the broadest level, the promoter or showrunner is figuring out the winners and losers. They’re the author and the wrestlers are at a broad level the characters in the story. But then when we zoom down, we see the wrestlers as authors for their own characters (wrestlers have real names, even the wrestlers with real sounding wrestler names have actual names, looking at you Billy Graham real name Eldridge Coleman), outlining how they’ll tell the story of their match inside the story of the show the promoter is running.
A lot of writers will say things at times like “the characters are taking over my story” or “they haven’t told me what they want to do” or something that sounds a lot like a hallucination or some kind of break with reality when really what they’re contending with is both an unwillingness to assume responsibility for their decisions as well as contend with the idea that as a writer they function as both promoter and wrestler - they’re telling the story all the way down, and yes, they should know how it’s going to end, even if they don’t know how to get there until they sit down and do the writing.
But all of this is on one side of a transaction. This happens away from the audience, so that the other side of the transaction, the crowd and the viewers get a genuine reaction to the events as they occur.
Or to put it into terms for us: the reader doesn’t know the story you’ve scripted, and that’s why we effort to tell the best story possible, even if that story sometimes means the heel wins the built and our hero gets defeated.
Yes wrestling is scripted, but so what, it’s still all in service of a good story. We should all be working to tell that good story, one way or the other.
Thanks for checking out the second volume of The Writers Secret Weapon. There are EIGHT more completely free volumes to come before I start additionally laying out even more content for paying monthly subscribers.
I wonder what happens if you subscribe early?
Love you. Talk soon.