Secret Weapon Volume 1
World rules, an inventor, 36 Chambers, Why Magical School Stories Still Sell, Wrestling Basics
Welcome to the first-ever Writers Secret Weapon newsletter. This newsletter has been in some form of development for about 8 months, and at one point was going to be a newsletter, then a podcast, then a Twitch stream, then a series of blogposts, then it wasn’t going to be anything because I was so unsure of what I wanted to do, and then finally back to a newsletter. I’m always happiest in long-form text, so here we are.
If you’re like me you subscribe to a lot of newsletters put out by a lot of writers and writer-adjacent people like coaches and writers and publishers. You skim their stuff and see how much of it is stuff you’ve heard before or it’s an upsell to some product with a huge price tag and salescopy that makes it sound like if you don’t sell a kidney right this second then you’ll miss out on something and you’ll never get published.
I wanted to avoid all that.
I can’t guarantee you won’t skim, but I can guarantee I’m always going to give you something worthwhile every week. 5 or more sections, 5 or more facets that illustrate good storytelling, 5 or more different dimensions that give you a little insight into how to tell a good story.
There isn’t one perfect and singular way to write a story and there aren’t many universal rules in writing. I think there’s always room for evolution in creativity, and I think every creative is more than one thing or one simple definition. So rather than try to squish everyone down into one single one-size-fits-all container of universal assumptions, I’m putting this newsletter together to have something to say about the multi-dimensionality of stories and storytellers.
It’ll sneak in some education in between all the interesting entertaining parts too.
Let’s get started.
I - Writing Advice
When you’re building a world, that world needs rules. For a lot of worlds in stories, those rules are just the rules of how our world works: things like physics and breathable atmosphere and laws and capitalism. It’s unreasonable to expect authors to always make up new physics and new social rules when “Earth rules” work just fine.
Nobody really questions that. Not many authors even really stop to think about how even in famous fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings, everyone’s breathing air and arrows are subject to wind resistance and gravity. Romance authors crafting small towns don’t suddenly invent new economic models and it’s unreasonable for horror writers to make up new social contracts when the monster is hunting terrified teens.
Big picture stuff comes easy. It’s so often a handwave. But let’s not forget that “world” doesn’t only mean the grandest planetary scale. The “world” of the story is simultaneously also the smaller spaces like the interactions between friends or co-workers or the family dynamics around the table every night when dinner is served.
We come up with not only the “Earth rules” but also the “rules for how Ruthie feels when she’s at dinner with her parents” or the “rules for how Mike works at the job he hates” or the “rules for how Dakota and Carter have to hide their relationship on the ranch so Miss Alice doesn’t find out” because rules are boundaries, and boundaries provide tension (and opportunities for tension.)
See here’s the thing - too often writers act like raptors testing the fences and create big huge rules specifically to develop a story. Like a kingdom that gets toppled by the heroic actions of the ragtag adventurers or the way an empire is brought down by a kid from farm. It’s almost as if the story has to be something big and dramatic and all-encompassing in order to be good enough, as if a story that isn’t about ending some massive evil or accomplishing a mega quest isn’t a “good” story.
This is some horseshit sold to us by publishers and other media that look for these kinds of stories because they can be packaged to us with hyperbolic and sensational language - “epic” “changes the galaxy forever” “a thousand year-old prophecy”. This language and these marketing campaigns have pushed us all into thinking bigger is better because we end up consuming media that’s all about bigger.
But in doing that, we forget that “bigger” is relative. When YA protagonist Ruthie is feeling trapped at the dinner table because what she really is thinking about is the old Sanders Laboratory on the far side of town, that is “bigger” to her than her annoying stepmom telling her to eat some gross slimy ham.
What’s big to your character is how the smaller rules of their life runs smack into the events of the story at that time. Ruthie isn’t thinking about the abolition of the electoral college, she’s thinking about the strange shit happening in her town.
That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with your story dealing with the bigger world rules, just don’t do that at the expense of forgetting how the smaller rules create stories and reasons for stories too. Yes, those big rules make for huge sweeping plots, but it’s the intersection/intrusion of the smaller rules and the characters’ lives that keep a reader reading.
II - History
Often you’ll find a good story inside the history of something you probably don’t think twice about.
I’d like to introduce you to Karl.
Karl Drais, or more accurately Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais von Sauerbronn, lived in Karlsruhe, the twenty-second largest city in Germany back in post-Napoleonic Europe. Karl was a baron, and Karl didn’t really ever have to work, but he did because “it gave him joy.”
He spent time as a forest ranger and conservationist (though it’s probably more accurate to say he employed rangers and spent his time raising money for conservation and tree planting) but Karl’s preferred job was as an inventor.
Here is a very brief and incomplete list of things Karl invented:
the meat grinder
the typewriter
a machine that transcribed piano music onto paper
a foot-powered cart to transport railworkers and supplies
But Karl is most known for inventing this:
That’s a Laufmaschine, but you probably know it better as a bicycle.
Karl invented the “running machine” that would later be called the “dandy horse” the “velocipede” the “draisienne” and the “pedestrian curricle” in 1817, after a particularly slow and uncomfortable carriage ride from the German countryside back to the city.
Roads back then were about as well-maintained as US roads are today, which is to say there was a lot of talk about them being important but nobody did too much beyond the bare minimum to actually maintain them. This left roads with three grooves, two on the outside where carriage wheels went, and one wider channel where horses went. This left what should have been a flat road looking more like a ruffled potato chip, ridged and ribbed for no one’s pleasure.
Initially the running machine was built to ride along the same groove as the carriage wheels, but sloping sides of those grooves left machine riders wobbling constantly for balance and made for slow going. Karl then decided that what his machine and their riders needed was an uninterrupted flat surface where there were no grooves where they could really get moving.
He found that especially in cities the best uninterrupted flat spaces where those next to the roads that formed perimeters around buildings and boundaries for roads.
Sidewalks.
You know, where all the people are.
What followed from 1817 to about 1840 were the “Panic Times” (that’s what newspapers in Calcutta called them) where cyclists “hurtled themselves down pavements and only seemed to stop when they collided with people or buildings.” This was primarily due to the fact that there were no brakes (they didn’t get invented until 1898) and the best way to stop forward momentum was to, according to Karl, “leap off” the machine.
To complicate Karl’s life, his work on the laufmaschine came during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval, leading him to give up his title as Barony as well as his wealth "for the good of the revolution.” He fled a number of assassination attempts, had most of his assets seized (no one wanted his laufmaschine, so he was allowed to keep it) and died penniless in 1851.
In the decades that followed, the laufmaschine became the “ordinary”, the “penny farthing” (that’s the bicycle with the comically large front wheel), the “boneshaker”, “the pedal pony” and ultimately the bicycle. Today there about about a billion bicycles on the planet, with a new one purchased roughly every 4 seconds. There are nearly three times as many bikes in circulation as there are cars on the planet.
Way to go Karl.
Why is this important? Because Karl was prolific even if in his time he wasn’t appreciated. He had fans and detractors (people tried to kill him because he was trying to create machines to help people be more equal for both social and economic standing) in his day, but it wasn’t until the early and mid-20th century that he got a decent amount of praise. Sadly now, Karl is an afterthought.
What you create at the time, no matter if it’s one thing or a dozen things, has longevity beyond just the time you spend working on it and offering it to the world around you. You don’t necessarily want to only look to some distant future, nor do you want to stay locked into just the present. All creating and all creations have a life cycle of some kind, your job is to produce your work, get it out in the world, and keep going.
III - Music
One of the greatest hip hop albums ever, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is a proud battle cry announcing a tidal shift in music. No longer would the East Coast be a sonic graveyard of disconnected pioneers lapped by the rise of West Coast gangsta rap.
1993 is an interesting musical year. It sees the last show of the original Guns N’ Roses in July, Snoop catches a case in September, Nirvana goes unplugged and Michael Jackson shuts down his tours as his molestation cases mount.
Notorious BIG won’t be out in New York for another year (mid-94) so New York’s hip hop scene is alive, but quiet. You get groups like Tribe Called Quest and Leaders of the New School (aka Busta Rhymes and some people you’ve forgotten about) keeping the touring and sound going … but Public Enemy is between albums and there isn’t anything new hitting the air.
Enter the Wu-Tang.
From the Staten Island projects and neighborhoods, nine artists came together, all sharing a love of hip hop as well as the truly awesome kung-fu films and comic books of their childhoods. Their first album is a fusion of their lives in Staten Island, their love of dudes fighting other dudes with sword styles, and their love of hard battle rap, the competitive verbal duels that would mirror the fights of their beloved kung fu movies.
It’s the first time I can remember hearing a musical production that wasn’t classical or opera - these were people playing characters (nobody names their child Ghostface Killah on purpose), and their album was as much biography as fantasy. For every line about the reality of living with the threat of violence or incarceration, someone’s praising Tiger Style or Spider-Man.
Which is why this album matters to me. A story that moves you, that connects with you, that you take with you to future stories is a story that blends the real with the unreal-that-feels-real. This isn’t a permission slip to wholesale fabricate or embellish the truth when it’s time to be truthful, this is a permission to take all of it as fuel for story.
Yes, you’re writing a fantasy story about a bunch of adventurers. Yes you’re writing a story about two fated lovers. That’s the unreal you’re trying to make feel real. But then there’s your own life. The argument you just had with someone. Your insecurity about doing the right thing. Your want to be recognized. That’s the real you can infuse into your characters. Not to weaken them as though you’re exposing them to you at your worst, but the give them depth because it will transform them from two-dimensional plot completers into people the reader can relate to.
Draw on your own life and then use your creative kung fu in whatever style to help elevate it.
IV - Publishing News
Not all booksellers are created equal. Yes Amazon is the monster we all fight with, are shackled to, are committed to, preyed upon by, aware of, awed by, and following behind, but the landscape of publishing extends beyond the walled garden of Kindles and tags and KDP and whatever other nonsense a billionaire vomits at us.
Bookshop.org is a seller trying to change things. Later this year, they’re going to start rolling out e-books and print their first book under their own banner.
Now the cynical will say they’re just doing what Amazon is doing, and how that’s not original and how could they ever to hope to compete with Amazon. And yes, that makes sense, if Bookshop was trying to be better than Amazon.
But what if they weren’t? What if they were aiming to be a different avenue for authors to use to publish their work? What if competing with Amazon wasn’t on the table?
I guess a better question for you would be - would you publish with them, assuming the rules and structure for it didn’t suck?
V - Writing Ideas
Why Magical School Stories Still Sell Well
I’m sure by now you’re familiar with the very popular book series about a teenage wizard who goes to school in a magical place and who has an adventure every semester in a world where there’s very little consistency beyond some really heinous anti-Semetic, anti-trans, pro-cop, pro-authority views espoused by the series’ bigoted biillionairess.
Everyone know who and what I’m talking about?
If you go looking at in YA spaces and even NA spaces, there are still people putting out stories that boil down to clones of that other series. Sure there are some changes (gender flips for characters, maybe a different location or a different magical system), but it’s still magical school and magical students being both teens and mages at the same time.
How much of that is just taking what Joanne did with her series and aping it and how much of that is the actual tropes involved in magical school?
Honestly, it’s about 80-20.
“Magical school” as a trope is an extension of “magical hero” which is an offshoot of either “child wizard” or “child of prophecy” depending on the sort of story being told. The school becomes a contained setting with some amount (usually the majority) of the story taking place in and around school.
Why? Because for the majority of readers, school is familiar and is all-encompassing. School becomes your world, and it’s a known commodity in terms of expectations (homework, tests, grades, social structures) so there’s built-in opportunities for tension before we even throw in any kind of fantasy elements like monsters and evil sorcerers.
The problem isn’t that the trope is garbage, it’s that the biggest creation in the space that’s still setting the tone for its contemporaries is garbage.
You’re never going to get where someone else already is, because your destination and your route to it aren’t the same as what someone else did. Now, yes, I’m sure there’s someone reading this saying “Okay, but I would love to have that much money and fame for writing the way that bigot does” but I am also sure you wouldn’t want to be a bigot in order to get that fame or money, nor would you want to do deal with all the negative attention even while the money came in.
I’m not saying you won’t succeed, but you’re not (last I checked) a bigoted transphobe who has to jump on social media to retroactively unfuck her canon because it lacks internal consistency, so what I’m saying is that your success is different.
The trope (just like any other) is a fine framework and launchpad for a story, but it’s what you do with it that’s going to take you where you want to go. Magical schools are still popular now because of a book series where wizards poop in hallways and disappear it that we all loved years ago. If you’re going to do a magical school, you don’t need a prophesied fish out of water to be the reader surrogate into a world that’s apparently both whimsical but also tragic and but fun but dangerous.
VI - Wrestling
I think wrestling is one of the greatest kinds of storytelling possible, whether we’re talking about the stories told within a match, with all the jumping and spinning and kicking and holds, or whether we’re talking about the longer stretches of storytelling that build a character and their destiny.
I originally intended today to start with a glossary of terms, so that in later weeks I can say “face” and “heel” and “rest hold” and not have to stop and explain it, but I think instead I want to give you an example as to why wrestling is the best.
This is one of the greatest stories told in wrestling in the last 15 years. Hangman Adam Page transformation from also-ran into “anxious millennial cowboy” who had to face his fears and his friends to attain his goals is a tremendous story told across weeks and months of matches and vignettes and vlogs and interviews.
Wrestling stories are always best when they hit core emotional truth - of good and bad, self-doubt and change, good versus evil, obstacle and conflict. And because they’re inherently physical stories, they’re acted out on a stage in a ring with bodies in motion, they’re more primal in how we connect with them. Blood, sweat, and tears aren’t just part of a saying about hard work, they’re visible byproducts of character effort.
I can’t guarantee that a few paragraphs each week will make you love wrestling the way I do, but I want you to consider this storytelling medium to be as fertile as all the anime, movies, RPs, podcasts, and streams you might consume.
Wrestling is amazing, and I love it.
VII - A Question For You
And with that, I bring the first instance/episode/edition/week of The Writers Secret Weapon to a close. Let me leave you with a question, something to think about until we talk again next week:
You’re writing a book, you’re making a show, you’re producing a podcast, you’re making a thing, what are the obstacles keeping that creation from being on my shelf, or in my ears or on my screen? What’s in the way?
I’m not asking so that you beat yourself up or so that you tell yourself you’re failing, I’m asking you to really look at what you’re doing (or not doing) and see what it would take to carve a path through the obstacles to make progress.
Think it over, and let’s talk about it if you want. Reply to this email, I read and reply to every single message.
Love you. Talk soon.