as stories about podcasters are to magical schools.

I just about died watching Steve Martin finally giving the audience what they wanted — Steve Martin being Steve Martin as only Mr. Steve Martin could possibly. I couldn’t breathe watching the elevator scene. Nine episodes of Steve Martin being restrained Steve Martin was worth every second of build-up at the first body flop.

Hogwarts cooled off the magic school genre for the longest time. It didn’t invent it, but for almost a decade, we watched it be perfected and then tainted forever, but let’s not get into our broken hearts about it. Any new magic school story had to do something different or better than Hogwarts. It became the Kleenex of magical schools before the CEO of it decided human rights could be measured out because of the way other people are made to feel about a subject matter.

I’ve read so much work from other writers where the story is: character has relationship with past famous murder that ranged from tenuous at best to the accused. And then they hunt down the real killer while their view count grows, despite it not being 2008 anymore.

I give OMitB a pass on this because they didn’t start blogging around a cold case. The bodies keep dropping in front of them. They don’t have immediate problem of what the podcaster is going to do once these characters solve the cold case yet.

People think that youtube success can come down to when you started. It’s the belief that if they were the only X youtuber talking about (blank) in 2008, they could be (famous youtuber) too. But Youtubers put in their ten thousand hours of meaningful practice that everyone is so quick to not-necessarily.

If, as it’s been suggested, the Beatles can tie their success to the hours and hours of playing in Dive Bars to their ability to write songs that can impact people on a philsophical level a decade later, then Youtubers that started in 2008 just didn’t let the fact they weren’t good at this thing they wanted to learn how to do stop them. Not one of them were thinking go pro or bust.

I watched Veritasium’s videos about his process probably with more interest than his science videos. He posted his first video about freezing water and critiqued it vs. what he knows now, but the fact he posted it at all led to the video of rewatching his old video being interesting.

He was focusing on the best way he knew how to present the information. He didn’t have to do so in a way that had to compare against everyone else’s best on constant display.

Today, would he have looked at the quality of what can be produced with even a dedicated one-person science channel and think that subject even needed to be discussed? So many writers want to know how to start writing their first book with an unsympathetic, unempathetic, unlikeable anti-hero and yet wonder why they got stuck on chapter two.

The first story I gave up on was the first story I wrote at age eleven. I realized it was too hard to tell an adventure story with a domesticated animal as a protagonist. I knew it could be done but I knew it couldn’t be done by me. I would look at that list of un- un- un- anti- and not know if what could be done in chapter two to move the reader to continue.

And yet the simple question of “how many likeable protagonists have you written?” is met with cold stony silence as though no one can fathom what that question has to do with anything. The assumption that everyone rolled their eyes at is: a likeable character is too easy.

Bets?

Because I laughed so hard when our On Spec Ben the Intern came back from his homework. He was shocked, shocked, I tell you, at how difficult it was to start the story with a scene that is designed to surprise the reader’s expectations.

I wasn’t laughing at him. I was laughing with him. Because man. When I realized, oh, here’s my problem: I tell when I want to show. If I want to show how the characters could understand that, all I need to do is

And then there was silence. If I’d known how to show that the protagonist just realized nope, no question. I have to do this. I would have written that instead. If the point at which he has to plan to kill his brother to save them all matters, I had to show the character doing all he can to do anything but that, first.

It was the first time since realizing that the ghost POV is the most difficult POV to tell a ghost story in that I realized, nope. I cannot do that yet. Because I couldn’t show that if I tried. And I had.

The secret to success isn’t cameras or critique groups or sponsorship deals. It’s doing the thing you do over and over again. Eventually, what you do with that knowledge will produce work that will make people want to engage with it.

And if that seems like too much work — and believe me, I’m exhausted — take meaningful instruction wherever it is. I get how it feels to know 100% of whatever piece of advice doesn’t need to be followed 100% of the time. But if you can’t figure out how it applies 70% of the time, keep asking questions until you do.

Most writers can’t write a story in which protagonists have no stakes in the outcome. And the writers who probably could probably know that the amount of work that would take to pull off wouldn’t be worth the payoff. And the writers who know automatically how they could naturally pull off a work without stakes, the letter J, and any reference to who is speaking shouldn’t assume the rest of humanity is so lucky.