50 simple rules for making it as a writer - The Writer Magazine

50 simple rules for making it as a writer - The Writer Magazine

Yes, we've all read all the rules and tips on the art and craft of writing, getting an agent, dealing with rejection, marketing, persevering etc. But here is one of the best and simplest list of tips by Harvey Rachlin to help any writer, aspiring or established, get on track and stay there. Often we become distracted, confused by advice on what to do, how to do it, and other angles we feel might be worthwhile. A lot of time can be wasted chasing the wrong rainbows, hoping they will turn into great leads (or pots of gold!).

There are a number of tips I have read before, but I hadn't given much thought to them. An example is the possiblity of foreign rights.

Tip #15. Write books with international appeal. Foreign publishers buy books they believe will be of particular interest to their countries’ readers, so keep that in mind when planning or writing your book. (Harvey Rachlin)

Is your thriller/romance/mystery/adventure set in a foreign country or an exotic location? Does your story have an interesting French/Italian/other culture flavor? An overseas publisher might just open the right door for your work.


This is just one tip that sparked my interest.


As for the rest? This is a list I shall print out and stick on my wall!


Harvey Rachlin is an award-winning author of a dozen books. His most recent book, Scandals, Vandals and da Vincis (Penguin), was published in June 2010 in Poland, following other foreign editions in Korea, Spain and the U.K.

The Rhythm of Life, Music and Poetry with Mary Muhammad

Please welcome guest number eleven on the Virtual Book Tour. My special visitor today is author and poetess Mary Muhammad who has written books of poetry and two children's books.

Poetry and children’s books are an interesting combination. I’ve asked Mary to tell us in her own words where her inspiration comes from, and what her aims and goals are in sharing her emotions and messages with readers.



Mary on Poetry

My love for poetry stems from two areas in my life—jazz music and recitation. Music, just like life, is poetry in a rhythmic form. When you are a lover of words, and someone recites to you words that capture rhythm, you automatically form your own rhythm, your own song so to speak, and this is how poetry became my love of expression. I'm inspired by children and life in general when it comes to poetry. Everything has its own rhythm and song; this opens a whole world to me when it comes to writing. The process is awkward for me, I guess, because the majority of my writing has to have a title in order to be; it's not easy for me to just write without a face to what I'm writing, and the title is a face for me. As my writing matured, my biggest influences came from a totally different era than today. It came from the early writers who seem to draw on the real issues of life, the deep intimacies of the early century. I was fascinated with this form of expression, the dialogue and many fashions of it. I just love reading it. Jazz is my second love of expression because of the diversity. I enjoy the instruments and how each of them voices their own sound while being just as important as the next in a piece. Yet without each one, the whole sound changes in a particular song. Jazz has melody, it's the real music expression for me, it's like body language without a lot of hoop and holler.

Mary on Writing for Children

My love for children comes from my upbringing. I came from a very large family and children were everywhere you turned. With six sisters and four brothers came many nieces and nephews, many of whom I baby sat, so my love of children has always been there. When I first started to hear and read of children being abused, I just couldn't fathom the reasoning; it just didn't make sense to me. I mean here you have an innocent being, and you have this happen to them! Every parent has the right to protect their children and should be an advocate for their protection. When seeing and hearing all this negative activity with small and older children, I couldn't sit still, I hoped with God blessing me to write, I could be an advocate for the children. I hoped I could be the voice they hold quiet, and bring awareness to this awful act. I pray more parents and family members will become more active on children’s behalf and learn of the seven steps to help protect the children. They need to know how serious and life changing this issue is for the children. They need to love them enough to stop and pay attention to changing behavior, because it changes their lives forever. They see life and people totally different than most. I don't know for sure if my message is working, but I pray it will save a child's life, at least one each day. If I can do that by making this as open as I can, my heart is happy, a child is happy, a child is safe. People don't have to take my word for it; they can go straight to the mouth of the predator committing the acts. They can hear it from them by visiting my website and going to the media room, where they are speaking about this, where they themselves warn the parents about what, how, when, where and why they do these things. How much more warning and proof do parents need to help protect the children? It's because of this activity Hugs and Kisses was written.

Mary’s Motto; "The love we say we have for another becomes a fallacy the moment judgment enters in."

Please visit Mary's blog post and jazz and poetry connections for more details and book purchase details.

Escape to An Enchanted World with author Danika Dinsmore

No, there's no mistake. Please follow the link below to my great interview with Danika Dinsmore, author of Brigitta of the White Forest. Danika is an award-winning writer, spoken word artist, and educator. Danika has been working with children of all ages for 18 years. Faerie Tales from the White Forest is her first novel series. Brigitta of the White Forest is Book One of Faerie Tales from the White Forest.

Danika grew up in Northern California. She earned her MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (founded by Allen Ginsberg). Her early writing career was built on experimental poetry and collaborative spoken word performances. While living in Seattle, she organized and performed with the 12-person Word Orchestra as well as the performance group FourWord FourTete. Her inspired performances earned her the Washington Poets Association award for Performance Poetry. After moving to British Columbia she turned her attention to film, television, and new media. She has worked as an artist-in-the-schools and media literacy educator for Learning Through the Arts and has taught screenwriting courses in the Writing Department at Vancouver Film School and at Capilano University. She blogs about her multi-disciplined writing life as The Accidental Novelist. She currently lives with her husband and their spoiled cat in Vancouver.

My good friend Shelly  Burns is away for a day and asked me to fill in the gap in her blog schedule. So please hop over to Write for a Reader and browse this fascinating article. Plus you can get to know Shelly as well! http://tinyurl.com/36frqsr

The Art of Murder (Writing)

I love murder! I should qualify that statement by saying I love a good mystery and if it includes a dead body or two in the library, so much the better! From Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canny detective to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, to Midsomer Murder’s Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, to the slew of murder and mystery thriller writers on the shelves today, each writer has something fascinating to offer in the way of (dare I say that word again?) murder. But how about the authors of murderous writing? Do they all write the same? Are all murder mysteries the same? No, there are rules and shades of differentiation. Here’s the opinion of an expert who is my guest today. Please welcome Shelia Lowe, author of the Claudia Rose Forensic Handwriting series. Her titles are compelling, just demanding to be read: Poison Pen, Written in Blood, Dead Write, and Last Writes.

What makes Sheila an expert is her more than 35 years experience in the field of handwriting. The author of Handwriting of the Famous & Infamous, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Handwriting Analysis, her analyses of celebrity handwritings have appeared in Time, Teen People, and Mademoiselle. Her articles on Personality Profiling and Handwriting Analysis for the Attorney have been published in several bar association magazines. Her expertise in forensic graphology makes her the perfect author for her Forensic Handwriting series.

I was fascinated to find that Forensic Graphology is the study of handwriting especially that found in ransom notes, poison pen letters or blackmail demands. Although this is a recognised and called upon scientific technique Forensic Graphology cannot tell a person's age or sex from the handwriting. What it can do however is give indications as to the person's state of mind at the time of producing a particular document, be it a blackmail letter, a poison pen letter or a suicide note. In addition, you can tell a lot about a person by the way they write—or more importantly—in the words they write. It has become commonplace now for us as individuals to write in the same manner as we speak, using abbreviations, slang and colloquialisms that vary from person to person and indeed place to place. These are important and a Graphologist can make good use of these things during the investigative process. So the next time you’re writing that blackmail note… be afraid … be very afraid!

Let’s hear it from Shelia Lowe about The Art of Murder (Writing)

Who doesn’t love a good mystery? With six of the top ten hardcover fiction books on the New York Times bestseller list in the mystery/crime genre, clearly, many readers do. And since my own mystery series has been published over the past four years, I’ve learned that a very large number of people are interested in getting their own mysteries published, too.


I’ve heard it said that there are three rules in mystery writing...but nobody knows what they are...ba dum bum. Seriously, all fiction requires plotting, characterization, setting, dialogue, and point of view, but the mystery genre has some other special stuff of its own. But before you even get to those things, you’ll need to know what subgenre you are writing. Subgenre affects who your audience—your all-important market is going to be. The subgenres include soft-boiled cozy (traditional) mysteries, medium-boiled psychological suspense, and hard-boiled gritty noir, police procedurals, thrillers. Who knew it could get so complicated?


In cozy mysteries there is little or no on-scene violence, bad language or, heaven forbid s-e-x. Cozies feature an amateur sleuth who is an ordinary person, such as Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote, or Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. The sleuth knows the people who are involved in the mystery and the story is typically set in a village or a small community where there is a limited pool of suspects. There’s generally a puzzle that has to be solved in order to get the bad guy or gal, which is why cozies are sometimes known as “locked room mysteries.” For example, how did the killer do his deadly deed when the door to the room where the body is found is locked from the inside and there are no other exits?


Police procedurals have a protagonist who works in law enforcement, usually a police detective, such as Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch. The detective follows police procedures (or doesn’t, and gets his butt kicked by his superiors as a result), and often has personal problems to deal with, such as alcohol or drug abuse, several troublesome ex-spouses, and run-ins with authority figures in the department.

Thrillers are fast-paced, action-oriented, and tend to be more graphically violent. Think Jason Bourne. The reader may know from the outset who the bad guy is—a spy or terrorist, perhaps—and we might see him plotting some horrible crime that is going to affect an entire population. The larger scale plot is the polar opposite from the setting of the cozy.


In stories of psychological suspense, character is emphasized more than plot. Thus, there may be less physical action, but a closer focus on who the various characters are and their reasons for doing what they do. My own Forensic Handwriting Series falls into this subgenre. My protagonist, Claudia Rose, is drawn into each plot through her clients. She doesn’t solve crimes with handwriting analysis, but she does learn about the motivations of the various people who populate the stories.


Once you’ve figured out your subgenre, you’ll have to figure out the crime, the precipitating event. Then, there are the subplots, the suspects, and the red herrings you’ll plant, making sure there is tension on every page. But those are subjects for another blog.

I will certainly be featuring Sheila again to learn more about those subgenres! Thanks for sharing those words of wisdom with us. Interested readers can visit Sheila’s site, and find the Amazon links to her books.