Blind Baby Raised by Worms

By Joe Moore

When I first started attempting to write fiction many years ago, I subscribed to and devoured all the writer’s magazines out there. Writers Digest, Writer, and many more. I read every article, sometimes multiple times, and I would use a yellow highlighter to mark those pearls of wisdom from the experienced authors on how to be a better writer. Over the years, I accumulated large piles of magazines containing many yellow highlights. When the day came to clean out my closet and give the copies away to some of my writer friends, I first sat down and went through every edition, copying those jewels of advice into one complete list. Today, I will share them with you. Maybe you might not agree with them all, but there’s a wealth of advice from countless bestsellers that can help improve anyone’s efforts at being a better author.

And if you’re wondering why this blog post is called Blind Baby Raised by Worms, check writing tip number 35. It’s the only one I personally contributed. Enjoy.

1. Easy writing makes hard reading, but hard writing makes easy reading.

2. Surprise creates suspense.

3. Vulnerability humanizes a character.

4. Anything that does not advance the plot or build character should be deleted.

5. Their reaction to a situation shows a great deal about your characters.

6. What your characters say and do under stress reveals their true feelings.

7. Coincidence is used effectively when it sets up a plot complication instead of a resolution.

8. Use all the senses to build your setting.

9. You are not accountable for the absolute accuracy or completeness of your factual information as long as it’s plausible. Write so it sounds right.

10. You can build characterization by seeing your character from another’s viewpoint.

11. The reader doesn’t know how a story will resolve, but they should have no doubt what must be resolved.

12. As a story grows, so should the obstacles.

13. Any word that can be substituted by a simpler word should be.

14. Suspense is created by having something extraordinary happen in an ordinary situation.

15. The simile includes the quality that is being compared as well as the comparison. The metaphor’s comparative frame of reference is only alluded to in the image used.

16. There must always be conflict in some form to keep the story interesting.

17. Deleting “very” usually strengthens a sentence or phrase.

18. Your story must interest you. If it does, there’s a good chance it will interest someone else.

19. Credible prose is not self-indulgent; it exists to illuminate the story, not to show off how clever the writer can be.

20. If you cannot describe your story in one or two sentences, you’re in trouble.

21. Rather than describing your characters, come up with actions that show what they’re like.

22. One way to decide if sex in a scene is necessary is simply to delete it.

23. If it comes easy, it’s a cliché.

24. Don’t give your characters names that are similar, start with the same letter, or are hard to pronounce.

25. A cliché is a sign of a mind at rest.

26. Think of your settings as a character.

27. The reader must feel that your characters were alive before the story began and will live on after it ends.

28. Begin the story where the reader will anticipate what happens next but is compelled to guess wrong.

29. A commercial novel is one that a lot of people buy, finish reading and tell others to read it.

30. The average reader must be considered a genius with the attention span of a two-year-old.

31. To get an editor’s attention, you have about three paragraphs in a short story and three pages in a novel.

32. Conflict, the basis of all good writing, arises because something is not going as planned.

33. Villains never think of themselves as “bad guys”.

34. Always start with the character, not the plot. The needs of the character will drive the plot.

35. Always use a cheap tabloid-style blog title to grab attention.

Are you a “student” of writing magazines and books? Have they been helpful? If so, which ones?

Morning Pages

Cricket McRae

It’s still dark outside, and the morning star – which is really the planet Venus – precedes the sunrise. It’s very close to earth right now, a bright, shiny beacon hanging at the end of night. I stepped outside to take a look while the kettle heated on the stove, breathing in the crisp air and listening to the deer – or perhaps raccoons – rustle through the dry grass on the other side of the fence.

Back inside, I brewed a pot of Earl Grey. I am the only one awake in the house, save for a purring orange cat. We’re both curled up in a blanket on the sofa while flames dance in the fireplace, and the scent of honey rises from my cup of tea. The computer screen is the brightest thing in the room.

Soon I will put aside the computer and write in my morning page notebook. Remember morning pages? Julia Cameron introduced them in The Artist’s Way, but Dorothea Brande suggested the same thing in Becoming a Writer back in 1934 (still one of the best books out there for beginning writers or anyone who is having trouble sustaining a writing project). The idea is to get up in the morning – every morning – and write without stopping until you hit three pages. The devilish editor on your shoulder doesn’t have time to engage, you develop a habit of writing every single day, and I, at least, find the process ferrets out a surprising number of truths.

Morning pages can be a kind of self-therapy. At the same time, they can lull you into thinking you’ve written for the day. It’s also possible they could sap some of your writing energy, much as I’ve heard some people say blogging siphons off a portion of their creative mojo. How it affects you really depends on how you view the process.

For a year or more in the mid-nineties I faithfully wrote my morning pages as Cameron describes. But over time, I’ve tweaked them to suit my own needs. Doing them first thing in the morning still works very well, but I don’t do them every day. Or even every week. And though on occasion I just want to brain dump or need to work out a problem that requires what I refer to as “thinking on paper,” more often I try to focus morning pages on something in particular. As a result, they’ve turned into a stepping stone that then propels me into my other writing.

Today I plan to write a scene in which a woman encounters a girl she thought she knew in a place she’d never expect to find her. I need to know how that feels – for both of them. I want to think about how this meeting sets the tone for their relationship throughout the rest of the story. It would be a good idea to play with how a recurring theme in the story can flicker through this scene. And finally, I simply don’t know enough about the girl and her background. Focused free writing will help me find these things out.

Sometimes it's a better thing to simply sit down and write. To allow that magical thing to come out of nowhere and flavor or twist what you’ve planned to put on the page. Or even not to plan at all. But this is a brand new character for me, and an important one. In this story, I’m working in a different fictional world than the one I’m used to.

Being able to write about the upcoming scene will afford back story that right this moment I’m unaware of. It’s the same kind of magic, finding the answers to questions and, more than likely, finding more questions to ask. It’s an aspect of getting to know the story that’s invisible to the reader – not simply research, plotting, or character development, but all those and more.

Do you use free writing as a tool either in your writing or in your life? Do you find journaling useful?

The Scratch of Pen on Paper

Cricket McRae

Lately I seem to be reverting more and more to analog behavior. Gone is the sound of Windows loading while coffee brews early in the a.m. Instead, crisp air, birdsong and the sound of pen on paper accompanies my morning caffeine.

The writing callous on my middle finger is in full working order. My addiction to paper, pens and pencils feels not only justified but necessary. Office supply stores aren’t my only bane – just this week I bought two banana paper notebooks at Target. How could I not? Banana paper is treeless, sustainable, and has a slightly rough texture that’s a joy to put pen to. Then there was the thick quad pad from the corner market, because there’s just something about writing on graph paper. Especially really white paper with really blue lines. Perhaps the grid taps into the uber-left brain?

And the Mead recycled notebook from the drug store (also acquired this week) has an olive green cover in textured squares and a thick cardboard back that makes it easy to write in anywhere. As for the Cambridge, burnt-orange composition book with green lines that also made its way into my basket, it’s size and colors evoke a nonfiction project I’m working on.

Each current writing project has a separate notebook. So does each potential project. Something about each notebook usually reminds me of something to do with the project it contains, be it color, shape, light happy design, luscious velvet or purple metallic cover. Inside they are half-filled with random thoughts, clusters of brainstorming, lists, whole scenes, character interviews, bits of dialog, questions to answer, research contacts, ideas to follow up on, and large chunks of free writing.

There could be several reasons for my recent reversion to the old-school methods.

One is that my I-Phone allows me to check – and delete – email from anywhere. Still techie, of course, but much more limited. Now I only respond to email once or twice a day unless something urgent comes up, and even then I can do it from the wee device, albeit in terser than usual language. This has saved me an amazing amount of time as well as the angst that comes from dealing with my crappy Internet connection on an ongoing basis. It also cuts down on online surfing. Now when I come to the computer, it’s to accomplish something in particular. Sometimes that IS surfing, but it’s intentional and usually timed.

Another reason is that I’m trying to pay more attention to the here and now, to the smell of the roses, if you will. Writing by hand gives me the feeling, real or not, of being more connected to my creative process. It’s slower. There is no backspace button. I find myself being more careful about what I’m saying the first time, not in an editorial way, but because I have the time to think more during the actual act of writing. Then when I input the draft into the computer, it’s an instant edit pass.

I’m also simply writing more lately. It’s an autumn thing and happens every year. That means fitting some of that writing in around other activities, sometimes in bits and pieces, ten or even five minutes at a time. I need something even more portable than a laptop.

Neo-Luddite tendencies aside, there’s real satisfaction in the sound and feel of a fountain pen’s nib on the page. Oooh: fountain pen. Doesn’t that sound la-de-da, all tweedy and writerly! Except I use Pilot disposable fountain pens, which aren’t la-de-da at all. I just like how they vibrate slightly against the paper, how the ink lays down in no-nonsense thick lines, the scratching noise they make, and the fact that I can toss them in the garbage when they’re spent. I buy them packs at a time in black, blue, purple and red.

I know lots of people write by hand, especially first draft. Why do you do it? If you’re a tried-and-true keyboard addict, do you ever go to paper when you get stuck, or during outlining or other parts of the writing process?

Banging the Keys

Cricket McRae


The other day I saw a book called Bang the Keys by Jill Dearman in the library at the Northern Colorado Writers' studio. It was in my hand before I realized I'd picked it up.

Okay, allow me to backtrack. Northern Colorado Writers is the dream child of Kerrie Flanagan. The stated goal of the organization is "to encourage and support writers of all levels and genres on their journey to writing success." Currently there are almost 200 members who take part in classes, workshops, critique groups, retreats and the annual NCW Conference.

But my favorite thing of all? The studio. Kerrie rented a good-sized office space and lots of people chipped in to paint, decorate, and furnish it. Coffee and tea are always available, as are snacks, a microwave, wi-fi, a house laptop, a printer and copier. There's a classroom space, a library and all sorts of places to sit and write. And finally there is the quiet room where talk is verboten, with the teal recliner where I sit for hours and hours and bang the keys to exhaustion. It's a place where writers can go to the office, talk publishing, writing, and promotion, and then settle down and work. Pretty darn awesome, if you ask me. Kudos to Kerrie for taking the leap and making it work.

Anyway, Bang the Keys is directed more at people who are starting a project or trying to make that leap from wanting to be a writer to actually, you know, writing. It looks pretty well put together and is no doubt inspiring, but I tucked it back on the shelf after a quick perusal.

What really caught my eyes was the title. See, I Bang Keys. Meaning, I type really hard. People at the library glare at me. My guy complains I type too loudly, especially when he's trying to sleep. Fast (Don't all novelists type quickly? I mean, what other choice is there?) and hard enough to wear the numbers off my keyboard.

The space bar on my laptop is worn like the dipping steps of a medieval castle. The "M" and "N" are gone, and the "E" is well on its way.


I blame my father's old Olympia typewriter.

After all, that's the machine I learned to type on. Sure, the high school had IBM Selectrics, but at home was the Olympia in its gunmetal gray case. I would sit in front of the television and watch reruns of Star Trek while banging out the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog over and over and over, trying to build up speed. Typing out bits of dialog from the TV, trying to keep up, whacking at the stiff keys like I was killing snakes.

Don't ask me why. I don't know. I was driven by little alphabet demons.

Still am, apparently.

One of the guys in my writing group says he's the same way. He learned how to type on an old, obstinate typewriter, and now he beats his laptop damn near to death. So there are at least two of us.

Any others?

Sticking Points

So there I am, happily pounding away at my keyboard, full of promise and verve. The words flow onto the screen, meaning takes shape; I’m in the zone.

Then it happens. That Feeling. Creeping in, growing stronger. The typing slows. Stops.

Something is wrong.

That Feeling is pretty familiar to me by now, working away on my fifth novel. And I’ve learned not to ignore it. It comes as I’m writing and also when I’m editing/rewriting. Sometimes it’s only a squiggle of a notion, but it’s always reliable. The scene isn’t working for some reason. The character is resisting the plot. There’s a logical hole I need to figure out. The tone is off. The pacing is off. The action isn’t adequately grounded. I need to do more research in a vital area. Whatever it is, I'd better fix it.

While it’s disappointing to have to move out of that magical timeless place I go when the writing is going really well, at least I have a toolbox of methods with which to tackle those hiccups in the process that I think of as sticking points.

Journaling as the character: This is particularly effective if the problem seems to be a recalcitrant character. Writers often talk about the characters taking over the story. Magic and muses surely affect the process, but a writer knows her characters pretty well. If I oh-so-cleverly plot something that’s inconsistent with the way my character would really act, then try to write them into doing it anyway, it doesn’t work. I mean, I don’t plot against my characters (so to speak) on purpose, but sometimes mistakes are made. If I journal the scene from the character’s perspective, I generally discover what they would really do in that situation. Sometimes that’s what I write. Sometimes I have to throw the scene out altogether and figure out an alternative.

Clustering: This is a method I’ve seen used in workshops, but which is probably best set out in the book Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Lusser Rico. You start off with a word or phrasee drawn in a circle in the middle of a page, and then rapidly draw lines and circles out from that circle and the subsequent circles, free associating ideas. It taps into the right side of the brain, and oddly enough, as you do it a linear solution falls out of the process. I find it particularly helpful for working out plot points and relationships between characters. I’ve looked at old clusters, and they look more like an alien barfed words all over the page than any kind of meaningful anything, but hey, it worked at the time I did it.




Take a walk: Nothing new here. We all know how getting out and moving helps the brain kick in.

Talk to myself about the problem: Not recommended for use in coffee shops or other public places, this method can be helpful in a pinch. Something there about hearing your own voice concretizing what needs to be fixed. I do have to be careful not to let in negative self-talk. Also, it’s good to have a partner who likes to talk to themselves, too, so they don’t think you’re stark raving nuts.

Sleep on it: I love this one, especially for when I’m figuring out what needs to happen next in the plot. Go to sleep with a question in your head, and then let your brain work on it while you’re off in dreamland. Because it frequently works very well for me, I am delighted by the sheer efficiency of it. For more detailed information about how this method works, check out a little book called Sleep Thinking by Eric Maisel.

And if none of these methods work, my motto is: Don’t let it stop the writing for long – if the issue isn’t solved, make a note (always), and come back to it later. Sticking points can be paralyzing if not solved quickly, so sometimes the best thing is to move on, leaving it sticky for now. Future writing may provide just the right solution.

What do you do when you get to a sticking point? Any tried and true approaches you return to again and again?

Plug and Play

Last night I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much – such a classic, and with many of the elements that are touted within the “how to write a screenplay” texts (e.g. Robert McKee’s Story and Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey). Reversals and gaps, plot pacing, character arc, conflict, etc. But this and a ton of other fabulous classic movies came out long before these “instruction manuals” graced a single shelf.

Gosh, how did they manage?

Well, there are older texts, certainly. Much of McKee’s story theory can be found similarly stated in Aristotle’s Poetics. Think Hitchcock read the Poetics? Maybe. But probably not.

And, of course, there are a ton of books that tell novelists in general and mystery writers specifically how to craft a [commercially] successful story. Should be easy, then. Just plug your idea in and you're good to go, right? What’s the big dang deal?

A couple of years ago when I was working on Lye in Wait, I took an intensive workshop on character development from Stewart Stern, who wrote many screenplays back in the day (and to the best of my knowledge continues to do so with verve and passion), including Rebel Without a Cause and the teleplay for Sybil. His take on the how-to books was crystal clear: good writers understand instinctively what a good story needs. The how-to folks find the commonalities among existing stories that really work, whether in movies or books, distill them and hand them back to aspiring writers as surefire formula.

Then I stumbled into story writing software online. Oh my. I would love to know of any published novels that were written using such software.

Now, I have nothing against books on writing. I have three shelves of the things. They provide both inspiration and information when I need it. And of course we have to understand the elements of storytelling, whether by instinct or by study (though I would argue without at least some of the instinct the study isn’t going to do much good), just as we have to know grammar, have an ear for dialog, and be able to get into the psychology of a variety of characters.

But surefire formula? No way. I say take the best and leave the rest.

How do you develop your own stories? Do you have a set structure? Write by the seat of your pants? Do you have any books on writing that you go back to again and again?

Playing Cleudo

By G.M. Malliet

This will be a shortish blog because I seem to have lost a character and I have to go look for him.

My work in progress has about a dozen key characters, and I feel like a mother cat with kittens. They keep wandering off. (Wasn't Winston supposed to be in the castle libary, dang it? But there he is in the sitting room talking with Tom. And where did I put Ninette?) Since they are all suspects, I have to keep track of where they are at any given moment. And where they tell the police they were.

Last night I realized I would have to come up with a schematic or floorplan of some kind, showing where each character is during the key hours leading up to the murder. I am beginning to wish I had taking a drafting course.

What I really think I need, though, is a dollhouse...then I could move the little figures about and take a photo of each new configuration in, say, half-hour increments.

How do you guys keep your timelines straight? Would some online site like Second Life help with this, do you think? Or software like Storyboard? I don't know much about how all that works. I just know I need to be able to visualize where all my "kittens" are.

Finding Nemo's Needs

By Joe Moore
I was over posting on Absolute Write the other day and a beginning writer ask the question, how do you find out what motivates your characters? I suggested it could be done with something as simple as an interview. I said to interview your character as if you were a newspaper reporter asking probing questions about their life, quest, current situation, and other topics that could yield the answers. Come up with all the questions first. Then conduct the interview. It sounds simplistic, but it works.

As authors, we know how vital it is that all our characters have a goal. They must want something, and that something is what drives them. But it's more than just a want. They must also have a need. If we don't know what our characters wants and needs are, neither will our readers. With nothing to root for, the reader will lose interest. And in the end, they won't care about the outcome.

So what is the difference between want and need? Think of Marlin, Nemo's father in FINDING NEMO. Marlin's only son, Nemo, is captured by a scuba diver and placed inside a fish tank in a dentist's office. Marlin sets out to find Nemo. But he has a big problem, one that's quite unusual for a fish: he has a terrible fear of the open ocean. So with just that much information, we now know his want and need. He wants to find his son, but to do so he needs to overcome his fear of the ocean. The reader (or viewer in this case) will root for Marlin to make it through all the perils he faces in order to find Nemo and rescue him.

Every character must have a want and need. The most critical are the ones for our protagonists and antagonists. But I think that even the smallest, one-time, walk-ons must be motivated. If we determine the goals of every characters, we will have an easier time writing them, and the reader will have a more distinct picture of the character in their minds.

In planning our stories, it's important that we determine our main character's wants and needs first. In doing so, we'll always have a goal to focus on as we write our stories. So what are your main character's wants and needs? Can you express them in one sentence like we did with Marlin? Let's go find your Nemo's needs!

The Great Idea of the Month Club

by Joe Moore

“Where do you guys get your ideas?” That’s the second most frequently asked question that Lynn Sholes and I are asked at book signings, conferences and in email from our readers. Our answer is that we subscribe to the Great Idea of the Month Club. In reality, ideas come at writers like angry bees swarming. It’s hard to run from them, there are so many. We’re bombarded with ideas on the news, in the paper, listening to the radio, and even from other writers’ books. I’m not suggesting plagiarism with that last item—just that one great idea usually spawns another.

Lots of times, the person who asks us the question usually follows up with something like, “I could never come up with ideas like that.” Personally, I don’t believe that. I think everyone is capable of coming up with a stone-cold, smash hit that could be turned into a bestseller. It’s the “turning into” that’s the tricky part. But ideas are as plentiful as HeadOn commercials—you just have to know when you’ve got one that’s good enough to turn into a 100,000-word manuscript.

So where do we get ideas for our Cotten Stone thrillers? Mostly from hotspotsz.com, the real-life, Great Idea Of the Month Club website. Because our books deal with the unusual, strange, out-of-the-ordinary, supernatural, and paranormal, what better place to go for ideas than the number one site for stories on Paranormal Phenomena. It’s like the National Inquirer for writers.

We’ve included subjects in our books that cover Friday the 13^th, Armageddon, The Great Flood and Noah’s Ark, quantum physics, quantum computers, human cloning, The Holy Grail, the Emerald Tablet, The Spear of Destiny, Atlantis, lost cities of the Inca, the Ark of the Covenant, Cleopatra’s Needle, the Apocalypse, the Anasazi, Lenin’s Tomb, the Secret Archives at the Vatican, the cathedrals in the Kremlin, Satanism, Fallen Angels, the Nephilim, Crusader’s tombs, The Garden of Eden, The Tree of Life, Medieval puzzle cubes, and witchcraft. This place is a virtual smorgasbord of strange stuff. There are other sites, but Hot Spots is one of our favorites.

So when we give our answer to the second most frequently asked question, and it sounds flippant, there’s actually a lot of truth to it. What’s the most frequent question? How can two people write fiction together? That’s a subject for a future post.

Where do you get your ideas?

Do you have geek genes or Levi jeans?

By Joe Moore

I consider myself to be tech savvy—maybe more so than the average PC user. I believe I have geek genes. My wife has Levi jeans. She is always calling me into her office to say that there's something wrong with her PC and could I fix it. It’s usually a result of pilot error.

I wasn’t born with a geek gene. I believe I got it while in close proximity to someone who was born with it: my son. I remember when he passed it on to me. Many years ago, he came home from school one day with a Radio Shack TRS-80. He had traded a friend an old CB radio for it. The TRS used a TV for a monitor and had a paltry 16k of RAM. No hard drive. Storage was on an external 5.25” floppy disk or an audio cassette tape. Within a week, I got my hands on a basic word processing module and was using the computer more than my son. I wrote lots of stories with it as I dreamed of becoming a novelist.

Being an official geek, I soon grew tired of the TRS-80 and moved up to the highly advanced Commodore 64. Same external storage but a whopping 64k of RAM. Now we were getting somewhere. I found a better word processor program and kept writing more stuff. My first novel was years away, but I was on a roll.

Somewhere along the line, I learned how to use an Apple Macintosh. Built-in floppy storage and a massive 128k of RAM. I could feel the power.

Then I purchased a dedicated word processing device made by Magnavox called a VideoWriter. It was a computer, printer and monitor built into one unit. I wrote my first book using it--an action adventure novel set in Cuba and South Florida called DIRE STRAITS.

My first real, bigboy computer was a 286 made by Emerson. It had 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. Today, you can find toys in a McDonalds Happy Meal with more memory than my Emerson.

Next came a Micron which I used for many years until settling into my trusty Dell running three 19” LCD monitors and a bagillion giggawatts of flux capacitors and hot-swapping Terradactyl bites of quadrophonic, plutonium multiplex demodulators. When I turn it on, it’s like the scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where the whole power grid dims.

Does having geek genes help me write better novels? Probably not. But when you're a geek, it doesn't really matter. All that does matter is staying on the "bleeding edge" of technology.

So whatever happed to my son who gave me the geek gene? He went on to become a federal agent for the Department of Defense. His specialty: computer forensics.

Which do you have: geek genes or Levi jeans? What was your journey like along the techno highway to get you to your current computer? And the biggest question of all: will you stay with Windows XP or upgrade to Vista? I'm running the Vista compatibility test right now.