Writing the Cozy Mystery: The Suspects

Mystery Writing Tips

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigfile000557708328

This is the second in my cozy mystery writing series.  Last week I focused on writing better sleuths. Today, I thought I’d take a look at another vital element for a solid mystery: good suspects.

How many suspects?  Fewer suspects can be easier for readers to keep up with, but can also mean that the murderer’s identity isn’t as much of a surprise.  If you have more suspects, you can more easily maintain the element of surprise at the end, but you have to be careful not to confuse the reader.  I usually prefer 5 suspects, killing one of them during the course of the book.  If you choose to have a lot of suspects, you can reduce confusion by making sure their names are very distinct or by giving them a casual reintroduction when they appear “onstage” again in the story.Continue reading

Twitterific Writing Links

Twitterific, Writing Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engineBlog (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 30,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

Hope my blog readers in the States have a great Labor Day weekend!  I’m taking Monday off from blogging and will be back for Friday’s post. 

How to Write Internal Dialogue:  http://ow.ly/Rx3st @MarcyKennedy

Vulnerability In Writing:  http://ow.ly/Rx3OF @rsmollisonread

4 Tips to Craft a Killer Novella:  http://ow.ly/Ry5B6 by E.M. Denning

Should You Feel Guilty About Taking Your Writing Seriously? http://ow.ly/Ry5Fc @colleen_m_story               Continue reading

Writing the Cozy Mystery—the Sleuth

Mystery Writing Tips

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigfile000946809180

I’ve had a few people emailing me asking questions about starting a cozy mystery (or, really, any type of mystery involving an amateur sleuth).  I promised to write a post on the topic… and then I didn’t deliver!  So here, belatedly, is the first post in a crash course on cozy mystery writing.

I thought it might be easier for someone starting out to think about potential questions to answer.  This helps us flesh out our sleuth and story.  It’s also, in my view, a heck of a lot easier than just launching into a brand new mystery.

Who is my sleuth and why is she getting involved in this case?  Readers tend to be able to suspend disbelief a bit in cozies, but it can be nice in the first book of the series to make the sleuth’s involvement more of a result of a direct action.  Is our sleuth a suspect?  Is the sleuth’s friend a suspect?  Was the victim a friend of the sleuth’s?  Did the crime occur at a place the sleuth works?  Did the sleuth discover the body?  There are many different directions to go with this.Continue reading

Curating Links and Scheduling Them

Business of Writing, Uncategorized

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigfile5951239550691

I’ve seen several articles and post comments online recently where writers have stated they’ve used services like Buffer to schedule tweets because it’s very cumbersome to mass schedule on Hootsuite.

Buffer is a popular scheduler.  It just didn’t work for my purposes because I like more control over when I’m scheduling tweets and I wanted to schedule more than 10 updates per day, which would require a paid Buffer subscription. I also needed to be able to download weekly lists of all of my updates for my weekly Twitterific link roundup.  I’m on Hootsuite Pro : a paid subscription that allows me to download reports/lists of my updates.

You can mass schedule on Hootsuite Pro with limited trouble.  These how-to posts can be really dull if you’re not interested in the topic explained, I know.  But I do think that scheduling our social media updates saves us a lot of time. Continue reading

Twitterific Writing Links

Twitterific, Writing Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engineBlog (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 30,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

Why Is Your Character’s Emotional Wound So Important?  http://ow.ly/RjznI @angelaackerman

Living in the White Space:  http://ow.ly/RjzIJ @MichalskiLiz

Don’t Be Afraid of Said:  http://ow.ly/RjyVF @ava_jae

The heartfelt potential novel:  http://ow.ly/RjzfE @TomBentleyNow

7 Ways Blogging Improves Your Writing:  http://ow.ly/Rjzt0  @MiaJouBotha    Continue reading

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