Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

I was out running errands yesterday and was a little farther afield than usual. Our cats have a special cat food that we can only get at this one particular store (I know…it’s crazy), and so I was about 35 minutes away from my own brier patch.

I’m planning on seeing some friends soon and remembered that I wanted to pick up wine and beer. I dashed into a wine store.

I picked up what I was looking for quickly, although I wasn’t familiar with the store. A Chardonnay in one hand, some Sam Adams Porter in the other, I was tearing toward the cash register when I saw a man standing at a table, hoping to distribute samples and looking awkward. He smiled hopefully at me.

I was in a hurry…but gosh, I sure know how it feels to stand at tables at bookstores feeling awkward. I sighed, then stopped with a smile.

It was a local brewery. He could tell I was in a hurry and stumbled into a spiel, “We’re right here in Charlotte, on the way to uptown. And—we don’t have any preservatives in our beer.”

I could tell that this was his big selling point. Maybe that info would have meant something different to someone with a different slant, but for me it was interesting from a marketing perspective. “So,” I said, “you can’t ship it then. If it’s preservative-free.”

He looked more cheerful now since I apparently was picking up on an interesting point. “That’s right!”

“So your focus is probably local restaurants?”

“Yes ma’am. And local bars.”

“But you’re starting to sell it in retail outlets?” I asked.

“We’re making inroads with a couple of local chains. Like this one. See, what you’d do,” he gestured to a keg-looking container on the table, “is to drink this by the best-by date, then return the container to us at a retail center and we’d fill it up.”

“The only problem is,” I said, “is that I live in Matthews. So it’s less convenient for me to drive over here to purchase more beer.”

He beamed. “It’s available at the Matthews location of this store!”

Ka-ching! It was a sale.

Only, actually, because it was convenient for me to buy the beer.

Convenience is, I think, one of the major selling points for an e-reader. And I think it should be a reason why publishers shouldn’t worry too much about the e-book revolution.

I’ve found, lately, that I’ve bought even more books than I usually do. And I buy a lot of books.

That’s because the Kindle has made it very, very easy for me to buy a book. Several times now, I’ve been out with a friend and they told me what they were reading and I’ve downloaded it.

I’ve also downloaded books that I hear about on book blogging sites—immediately, before I have an opportunity to forget the title or author.

I know publishers are worried about ebooks. I know they’re treading into uncertain territory.

But I really think that they’re going to get a higher volume of sales. It’s just so easy for us to buy books.

Do you have an e-reader? Do you have one on your wish list? If you do have one, have you seen your book buying habits change?

Last year, I heard from my agent that there was an editor interested in working with me on a mystery they wanted written.

I was to come up with the characters and plot. They’d like the series set in the South and to incorporate quilting.

Of course I jumped on it. I’m no quilter, but quilting is a big part of Southern heritage. I’ve appreciated it as an art form and as a vehicle for telling stories. And the South is my chosen setting—what I know the best.

This was all I knew about what the editor wanted: the setting and the subplot.

I started reading as many novels as I could that used quilting as a subplot or hook.

After reading quite a few of these books, I came up with what I thought the editor wanted.

I wrote an outline for the first book. The characters were quieter than the characters I usually wrote. They minded their manners a little more. They were a bit more serious. There wasn’t any of the loud laughter or slapstick humor that my characters are frequently fond of. I hushed them up and told them to behave.

But there was this one character, a ferocious old lady who demanded inclusion in the book.

I reluctantly included her, knowing she had a lot more in common with my Myrtles, Lulus, and Evelyns than the new characters in the new book. I killed her halfway through the book.

I submitted the outline to my agent and she sent it to the editor at Penguin/NAL.

I heard back from my agent after about a month. The editor liked it, but wanted livelier, more colorful, quirky characters. They waned more characters like the ferocious old lady…in fact, they wanted the ferocious old lady, herself.

So I raised her from the dead. :) And I knew what I should have known before I ever started sketching out the outline for that book—they wanted me to write the way I usually wrote. They wanted me to write my specialty—humorous Southern mysteries full of quirky Southerners.

Got it!

What gets me is why I’d think otherwise. If someone is contacting me, they’re looking for what I usually write. It makes sense. If I’m calling a plumber, I’m not asking him to fix my electrical problems. I won’t ask the appliance repair guy to do my interior painting. They probably do know how to do those other things—they’re handy people, in a general sense. But it’s not their specialty.

Can I write other styles and genres? Sure I can. Does it come as easily? No. I don’t know about y’all, but for me there are some things that just come naturally to me—that are second nature for me to write.

What’s your writing strength? Are you capitalizing on it by writing a story that plays to it?

I have a hard time making decisions.

Not big decisions—those are pretty easy for me to make.  But smaller decisions, like what restaurant to choose for supper. 

I used to have a hard time deciding which story idea I’d work on next.  When you have a lot of ideas, it’s tough to choose between them.

And characters.  Think of  all the potential characters we’ve got up in our heads!  I’ve got a whole cast of them and they’re all auditioning with gusto, hoping for their chance to get in a book.

If you think of it, every single bit of our story is a choice.  What will the characters do next?  How will they react to it?  And then what happens?  How does it all resolve?

We can choose so many different paths for our story to take.

Right now, I’m starting a requested outline for the second book in the Southern quilting mystery series (and working on the second draft of the first book in the series).  I’ve got several ideas for it that I could go with.  Which should I decide on?

There are several different things I think about before choosing a storyline.

The first is the reader.  I know my genre well and I think about which aspects of the genre readers love the most.  I work to incorporate those in the story.

After that, I think about which story I’d have the most fun writing.  Is it something I’d have fun with?  Is it something my readers could relate to and have fun with, too?

Is there a plot that I can easily see the different possibilities with?

Is there a story with more potential for conflict than another?

Is there a story that will give my protagonist more challenges, internal conflict,  and more opportunities for growth?

Is there a storyline with more of a marketable hook than another?

Is there a story idea that requires more research than another?  Do I have time to do that extra research in a thorough way, or should I choose a simpler idea?

Sometimes my plot ideas come with characters included. Is there one that has more interesting supporting characters than the others?  

Have you got lots of different story ideas?  How do you choose which to focus on?

Problem scenes. I usually have several areas that just don’t work in an unfinished manuscript.

If I’m writing my first draft, I’ll just totally skip past the problem and continue to the next scene in my book. No big deal. If I’m particularly bothered by it and just want to put it out of my mind, I’ll make a comment to myself in the margin of the manuscript with Track Changes and keep going.

But…at some point the problem area has to be dealt with.

There are a few different ways that I’ll usually approach this chore. The first is to see if I can cut the scene out completely. Really—if it’s that bad, do I really need it? Can I sum up the content in a different way—through dialogue or a short transition? Does the scene serve a purpose and propel my plot forward, or would it be all right to just leave it out altogether?

My second standby is to open a new Word document and rewrite the scene without looking at it…basically by just reading the previous scene and going from there. Sometimes even the old word choices will serve to mess me up and keep me from rewriting the scene stronger.

Now I have a new technique to work with, courtesy of my writing friend Jan Morrison. She calls her technique ‘free fall’ and it applies the best of brainstorming—the stream of consciousness approach—to a problem scene.

Jan advises going to the problem area and picking out one thing about the page/scene that you like. It might be a great phrase or sentence. Then you put that snippet up at the top of a blank page and do a free fall/stream of consciousness exercise with it—until you reach the end of the thought or concept. Then, Jan advises taking the best out of that exercise and do the same thing, again, on a new sheet of paper. This sounds like a great way to explore a concept and a fresh way to take a look at a problem area. Jan calls it ‘mining for gold,’ and she further explains the free fall approach here.

A fourth way to a approach the problem scene is by distance from the manuscript or other ways of looking at the scene with new eyes. There are different ways to accomplish this—by actually letting time pass, by printing the scene and reading it on paper, reading the scene aloud, reading it in a different font, etc. I don’t always have a lot of time to just let a manuscript sit, but I do like printing it out or reading it aloud to better diagnose what’s wrong.

How about you? What do you do when you’re faced with a scene that doesn’t work?

My son’s Language Arts class is required to do a literary analysis at the end of each quarter on whatever novel they’ve read for fun.

I got an email yesterday from one mom in the class, saying that her son had chosen Delicious and Suspicious to analyze.

My first reaction was, “Uh oh.” The assignment states:

A literary analysis is not merely a summary of a literary work. Instead, it is an argument about the work that expresses a writer’s personal perspective, interpretation, judgment, or critical evaluation of the work. This is accomplished by examining the literary devices, word choices, or writing structures the author uses within the text. The purpose of a literary analysis is to demonstrate why the author used specific ideas, word choices, or writing structures to convey his or her message. It is a careful evaluation of the work.

This is one of those things that tends to make me feel insecure because I’m not writing literary fiction. I didn’t write the book by planning out specific literary devices that I was going to include. I was focusing on the story.

What was my theme for the story? Murder happens? Hmm. Good versus evil? And how had I conveyed this message? Literary devices? Bleh.

Then I started thinking about it. Although I might not have planned to include different elements in my book, I think most of us include them without really thinking about it. Maybe this comes from years of reading.

Simile and metaphor? At first I thought figurative language counted among elements that I didn’t include very often in my books. But then I started thinking about it—I’m fond of using them for my character descriptions. I’m not a huge fan of description, so if I can say a character’s mustache makes him ‘look like Captain Kangaroo,’ then I’m going to go that route instead. Same with casual use of metaphors…the backyard was a furnace, not just ‘hot.’

Imagery? My first reaction was that I don’t use much imagery in my books because I avoid graphic depictions of crime scenes. But I do use imagery to set up scary scenes, humorous scenes, etc. Really, imagery is just getting our readers to picture and experience our made-up world by incorporating all of the senses in our writing. That’s just something that comes naturally to writers, I think.

Allusion? That’s one of my character, Myrtle Clover’s, favorite things. She’s a former English teacher and she’s always muttering literary allusions under her breath and feeling clever.

Alliteration is sort of fun—I’ll occasionally stick in a few examples (mostly, again, when I’m trying to be funny.)

Tone? Oh we all use specific word choices to create tone. And I don’t think we’re actually sitting down to analyze what we’re doing, either. It’s almost automatic.

Foreshadowing? I like to use a touch of it.

Flashbacks? Those have been sort of looked down on lately (and they can make life complicated for readers). I usually try to steer away from them.

Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we’re all using a lot more literary devices, elements, and figurative language than we might think. So no worries about Language Arts projects! In our pursuit of story, literature happens. :)

What literary devices do you use in your writing? Are you even really aware that you’re including them?