Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

One of my hobbies is working jigsaw puzzles. One of my husband’s hobbies is finding a puzzle to make my life difficult. He has given me puzzles with no edges, puzzles with little or no contrasts – like a baby seal in a snowbank – and puzzles within a puzzle that had 16 corners and 650 edge pieces. He smiled a lot when he gave me that one because I am a fanatic about doing edges first and he couldn’t wait to watch me twitch.

On the other hand, my husband didn’t think this round puzzle with a mere 440 pieces would be much of a challenge for me, but he didn’t take into consideration the shape of the pieces. They are all curved. And some of them connect by matching the outer edge of the curve into the inner edge. Until I found a few pegged pieces that could hold those pieces together, they would separate at the slightest touch. Imagine what happened when one of the cats decided to jump up on the table and slid across the puzzle.

I am a horse lover, so my husband buys me puzzles that feature horses. At first glance, this puzzle looks like it could go together fairly quickly and easily, but since there are only two major colors, pieces could fit anywhere. Which painted horse does this brown piece go to? And is this white piece part of the snow or a patch on a horse?

While working that many-edged puzzle recently, I started to see a correlation between jigsaw puzzles, writers, and stories. We all have different approaches to story. Some of us like to get all our edges – plot points and an outline – in place before trying to put scenes together. But what happens if we can’t do that? In my current WIP, the sequel to Open Season, I never have had all my edge pieces in place, and have been writing scenes as they come to me and going back to tie them all together.

That is probably not the most efficient way to work, but I remember what Diana Gabaldon once said at a writer’s conference about how she writes. She said she writes in one continuous flow, often jumping from scene to scene without a clear transition and smoothing it all out in the rewrite.

So I guess it is okay to write without all the edge pieces in place.

And sometimes those scenes don’t hold together until you get a pegged piece to anchor them.

As for contrasts, we need to make sure we have plenty of them. Don’t leave a reader holding a piece of the story and wondering if it is in the right place.

And when the writing is not going particularly well, you can always take a break and go work on a jigsaw puzzle.

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Thanks so much for your post today, Maryann! I know Maryann through the blogging world and she’s always got fantastic posts on the Blood Red Pencil blog as well as her own. And, when I read bios like Maryann’s (see below), I realize that I need to diversify more as a writer!

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As a journalist and author, Maryann Miller amassed credits for feature articles and short fiction in numerous national and regional publications. The Rosen Publishing Group in New York published nine of her non-fiction books including the award-winning, Coping With Weapons and Violence in School and On Your Streets, which is in its third printing. Play It Again, Sam, a woman’s novel and One Small Victory, a suspense novel, are electronic books available on Kindle, Nook, and other e-book reading devices. One Small Victory was originally published in hardback.

A mystery, Open Season, is a new release in hardback from Five Star Cengage Gale. A young adult novel, Friends Forever, is her first book for BWL Publishing Partners. She has also written several screenplays and stage plays and performs in community theatre in venues around East Texas. You can find Maryann on Facebook and Twitter, on her blog and on her group blog, The Blood Red Pencil.

I was picking up a carpool of high school and middle school boys for Scouts on Monday evening. It was absolutely pouring cats and dogs, lightning was illuminating the darkness every couple of minutes, and it looked like we were working up to a flash flood.

At one house two boys ran out the door, full speed, jackets held over their heads, and launched themselves into my car. “Mrs. Craig?” gasped one of the boys, “Uh…do you need a car wash? Have you got a dirty car?”

“No, no Daniel,” said his brother, briskly. “That’s not the way to sell Mrs. Craig anything! Remember, you’re supposed to say, ‘Mrs. Craig, I noticed your car is dirty. Guess what? I’m selling car wash tickets for lacrosse.”

We were all laughing about the fact they’d bolted right into the car without even looking at it. But it was definitely going to be filthy after the rain we had (which makes me wonder what’s in our rainwater that makes things filthy.) Besides, they knew I was going to buy whatever they were peddling, anyway. It was a sure sale.

Selling our readers or editors on our writing is a tougher job—after all, they’re not totally invested in us like I am with my Scout carpool. And before our writing even gets to the reader, it’s got to convince an agent or an editor that it’s good.

My first drafts are full of seems, felts, mights, started tos, thinks, and coulds. These words dilute my writing and make it sound indecisive and weak. So I take most of them out, unless it’s a wishy-washy character using the words in dialogue.

Writing can also sound stronger by avoiding passive construction of sentences (when the subject is acted on instead of performing the action.) Strunk’s Elements of Style is one of my favorite writing books. As Strunk put it (and I’m using his example to illustrate his point, below):

The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard.

Instead of: There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground. Use: Dead leaves covered the ground.

Decisive is convincing…and I’m trying to sell my agent, editor, and readers on my story.

What kinds of things do you do to strengthen your writing?

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The WKB newsletter that Mike Fleming and I are putting together is set to launch later this week. We’ve got a great interview with freelance editor Jason Black and links to February’s most popular writing articles. For a preview of what’s in the newsletter this month, click here for Mike’s blog. If you’d like to get on our email list for the newsletter, please sign up here: http://bit.ly/gx7hg1.

Writing, like life, evolves from the journeys we’ve taken.

Adventures, life lessons, relationships, love. Regardless of genre, these are experiences all writers encounter, either within ourselves, with other writers or even with our characters. (I’ve been known to fall in love with my hero a time or two–or ten.)

Life often doesn’t give you a choice whether or not you take a particular journey. Some life journeys you choose, such as taking a new job or deciding to have a baby, but others are thrust upon you, like an illness or a loss. But writing journeys are all about choice. You choose to travel every journey with your character. Journeys of your own making. Journeys often thorned and complicated and painful.

When you think about sitting down to voluntarily jump into the muck of situations usually far more tumultuous than real life, it’s truly no shock the resistance to write is, occasionally, insurmountable.

Challenge creates excitement. And anxiety.

Many of these anxiety-ridden days have been piling up for me recently as I delve into writing my first option book. With the two manuscripts contracted with Kensington finished, polished, submitted and awaiting editorial comments, it’s time for me to start writing another book, one which the publisher has the right to view before my agent and I submit to other houses for consideration.

I decided to write the third novel in this series for the option because I love trilogies, and because I believe in this team of characters enough to risk having the book not sell. If my current house decides to pass on this manuscript, it would be difficult, (although not impossible, granted), to sell the third of a series already printed by another publishing house to a new publisher.

So, not only am I breaking new ground by writing a book I know has to be stellar enough to sell on just three paragraphs and a synopsis (as options are often written as proposals, not full manuscripts), this third book is a reunion story, always fraught with complex emotion and hell on a writer, and I’ve got to culminate the overarching plot of the trilogy while tying that plotline into the individual book’s plot.

Gee…I wonder why I’m resistant to sit my butt down and face that blinking curser.

The universe will give you what you need. You just need to listen.

On one of these should-be-writing-but-wasn’t days, I took my pup to the beach for a walk. Exercise, like writing lately, is often one of those things I procrastinate over. But I forced myself out of my little introverted world for the sake of my awesome pup. (They’re good at getting you out.)

After we reached the waterline and headed south, that momentum the motivational speaker Tony Robbins speaks of took over. I was there. I was walking. And it seemed the beautiful, crisp, clear winter day was my reward for showing up. Until, a ways down the beach, I found another little treasure half buried in the wet sand: a perfect sand dollar. I got a little thrill as I picked it up, washed the sand off in the sea and carried it with me. Another fifty feet—another sand dollar. Wow, this was cool. My daughter is the one with the sand dollar karma, I never find them. But that day seemed to be my very own sand dollar day.

As I walked our customary low-tide four mile trek, the sand dollars appeared more frequently. Every thirty feet, every twenty feet, every ten feet I’d discover one sparkling at the water line or catch sight of one from the corner of my eye. By the end of our walk, I’d collected twenty-one perfect sand dollars, each as unique as a snowflake. One as tiny as a dime.

Little treasures I’d never have discovered if I hadn’t taken that journey.

I felt as light and invigorated and inspired as after a solid writing stint that produced a new plot twist or created a fresh character.

And I knew it was time to crack my resistance to this option book .

Every writer gets stuck at some time or another. Not every writer gets going again. Be the exceptional one. Let the promise of those little treasures lure you back to what you love.

Because if you don’t show up, neither will they.

What keeps you from writing? How do you unstick? What little treasures have you found while pouring yourself into your story?

I thought this little guy was appropriate for a giveaway on a mystery writer’s blog. (And I adore him!) Comment to enter the drawing to win the Dead Guy Sticky Notes pad.

Joan Swan is a triple RWA® Golden Heart finalist, and a double Kiss of Death Daphne Du Maurier finalist. She writes sexy romantic suspense with a paranormal twist, and her first novel with Kensington Brava, FEVER, debuts April, 2012. You can find Joan at her website: http://www.joanswan.com.

Thanks so much for guest posting today, Joan! Joan is a writing friend of mine that I’ve gotten to know on Twitter, where she’s active as @joanswan. She also has a great blog that I’ve tweeted before. I’m looking forward to her Phoenix Rising series next year.

I don’t know if y’all subscribe to Writer’s Digest, but this past month’s issue (the February one, pictured left) is especially good, I thought. There was a nice article in the issue called “25 Ways to Improve Your Writing in 30 Minutes a Day.”

The article touches on things like sentence structure, pace, flow, and imagery. One subject I found particularly interesting was the section on unity.

Writer Jack Heffron pointed out the usefulness of selective repetition. He said:

“A detail or remark or even just a unique word mentioned early in your piece can be echoed later, creating a sense of wholeness through the reader’s recognition of the previous mention.” That recognitions also imbues the repeated element with a resonance… The reader enjoys a satisfying sense of progression, of having moved from one literary moment to another.”

This is something that I’ve enjoyed playing around with, but always in terms of subplot. I usually have a subplot that crops up in an innocuous (and frequently humorous) way in my mystery. Then I tie in the subplot to the main plot at the end of the book. I’ve always really liked the feeling of completeness that it gives to a book.

I’ve never thought about it, but there are other subtle ways to use this device, too (and I think ‘subtle’ is key here.) It could be used with setting, imagery, a triggered memory or simply an unusual choice of words.

I’ve always used it for more of a humorous effect and that pleasant sort of tying-up-loose-ends feeling. But it could be used to evoke a variety of responses from readers…still with that satisfying ‘wrapped up’ feeling of unity.

Is selective repetition/unity an element that you’ve used in your writing before? As a reader, is it something you usually notice?

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The WKB newsletter that Mike Fleming and I are putting together is set to launch later this week. We’ve got a great interview with freelance editor Jason Black and links to February’s most popular writing articles. If you’d like to get on our email list for the newsletter, please sign up here: http://bit.ly/gx7hg1.

I think most writers are almost overwhelmed by ideas. The problem is usually too many ideas or getting ideas for new books when they’re not finished with the old one.

That’s they way it is for me, too. But I’ve noticed that the ideas are striking at different times than they used to.

I used to always get fantastic ideas when I was out running errands. I had a notebook in the car at all times, just in case, and index cards in my pocketbook for those times when I was actually shopping when they struck.

I think what’s happened is that I’m now really focused on the errands and getting them knocked out as quickly as possible. So I have less time when my mind is wandering.

Apparently my brain is just dying for opportunities to flood my mind with these ideas that have been collecting. So lately, the floodgates have been opening while I’m falling asleep, while I’m sleeping, and as I’m waking up.

So I’ve adjusted. There’s a book light and a pencil and a notebook on my bedside table. My husband is probably wishing that my ideas would start coming during errand time again.

A couple of nights ago I had an idea that did more than wake me up and make me jot it down in my handy-dandy notebook. This idea completely launched me out of the bed and downstairs to the computer. It was the solution to a plot hole.

So what I’m gathering from all this is that I’m putting up some barriers to the flow of ideas just because my busyness isn’t making me as receptive to them. So these ideas are all popping out when I’m trying to sleep.

My plan is to tune in more to the daydreaming, idea-generating side of me and less to my to-do list or whatever it is that’s putting up walls.

How do you ensure you’re receptive to getting ideas?

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Couple of quick notes:

First of all, Margot Kinberg is sponsoring “Do the Write Thing” for the victims of the devastating New Zealand earthquake that struck a week ago. She’s holding a raffle to help raise money for the relief effort. For more information, please visit Margot’s blog.

Secondly, the WKB newsletter that Mike Fleming and I are putting together is set to launch later this week. We’ve got a great interview with freelance editor Jason Black and links to February’s most popular writing articles. If you’d like to get on our email list for the newsletter, please sign up here: http://bit.ly/gx7hg1.