Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

Sometimes it’s easy to get dragged into your day…and the day isn’t a very inspiring one.

That was my day on Wednesday. I had what felt like an army of workmen at my house, in and out, lugging materials around for the air and heat system. They kept me in the loop as far as what they were doing (although I didn’t understand a word of it.) And my daughter was dying to get out of the house (probably because we couldn’t get out of the house.)

The salesman who sold us the system, which cost a pretty penny, dropped by on Wednesday afternoon to check and make sure I was happy with the installation so far and that the workers were doing all right in the extreme heat they were working in.

I noticed he kept looking into my living room. Then, he finally asked me with some hesitation, “Do you mind if I play your piano?”

“Please play the piano,” I said. “It’s dying to be played.”

I thought I might hear The Entertainer or maybe Frère Jacques but he launched right into a complex and long bit of classical music that I wasn’t familiar with. He played without any hesitation and it was fantastic.

The men came down out of the attic to listen to him play and I moved into the living room. We all applauded when he was done. It totally took me out of the HVAC replacement doldrums.

“That was amazing,” I told him. “I can only play Twinkle Twinkle.”

“I was a music major in college,” he said, “but my dad told me that no one would pay me to play the piano, so I started working with air and heat installation. Then I was promoted to sales…but the piano is my first love.” And he was probably in his late-fifties. “I just wish I could make a living at it.”

I told him I completely understood—that I wrote books. But my husband makes a nice living so that I can write books instead of earning a living.

Which makes me think—how many of us out there are downgrading our artistic talents to hobbies? I know plenty of us don’t have the need to share what we write or the music we play or the paintings we create…and that’s totally understandable. But I wonder how many of us would be pursuing something artistic full-time—if only we could make a living at it.

Also, my friend Dave on My Year on the Grill reviewed Delicious and Suspicious and cooked a recipe from the book. :) If you’re in the mood for some comfort food, pop by for some country fried steaks.

Right now, even as I type, we’re having our upstairs and downstairs a/c systems replaced, along with our furnace.

In my blissful ignorance, I thought this wasn’t that complex of a job. Actually, I don’t think I thought anything much about it at all. I was a little surprised when I heard that it was going to take Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to do the job…but I didn’t really think about the why behind the length of the job.

Then, a few days ago, I spoke to a friend of mine and mentioned the upcoming work. “Ohhh,” she said. “That was the craziest, most invasive thing I’ve ever had to go through when we had ours replaced. They were in every room of the house and the garage and attic, too! It took days and they kept running into problems during the installation.”

This was an eye-opener.

So when the guys showed up Wednesday morning and were in and out the door with all kinds of materials for the HVAC installation, I had the cats squirreled away in a quiet place where they wouldn’t be too freaked out. When they ended up having to take the attic door off because the new furnace was too big to go through the door, I wasn’t too surprised. When I was told the upstairs wouldn’t have any air conditioning Wednesday night, I had the downstairs bedroom ready for us to sleep in.

So far, the process feels like it’s going pretty smoothly—even when it’s not—because I’m prepared for the possible outcomes.

This same approach works well for writing, too. I think, sometimes, when we prepare ourselves for rejection or criticism or bumpy spots in our manuscripts or writer’s block then when it happens (as it inevitably does if we write for a long while) that it’s easier to deal with.

We’re still going through the bad patch…but we’re better equipped to deal with it because it’s not a surprise.

Jody Hedlund, who writes an excellent blog under her name, wrote a post Wednesday called “The Pain of Rejection Never Gets Easier.” She’s right—it doesn’t…whether it comes from agents, publishers, editors, readers, or reviewers.

But I think we can steel ourselves against it a little. And while we’re at it, we can also expect that there will be places in our manuscript where the muse will give us the silent treatment. There’s a point, obviously, where this attitude becomes pessimism, but I think I’m one of those people who likes to be pleasantly surprised instead by good news instead of sucker-punched by the bad stuff.

How do you prepare yourself for problems—whether they’re bad writing days, manuscript rejections, or poor reviews?

I’d reached one of those points in my current manuscript where I really wasn’t excited about moving forward with the plot. I wasn’t even really sure how I was going to move the plot forward. In fact…I’d stalled out.

I skipped ahead to a different part of the book…which works out great. You still get work done on the manuscript, but you’re not working on the part that’s tripping you up.

But I needed to get back to the rocky part of my story.

I’m one of those writers who works completely alone on the first draft portion of my book. I don’t tell people what, specifically, I’m writing about. I don’t belong to critique groups, I don’t ask for help. I just sweat it out through the first draft.

Subsequent drafts are different. I need help for those. But I usually can’t imagine a scenario where I’d talk to someone about my plot while drafting a story. It’s just not finished enough for me to really recap.

Plus, it’s sort of like the baby name conundrum—you know. When you’re expecting a baby and someone asks you what you’re going to name the baby. You’re not really sure what name you’re going to stick with, so you tell them the ones you’re deciding between. Then you hear how one name reminds them of this kid that threw up in 4th grade on his desk, or how one name is really, really cute (and that’s not the one you’re leaning toward), etc.

So a friend of mine called and invited my daughter over for a playdate. I sweated over my manuscript for a while, then jumped in the car to pick my daughter back up. I was thinking about the manuscript the whole way in the car.

When my friend asked me how my book writing went that afternoon, I suddenly spilled everything out. It wasn’t going well. I was stuck. I was even thinking about doing a rewrite after the first draft was done to change the whole motive for the murder.

“What’s the book about?” she asked.

So I told her. And the funny thing was that she had a lot of experience with the topic I was writing on. I’d had no idea. And she told me all kinds of stories filled with people stabbing other people in the back—real people with real emotions and real stories.

And as she was vividly telling me these stories, waving her hands around while she did it, I was thinking about my story and getting all kinds of tangent ideas.

Which is a very good argument for sharing what we’re working on. Although, as you can tell, I’m not doing it here…still thinking about the baby name example. :) And not everyone we share with is helpful—sometimes they can be more critical.

So my question for you is—do you share what you’re working on as you write a first draft? Why or why not?

I’ve gotten a few comments in the last couple of months, asking about Google Reader and how we can make it work for us. I thought I’d do a real quick overview of the way I use the application in case it might help someone else.

I subscribe, admittedly, to an obscene number of blogs (See below. Looks like I’m up to 1380, although I could have sworn I was around 1,000.)

What is Google Reader? It’s sort of a newspaper with all the blogs you’ve chosen as favorites included in the paper. It’s a quick and organized way to read through all the blogs you subscribe to—and, when the blogs update, your Reader automatically updates, too.

You add blogs to your Google Reader by subscribing to an RSS feed. What’s an RSS feed? I’m not exactly sure. :) Fortunately, it’s not really necessary to understand it to use it. Basically, if you look up at the top of your computer right now, you’ll see an address bar with Mystery Writing is Murder’s address in it. Next to it you’ll see an orange icon of something that looks like a radio wave (like the icon at the top of my blog post.) If you left-click on the icon, it gives you options to subscribe to my blog (or whatever blog you’re on.) Then you can choose “Google Reader” as the way you’d like to read your subscription.

Google Reader is free, but you need to have some sort of a free account with Google—like a gmail address or a Blogspot blog to use the application.

Once you’ve added blogs to your reader, you can read them…either a list view, like this:

Or an expanded view, like this:

If you really subscribe to a lot of blogs (like I do), then you can organize the blogs into different folders/categories.

To create a folder, click on “manage subscriptions” at the very bottom left-hand corner of your page (under “subscriptions.) Then click on the subscriptions tab. Then click “add to a folder” on any of the blog feeds (it doesn’t really matter which one.) At the bottom of the drop-down menu, it will have “add a folder.” Click on that to create a new folder.

Ideas for folders: I love reading writing blogs. If I had my way, I wouldn’t do any work and I’d just read blogs. Obviously, this isn’t a good way to get books written. So to curb myself, I organize blog subscriptions into days of the week and then read those blogs those days. This way I can be sure to read everyone at least some of the time and still get some work done. :)

To page up and down and through your Reader quickly, here are some Google Reader shortcuts to help you out.

Google Reader Housekeeping:

Sometimes you’ll want to go through your Reader and cull some blogs—maybe they’re blogs that haven’t updated for a long time, for example. If you look at the left-hand column on your Google Reader, you’ll see “Your Stuff.” Several items below that is “Trends.” If you click on trends, a screen will pull up that lists blogs that are inactive or obscure…and you can delete your subscription right off the screen.

Hope this helps! Does anyone else have some Google Reader tips to share? Or any questions?

I know that it seems like I spend way too much time at the swimming pool. It’s just been such an incredibly hot summer (even for the Deep South), that whenever my children utter the fateful words, “We’re bored!” then I just pop them in the car and take them off to the pool.

I was at the pool last week and something started bothering me about the tree in the picture. See the tree I’m talking about? It’s huge. It’s like a pine tree on steroids.

The other thing that bothered me about the tree is that, despite the fact it was a windy day and the other trees were blowing back and forth, it didn’t move at all.

Finally I took a picture of the tree (the mommies at the pool are getting used to my weirdness by now, I guess…laptops at the pool, notebooks at the pool, talking to myself, taking notes on the people walking and talking around me, taking pictures of trees….They don’t ever seem to engage me in conversation—I wonder why!) and I realized that the tree was, actually, a cell phone tower disguised to look like a tree.

Having a character stand out in a book because they’re too stiff or not lifelike is a problem—especially if the character is our protagonist.

How can we make our characters more lifelike?

Cheat a little and base the character on someone or several people we know well.

Have the character really feel emotions and show them displaying some emotional range—humor, anger, trepidation.

Give the character a few flaws. Nobody’s perfect.

Help put the reader in the protagonist’s head. What is the character thinking? When a new character is introduced, what does the protagonist think of him or her?

Character growth and development. Does the character change and grow? Or is he static?

How do you make your characters more lifelike?