Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

I’m writing this Tuesday morning at the coffeehouse. There’s a lady sitting at the table in front of me who keeps looking at me and smiling like she knows me.

I hope she doesn’t know me because I definitely don’t know her.

She’s blonde. She has her hair back in a ponytail and a Nike baseball cap on top of that. She’s medium build. She has a nice jogging suit and expensive running shoes on.

She looks like about twenty-five other suburban mommies I know. I’m sure I’ve got to look to her like a million other moms she knows…so maybe she doesn’t know me and she just thinks she does.

This is a danger when creating characters, too. Sometimes characters can run together a little bit.

What I don’t usually include:

There are only so many different hair colors. Well, unless you dye your hair….that really opens up the color spectrum. So when describing a character, I might not mention the hair unless they’re losing it or have their roots showing or have something else noteworthy about it. Because, as a reader? I’m just not going to remember later who the blondes, brunettes, or redheads in a book are.

Describing height is also something I don’t spend a lot of time on unless the character is unusually tall or short. It just sounds sorta police line-uppy to me.

I’m also not crazy about paragraphs that are intended to paint a descriptive picture of a character. It just pulls me right out of a book—I feel like I’m seeing the puppet’s strings.

What I do usually include:

I like a couple of interesting details about a character. I don’t need a total rundown on their appearance, but little bits are great—I loved that Harry Potter’s glasses were taped together and that he had a lightening bolt scar. Unusual physical characteristics help tell characters apart.

Learning about characters’ personalities through their actions is fun. Are they calm and collected during emergencies? Do they party too much at parties? Do they keep the secrets our protagonist tells them? Do they over-tip or under-tip a waitress? Are they sloppy in appearance or in their housekeeping? Some characters are reticent and fearful during the mystery. Others are always happily in the middle of the action.

Mannerisms and dialogue are helpful in establishing character identities. Each expresses their own attitudes, insecurities, or confidence when they speak. Sometimes characters can even casually talk to other characters and drop clues as to appearance. “I wish I could eat a plate of onion rings and not gain a pound, Lou.”

As a reader, if I read one character’s perceptions of another character, it does help me remember the character. It’s almost like that character is gossiping to me. Myrtle wished Erma would just back UP. This close-talking was fine and dandy unless you had halitosis. Which Erma definitely suffered from.

The woman here at the coffeehouse is packing her things up and leaving. Maybe she wasn’t sure she knew me either. Good thing neither of us are characters in a book.

I frequently have classical music playing in the background at home while the kids are eating or while I’m writing (no pesky lyrics to get me off-track.)

My daughter perked up when one piece started playing. “I know this one!” she said. Then she frowned at the title that showed on the television (I get music via satellite on Sirius.) “Whaaa? What’s the name of it?”

It wasn’t a very catchy name. Eine kleine Nachtmusik Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major, K. 525. By Mozart. And if you listen to it, you’ll recognize it right away—it’s background music in gobs of movies, commercials, cartoons, etc.

But good luck remembering that title, unless you’re a huge classical music fan. It’s just not something that’s going to stick in your head.

I’ve read a few books like this, too. The title is either way too long, has a difficult to pronounce place name or character name in it, or just doesn’t seem to fit the book. When it doesn’t fit the book, a connection doesn’t click in my brain. And then I look dumb when people ask me what book I’m reading and I can’t remember the title!

Character names can be just as bad. I’ve pointed out some character name difficulties before—characters whose names start with the same letter, etc. (I just have a horrid memory and stumble when reading if I can’t differentiate easily between characters.) But obscure or difficult to pronounce names are also hard for readers.

I read Those Who Save Us late last year. One of the main characters in the book was the Obersturmfuhrer. Bleh. So every time I read that name, my mind just said, O-blahblah. Which was fine, until I went to my book club meeting and couldn’t remember the guy’s name at all…and couldn’t very well call him O-blahblah.

My first two books had punning titles of Southern sayings. They’re catchy enough…but people mess up those titles all the time, y’all. I’m just lucky that when you Google Pretty is as Pretty DOES, that my title will come up, even though it’s DIES. So I can’t necessarily recommend that approach.

My first Memphis BBQ book will be Delicious and Suspicious. It’s short and rhyming, which hopefully will keep it catchy.

I’ve currently got two books I need to name. How do you come up with titles for stories and novels? Any good tips to share?

Alan Orloff at A Million Blogging Monkeys had a great post last week dealing with scene pacing. As he mentioned, it’s best to start a scene late in the action and end the scene early.

Otherwise, our characters start doing boring things.

My characters love doing boring things. I let them have their way with the manuscript on the first draft, but for the second? They’re not having pointless phone conversations anymore. They’re not walking to the front door, putting on their jacket, and strolling out to the car.

We don’t have to be with the character every step of the way in a book. We don’t have to sit with them through their meals, watch them do their dishes. We don’t have to be there when they go to bed at night or wake up in the morning.

Instead, we can start scenes in the middle of the action.

So instead of having my Memphis BBQ protagonist Lulu get dressed in a floral dress, eat a bowl of Fruit Loops, happily sing along with the radio, arrive at her Aunt Pat’s barbeque restaurant, and discover a body, I could do this instead:

Lulu unlocked the door to the restaurant, reached in, and fumbled for the lights, still humming that tune from South Pacific. Her keys hit the wooden floor with a clunk. There was a body in a pool of blood smack dab in the middle of the dining room.

The reader just assumes that Lulu got ready for her day. I don’t have to shadow Lulu while she decides which of her dozen floral dresses she’s going to put on for the day. The reader assumes that Lulu has gotten dressed. They know she didn’t just show up for work unclothed. And she probably had something to eat, too.

Okay, let’s say we’re spanning two days. We have one event that happens in the early evening (say Lulu finds a clue), then we have something that happens the next afternoon (a suspect is taken in for questioning.)

So Lulu has made a major discovery pertaining to the case. It’s a clue…or maybe a red herring, we don’t know yet. This is a very exciting development for the case. But I’m going to water down that exciting moment if I suddenly go into documentary mode and follow Lulu home, have Lulu turn in, have some time-filling stuff going on all the next morning, lunch, and early afternoon. I’ve just killed my exciting moment.

Instead, I’ll have Lulu’s world rocked. She’s discovered a clue—and it points to the guilt of someone close to her. Lulu’s stomach knots up. End of scene.

How do I transition to the next scene, nearly twenty-four hours later? Very simply: The next afternoon, Lulu was cleaning up after the lunch rush when two police officers strode into the restaurant.

That’s all there is to it. The reader doesn’t even really notice that time lapse…it’s as innocuous as using ‘said’ to tag conversation. Our brains just kind of register it and move on.

Right now, looking at my first draft, my characters are doing all kinds of monotonous stuff. I think, for me, it’s the writing equivalent of using ‘uh’ and ‘um’ in conversation. They’re just cleaning up, dressing, sleeping, and eating while I figure out what to do with them next.

But once I’m in second draft mode, their nonsense is all edited out. With 75,000 words, I don’t have time to waste.

I wrote for a couple of hours in the coffeehouse last week. A couple of hours is a pretty long writing session for me. I got nearly a chapter written on the second Memphis book and felt proud of myself for knocking so much out.

But there was a barista there who had me beat to pieces, as far as being productive.

She greeted probably 80% of the people who walked in the door by name. (I have days when I struggle to remember my own name. It’s the Riley/Elizabeth thing…I think I’m getting confused.) This girl seemed genuinely happy to see the customers and even asked about specific things related to their lives.

The barista told one of the customers that she’d been up until 2:30 that morning studying….she was a college student. She gotten to the coffee shop at 6:30 a.m. and was working until noon, when she went to class. After class she waited tables at a restaurant until 11-ish. Then went back to her apartment and studied.

Okay…given…she was 21 years old. Being young does do a lot for your energy level. But she seemed—alert. Energetic. Happy!

I’m usually running around like a chicken with my head cut off. It’s fueled by coffee in the early morning and deadline desperation by the late morning. My fast pace while knocking out non-writing related stuff is due to pure necessity. Otherwise…the stuff just wouldn’t get done.

My energy? It’s hyperactive. It does get stuff done, but I seem more jittery than not. And I have a writing friend, Cleo Coyle, who writes two series for Penguin and has a lot going on. But it seems like the more she has to do, the more productive she gets.

So I thought I’d look at energy-boosting ideas.

Coffee. I’m drinking enough of it, I’m sure. It does help, though! At least, short-term. Before the inevitable crash. :)

Exercise. Bleh. But okay, I’m trying. I’m on the Wii 3 or 4 times a week now, doing that advanced step aerobics. Does anybody else do it? Do y’all think it’s hilarious that the steppers are on a stage with an audience cheering them on?

Sleep. Yeah, that would definitely help. Insomnia keeps me from much of it, though.

Meditation/Quiet time. I hear a lot about the benefits of this, but haven’t seemed to be able or willing to squeeze time in for it. How long is long enough to have it work?

I’m thinking exercise or meditation sounds like the best of the group. Maybe there are more ways to get energized? Anyone?

And—if you exercise—what works well for you?

I thought that, after writing a post on James Patterson—the top book marketer—that I’d write a short post on J.D. Salinger—the anti-promoter.

James Patterson and J.D. Salinger shared the same publisher: Little, Brown & Co. That’s all they seem to have had in common.

Salinger, famed writer of Catcher in the Rye, died Wednesday at the age of 91. He wrote four books; his last release was Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

By all accounts, he was a man who loved writing. In 1999, Salinger’s neighbor claimed Salinger told him he had at least fifteen unpublished books in a safe at his house. Salinger’s former girlfriend said he wrote daily.

In 1974, Salinger told The New York Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

Salinger was a remarkable writer, but it’s easy for me to feel selfish as a reader and wonder why he didn’t care more about us—what books have we missed out on because of his intensely private nature?

I have similar feelings for Harper Lee. No other To Kill a Mockingbirds for us? Really? Please?

I’m a private person, myself. And an introvert. It is very difficult for me to gear myself up to do an appearance or go to a conference or workshop. But I see it as part of my job as a writer.

The job description of an author has definitely changed in the past twenty years. Unless you have a truly amazing talent, you really can’t get away with doing some form of promotion for your novel.

Readers are lucky they have Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird to read and enjoy. Maybe it’s just human nature that we want a little more.

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A quick note to mention we’re all lying about ourselves at Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen today–and also giving one truth…but you’ll have to pick out the truth from the lies! Hope you’ll pop over: we’re having fun today.