Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

I’d just like to check and see if anyone else is in the same shape I am, memory-wise. It seems that my head is so full of imaginary friends (and I do mean my characters…I gave up on Super Elizabeth a long time ago) that I’ve become very, very forgetful.

I forget things I’m supposed to attend. I forget where I’ve put something. I forget why I went upstairs. I forget why I went to the store.

And very frequently, I’m forgetting people. This is very bad because these people never forget me and spend their lives tormenting me in the drugstore, grocery store, post office, and library: “Elizabeth! How are you? And how is your husband? And your two children? Gosh, your son must be going into 7th grade now? Wow! Please tell your family I said hi.” And I am smiling and stuttering and wondering who the hell these people are.

My good friends know that I will never introduce them to anyone because I won’t remember who the person is who acts like they know me.

Lately I’ve tried to do a pre-emptive strike: if a person looks even vaguely familiar, I go up to talk to them. If I act like I know them first, then they won’t realize I don’t remember them at all.

This led to a very embarrassing situation for me at the Harris Teeter grocery store the other day. There was a middle-aged man in the frozen foods that I thought looked familiar. “Hi there!” I said brightly and started a conversation with him. He looked surprised, but pleased. I ended up with, “Well, I hope I’ll see you at Boy Scouts soon.” “Oh,” he said with crinkled brow, “I don’t have a son.”

Dear God. So my poor memory led to me chatting up strange men at the grocery store.

Anyhow, the point of this story is to find out if anyone else is in the same mess? Oh—and also, do people talk to you when you’re in your own, creative little world and they have t0 say “Ma’am? Ma’am? Ma’am?” a few times before you snap-to?

Or do I need to make an appointment with my GP?

We all need a little help.

I’ve been the recipient of a great deal of help the last few days—in the form of my twelve-year-old son.

We were at Walmart and he wanted to purchase something there….and he was a little short. He wanted me to spot him—$40.00.

I know a good deal when I see one. He’s young, he’s strong, and he needs money. Now I have myself an indentured servant for the next month and boy: I am definitely taking advantage of that fact. Yesterday, he and I went through my desk. The process took about an hour and a half. He spent most of that time shredding, filing, and occasionally rolling his eyes. But he also had some very good ideas about how to make the process easier.

Ideas are important and we don’t always get them ourselves. Sometimes we’re so stuck in the rut of our routines (but…this is the way I always organize the desk…) that we don’t view challenges with fresh eyes.

Sidekicks are wonderful additions to our novels. Dr. Watson for Sherlock, Captain Hastings for Poirot, Robin for Batman. For one thing, they keep our protagonist from having long internal monologues about their conflicts—instead, they can share them with a sidekick. And maybe bounce some ideas off them, too.

It can be a little boring reading about the perfect protagonist who solves all their own problems. Much nicer, much more realistic, I think, to have them tell a friend about them…and maybe get a fresh perspective on their challenges.

Today was my first day to blog at InkSpot—the blog for Midnight Ink writers.

The topic I wrote on was “Information Dumps”—you know, when you dump a whole bunch of information, usually backstory and character description, on a reader at one time.

Hope you’ll pop over to InkSpot and visit me there.

I’ve always been fascinated by different perspectives (like the optical illusion on the left. Do you see the young woman with her face turned away? Do you see the hag with her chin tucked into her fur coat?)

Whenever a plane crashes, the eyewitness accounts are usually radically different: “The plane banked to the left.” “The plane’s nose turned to the ground.” Even the eyewitness accounts of the Titanic differed: did the ship break in half? Did the ship descend into the sea fully intact and nose down?

I like the use of different perspectives with mysteries and think there may be other applications in both fiction and non-fiction. In mysteries, different eyewitnesses may have completely different versions of events. This means a sleuth may rely on the account of one witness: “When I heard the noise it was eleven o’clock. Woke me up out of a sound sleep and sent shivers up and down my spine…” but then discover from another witness: “Jim? No, he wasn’t awake at eleven o’clock. Snoring like a baby. But I did hear a ruckus around 11:45….scared the life out of me.”

What about in non-fiction? Journalists usually interview more than one witness to get information for a story. What if you were doing an in-depth report on the election debacle in Iran? You would hear one completely different account from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supporters and another from Mir Hossein Mousavi’s. It’s always interesting to include opposing opinions. It may make the proponent of the wrong-sided opinion look ignorant, but it’s almost always entertaining.

In fiction, you could have a protagonist who seems to go from one conflict to another, fueled in part by their pigheadedness. What if they had a best friend who slapped some sense into them and started them on a completely different track? What might that do to your story?

I don’t know about you, but the site that I use most frequently is Google. I have it set as my home page now, since I bring it up so much.

There are some time-saving tips for use with Google, in case you’re like me (always searching for something in a hurry.) Check out the Google Guide. Here are some of the more-useful search tips (excerpted right from the guide):

salsa –dance
the word salsa but NOT the word dance (that’s a minus sign before the ‘dance.’)

castle ~glossary
glossaries about castles, as well as dictionaries, lists of terms, terminology

define:imbroglio
definitions of the word imbroglio (or whatever word you’re looking up) from the Web

site:
Search only one website or domain.
Halloween site:www.census.gov
(Search for information on Halloween gathered by the US Census Bureau.)

link:
Find linked pages, i.e., show pages that point to the URL.
link:warriorlibrarian.com
(Find pages that link to Warrior Librarian‘s website.)

phonebook:
Show all phonebook listings.
phonebook: Disney CA
(Search for Disney’s phone numbers in California – CA.)

info:
(or id:)
Find info about a page.
info:www.theonion.com
(Find information about The Onion website.)

related:
List web pages that are similar or related to the URL.
related:www.healthfinder.gov
(Find websites related to the Healthfinder website.)

intitle:
The terms must appear in the title of the page.
movies comedy intitle:top ten
(Search for pages with the words movie and comedy that include top ten in the title of the page.)

It can be really frustrating to Google something specific and have thousands of unrelated hits come up. These are tools to narrow down what we’re looking for and get our information quicker—and get back to writing.