Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

Elizabeth writes the Memphis Barbeque series (as Riley Adams) and the Southern Quilting mysteries for Penguin and writes the Myrtle Clover series for Midnight Ink and independently. She also has a blog, which was named by Writer’s Digest as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers. There she posts on the writing craft, finding inspiration in everyday life, and fitting writing into a busy schedule.

Creating Distractions for A Protagonist

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Siamese kitten looking distracted

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Larry Brooks of StoryFix frequently offers helpful posts for writers. He wrote a post recently for the Kill Zone blog called “Three Quick and Easy Tips that Will Make Your Novel Better.”  One of the tips he listed was to “give your hero a distracting personal relationship.”

This is one element that can be used in a lot of different helpful ways in your story. It helps make your protagonist seem real and helps create reader empathy for the protagonist. It also can make for a nice subplot to weave through the course of the story to help keep readers reading to see how it will resolve (sometimes as a reader, I’ve found myself more interested in the subplot of a book than the main plot).

It’s especially helpful as a continuing arc in your series, if your series is to be read in order. It can be one thing that remains a constant in the series as crises and supporting characters and settings change.Continue reading

Twitterific Writing Links

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Bluebird with beak open and 'Twitterific Writing Links' by ElizabethSCraig superimposed on the image

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

A weekly roundup of the best writing links from around the web.

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 40,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

Have you visited the WKB lately?  Check out the new redesign where you can browse by category, and sign up for free writing articles, on topics you choose, delivered to your email inbox!  Sign up for the Hiveword newsletter here. 

Have you seen the Top WKB websites for writers for 2017? Check them out here. 

I’ll be away tomorrow in observance of Memorial Day, but back on the blog on Friday. 

Continue reading

Description: Letting Readers Fill in the Gaps

Uncategorized, Writing Tips

Sailboat in background and a man and a woman silhouetted in the foreground, looking out into the sea. The post title, "Letting Readers Fill in the Gaps" by Elizabeth Spann Craig is superimposed on the top.

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I read a nice post by Nils Ödlund, “Don’t Show, Don’t Tell — How to Leave Room for the Reader’s Imagination ” on the Mythic Scribes blog.

As he says in the post: “…I’d like to explain why the reader’s mind is so strong: it’s because they put something of themselves into it. They use their own experiences, expectations, and associations to create the image, and this make it theirs. It becomes more personal; making it easier to understand and to believe in.”

Twice recently, I’ve been surprised by readers with compliments on my character descriptions.

One woman said, “I could see her perfectly. She was just like my Aunt May.”Continue reading

Expanding into Hardcover

Business of Writing, Uncategorized

Hardcover books on shelves in the background, open hardcover books on table in foreground, and the post title 'expanding into hardcover' is superimposed on the front.

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig,o9

I’ve recently been interested in expanding my books into every format that I can.  Who knows how someone might want to read my books? I’m in digital, print (paperback), and audio. I’ve made my books accessible to an international audience and now the Myrtle books are being translated into Spanish (more on that in a later post).

But I’d never really thought about hardcover. It seemed like a very expensive option to buy. I know that, aside from gifts for family, I haven’t bought a hardcover book in ages.

As part of my expansion into other formats and to other markets, however, I realized that my books (through PublishDrive) are doing very well on the OverDrive platform.  That’s a major distributor of digital materials to libraries. (More on OverDrive in this post.)

If my books were doing that well at libraries, I figured that it would make sense to have them also available in hardcover. Perhaps an acquisition librarian would note that my digital books were circulating to readers and decide to purchase a hardcover for the stacks.

Things to consider: 

If you’re on Ingram, you’ll need to have ISBNs for your books (not the free ones from CreateSpace or Smashwords…which actually show CS and SW as the publisher). And, even if you have your own ISBNs, because this is a different format, you’ll need new ISBNs for the books for this particular format. I’m buying ISBNs from Bowker in bulk.Continue reading

Twitterific Writing Links

Twitterific

Bluebird with beak open and 'Twitterific Writing Links' by ElizabethSCraig superimposed on the image

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

A weekly roundup of the best writing links from around the web.

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 40,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

Have you visited the WKB lately?  Check out the new redesign where you can browse by category, and sign up for free writing articles, on topics you choose, delivered to your email inbox!  Sign up for the Hiveword newsletter here. 

Continue reading

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