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• Writing didn’t need to be something that she dreaded.

• Writing didn’t need to be something that took over her
  life.

• Writing could be something she choose to move forward
  on each day.

• Even if you consider yourself a spontaneous person,
  some writing rituals can dramatically increase your productivity and
  decrease your stress. If you loathe this idea, you can find out how to
  overcome your inner routine rebel in my book.
• Look at developing custom routines as
  a process that includes editing. As you saw above, this writer didn’t just
  have one routine and stick with it. She needed to try out a few iterations
  until she found one that was exactly the right fit.

• It’s OK to have a “flexitarian”
  schedule, meaning that not everything needs to happen with clockwork
  precision. For instance, this could mean picking a start trigger, such as
  “after I eat breakfast,” instead of a start time, such as “8 a.m.,” to
  begin your writing.

• Focus on consistently following your
  schedule instead of worrying about constantly being on it. No matter how
  hard you try, there will be some days when following your writing routine
  just isn’t possible. Instead of beating yourself up over it, you can
  simply acknowledge the deviance, forgive yourself if it was due to some
  fault of your own, and then move on in the realization that the only thing
  you can control is your decision of the present moment. 

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

One of my favorite ways to learn more about a new character (I always have plenty of new characters since each book has new suspects), is to think about what they’re reading.

Or…if they’re not reading…that says a lot about the characters, too.

What’s the book title?  Why is he reading it? For work?  Because someone pressured him to read it?  Because he thinks he should be reading it?  For pleasure?  What’s the book’s genre?  Is it nonfiction?  Is he reading on an e-reader or a print copy?

There are tons of these types of questions that we can ask ourselves about our characters.  Many times, we just take that bit of insight into the character and don’t need to share our findings with our readers. 

But sometimes we will want to share.  Because readers like picking up on these small clues to a character’s personality, too.  Readers, upon discovering a character casually reading The Visual Guide To Extra Dimensions: Visualizing The Fourth Dimension, Higher-Dimensio​nal Polytopes, And Curved Hypersurfaces will assume that Ralph is smart.  Being told that Ralph is smart is less interesting.

Sometimes characters just pop into our heads, fully-formed. Sometimes they’re amalgams of different people we know. 

And sometimes we have to work on our characters a little bit.

There have been resources over the years that I’ve found particularly helpful for thinking outside the box when creating characters.  I’ve listed these in various past posts, but thought I’d compile a bunch of them here.

Author Stina Lindenblatt in her post “Creating the Non-Stereotypical Character” shared an exercise from author Mary Buckham for character development.  It involved listing stereotypical traits for the main characters’ careers…and mixing the traits from the lists up. 

Writer Cheryl Reif talks about character quirks in her post: Tuesday Ten: Character Quirks .  An old role-playing system by Steve Jackson inspired her approach.

The folks at Inspiration for Writers came up with a useful page to help develop characters…personality components can be particularly useful (toward the bottom of the page.) 

I’m not always a worksheet-oriented writer, but they always help when I do use them.

These worksheets are excellent and are from our friends at the Adventures in YA and Children’s Publishing blog (but are useful for all genres):

Character Worksheet Part 1
Character Worksheet Part 2
Character Worksheet Part 3
Character Worksheet Part 4

Janice Hardy in her post “She’s Such a Character: Creating Characters,” lists things she wants to know about her characters before she starts writing…and things she looks for as she writes, too.

Writer Kaye Dacus’ series on Creating Credible Characters covers everything from character name creation to character culture, to casting characters.

Hope these links will help.  You can find many more tips on character development at the Writer’s Knowledge Base.

What methods do you use to develop your characters? 

Image: Brian Hogg, MorgueFile

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Happy New Year everyone!  Hope you all have a healthy, happy year.

Writing-wise, 2013 will be a different type of year for me.  I’d halfway forgotten this until I was speaking with my family over the Christmas holiday.

“What are you working on for 2013?” they asked.

“After my deadline on February 1, I’m on my own,” I told them. I said this with complete equanimity, but each time I said this (different groups of family), the other person was startled and appeared a little worried.

“You don’t have another contracted book after that?” they asked.

I don’t.

So I have a book coming out in 2014 with Penguin that I’m turning in at the end of this month and then I wait to see if one of my series will be extended.

My family also asked if I had ideas that I could pitch to my publisher.  And I do.  I actually even have an outline…or what passes for an outline for me—where I give the book premise, suspects, motives, victim, and killer.  I think it’s a pretty viable outline and will make for a good series. I like my other concept, too.

But….I think I might keep those pitches to myself.  I’m thinking about writing one of them later this year and putting it out, myself.

If I’m contacted about extending my two series with Penguin, I’ll be delighted to write them.  I love the characters and have enjoyed writing the series so far.

If I’m contacted about writing some new series, one that my publisher would like to have written, I’d be happy to write that, too.

But I think I’m keeping my current ideas to myself.

It will be an interesting year.  Last year, I wrote Knot as it Seams, Quilt Trip, and Rubbed Out for Penguin (Knot and Rubbed will come out this year, Quilt Trip next year) and  one Myrtle Clover book, Body in the Backyard, for myself.

This year, I’m polishing up Quilt Trip before turning it in Feb. 1…and then I’m on my own.  

My plan is to write just as many books this year, but they’ll all be self-published, unless I get a contract extension or a new project from my publisher.  One of my self-pub. projects will be a short non-fiction how-to on cozy mystery writing…good to try something new.


I’ve definitely got a different mindset than I did in 2009.  At the time, I wondered what would happen after I finished writing book 3 of the Memphis Barbeque series. I felt a tremendous sense of relief when my agent contacted me about writing a new series for Penguin.

Now I’m a lot more relaxed.  I know that I can do well self-publishing.  I know I’ve got a team of people to help me make sure my stories are ready to publish and look professional. I know I don’t have to have a contract with a publisher…I can have a contract directly with a retailer like Amazon or Smashwords or Barnes and Noble.

I’m not usually Little Miss Que Será, Será.  I’m usually a basket of nerves.  Which goes to show how radical this publishing shift has been over the last few years.

I’m enjoying this sense of freedom and lack of urgency.  Realizing things will work out either way…and simply keeping abreast to any industry changes or any new ideas about taking our writing into the future.

I remember thinking that getting a traditional publishing contract was like a politician winning an election—you celebrate for a day, then you start worrying about and working on the next campaign.  It’s wonderful that this is no longer the case in publishing.

But being relaxed doesn’t mean we don’t push ourselves.  We push ourselves to reach our goals, to tweak our stories, to learn about self-publishing, to decide how much promotion to do, to keep up with industry news and developments. We push ourselves to stay creative and consider writing new and different stories or even new and different genres.

What are your writing plans for the year? Have they changed at all in the last few years?

Photo by  nasirkhan from MorgueFile

Happy New Year (almost)!  I’ll be back on Wednesday with my first post for 2013.  Now for some writing links.