by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I’m new to outlining and sometimes there’s an element that’s missing when I draft outlines—complexity. I think that’s because I usually add more layers to my books after [...]

by Jodie Renner, editor, author, speaker What exactly is “voice” in fiction? An engaging story “voice” captures us from the first sentence and beckons us into the story world. Literary agents and acquiring [...]

 by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Twitterific links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 23,000 free articles on writing related [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I recently had someone email me asking how he could most effectively promote if he had no time at all to promote. I know there have got to [...]

Guest Post by Jack Smith You can handle novel revision in many different ways—probably too numerous to mention.  One method: You can rework pages one at a time, trying to get everything right [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Friday I spoke to a book club in my hometown of Anderson, South Carolina.  It was a great group and a very well-established one—it had been founded in [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Twitterific links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 23,000 free articles on writing related [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Hi everyone.  Hope you all have a great weekend.  I’ve got a guest post today at the We Wanted to be Writers blog–they have an interesting feature called [...]

by Stephen McCutchan, @stevemccutchan A Good Mystery A good mystery helps restore order and makes sense out of something that is unexplainable in our society. People do not like to live in a [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Although I don’t do a ton of interviews, I probably do a live or recorded interview every few months.  I especially like the recorded ones because I figure [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Twitterific links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 23,000 free articles on writing related [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig On Monday’s post, I received a comment from Colleen…she was interested in hearing more about balancing or approaching life as a hybrid writer—someone who is both traditionally published [...]

Guest Post by James Mullen I’ve started to sketch out the plot for my second book.  The book is a police procedural based in Boston, and although I visit the area frequently, I [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig As I mentioned last week, I recently turned in a teaser chapter and an outline to one of my Penguin editors.  This particular editor likes to see an [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Twitterific links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 23,000 free articles on writing related [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I dislike writing setting and description, but I used to absolutely despise it.  I’ve got plenty of now-published manuscripts in my Word archives with helpful editorial direction on [...]

 Guest Post by Deborah Sharp First, I must recognize Mystery Writing is Murder as the fantastic resource it is for me, and for countless others. Much thanks to Elizabeth for her fantastic blog, [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Last December I was at a Christmas drop-in and was hanging out near the back of the room…my favorite haunt at social events.  This spot is even better [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Twitterific links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 23,000 free articles on writing related [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I wanted to share some sites that I’ve found really helpful lately.  I’m always looking for ways to save time using apps and, so frequently, I seem to [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I had a deadline Sunday that I met just in the nick of time. :)  It was a deadline for a teaser chapter—the first chapter in my current [...]

Guest Post by Jack Smith Dialogue Tags What about “he said”/”she said”—do you need them?  Or perhaps the character’s name instead of the pronoun?  How much of either is needed?  How much is [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Twitterific links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 23,000 free articles on writing related [...]

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig This post will be short and sweet because…I’ve gotten a little behind with everything this week.  :) And the odd thing is that this is back to school [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig The business side of writing is my least favorite part.  I struggle to keep up.  And there’s sort of a residual guilt that I’m not doing all I [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I think when writers ask how many drafts another writer completes for a finished story, they’re really wondering whether they’re spending too much time editing or too little [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Twitterific links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 23,000 free articles on writing related [...]

 by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Wednesday, I was the only adult in the line of about 100 junior year high school students in front of the counselor’s office.    The students were all [...]

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I’ve been asked a few times lately to write a post about how I outline, since I’ve recently been talking about outlining. This is something I’ve been reticent [...]

by K.M. Weiland (@KMWeiland) I’m sometimes asked which is more important: plot or character. This is a misleading question, at its foundation. Not only are plot and character equally important, they’re also interdependent [...]