by Elizabeth Spann Craig, @elizabethspanncraig.com Filter words sneak into your writing and create distance between readers and your story, turning vivid scenes into secondhand reports that readers experience from the outside looking in. [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethspanncraig.com The last thing we want for our books is to have readers abandoning them halfway through. I’ll admit that, as a reader, if a book hasn’t grabbed me [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethspanncraig.com Nothing kills reader enjoyment faster than confusion. We lose readers when readers have to stop and figure out who’s talking, where they are, or what just happened. [...]
by DiAnn Mills, @diannmills Throughout time, the world has provided us with real people who attempted feats of courage to survive the odds against them. Those heroes and heroines tapped into mental, [...]
by Nick Bailey It was a dark and stormy night… reading this opening, you might be tempted to roll your eyes. But there’s a reason the phrase has endured long enough to become [...]
Today I’m over at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group with a post on plot devices. When done wrong, they drive me crazy. But when they’re done right, they can make a story very [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethspanncraig.com Creating a personal style guide can be really helpful when you’re writing in series. It was something that Penguin did for me when I wrote for them [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethspanncraig.com It’s a scenario every writer dreads: you’ve sent your manuscript to several beta readers, and their feedback arrives with contradictions that leave you more confused than before. One [...]
I think drafting is one of those processes we have to make our own, often through trial and error. There are a few of those when you’re a writer: whether to outline [...]
By Joanna Campbell Slan, @joannaslan Writing Through the Pandemic: Why I Decided to Include COVID-19 in My Cozy Mysteries By Joanna Campbell Slan When I began writing Mask or Raid: Book #17 [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig As a reader, I’ve always enjoyed a good subplot. Sometimes, it’s what’s kept me reading a book. I’ll want to see what happens in the B-story, even after I’ve [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I’ve both read a book and watched a movie recently that had bad reviews because the audience thought they were going to read/watch one thing and were delivered [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig When I was starting to write my Memphis BBQ series in about 2009 (assigned as a writer-for-hire for Penguin), I packed up and my husband and two young [...]
By Patricia Crisafulli, @TrishCrisafulli I was on my way to a writers’ conference where I was teaching a workshop on the objective correlative—a rather complicated way of saying “things that are far [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig This is one of those posts where I sort of cringe as I write it. It’s not what I would have necessarily believed or even wanted to do [...]
by Neil Plakcy When I began writing my series of stories based on the concepts of Japanese healing fiction, I discovered that there are many uniquely Japanese literary terms. The popularity of this [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I’m always looking for ways to improve as a writer. Sometimes, the information out there on the writing craft can be a little overwhelming. Actually, it can [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig Crutch words are a funny thing. When I first started seriously writing, in the early 2000s, the overused words I leaned on were different from the ones I have [...]
by DiAnn Mills, @diannmills Writers hear so much about deep point of view, yet we question where it fits and how to use it? Much of the curiosity is centered on today’s readers. [...]
by Felicity Green When I first started self-publishing in 2014, I was familiar with the German book market. I had worked at small publishing companies in Zurich, as an editor and in marketing, [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig I was reading a mystery recently, a book that I was enjoying. It was a British police procedural with great, atmospheric settings, interesting characters, and a puzzling murder. [...]
by @AngelaAckerman @WriterThesaurus Writing is no easy task, especially as it means juggling dozens of story elements at once: characters, plot, setting, dialogue, description, pacing, symbolism, you name it. And when we become [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig A little over a year ago, I started work on a new project. Three weeks later, I abandoned it. It’s the first time since the 1990s that I’ve [...]
by Mike Martin, @mike54martin It seems like I have been writing the Sgt. Windflower Mystery series forever. Well, it has been a long time. The Walker on the Cape came out in 2012 [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig LitLinks are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 70,000 free articles on writing related [...]
by Anna A Armstrong Everything in life and books comes down to character. There are few more enjoyable ways to while away a morning than spending time in a café with a really [...]
by Hugh Cook A cardinal principle of fiction writing is that effective characterization lies at the heart of all good fiction. This holds true whether you write thrillers, romance, fantasy, sci-fi, or literary [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig It’s been a while since I started writing a new series. Late-2018 was the last time, actually. The reason I don’t start new series all the time is [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig Here’s a quick reminder for those of you who get book covers from your designers before working on the book. Make sure, before the paperback version goes live, [...]
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig LitLinks are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 70,000 free articles on writing related [...]
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