Elizabeth Spann Craig's Blog, page 238

What Highly Creative People Have in Common…Nurturing Creativity

One of the most popular posts that I tweeted last week was this one: http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit/ on Leo Babauta's excellent Zen Habits blog.

His post, summing, up was on the number one habit of highly creative people. It was solitude.

He'd polled some creatives from a variety of different fields for the answer, but he'd also pulled examples from the past, like:

Picasso: "Without great solitude no serious work is possible."
Sandburg: "One of the greatest necessities in...

Adapting Our Writing Routine…and How to Survive Your Kids' Summer Vacation

I have a week and a half until my children's schools let out for the summer.

This time last year, I was completely horrified at that realization.

This year? Not so much. Because I managed to write the better part of a novel over summer break last year. It had to be done…I was under a deadline. I developed my own routine last summer.

Now I've got a routine for every occasion, not just summer break.

Please pop over to the Meanderings and Muses blog where I outline some different...

Twitterific

First of all, I'd like to make a little plug for my upcoming release, Delicious and Suspicious, written under my Riley Adams pen name. Today, my book is reviewed on Mason Canyon's book blog, Thoughts in Progress. I hope you'll pop over and visit there.

And now, Twitterific. Here are writing links that I've posted to Twitter for the past 7 –8 days. If you're looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top left-hand corner of the blog and the...

Trying Something New vs. Branding

This is a subject I haven't worked out for myself yet, but I've been thinking about it.

There are definitely some authors that, when you say their name, you get an image of a particular kind of book.

Stephen King.

Nora Roberts.

J.K. Rowling.

To a much lesser degree (and I think this mainly refers to genre writers), you have midlist authors who get associated with a particular genre and writing style. If the author has done their job promoting themselves and their books and creating a b...

Fuel for Your Marathon—by Stephanie Janulis

Writing a novel is often compared to running a marathon - the necessary training, tenacity, endurance, passion, and sheer will to finish are shared by both endeavors.  I trained for a marathon but never ran the race.  It took a long time for me to look at it not as a failure, but as an opportunity to learn a lesson or two and apply those to a fresh challenge.  I also worked on my first novel for four years and finally put it aside, incomplete.  For that, too, it was difficult to move past...

Someone for the Reader to Care About

Sometimes I read books and the protagonists just leave me completely cold.

The books frequently have plenty of conflict. Bad things happen to these characters and we're supposed, as readers, to care about that.

But…I don't. And when I get to that point in a book, I might as well just scrap it, and usually do.

This doesn't mean the protagonist has to be a really good person. In fact, I can read books like the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay or The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia...

Website and Blog Musts

An author, or aspiring author, website or blog plays a lot of important roles.

We can entice new readers, sell books, and generally offer a professional image of ourselves to people in the industry or readers.

Also—we can give people a way to contact us. These people could be agents, editors, journalists, book bloggers…or other people who would like to get in touch with us.

Over the last week, I've noticed that while many people have Facebook pages and Twitter feeds linked in their...

Rearranging Things

Yesterday I was cooking and opened a cabinet for a Corningware dish.

It wasn't there.

After a lot of looking, I found it in a completely different location of the kitchen in a cabinet I rarely use.

Did I have a mild stroke before putting it away? Was I under the influence of allergy medication?

Oh. No, my husband had unloaded the dishwasher for me. I reminded myself that that was nice of him. Although he doesn't seem to know where anything goes.

Then I looked at the location he'd...

Marketing Lessons from Passionate Artists

This past weekend I ran into a couple of different artists selling their work.

The first time I was at (of all places) Walmart. There was a man in the parking lot, approaching different people with: "Hi there! Do you like hip-hop? You do? I've got something for you to listen to that I think you're going to love."

Yes, he was hawking his CDs in the parking lot of Walmart. I actually stopped what I was doing and watched him for a few minutes because he was so good at selling his work a...

Twitter for Writers

My friend Jan asked me yesterday to elaborate a little more on Twitter—mostly how to make connections to share her blog posts with a wider audience of readers.

So let's say you're on Twitter. You have a handful of followers and you are interested in promoting your blog posts or maybe a book.

First of all, you need more followers. How do you do that?

I think the best way is to steadily increase the number of people that you're following. And you're probably going to want to target...