Tag: writing process

Guest Blogger ~ Lois Winston

~ patyjag ~ 14 Comments

Don’t Measure Yourself Against Another Writer’s Yardstick

By Lois Winston

My critique partner thinks I’m an organized person. When she told me this, I laughed. Like Santa, I make lists and check them, not twice, but multiple times. For instance, I have a list on my phone of items I need to pack for trips, but every time I go away, I invariably wind up forgetting to pack at least one of those essentials and need to find the nearest Target.

I walk into my office to do something, get distracted, and forget to do what I came in to do. Is it age-related? Possibly. I’m the first to admit I’m not as young as I used to be. But if I’m honest with myself, this isn’t a recent development. It’s occurred for as long as I can remember, going all the way back to my childhood. A touch of ADHD? Perhaps. Or maybe I just have an overactive imagination and so much going on in my brain that the less important things get pushed to the side.

Nowhere is this more evident than in my writing. I often can’t remember the names of all the characters in my books. Or the titles. However, I’ve been writing for more than thirty years, and most days, I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night. So how can I be expected to remember all those characters’ names from books written decades ago? Then again, twenty-four novels, five novellas, and several short stories in three+ decades isn’t that much. It’s not like I’m Nora Roberts or James Patterson, knocking out three, four, five or more books a year. (I wonder if they remember all their characters and titles.)

When it comes to sitting down to write, I’m a pantser, not a plotter. Plotters are far more organized, but the few times I’ve tried plotting a book, I became bored with it, deleted the outline, and started over with either the barest bones germ of an idea or maybe only an interesting opening sentence. Rarely more than that. Pantsing is what I do. Trying to write like someone else is counterproductive to achieving an end result that I will be proud to release into the world. Plain and simple: Plotting just doesn’t work for me.

Like readers of mysteries, I want to be surprised. If I already know the who, what, where, when, and why of a story before I write the first sentence, I’ve eliminated the surprise. Writing becomes drudgery, and I know I’ll be letting my readers down. Readers are savvy. They can tell when an author is phoning it in, and when that happens, they toss the book aside.

This is not to say that pantsers are better writers than plotters. They’ve simply found a different path to The End. One that works for them. I wish I could be a happy plotter. Plotters probably don’t write themselves into corners as often as this pantser does. However, I’ve learned plotting is not an option for me. I’m unhappy when I plot, and it shows in my writing. I imagine a diehard plotter would be equally unhappy if forced to sit down and start writing without a clue.

In life, there’s never one right way that works for everyone. The same is true for writers. You can’t measure yourself against another writer’s yardstick. No two brains work the same way. We all learn differently. We each bring unique experiences and knowledge to our writing. Every writer takes a personal path to creating a novel. We all need to find the path that works best for us.

We all choose paths as we go through life. Whether you’re a reader or a writer, have you found the paths that works best for you? Post a comment for the chance to win a promo code for a free audiobook download of any available Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery or Empty Nest Mystery.

Embroidered Lies and Alibis

An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, Book 15

A Stitch in Time Could Save a Life…

When Anastasia’s mother Flora is offered a free spa vacation from Jeremy Dugan, a man connected to her distant past, Anastasia and husband Zack suspect ulterior motives. After all, too-good-to-be-true often spells trouble. Their suspicions are confirmed when the FBI swoops in to apprehend Dugan. However, Dugan isn’t who he claimed to be, and his arrest raises more questions than answers.

The Feds link Dugan to a string of cons targeting elderly single women across the country, but his seemingly airtight alibi leaves investigators stumped. Then, shortly after his release on bail, he’s kidnapped. A certain segment of New Jersey’s population is known for delivering deadly messages, and the FBI believes Dugan received one of them.

Meanwhile, bodies begin showing up in the newly created public garden across the street from Anastasia and Zack’s home. With two baffling crimes, no clear suspects, scant evidence, and every possible motive unraveling, both the FBI and local law enforcement are once again picking Anastasia’s brain. This time, though, her involvement is far from reluctant. Will she stitch together enough clues before she or someone she loves becomes the killer’s next victim?

Craft project included.

Find Buy Links here.

USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com, where you can sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

Self-Discipline at 5 in the Morning

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 3 Comments

By Margaret Lucke

How do you define self-discipline? To me, it’s the quality that enables you to force yourself to do something you know is good for you when you’d rather do something else.

It’s focusing on business rather than pleasure.

It’s favoring long-term goals (lose five pounds, meet the deadline) over short-term benefits (eat the chocolate, spend the gorgeous afternoon taking a walk).

It’s getting up way too early in the morning, when any normal person would still be tucked up comfortably in bed.

But not everyone agrees with me.

Quite a few years ago, as an aspiring mystery novelist, I attended the late, great Cabrillo Suspense Writers Conference, a wonderful event held annually for a decade at a rustic lodge in the Santa Cruz Mountains. One day I had a conversation over coffee with a fellow writer. At that time he had published two well-received mystery novels, but he was still working long hours at his day job at a local college. Finding time to write was a challenge for me, and I asked him how he managed to do that while dealing all of the other demands in his life.

“It’s simple,” he explained. “Every morning, seven days a week, I get up at 5 o’clock and sit down at his desk to write.”

Seriously? There’s a 5 o’clock in the morning? I thought 5 o’clock automatically meant late afternoon.

I am not a morning person. I’m fine with being awake when it’s dark outside, but only if I’ve approached it from the other end, the gradual fading of daylight into night. But wake up while it’s still dark? Impossible. Until daylight touches my bedroom window, my eyes refuse to open and my brain is on strike. I can’t find the floor at 5 a.m. unless I fall out of bed. There’s no way I can write a coherent sentence.

But I have a high regard for writers, and I’ve known several, who regularly rise before dawn to produce pages. Good pages too, not the gibberish I’d come up with.

I said as much to my coffee companion: “You know, I really admire your self-discipline.”

His response surprised me. “Oh, that’s not self-discipline.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “You just said you make yourself get up every morning when you want to be sleeping and force yourself to sit and write.”

“That’s right.”

“How is that not self-discipline? It sounds like the perfect example to me.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “It’s not self-discipline because I don’t enjoy it.”

What? To me, if he didn’t enjoy it, then his peculiar (to me) habit fit the definition even more. Obviously we had different takes on what self-discipline means. I prodded, but I couldn’t get him to explain his concept any further.

Self-discipline or not, whatever he was doing worked. He went on to considerable success and acclaim as a mystery writer, with almost three dozen novels to his credit and several awards on his shelf. My track record, on the other hand, is considerably shorter.

Maybe I should try setting my alarm clock just a little bit earlier.

Endings and Beginnings – Happy 2026

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 10 Comments

By Margaret Lucke

“The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”

Variations of this quote have been attributed to numerous authors, from Mark Twain to Tom Clancy. All of them have had to deal with one of the big challenges of writing fiction—coming up with an ending that works.

How things end is one of the biggest ways in which fiction differs from reality. In a novel or a short story, the events of the tale are supposed to come to an orderly, or occasionally disorderly, resolution. The writer is supposed to tie the plot threads together, if not in a big bow then at least into a somewhat tidy knot. The ending doesn’t have to be a happy one, but it does have to make sense.

In real life endings are often messy. Whether it’s a romance, a marriage, a friendship, a job, a war, a civilization, the ending sometimes comes out of nowhere, a total surprise. Or it’s not so much an ending as simply a point where something stops or runs out of steam. Now and then we don’t even realize that an ending has occurred until much later.

But our human brains, aware that time marches steadily forward, like endings—and beginnings too. When we can bracket a set of events with a start point and an end point, that helps us impose a sort of logic on what’s going on in our lives and lets us achieve a measure of understanding.

Even better are the new beginnings that can follow an ending. This doesn’t happen so much with fiction unless the author is writing a series that chronicles the continuing adventures of a particular character. But in real life the closing of one door often provides us with a way to open another. New possibilities arise; we have new opportunities to reinvent ourselves.

That’s what drives our celebration of New Year’s Eve. The end of the year marks the start of a new one, a fresh page offering hope and the potential for better things to come. We make resolutions of a different kind than the ones we mean when we talk about the resolution of the plot in a work of fiction. We resolve to get organized, to lose weight, to become better people. We entertain the belief—though by now we realize that this may be another work of fiction—that the coming year will be better than the one that has just passed.

Right now we’re in that annual season of endings and beginnings. Last week, in celebration, we put on silly hats (well, not me, but some of us), we blew our noisemakers, we counted down as the ball on tower at Times Square descended, we lifted glasses of champagne in a toast (you could count me in for that one).

We said farewell to 2025, and some of us may not be sorry to see it go. We are ten days into a fresh new year, 2026, which at this point is full of hopes and dreams and positive potentials. May all they all turn out not to be fiction but become a positive reality.

I’ll close with my favorite New Year’s toast, my wish for all of you:

“May 2026 be better than any year that’s come before, and worse than every year that will follow it.”

Cheers, everyone! And Happy New Year!

Are You Listening to What They Are Saying?

~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 2 Comments


by Janis Patterson

Books are a widely varying commodity. Some are so wonderful you could live in that world forever. Some are so bad you don’t even try to finish them. Most fall somewhere in the middle. Right now we’re dealing with a new kind of book, a kind of zombie product written by the abomination of AI and released by the overwhelming hundreds. Luckily – for now, at least – they are recognizable primarily for their lifelessness.


So what is it that binds these widely varying standards together – good, bad and zombie?


There are lots of things, but I believe a lot of it is dialogue. Good books have the characters speaking as if they were real people – not interchangeable cardboard cutouts. Of course, this is occasionally a rule that can be tweaked. In a futuristic sci-fi populated with human-android characters, the speech patterns and word choices would be different than in a light-hearted Regency romance, and each choice should be congruent not only with the time and setting of the book, but with the status/occupation/ethnicity of the individual character.


For an only slightly exaggerated example, everyone is familiar with the slave Prissy’s exclamation during the battle of Atlanta sequence in Gone With The Wind – “I don’t know nothing ‘bout birthing no babies.” As offensive as some modern readers might find it, her heartfelt cry is commensurate with her time, her status and the situation of the scene. Just imagine how jarring it would be if she were to say : “Good gracious, Miss O’Hara, I am completely ignorant of the processes involved in delivering a baby.” That would pull the reader right out of the scene. To a large extent, language equals character.


And the principle doesn’t really change no matter what the genre, though the actual words probably will. In a hard-boiled detective story, a police sergeant is not going to speak the same way as a career petty thief. In a western, a wealthy rancher with political aspirations will sound different from a brow-beaten saddle tramp. In a Regency romance a high in the instep duke will have a completely different vocabulary and range of meaning than a poverty-stricken dock worker. In a contemporary romance sometimes the difference will be less blatant, mainly because of the ubiquity of books and television acting as influencers, but there will be noticeable differences.


Just to make the convoluted even more so, know that all the above can be overridden if the plot demands. Perhaps the duke is working on the docks to find out who is stealing his fortune or something. Perhaps the weary saddle tramp is really a Pinkerton man out to investigate the rancher whom he thinks is really setting himself up as a dictator. Perhaps…. you get the idea. Confustication upon confustication. But you must play fair with the reader – not by telling him from the outset what is going on, but by allowing him to listen to the various people and find out the truth for himself.


Language equals character.


And if you’re writing a hard sci-fi about three-eyed, blue-skinned Orychiks from the Dyinolive galaxy with no humans involved you’re pretty much on your own… just remember that in almost every society the ‘elites’ (for want of a better word) speak differently than the ‘hoi polloi’ (again for want of a better word) primarily as a matter of status. I think this need for distinction, for individuality (even in a herd sense) is hardwired to people’s/being’s innermost self. Even among most animal species there is a distinct pecking order.


Just remember two things – language creates and showcases character, and you must play fair – enough that the reader can follow along with you and understand, even if you do pull a few tricks along the way.

Words, Words, Words

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 4 Comments

By Margaret Lucke

The other day I fell down another internet rabbit hole. While working on a scene in my latest novel-in-progress, I was looking up some words to make sure I was using them correctly. I always like to catch these things, if I can, before the book is published and readers start pointing them out to me.

A couple of hours later, I resurfaced, the sought-after definitions in hand along with quite a few more that were totally irrelevant to the scene in question.

Doing the research can be more fun than doing the writing. It’s a great way to procrastinate while persuading myself that I’m actually working, just as much as if I were putting words on the page. Once I get started doing research like that, one interesting fact leads me to another, and to another. I’m especially fond of fun facts about words, writers, and literature. Here, for your amusement, are some of my discoveries:

*    The longest word in the English-language dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, which is a lung disease contracted from inhaling volcanic particles. It contains 45 letters (I counted so you wouldn’t have to). But its primacy is challenged by the chemical name of a giant protein known as titin, which has 189,819 letters and, it is estimated, would fill around 57 pages if printed in a typical book. A YouTube video of a man pronouncing the word runs almost as long as the film Gone with the Wind. No wonder the dictionary leaves it out.

*    That long p-word disease isn’t much of a problem for writers, who are more likely to be afflicted with colygraphia, which sounds serious enough to earn us plenty of tea and sympathy. Most of us call this problem by its more common name — writer’s block.

*    After you recover from your colygraphia, it’s time to get back to work. Before you know it, you may find yourself complaining about mogigraphia, or writer’s cramp

*    Someone who probably suffered from mogigraphia was Peter Bales, who earned fame in Elizabethan England for his skill as a scribe and calligrapher. In 1590 Bales transcribed a complete copy of the Bible so tiny it could fit inside a walnut shell.

*    Though Bales was known to engage in contests and rivalries, I don’t know if he produced his Bible to win a wager. But some have taken pen in hand in order to win a bet. For instance:

>>   Editor and publisher Bennett Cerf bet Dr. Seuss $50 that he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words. Seuss responded by writing Green Eggs and Ham.

>>   Ernest Hemingway famously won a bar bet when his drinking buddies each put $10 in the pot and challenged him to write a story using only six words. Hemingway scribbled these words on a napkin — “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” — and collected the cash. This has led to an entire genre of six-word stories, some of which can be found at http://www.sixwordstories.net/

>>   Agatha Christie wrote her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, after her older sister bet her that she couldn’t write a mystery novel in which the reader couldn’t guess the murder even though given the same clues as the detective – who in this case is Hercule Poirot.

*    Christie’s other famous sleuth is Miss Jane Marple. But Miss M. was far from the first female detective. That honor may belong to the heroine of a novella by E.T.A Hoffman that was published in 1819, more than a century before Miss Marple made her appearance. Both the sleuth and the novella are named Mademoiselle de Scudéri. That’s the same E.T.A. Hoffman, by the way, who wrote The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which formed the basis of Tchaikovsky’s Christmastime ballet.

Who knew all these cool bits of trivia? Well, I know them, thanks to my research journey and the stops I made along the way. And now so do you. I’ll conclude this list with one final entry:

* A literarian is someone who loves literature and is dedicated to sharing that love with others. In other words, me.

What are some of the odder entries in your literary lexicon?