Guest Bio:
Elizabeth writes the Southern Quilting mysteries and Memphis Barbeque mysteries for Penguin Random House, and the Myrtle Clover series for Midnight Ink, and also writes and publishes independently. She blogs at ElizabethSpannCraig.com/blog, which was named by Writer’s Digest as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers. Elizabeth curates links on Twitter as @elizabethscraig that are later shared in the free search engine WritersKB.com.
Show Notes:
The thing I enjoyed most about talking to Elizabeth is how freaking strong her Pro Writer Mindset is. She was rejected by agents 110 TIMES!!! Most writers would’ve thrown in the towel long before that, but she just framed it in her mind as “this wasn’t the right agent for me.”
Some additional takeaways I had from this interview:
- Elizabeth actually got the “rights to her characters” back from her publisher so she could continue writing stories about those characters and their worlds, but self-publish them instead.
- She recommends using your book reviews as feedback for how you can improve–especially if the same problem is mentioned over and over again.
- Collect all the stuff you’ve written that you really love–blog posts, passages from your fiction, emails from readers–and keep them all in a folder on your computer. On the days when you’re feeling like you suck, are feeling overwhelmed or like you can’t do this, you can go back and read through these passages and be reminded of why you’re doing this and how good you really are. It really puts it into perspective.
- Ask yourself–what’s the bare minimum I know I can write every day? 100 words? 1 page? Figure out what the bare minimum is for you, and then commit to doing at least the bare minimum every day. This will create consistency and progress, and that will motivate you to keep going.
- Pro writers have a BUSINESS mindset–they think about their readers when they’re writing and creating their books and other content.
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