Nathan Bransford - The Forums

"Ronald left this world as he entered it: on a frigid winter night, amid frantic screams and blood-soaked linens, while relatives stood nearby and muttered furious promises to find and punish the man responsible." How the heck are these the worst sentences written? Sure, it sounds like it ...

I tend to watch more Netflix than real TV, what with not having a real TV, but recently I've been scouring the parts of British comedy that never made it to PBS in the US; I'm waiting right now for the first disc of "Only Fools and Horses", ranked Britain's best sitcom ever but which is co...

"When I learned Greek at Cheam and heard of other gods a great pity came on me for those beautiful marble people that had become forsaken and this mood has never quite left me." --Lord Dunsany I think the single weirdest thing that influences my writing is the fact that I read more miscel...

I just discovered James Branch Cabell, Neil Gaiman's biggest inspiration and the namesake of my college's library. I don't know how I never heard of him, but he's got this great dreamy sense about him, but with a bitter bite, like a cross between Tolkien and Ambrose Bierce. Well, okay, not quite _th...

I wish my aspirations were more literary, but my dream is to some day have the clout to be able to waltz right into media outlets and pitch them ideas and have them listen to me (and, of course, pick up the pitches and do them.) I want to be at the creative helm of a media empire--like Neil Gaiman. ...

See, I'd always been taught that you don't capitalize 'the'. To take an example at random, if you're talking about the Washington Monument, I'm not sure how you could say the word 'the' is or is not part of the name--it's the proper name of the object, so the article wouldn't be part of it. So unles...

My favorite villains are the disturbingly affable ones that are also unspeakably evil, such as Dr. Facilier from Disney's "The Princess and the Frog", Mr. Nick from "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus", Oogie Boogie from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (I feel kinda bad ...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and give you an actual opinion...I say fix it now. There is wisdom in going ahead and writing your first draft beginning, middle, and end, but if you're making some major change--you called it "a better way to tie things together", which means it could su...

It's a lot less common in the world of writing than it is with movies or art--I don't know why that is, exactly. It's just the kind of thing I enjoy, at least for a bit of casual reading, so here's a few: " The Young Visiters ", a novel by a nine-year-old girl written long enough ago that ...

I think the reason for some of these problems--especially the way bad guys just sort of fall down after getting hit a few times--comes from today's movies (and to a lesser extent, everything else) being just a bit too influenced by video games. Have you noticed how action movie climaxes seem to have...

Spinning ideas off the suggestion of dryads, I'm also considering satyrs, leshoviks, woodwoses, or something resembling Ents, which would fit in nicely with the clash of value systems and ideals that Polymath was talking about. (I'd straight-up go with some kind of Ent knock-off, except that the plo...

A while back, I was hit by a bizarre setback--I'm writing my first fantasy novel, and I somehow managed to name three of my major characters after major characters in some famous fantasy novels (two from the Conan series and one from "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser"). Then the other day I was ...

I always do a re-write or two before showing anybody anything, because of something I learned from critiques in art school: before asking other's opinions, take your work and see what you think they're going to say, regardless of what you think. If it's really obvious, you should probably fix it.

As I've mentioned a few times, I'm working on a YA fantasy novel series based on American folklore instead of European--you know, like instead of being inspired by Tolkien, it comes from Twain, Poe instead of Dunsany, Teddy Roosevelt instead of Charlemagne. Just as Conan the Barbarian's world is a f...

Corporate-owned names should be genericized to avoid legal problems, but I think previous commenters have explained that enough. Personally, I keep away from real places too, just in case I need to do something for the plot that the real world location would prevent--for example, using my hometown o...