Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Personally, first I moved to Atlanta, then I've been looking for jobs. I had really hoped that moving to a bigger city would help matters, but no...not really. There's a lot more openings, but there's also a lot more applicants, and I gotsta get paid--or rather, the bills do. So for the moment, I'm ...

If you're wanting to be creative but your old writing patterns aren't working, try something different. You've been working in the same world with the same people that you're probably still thinking in the same ways, so I would suggest brainstorming something in a totally different genre or medium. ...

Okay, not having taken a lot of formal writing training, I'm not sure what the terms are for what I'm trying to talk about, but I'd like to vent. There's a problem I've seen in a few different books (currently the first half of "The Dark Lord of Derkholm" by Diana Wynne Jones, all of "...

Before I do any writing, I tend to do a lot of world-building, to a degree that I've wondered sometimes if maybe I should be making video games or something. As a result, I tend to end up with a huge cast list of characters I'd like to visit, and it gets whittled down from there to what the plot req...

So yeah...I'm a word dork. A few years ago, I sat down and tried to find all the words I could make out of the letters in my name; I didn't get many, but that's because my full name (John David Durvin) is only fifteen letters, three of them D's. I'm proudest of "hadji" and "Jovian&quo...

Wow, you've really thought this thing through! Yeah, I tend to do a lot of my best thinking when I'm supposed to be going to sleep. I like the idea of switching his career over to Hollywood--he should totally be an actor, taking leading roles over with his dominant personality, and perhaps a health...

I'd actually never heard of this particular "Rule of Three"; I'd always heard the Rule of Three of comedy, where you're listing things and you go: mundane, mundane, funny. And of course, in a movie like Elf, a plot twist will probably be funny. As for the Rule of Three of plot-relevance, t...

The Great American Novel is something I hear a lot of people talk about. Other countries with literary traditions have novels (or at least writers) that define them, that show the spirit of the country, that show what it means to be from there. Apparently the US doesn't have one. My guess is that on...

I really like STFU, but that leads me to what I was going to say before I saw that post: personally I'm pretty sick of acronyms for things like this. I think that dead horse has been beaten enough already, especially with blunt instruments like "Field Intelligence Strike Team" or "War...

As a broader statement, phrases used by a narrator should only refer to things that narrator is aware of. To use the above example, if you're telling a story about your Irish ancestors, you could use anything you wanted; but if you were writing it from the point of view of one of those ancestors, th...

Remember in "Wayne's World" when Wayne pointed out "Dick York, Dick Sergeant, Sergeant York"? Well how about this: Bill Clinton, George Bush, George Clinton (funk musician), Billy Bush (TV personality and radio host). Can anybody else think of any? I thought about starting a whol...

I recommend you just go hit up TV Tropes; that will answer your question better than anything I can say. All I'll add is the classic "animal powers" motif that runs from classical mythology up through Spider-Man. What you've got so far seems to be mixing "origins of powers" and &...

Labyrinth in the middle of space-time populated by thought-eating creatures? Sounds like an evil sci-fi version of Wonderland. I'm absolutely not suggesting you start using Alice motifs or anything, but if you're already dealing with a place where time and space don't work right and creatures are su...

Personally it's been years since I had a flu shot or the flu. I usually stay pretty healthy, so long as it's not a disease that attacks the throat; I always have trouble with that. It seems to run in my family; my dad's in his fifties, and he only gets the flu in the years when he gets the flu shot.

Most of us tend to think of our writing as just the words, but this article takes a different view--some books need to be books. Their example is their new illustrated edition of "The Odyssey", and I think I can see what they mean. I've never been able to put my finger on why I like print ...