Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I was foolish enough to enter NaNoWriMo last year, and complete the challenge at just over 50K words in one month. I didn't finish the remaining 45K until April of this year, so that's around 6 months, but that's just the first draft.

I've been using a nice piece of freeware called "yWriter" that breaks the text into scenes and chapters. You can also define characters, locations and objects, and link them to the scenes in which they are included, track plot threads, define POVs per scene, backup the text and export it t...

I've been looking at that subject line and I keep thinking it should be "Who do you write like?" My reasoning is that to determine the case of an interrogative pronoun, you turn the question into a statement and change "who|whom" to "he|him": "You write like him&qu...

I liked the dialogue but I agree with other posters that you need to loosen it up a little. On thing that struck me was the phrase "Angeline and the kids are anxious to see you". It sounds too formal to me, specifically the word "anxious". I would rewrite as "[Angie | Angeli...

I have little to add to all the good previous advice except to emphasize Polymath's note about preserving the rhythm of the speaker's native language. A trick I use in my WIP, in which the characters are ostensibly all speaking fictional languages, which, of course, have no established rhythm, is to...

Title: The Brickweavers Genre: Science Fiction (235 words) That night the bricks had appeared to Jeppo as they had for many nights before and while he analyzed the pattern, a small, distant voice shouted, "Remember it!" while another countered, "He need not remember it. He need only u...

I was telling someone recently about the novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind. I had read it back in the '90s, enjoyed it immensely, and always figured they could never make a decent film version because so much of the novel focused on the sense of smell. But they did make a mov...

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I had gotten quite a bit of positive feedback from my advanced composition professor in college but my life went in a different direction and I never considered writing anything for 30 years. I had had this idea for a novel kicking around in my noodle for ...

There seems to be something of a consensus, summed up well by Nathan's post. There were also some very kind words about this sort of work so I forwarded a link to the folks who write the synopses nowadays. They do the work every day, under grim deadlines, anonymously and with, IMHO, inadequate appre...

Basically, you don't want to use the brand negatively as E McD pointed out, and you don't want to make it look like you have any affiliation with the brand. Note that Fannie Flagg didn't need to mark her references to the Piggly Wiggly in Fried Green Tomatoes . (A great read, BTW, and different enou...

When I was younger I read Verne, Wells, Azimov, Herbert, Bradbury and Clarke. Huxley and Orwell, too. But I haven't really read anything modern or any of the "hard stuff". My WIP is science fiction with zero supernatural elements and no extraterrestrials, robots, "zombies", or sp...

I did one chapter of my WIP at a time: 1 Margaret Atwood 2 David Foster Wallace 3 H.G. Wells 4 Neil Gaiman 5 H.P. Lovecraft 6 David Foster Wallace 7 Dan Brown 8 Daniel Defoe 9 Mario Puzo At first I thought this was just a frivolity but I can see some reasons why the analysis turned the way it did. I...

I don't have much to say except that I really, really enjoyed the writing. The part where she realizes she may be in shock, it was like one of those moments when somebody who's usually just joking around starts behaving genuinely ill and your mind makes that awful, sickening switch in mood from amus...

Mira wrote:What's the saying about fiction and real life? :)

This one?

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
Mark Twain

:)

I usually based the movie synopses on my own viewing, otherwise I had to read a lot of reviews and come up with an original description based on that. Here's an example of one I actually screened: A writer of pulp Westerns searches for his boyhood friend in the dark, corrupt world of divided post-Wo...