Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Doubt, in my opinion, is a writer's friend...used constructively it'll help you grow : ) Stay creative! c.ska I thought this was a good one as well. I tend to doubt my stuff, but in an odd way. Sometimes I feel pretty confident about it, sometimes I don't. Sometimes it depends on the scene in quest...

Poptart, your answer cracked me up. :) Good explanation as well.

I need both. I don't need a lot of praise, but particularly if you're going to be telling me fifty reasons why my book sucks, I'd like at least one, "But I really loved this line on page 49" to balance it out. Otherwise I feel like I haven't done anything right at all. I do like having cri...

This one's a toughie, isn't it? Hm...I'm going to throw in my own two cents, but keep in mind that I'm both unpublished and not a professional (aside from once being a writing tutor lol) and this is based mostly on my own experience so take it with a grain of salt. Hopefully people smarter than me c...

Sorry if I misinterpreted the writing comment. It followed a post about how we should be making calls, etc., and was around one that mentioned going to conferences, so when you said "it's not about writing" I made an assumption about what you were saying it was about, and I should have ass...

Okay, I wasn't going to comment but I saw like four things in here that just struck me as odd. First, if you haven't written the book yet (implied by "will ever spend writing"), how can you be querying? I know non-fiction rules are different, but isn't it right that memoir isn't queried in...

I think the idea of "stand-alone" here is a good stopping point. In my mind, stand-alone means that you can read only that and it will make complete sense without any other context. I liked the phrase "end of the dramatic unit" personally. I think a lot of times chapter breaks ar...

I seriously hate it when that happens. Most of the time something I'm happy with on the first draft stands out as atrociously bad on the first revision, but I had one chapter last time that was a similar situation--incredibly important and I couldn't get it right at all. Drove me nuts. Good luck. :)

I think the difference between book publishing and publishing in academia is the reasoning behind being published. If you're going for fiction (non-fiction is different of course), one of the first things a publisher needs to know is whether or not the person can write well. Then they have to consid...

Haha, I just was asking about this recently. ;) I know some readers are turned off by it and won't buy a book with a lot, but that's a personal preference. I'm sure there are also people who will flip through a book and see hardly any dialogue and say, "wow, that looks boring." I read a co...

My advice to a newbie would be to not worry so much about the first draft because the most wonderful thing about writing is that it can always be revised. Even if the writing sucked eggs in the first draft, that's completely okay if you work hard and practice editing it up to par. My second bit of a...

I've heard some really great advice so I'm going to reiterate it here: Right the first draft for you. Worry about the rest on rewrites.

I don't write humor books, but I have taken to writing more humor into them lately. The last one had a lot of humor (particularly of the dorky variety...I have no idea if it will work with the average reader ;). I was actually a bit worried about this because I had never written humor before, but ev...

I had a friend who had carpal tunnel syndrome from typing too much, though thankfully haven't faced that one yet myself. I'm wondering if it's more to do with posture or the type of chair you have than anything. Have you looked into trying to find a good ergonomic writing set-up? Your physical thera...

Okay, here's one I haven't seen asked yet. Then I swear, no more questions! You've talked a lot about how you like to have query letters personalized. I'm intending to include that I am a fan of your blog in my query letter, but it just occurred to me...would it be a good idea to mention our user na...