Nathan Bransford - The Forums

The Buddy System post series continues! Part II covers the basic writing issues to watch out for in your buddy's writing.

http://offcentre.net/blog/?p=51

Let me say up front that even your first query got me excited to read your book--and obviously what you have is attracting agent attention already. :) That being said, I do have just a few suggestions: NEWEST QUERY: When Seventeen-year-old Nicola Summers goes outside to take out the trash I think th...

All right. This is my first go at the query-writing business; I expect it will take a LOT of revising. Thank you in advance for all your brilliant advice!! Young noblewoman Fierine Cheraville Calloun dreads following her father’s path to master the arcane—a path fraught with forbidden magic, danger...

I'm starting a new post series on critique partners! It begins here:

http://offcentre.net/blog/?p=47

My whole blog is new! Yikes! I only post in the evenings, and not every day. But my most recent post is about choosing the right tense for a story.

http://offcentre.net/blog

Also, I have way too many -ing clauses, sometimes three -ing clauses in a row. That and I noticed too as I edited that I didn't know how to use semicolons. I forgot who said it, but I read somewhere something to the tune of "overuse/misuse of semicolons makes your writing look like a crying te...

Ugh. I have FAR too many -ing clauses. As does my critique buddy. But in a way, we help each other--when we notice how jarring it is in each other's work, we're more mindful of it in our own! I also keep falling back on "safe" words/descriptions for things. I have to poke myself to remind ...

See what differs about it from your others, of course! Is it the sentence variation? The imagery? The dialogue tagging or flow? The word choice? The tension and foreshadowing? Analyze the hell out of why you think it stands out so wonderfully, and aim to achieve it in all your words :)

I'm juggling two mss right now because of this, but I've at least managed to limit myself to that when I've got five more ideas banging down my door! It's nice to be able to swap back and forth for the change of scenery, and to help me to keep writing--when I'm stuck on one story, instead of sitting...

I actually quite liked it, but you're right about the repetitive sentence constructions. The chapters that were nothing but narrative summaries/lists irked me too. Loved the characters and story though! While we're on topic of bestsellers we hate, though, I got through the first 100 pages of "T...

I occasionally review books on my blog, but I tend to stick to books I enjoyed. I'll mention some criticism, such as "some of the language was a little off" or "the plot was a bit slow for my liking." I try to keep it constructive and avoid snark. . I certainly wouldn't go for s...

So I've been mulling over ideas for my own writing blog, and as we all know, blogs are just one of the many tools in your publicity kit to get published and be successful once you are published. But is it considered unprofessional to ever say anything negative about another author in such a public s...

HAH! That is definitely the feeling it conjures up. I try not to obsess over the clunkers even as I'm typing them out, though. I just mark wavy lines under them on my print-out when I'm editing, which tells me that I need to figure out a better wording for the information I'm trying to convey there.

There are countless modern novels out there that readily inform readers that they are intentionally a modern "retelling" of a classic story: Pride and Prejudice, Othello, Heart of Darkness, and even real-life events... What are the complications that can ensue, legal or otherwise, from att...

I can not make is shorter unless I take one of the stories out and that would not work. I wonder how to get this across in a query. I have read Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time etc. and they are very long books right from the debut. There are a number of first novels that I have read which are long. T...