Nathan Bransford - The Forums

The seventy-something year-old mother of friends of ours is British. Her father was working in Syria (where the family lived) in the forties and they sent her to boarding school in England when she was still in elementary school. During this time World War II broke out, and she spent a year separate...

Okay, since there are no rules, I'll enter one: The young woman at the counter had long since stopped making eye-contact with anyone, and a strand of hair was falling over her brow from her otherwise neatly-tied bun. She then picked up the phone in front of her, dialed two digits and was heard overh...

I have no authority and virtually no credentials. Undaunted by my lack of qualifications, I'm asking my fellow forum members to shake it up a little with 300-400 words of dialogue between three characters of any gender, one being of 80 years, another of 50 years and another of 20 years. They are sit...

I am now working on novel #2, while trying to hook an agent for #1. I never anticipated the hooking part (no pun intended) to be so all-consuming. I'm having hard time getting to novel #2, and when I do, I have to re-acclimate myself before I can write. My first lottery winning priority (after buyin...

Sometimes the sequential description of a chain of events creates an effect all its own that you don't need to fix it. My favorite device is flashbacks either through internal dialogue (character with himself) or in external dialogue. So, you just jump a couple of steps ahead (meaning anything from ...

In each of our life-partner relationships, we broker for resources that are yours, mine and ours. My wife and I both work in demanding jobs and we still have adolescents living at home (how long, Lord?). And then there is writing. We have an occasional-and-usually-good-natured discussion about when ...

Every once in a while (well, now in two manuscripts), I have had the character sing to the radio, usually in a way to connect a little more with the setting, but also to put some words in their mouths that subtly impart a message. Naturally, my writer's group comforted me (none of them lawyers) that...

I'm at a point that requires a keyboard for the creative process to work. Something is now wired between my hands and my head that makes stories. Two years ago I had back surgery, which made it necessary for me to take my hands off the keyboard for about four weeks. I got one of those voice recognit...

Could our character find out (at just the right time) from someone else in the course of the story? You know, one of those, "Before you were born, your mother and I . . . "

Blog Rhyms with Frog -- what I know about this world. I have always been able to figure out new technology (except for our microwave). I’m not just blowing smoke. I am actually sought out in my day job for technical solutions. This is why it surprises me that all forms of web-based social networking...

In theater and cinema, you know when you see overacting. You also recognize the not-so-subtle manipulations of soap operas and action movies alike -- they keep you interested by getting your heart pumping in different ways. As a reader, I'm hard pressed to think of good novels that don't include dea...

There is a lot of truth on either side of this. I have gotten gems from children and neophytes and I have gotten rocks from experts. Being somewhere below an amateur writer myself, I appreciate the sentiments of those further along that say they would listen to my advice. But it seems like this is d...

Sympathy can grow as the character develops, though. If you look at Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge , a Pulitzer Prize winner and by all accounts a success, her main character fits into the description of yours. As the reader views Olive through the course of a few years, she is downright unlike...

Very cool thread. I really like the conjoined twin thing, and the bible rewrite. I recently read John Irvin's A Son of the Circus in which there was more sexual deviation than I think I have ever seen depicted in one place -- including transexuals (of varying degrees). I wonder if there is a decent ...

I have found that reading and writing both take a hit when my reactive life takes over. I got advice and inspiration from two sources. First, a friend of mine reads non-fiction mostly and I asked him once how he seems to be continuously in the middle of something new and interesting. He told me he s...