Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Ughhhhhhhh. And then, there is always how do characters "sound" when speaking, that must be considered (as many people do not use fully correct speech). As for the dialect of gerund, there seems to be a fierce political standoff between the anti-gerund at all costs and gerunds are my birth...

Not (really) spouting my miseries. Okay, Am. Broken car heater in middle of winter. Hard drive crashed and all was unrepairable, lost all passwords and software (luckily I backed up my writing THIS time), new Firefox refused my old passwords (that I had stored in a book), all after spending a week g...

New Post: I have, in the past, used this type of partnership for up to sixteen weeks. Lately, an 8 week agreement is better. On my latest 8 week experience: WOW, I have made great, consistent progress on an editing job that I was -previously- procrastinating on! Yea! I have also found the following:...

I just read an article that compared "bad" head-hopping to "good" or artful head-hopping and referred to The Old Man and the Sea , Hemingway. So I picked up my copy and read the opening again and yes, he does go from inside the man to inside the boy to even inside the group of fi...

Thank you, Polymath. Raconteur: A new term to me. And now I have just started down a good journey to learn more and found this most entertaining NYTimes article: The Voice of The Storyteller by Constance Hale http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/the-voice-of-the-storyteller/ which I also ...

Polymath, you describe the harsher side of that position. Preachy or chauvinistic. Definitely out of style. I am thinking about it in a more modern, enjoyable format. A storyteller voice. Even such as around the campfire, a primitive retelling of beloved or mythic or tribal tales. Not necessarily fo...

I am thinking a LOT about Third-Person, Omniscient, wanting to get clear -or clearer- on it. Is this the POV of the fairytale narrator? How about The Princess Bride ? The narrator seems a voice in and of itself and can see and understand inside all the characters. Do I have this right? If not, what ...

I'd like to commit to just writing four days a week -for several designated writing periods this year- (and I don't care how much I write, just that I write or edit on those days). And I'd like to find a writing partner to check in with briefly on those four days as that keeps me on task for at leas...

I'm looking for something a little different: a writing coach partner. (And, then, maybe, down the road, sharing critiquing.) I've done this writing coaching thing before and found it very helpful and productive. How my format works is this: The goal is to write everyday Mon-Thurs. It can be one wor...

Like Polymath (but no way as informed or intellectual on these things), I take time -especially when my curiosity gets that pique- to try to learn and improve my understanding of language and grammar. Anyway, lately, I have noticed what to me seems a big trend in titles that are (one word) verbs-tur...

His father used to tolerate Joe, but that was when Steven was still alive. Now his father hated him. Joe should have died instead of his brother Steven, but that was something even his father could not, with all his power, change. Joe had lived while Steven had died. Even to please his father, Joe ...

Hi. Well, realistic? No, but continue on: It's Entertaining as Hell! I am VERY entertained. I love it when a character acts out of the expected, (expected in like hunkering down, guilty as discovered). Instead, audacious! I think it's really a fun move. (To me, it's much like when the bad dude on Ra...

In my current WIP:

1 main character told two ways.

4 supporting characters with woven subplot story lines.

13 minor characters, all with back stories that connect to the lead and supporting characters.

and

15 characters incidental to certain scenes.

33 characters total.

Oh, And the other thing. What if it ends up just looking so simplistic. If the story is that simplistic, my concern is then how are you enticing someone to want to read it? I mean, imagine you are a romance novelist and the one sentence (or paragraph trying to disguise itself in a sentence) reads so...

One of my three page synopsis attempts has gotten me a number or requests for fulls or partials, so I think it's been pretty successfully received. But after thinking on this thread, and whittling one down to two paragraphs, I went back and reread some articles on writing a synopsis and I think I mi...