Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing
Helping authors achieve their dreams
One of my favorite jokes on The Office is when Dwight Schrute boasts, “I know everything about film. I’ve seen over 240 of them.” It’s funny because it sounds reasonable at first, but then you realize 240 is a pittance. You’ve surely seen thousands of movies, not to mention thousands of hours of scripted TV shows. […]
I’ve dished out plenty of edits as a former literary agent and current freelance book editor, and been on the receiving end as the author of a middle grade trilogy and several guides to writing and publishing. When I receive an edit, I know that the (usually brilliant) suggestions my editors make are nothing personal. […]
A while back I outlined the general necessity of whittling down your plot to one sentence, one paragraph, and two paragraph pitches in order to give yourself a head start on the literally thousands of times you are going to need to summarize your work over the course of a book’s lifetime. Today I want […]
Few storytelling elements in a novel are as powerful as dialogue. Writing good dialogue is a crucial way of letting characters speak for themselves outside of the narrative voice, and it’s one of the best ways of conveying personality and flavor. And, as with any powerful device, it can be abused. Over-use of dialogue has […]
Whether you’re pursuing traditional or self-publishing, self-editing is one of the most crucial skills any writer can possess. It’s not an exaggeration to say that novels are made or broken by the revision process. But it’s very difficult to see your work objectively, and novels are wondrously complex. I find it helpful to be systematic […]
The Reading Rainbow theme song really had it right. One of the best parts of reading is the way books open up new worlds to us, whether a story is set in an unpronounceable ancient kingdom, the far reaches of outer space, ancient history, the distant future, or even the real world but maybe somewhere […]
Helping authors achieve their dreams
