Joel Brigham

2026 marks Year Five for Brigham Editorial. Twitter was instrumental in helping me find my people, and I definitely miss the old days. Either way, thank you all for the continued support!

I'm Joel Brigham, and I approve this partnership.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature for “Herscht 07769." It's a book about a graffiti cleaner in Germany who writes letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel to alert her to the world’s impending destruction. It features ONE period in 400 pages.

WE'VE LANDED ON THE MOON!!!

Just wrote a note for a romance author that the two romantic leads need "to kiss earlier and more often, and probably engage in the horizontal polka." At least no one will ever accuse me of editing with ChatGPT. A.I. *wishes* its sense of humor was as bad as mine.

I can't support this platform anymore, gang. Sucks to abandon 15 years of connecting with writers, but I'm out. I'll never forgive him for ruining this place. I'll be at the standard alternatives, and my links remain in my bio. Hugs and high fives. -JB

You can find me at the place with azure skies. Subscribing to my free newsletter is the best way to ensure we don't lose touch.

Check out this post by @joelbrigham from his March newsletter. It's full of great insights on characters and storytelling. #writingcommunity #substack open.substack.com/pub/brighamedi…

@joelbrigham's newsletter landed in our inbox today, and it's another great one! Our favorite takeaway? "Not everything in a book has to be a surprise."

@edighafrancisca That particular author's book was WWII war fiction. Love historical. Love speculative. Love contemporary. Anything with heart, I'm in on. (Bonus points if it makes me laugh!)

@joelbrigham What genre do you niche on?

It's a good day in editing when I get to research the 1943 MLB season to make sure my author's throwaway line about the Yankees and Red Sox would've been historically accurate.

@edighafrancisca Oh, I did :)

@joelbrigham I love those deep-dive research moments! It’s amazing how even a small detail can add so much authenticity to a story. Hope you found exactly what you needed! #HistoricalAccuracy #WriterLife

@AriannaSidd I'd love to do it! Send me a DM and we'll set it up!

@joelbrigham Thank you Joel! How kind!! would love to have you on a future episode on editing and revision… 👀

1. I'm obsessed with this branding. Logo, color scheme... all of it. 2. This podcast looks amazing!

@Atomalone You're not wrong though!

@joelbrigham Haha, just ball bustin' 😎👍

Now you have to remove your prologue and chapter one LULZ.

@Rhinestonefilms There's a cadence to storytelling. I think you stop once beta readers tell you they're settling into a flow. Most issues are EARLY. I have NEVER asked to write to cut half a book! (Rewrite? Maybe. Cut? Never!)

@joelbrigham I enjoy this process. But if you start enjoying deleting your own hard work it can be difficult to see where to stop, why can’t my novel start Half way though? I ask myself, could the last chapter be a novella and I scrap the rest?

I can't tell you how many books I edit where the solution to a slow start is simply to delete Chapter 1. Why? Because Chapter 1 is so often full of unnecessary backstory, stage-setting, and info-dumping, but usually by Chapter 2, authors get things moving on The Plot.

Yesterday I suggested a possible solution to a slow Chapter 1: cut Chapter 1 entirely. @Atomalone made a fantastic point that I've already told writers to cut their prologues. Now I'm telling you to cut Chapter 1, too! But there's a key difference between these: Editors suggest cutting PROLOGUES because they're often unnecessary. My suggestion to cut CHAPTER 1 is because it /was/ necessary for the author to write the book, but isn't necessary for the reader. Allow me to explain. Here's why PROLOGUES are often unnecessary: - They often focus on a character who is not the main character, forcing the reader to reorient when they actually DO meet the main character in Chapter 1. In other words, it just delays the start of the story you actually want us to care about. - They often serve the purposes of world-building or info-dumping, which is so much clunkier than integrating those things smoothly into the main plotline. - Enough prologues are unnecessary that an agent sees the word "Prologue" and immediately grows pessimistic over what they're about to read. It can set a negative tone with the gatekeeper, even if your prologue is necessary and awesome! While I've read some amazing prologues in my day (and while I recognize that epic fantasy does have genre expectations for slow, exposition-heavy prologues), there are very few that MUST stay as they are. Often, what the author is trying to accomplish in a prologue can be accomplished elsewhere in subtler, defter ways. Here's why CHAPTER ONE might be unnecessary: - When it's all (or even largely) backstory, stage-setting, or info-dumping, the reader can't settle into the current storyline. They aren't able to stay there long enough without breaking off to explain something. This is bad for flow and engagement. - Why does this happen? Because when we WRITE that first chapter, we don't know what our book is yet. We have to explore character histories and world-building elements as we write to get our own heads around the project. Usually by Chapter 2, we're ready to roll. - We also tend to think that because WE needed that information to get off on the right foot, our readers do, too. But they don't. They're going to get all of it in bits and pieces as the story goes on. (Or at least, they should). What the reader NEEDS is to be engaged, and they are engaged through plot and character in the present, not through info-dumps and explanations of the past. So when editors ask writers to consider cutting Chapter 1, we're asking whether it's there because you needed it to write the book, or whether it's there because you think the READER needs it to read the book. Often (or at least sometimes), it's the former, not the latter. Cutting prologues is something else entirely, and beyond that, I would NEVER come for someone's most beloved chapters. That said, it's my job to help you all assess those chapters. They don't call it killing your darlings for nothin' :)

"It's relatively rare when a human uses it." If we ever needed evidence that AI has been stealing our writing to train its models, this would be it. Cuz y'all are absolutely not using this punctuation mark judiciously. 😂