/lit/ - Literature

>>4900442
No. Stopped at first sentence because it's missing a comma. Where did you come from where you thought you could write? What gave you that idea?

>>4899498
No. First sentence was poorly composed, suggesting you are a beginning writer and I ain't got time for that.

>>4899463
No. You don't know how to use basic punctuation. Reading a novel of your writing would be torture.

>>4899517
No. Overwrought. A story about being a writer who lives in a post-apocolyptic book store? Pass.

>>4899542
No. Beginners trap of trying to achieve sophistication with over-description.

>>4899562
No. Opening with a super-dramatic scene and no cleverness is a turn-off. Your attempt at FEELS OVERLOADS fails.

>>4899616
No. Does not merit explanation.

>>4899698
No, but, sadly, this is the best of a sad lot so far. Problems. "Every time." Every time what? "He was sobbing, like a lamb before the slaughter." Lambs do not sob; they don't know they're being killed. "Probably." Cut these qualifiers. You're the writer, either it would have been worse or it wouldn't; it's your fucking imagination, don't qualify it.

>>4899815
No. Dialect overload. There are better ways to establish atmosphere. Use dialect lightly with rare exception. It really slows down the reading when you use it otherwise.

>>4899940
No, but only because I know you're trolling. This is the best written opening so far. I'm going to kill myself now.

>>4899943
No. Needs editing. Not too awful. "The King's glance however never left the stones of the street" - cut 'however.' "The pulse of the walk" - ugh, awkward. How can you not see that's awkward? Being a decent writer requires a certain self-awareness and I don't know where you get that.

>>4900000
Nice QUINTS. And no. "that she had ignored—or celebrated—for two days." That blips out at me. I also dislike 'wildly.' Cut them both. However, this is not all too bad.

>>4900043
No. Presumptuous openings annoy me, so do a whole lot of insider words that I now need to memorize. Ugh.

>>4900090
No. " its humble charm is lacking any real tolerable bits of interest" is clunky and painful to see as a grandmother falling down a flight of stairs.

>>4900189
No. Not clever. Again, the beginner trap of over-description.

>>4900197
Hmm, okay. I might read another few paragraphs. I detect competence, but that is often enough a false positive.

>>4900203
No. "Parallel."

>>4900227
No. The dialogue opening was okay, but then it became badly overwrought.

>>4900257
No. It reads like "Intro to poetry" rather than "Intro to creative writing." But thanks for mixing it up.

>>4900281
No. Explanation not merited.

>>4900322
No. Wall of text + cliche in second sentence. Stopped there.


>>4900330
No. But this isn't ghastly and what you really need is some good editing. Learn how to use commas. I'd say this is among the best posted so far.

>>4900366
No. Don't waste my time on something you just wrote for this thread. I'll return the same attention you gave your work with the amount of attention I give your explanation of why it's bad.

>>4900386
No. Learn grammar, then write.

>>4902689
Neither the person you're responding to or the journalist, but if you know about a certain drug, and an author gets a detail about it wrong, it takes you out of the story.

>BUT HE MEANT TO DO THAT!!!

*shrug*

>>4901191

>>4901191
" that is obvious, he is deluded in his social naivety"

Then this must happen to him all the time.

Also, a father's funeral is not an insignificant event unless there's a serious problem in that relationship. Playing auto-footsies with another woman while he drives to his father's funeral breaks the story without making the character out to be a psychopath, and, like children, they don't make for great lead characters in stories, short or long.

Another sign of being a beginner, and another way I can help this author, is that he doesn't know what to cut. The story would be immeasurably better if he cut out the part about his father's funeral. That solves a lot of problems. Then the character is just dealing with his shyness.

I'd also assert another sign of beginnerness is that this isn't a story at all, but a character sketch, and that the author doesn't know the difference between the two.

What makes it a sketch? The main character in the story is flat. He's the same at the beginning as he is at the end. For it to be a story, he has to have some dynamic element.

>>4901155
>>4901155
But why would he be crying? You are leaving a lot to the reader to speculate.

Why is he pulling over and crying? Does he have a history of doing this?

There's no resonance.

Here, I'll help you. Go read "Victory Lap" by George Saunders. At the end, a character does something rather unusual and out of the ordinary, but we do know exactly why he's does it even though it manages to surprise us (it does so convincingly).

Your story doesn't do this, so it does not resonate.

I'll give you another example of a problem. You say that you're character 'probably' loved his father. You're the author, you created the character, but you don't know him well enough to state his feelings towards his father without a qualifier.

>>4900976
I'd also add that the plot is first-year beginner. The seams show.

The clearest indicator that you are a beginning writer is that your drama is overwraught and not fully connected to the story.

A guy's father died, and he breaks down over a missed opportunity to peruse a stranger. How does that make any sense to the reader?

I know you have the unpublished plebes here eating out of your hand ("submit it to the Paris Review") but they don't know shit.

I've read dozens of stories like this from intro to creative writing classes. Rethink it.

>>4900976
It really will come down to the prose, not to the plot.

>>4890629
A scuba diver and a native free diver from the neighboring island encounter each other under water, and the free diver is accidentally killed, though neither of them is at fault.

>>4893512
I did write a few like this.

The best was for a dry run of a standardized test that required an essay. The essay question asked about our favorite television show.

I wrote that my favorite was the Brady Bunch and that the best episode was the one where the siblings got each other pregnant on accident while playing Twister, and it went downhill from there.

We later peer-reviewed the essays and the girl who got mine left the room crying. (She was also kind of a slut, and the first girl in the class to have had sex. Go figure.) The teacher pulled me out of the classroom into the hallway and told me I wasn't funny.

And that's when I decided my children would be educated independently. Because fuck that.

>>4891363
fuck off.

>>4887209

I don't read shit-tier literature, so I usually don't stumble into tropes. I have read a lot of unpublished author workshopped stuff, so I'll list off a few the particularly bad ones

- The story begins with an alarm clock.

- The story centers around young people getting drunk/high.

- The crush is gaaaaay.

- Ouija boards.

- Lost/recovered memories.

>>4879728
Why don't you explain further?

bumping for the last time, add synonbear@gmail.com on gtalk if you actually want to discuss stuff

>>1900561

Not the little fiction collection mag. An actual paper based on real things

Looking to see how many people on this board are interested in contributing to a weekly magazine/newspaper. It's contributors will be from 4chan, even though the magazine itself is not targeted towards chan culture. It will consist of articles and opinions on everything and everything, across wideranging interests, journalism, opinion and fiction. All we ask is that you have something interesting to add. It will cost nothing and you will get nothing, except exposure. Every contributer to the magazine will have an alias, can be anonymous but you don't necessarily have to be. No one will ever connect a real person to an alias unless the writer themselves requests that I give that information to a prospective employer. If your real identity is in anyway connected to your alias you will be banned from further contribution.

You can just be a contributor or part of the staff if you want. We are in need of Associate Editors, Copy Editors, Graphic Designers and Page Designers. It is okay if you have no idea how to do any of these things since nobody involved has ever been involved in publishing ever. Grammar Nazis can be copy editors, those with a wide range of knowledge in various areas can be associate editors. Graphic Designers work on the overall look of the mag and the Page Designers make sure that the graphics and text of each page work together.

I am posting this to many different boards on 4chan, including ones I have absolutely no experience and knowledge of, so my apologies if I am slow to answer questions. I'm on gtalk, you can add synonbear@gmail.com if you have something to ask. Any ideas/articles you can fire over to thebearadmissions@gmail.com.

Hello /lit/,
I have to compose an essay on the "Philosophy of Composition" and how it relates to one of Poe's works. The catch however is that I cannot use "The Raven" as an example.
I have never read any other works of EAP besides The Raven (reading Philosophy of Composition at the moment) so i ask of you what piece of literature would best suit this assignment?

Please excuse me for my poor grammar.
-Thanks