/lit/ - Literature

>>16443827
Good suggestion! I suppose the reason people instinctively assume that more is better is because that by mentioning more details, they can paint a more vivid picture, or they can show the reader exactly what they have in mind. However, it's quite the opposite.

To make an analogy with cooking, description is like fat, you have to find the right amount. When making risotto, if you don't use any butter, it's gonna burn, and if you use too much, the rice will be swimming in grease, but if you use the right amount, then it's going to have that a rich, creamy mouthfeel that you can't get enough of, and the butter will compliment the flavor of rice, instead of overpowering it.

With writing, it's better to write less than more. Make sure each detail (same considerations apply to events/scenes) serves a purpose: it's unusual, it's likely to make an impression on the reader, it builds up tension, it's comical... don't mention any detail that can be obviously inferred from context, or is completely inconsequential. Overwhelming the reader with detail must be done with judgement (e.g., you're deliberately doing it for stylistic effect), because you run the risk of turning your prose opaque, and losing the attention, or worse, interest, of the reader.

>Elmore Leonard
Any recommendations on where to start/works you liked?

>>16384959
>capitalism, rationalism, and relativism have destroyed our sense of enchantment in the world
You should look into Leopardi. He considered the ancient Romans/Greeks as people who were able to live in an enchanted world, and thus could find meaning in it, while we modern men are too rationalistic and disenchanted, and thus life is meaningless. He was the quintessential blackpilled doomer two centuries before we even came up with that word.

> From the same year is Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi ("Essay on the popular errors of the ancients"), which brings the ancient myths back to life. The "errors" are the fantastic and vague imaginings of the ancients. Antiquity, in Leopardi's vision, is the infancy of the human species, which sees the personifications of its myths and dreams in the stars.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Leopardi))

>How did the heroes of the past do what they did, he wondered? How did anyone find the will to achieve anything? Illusion. They were driven by beliefs that were demonstrably vain, by the very errors that Leopardi had trained himself to smell out and deconstruct. On the other hand, how wonderful to believe in such things and to act with energy and intention. No sooner had Leopardi undergone his philosophical, essentially nihilist conversion than his thinking began to revolve around this central paradox: one studied and educated oneself under an imperative to find the truth, yet to live a happy life, which necessarily meant a purposeful active life, one needed to be impelled by illusion, not truth – or certainly not ultimate, philosophical truths.

>So was ‘illusion’ a positive quality? And was it actually better not to know things, at least certain things? In his first major, but very brief poem ‘The Infinite’, written in 1819, the poet, sitting on a hillside, rejoices in the fact that his view is mostly blocked by a hedge. Not seeing the landscape, he can imagine all kinds of things out there beyond the hedge, imagine the infinite, and hence write poetry, something he would not be able to do if he saw the landscape plainly. Freed of a stream of hard information, the imagination is stimulated, which is a pleasure. ‘All that is fixed and certain,’ Leopardi commented in his diary, ‘is much farther from contenting us than that which, by its very uncertainty, can never content us.’ Vagueness has a value in itself.

>while nevertheless swallowing the bitter pill: life is empty and absurd. In ‘Copernicus’ [...] Leopardi satirises human delusions of grandeur, but simultaneously reminds us how attractive it was to think of the Sun being pulled across the sky by a chariot, and how uninspiring is our mechanistic knowledge of the Universe. If our condition is dire, we do have our imagination, he suggests, which we dismiss in favour of scientific fact at our peril.

(https://aeon.co/essays/why-read-the-nihilistic-work-of-giacomo-leopardi-today))

Anons I need some advice. I'm having a hard time making my characters seem realistic, human, or relatable, because of the relentless pace of my book making them seem like robots.

My book is filled with explosive combat scenes, which I love, but the flip side of that is my characters being just stiff caricatures that can only react emotionally if someone gets hurt. Other than that, they just fight. It makes no sense for me to inject a 'calm' scene where they talk or unwind or relax or whatever, when they're racing against the clock or are being hunted down and killed. I don't know how I can get these scenes in. And would a few calm scenes even work? I feel like the issue with my characters being shallow runs further than that.

Just to give an example, here's the rundown of the first third of my book.
>protagonist arrives in Ireland, ends up shooting a man dead in a mixup
>she stops a hanging of one of her friends and saves her life
>is immediately recruited into an expedition to an abandoned facility
>ambushed on the way, one of her team dies
>ambushed again near the entrance, extremely bloody fight, her team splits apart and runs off
>it's just her and her boyfriend who also got shot
>she races inside the facility solo to gather tools for ghetto surgery to save him
>kills a man to obtain surgery equipment, goes back, saves her boyfriend's life, sticks him in a cold shower to reduce fever.

shower scene is the first 'calm' scene of the book. everything else is just relentless action. is my book fucked? do I need to write about boring shit for my characters not to seem like robots?

help me, anons. I can't have my first semi-human scene be 30 000 words in...