/lit/ - Literature

As many of you will probably have experienced, there are a series of tiers or barriers that you eventually come to break through each time you realise it's time to stop fucking around and "take this thing seriously" or however you frame it to yourself. It's a good thing, and, if you are actually taking it seriously, each time you have the realisation you will ascend to the next level and find how much more you could have been doing - rather than sort of being lazy after the epiphany and going in circles and having the same realisation again and again.

But whatever. More recently I finally had a story of mine published in reputable quarterly, it is basically the greatest achievement of my life and I don't care how small it is because I'm all in on this thing. So I took some time, enjoyed the after glow, continued working on the story I was (derivative, boring shit I've always done) and I kind of realised that now along with a strict reading and writing schedule, dedication, motivation to review, re-write and edit etc. I need to broaden the scope of my work.

This is where I might differ from the experience of a lot of /wg/ I know there are a lot of fantasy and adventure stories on the go here, so you will know more than I do in this space. Basically, I have always been a bit of a /lit/core fag in that a lot of the shit that really interested me were the very typical Joyce and Gass stories that have to do with the mundane, unexcited, melancholy or stream of experience and what is to be a human and what do humans do and blah blah. Quite dry and boring. And although I have had success with this sort of writing myself, I think I have kind of come to the limit of what that can produce for me - I find that I am writing the same story again and again and what's now necessary is a story, or some kind of adventure that my themes need to attach themselves to. I'm still a /lit/core fag at heart so I have recently begun reading a lot of Joseph McElory which can be pretty weird and wonderful even in the way that some of Pynchon's stuff can be - Pynchon for example I remember sort of frowning at the idea that V had to do with a sort of spy story, mystery, intrigue etc. as I had kind of associated any sort of adventure with pulpy attitudes.

Anyway. What I want to do now is deliberately challenge myself to move into different spheres of story telling that occur outside work places, homes, kitchens, bedrooms, and in deep spiralling paragraphs of thought and reflection. So what is your advice for writing adventure and different sort of tales into a story, as when I try to begin I can't even imagine where the fuck to start.