/lit/ - Literature

>>15739916
>>15740181

Thanks guys, I mean it. Even if you tell me how shit things are, you've given me some good constructive criticism (that's why I'm on 4chan after all, I don't want the reddit circlejerk I normally get). My friends irl don't give a shit about literature, and even if they tried to help me, they wouldn't know what to say.

I have obsessed over elements of this story in my mind for over five years, literally every single day I do, and its details have been building up all this time. I have a very particular aesthetic picture of what I want to convey, and I even know a lot of the exact adjectives I wish to use, but I just didn't realize how difficult it would be to put them down into sentences, much less arranging those sentences into an engaging narrative. I would say I have a good understanding of when a sentence is grammatical, but being grammatical is definitely not synonymous with being concise.

And you're right, I did obsess over the beginning, and I did kinda shit out the rest. Since I have a tendency to abandon projects halfway through, I've written an outline for the story (which I want to be about 70-80,000 words), and I'm trying to give it structure so I can build on it later during revision. As I said before, I've never, ever written a prose story before, not even a short one; I've only written a work of poetry that was a few thousand words. I also mostly read nonfiction or reference books. I refuse to give up on this, because I know the story itself is phenomenal.

>>15725040

Thanks for the clarification. I guess the main thing I wanted to do with the first 27 pages of that document was show an exposition of the main character and his inner processes in solitude, getting rid of the last decadent thoughts he entertained from his life before: first the sun exposes that he exists, and then his eye perceives the details around him, piece-by-piece, because he'd retreated so far into himself that he had to come out slowly, like a prisoner has to adjust to light once he's let out of solitary confinement. The Persian classics often use physical features and flowers to illustrate God's properties in their characters. Showing the main character as some beautiful boy can sound faggoty, because it kinda is.

The writing style shifts in certain parts of the work, from mythical-style writing (as the first 27 pages and his later dialogue with his lover portray, because the character becomes a mythical figure in the passage of the story) to snide, snappy dialogue between pissed-off characters that live in a harsher reality, where they actually make fun of the two characters.

The biggest question I face then is whether introducing external action to those first 27 pages would detract from what I was trying to convey, because I do recognize that this would make the introduction more lively. Quite a dilemma for me.