/lit/ - Literature

>>23263639
This is honestly a good realisation that will make you improve as a writer. All amateur writing is impeded by a desire transmit the little movie that's playing in the writer's head. The paradox is that it's only good literature (fiction that realises its strengths lie in voice, ideas, character) that seems to evoke in the reader's mind the really vivid, haunting flashes of 'actually being there'. I can't explain why, but that seems to be the case for me at least.

>>22997840
You could apply your argument to books: 'All books are just cope, they're the same plot recycled over and over, they don't teach you anything real.'

If someone said that about literature, you would rightly judge that they had no curiosity or sensitivity.

Obviously literature to the non-reader is going to seem like a bunch of whiny Dostoevsky-narrator stereotypes in a bunch of 19th-century houses with nothing going on; and obviously travel to the non-traveller is going to seem like purely an affair of smug Americans travelling through a world of grinning Africans and bowing Japanese while taking meaningless photos of palm trees and pyramids.

In both cases you need imagination to sense that there's something more beyond that, and you need imagination to fully immerse yourself in the experience while it's happening.

And whether you're reading or travelling the experience will also end up feeding and enhancing your imagination in turn. A good book or a good journey will make you realise how limited your imagination was before you began it, and how much it has grown since then.

Just my two cents.