/lit/ - Literature

>>16723235
>it seems impossible to tell a story and create images in someones mind while also having subtle and perfect beautiful sentences.

No matter what, it will always be better in your head. There's a reason we say "ideal" and "idealized".

The quote below is by Ira Glass. The tl;dr is "the reason you think you suck is because there's a gap between your skill and your taste; the only way to reduce that gap is with practice". Musing on which medium is the best will get you nowhere, it's just an excuse to procrastinate.

If you keep thinking about ideas, you will only get more disheartened -- the gap will seem even bigger, because you put so much thought and energy into your ideas, that they will seem even more unreachable. The sad reality is, "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy". It has happened to me, the second I wrote the first sentence, I realized that the idea I had been entertaining in my head wasn't as good as I thought.

Ideas are ineffable, it's easy to fall in love with them. Don't think too hard about your story while you're actually sitting down and writing it. And don't forget to read! Go stand on the shoulder of giants.

>Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

>A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

>And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.

>And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

>>16495059
You must fearlessly face the black lodge to rid us of this menace. Good luck anon, our date is in your hands

>>16488228
>Is there a good word to use to describe these phrases/tactics?
I think "Doublespeak" fits what you're describing:

>Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. [...] It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth. Doublespeak is most closely associated with political language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

>>16488276
Based autistic anon. Good thing autism rates are increasing in the US!

>>16471799
I completely agree, I find "realistic" romance (e.g. Toradora) to be cringy and boring.
But then again, I'm a NEET incel, so that may just be my bias, and normal people go crazy for that shit because they can relate to it or something.

>>16426454
>I talked to a Greek once about this. Apparently the roots of the words are totally legible, albeit with thousands of years of change (I know that "to beat" now means "to educate" and "courage" now means "stupidity"). However, the grammar is totally illegible, to the point where it's fair to call it a different language.
Same with Italian and (classical) Latin. Though I've seen some examples of medieval Latin which are much easier to read and parse, and it sounds more like a dialect than a different language.

It's quite likely that classical authors are harder to read just because they preferred erudite words and a byzantine sentence structure (most of the sources that survived were written by aristocrats, after all, and you can go nuts with word order thanks to cases), while everyday speech, especially between commoners, would've been much simpler to understand.

As for medieval authors, I'm not sure whether the language is simpler because they were deliberately using a plain style, while they could've written in the classical style, had they wanted to, or because vulgar (non-Latin) dialects had evolved to the point where authors were starting to vulgarize Latin too. Even as far back as the 10th century you could see something halfway between Italian and Latin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placiti_Cassinesi

By the 13th-14th century, you already have what's pretty much Italian: https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Convivio/Trattato_primo
Of course, contemporary readers may struggle a bit, since the sentence structure and word choice may not always be plain and obvious (after all, Dante was a poet), but I think it's safe to assume that everyday language from 700 years ago would be almost completely intelligible to even a zoomer today.

What about Greekbros? How far back can you go in the history of your language, while still maintaining high intelligibility?

>>16416947
baste