/lit/ - Literature

>>20849434
I have a playlist for each project. My second project I was listening to this album on repeat when I wrote the first draft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1BnakexgSU
The track "Believe in Yourself" is the centerpiece to me. It feels really good.

>>20797330
It's too detailed to show. The general gist of it is a Southern state in the US roughly 20-30 years from now. Changes in the government structure leads the states into isolating from each other politically and culturally. The main character is an embodiment of that new ethos that is supremely resistant to outside influence. He is a dysfunctional relationship with a woman who molded him into someone callous and abusive. The crying woman I was referring to is that girlfriend and maid (pic related), she has extreme mental issues and her perversions sometimes manifest as hysteria. The guy ends up desperately in love with a whore—from another state—even though he knows she's lying to him about everything.

>>20703399
I'm working on two. One is full steam ahead toward the final draft and other I left at 1st draft.
>>20703548
Rule of three is a writing principle that trios are satisfying and significant to readers. It could be mentioning three ideas, three people, three events, etc. In the case of Chekhov's gun, if you show it three times it is bound to find significance with the reader. Thing is you don't have to mention it the same way each time, you just have to in some way remind the reader that the gun exists. I was reading a novel recently where a character says "I'm leaving" three different times but another character gives different explanations about why she won't leave. Eventually we really believe that she will leave, and leave peacefully as she insists. There are various guns mentioned in the story so we know the guy has guns, but the guns are not mentioned for a while except one character points at her husband with a fingergun at his forehead. Two pages later the girl that said she was going to leave pulls out a gun and shoots the guy.
What made that great was that the author established first that there are guns, but then begins to establish that a character wants to leave peacefully so we rule out guns until the reader gets one last chance to consider it with a less direct reminder about guns. Sometimes if you fail the rule of three before a major surprise, it can sometimes disappoint readers if the writer fails to prepare the readers expectations for what could happen.

>>20535751
I'm a lot more interested in the first story too but I think the second will be good on account that I will slowly reveal the extent of disfunction. Watching the protagonist lie to himself as well as his frank opinions, his current girlfriend dehumanize herself into a speechless maid with severe emotional baggage (pic related), and of course the completely untrustworthy new girl. There are a good number of scenes I think will be really fucked up in that one and actually has lots of thoughts on contemporary life. My first book barely talks about contemporary thought at all, it's almost entirely criticizing what we hope to be.

>>20474779
That's what I'm thinking too. I had been thinking about one story so long that when I went to go look at some of my short story prompts I came up with I realized two of them were novel material. After a brainstorming session a few weeks ago I turned what would have been a story about a guy getting conned by girl into a southern gothic tale of a rich bachelor made dysfunctional by his nympho maid (who rarely speaks and often seen sitting on a stool in the corner of a room) and his attempt to court a conartist who leads him away from his worldview.
It's allowed me to vent about all kinds of things the first project wasn't about and or look at old themes from another angle. It's also had a lot of fun with how I reveal the maid character and what she did to the protag because it's truly sick. I really want to get the first draft done since it's going so fast, finish up the previous book then come back to this new one during beta reading/submission.