/lit/ - Literature

>I'm going back to school. I'm studying advertising and I'm going to be an evil corporate capitalist pig and use my talents to manipulate people so I can buy a Porche.

that's more than likely not going to happen. To be excellent at something you have to start early, be focused and not waste half your life on shit you're no good at.

To aspiring writers on /lit/:

You don't actually think you're fooling anyone when you label your novel 'post-modern' do you? You don't actually think you're going to pull the wool over any critic who's worth his salt into thinking your emphasis on abstract concepts and subjectivity is anything other than a thinly-veiled excuse for the lack of anything vaguely meaningful to write about in your life, which is a rigmarole of mundane and banal basement-dwelling totally detached from social issues and relations?

It's not that we blame you or anything, don't get us wrong. If there was nothing interesting to write about in our lives, we'd obviously be forced to write about inconsequential bluster totally removed from the concerns of everyday life. But that's not the case, and neither has it been the case in the lives of the greatest writers (Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mann, Fitzgerald). Even someone as nebulous as Walt Whitman always maintained a grounded concern for the people around him, for the state of those he knew and his nation.

My advice to those of you still labouring under such isolation-induced delusions is to drag yourself out of the basement (in more senses than one) and start living a real life with real concerns, start to get to know the people around you and their problems, study them. Then you will produce a work of worth.