/lit/ - Literature

*slaps Butterfly’s ass*
YOURE MY BITCH

...cutie pie :3

>>13350893
Tons of short stories use first person past tense. Personally it feels more natural/less awkward to both read and write in

>>13350893
>Erase it all and stop writing
This is the retarded part. You could've just changed things to look less awkward.

Read more short stories and copy what they do. This is why reading is an important part of learning to write well.

>>13350893
Things aren't going to immediately come out perfect. Throwing everything away because of a flub is just wasting your time.

>>13350893
It's not your fault English is shit

>>13350893
anon, you're going to be the writer who uses I relentlesly and do it good. It will become a hit, everyone can relate and in 5 years academic papers start most sentences with I, bless

>>13350893
Writing in the present tense is honestly genuinely hard, especially for beginners. Because you need to account for basically everything that's going on and you can't really take any shortcuts or skip around.
I had stuff before, but when I got back to writing,I made the mistake of starting in the present tense initially. I went on a year hiatus to go and think things out in my head and also because a lot of personal things were happening, and when I started back up again from scratch, I went with past tense and it flowed immensely better.
So in the end, it's really up to you. Experimentation certainly wouldn't hurt.

The first thing I practiced (apart from basic spelling and syntax) was to never ever EVER start two or more sentences with the same word—unless it's "transliteration", or something similar/pseudo.
I later learned of em dash and semi-colons, they really help with that.

>>13352238
I keep abusing dashes.
Does this make for bad writing?
Also, I try to avoid using same words altogether. If I used the word "head" in one sentence, I'll try to avoid it in the next.

>>13352115
>He sat down by a table. While waiting for the waiter, he looks at an old man in the far corner.
What's wrong with this sentence?

>>13352249
If you use them too much it'll look retarded. Though as for repeating words between sentences I'd say the trick is to not use most of the same words for every 2.5-3 sentences. If you maintain that interval it's not as noticeable.

>>13350893
Listen to good song lyrics. Since artists have such massive egos it's always about themselves and what they feel about their present state (or poetry, I recommend YATES).

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Start with I, ends with said.

>>13350893
That's a non-issue, its like worrying about using the words "and", "the" and "is" too much.

>>13352281
It's an issue if every sentence starts looking similar and it wasn't a deliberate stylistic choice.

>>13352249
I have a rule of always replacing the third or fourth comma with either a semi colon or dash. Or like that where there's no punctuation at at when there could have been, here's a semi colon; I'm not writing as if the example is itself the example of itself—if that makes any sense (I could have said "if that makes any sense" in parentheses, but I'm using a parantheses here, and that's that—but now I used em-dash again, which means I should probably replace the first with just a normal comma.)

>>13352294
At all*
I'm now*
Something I need to practice is proofreading.

>>13350893
>Is this the curse of first person present tense?
No, it's the curse of the English language. Shift to a prodrop language

Should you replace a word with a synonym, if that synonym is obscure and most people wouldn't be able to understand it?

>>13352309
Yes. Fuck most people.

>>13352260
When I said experimentation, I didn't mean alternating between the past and present tense. But to answer your question, not only was it doing what I just said, but the pacing is also awful and I don't even need to explain why "waiting for the waiter." sounds really dumb.

I would go more among the lines of
>"He was shown to his table, and had sat down. Waiting for someone to come and take his order, he turned his head and glimpsed at an old man eating on the other side of the restaurant."
I would've used corner at the end but I hate using similar-sounding words not too far from each other if I have other options.