/lit/ - Literature

>>14501769
lmao loser

Novelist isn't a dream of mine.

You can do anything you put your mind to. I didn’t start writing until 28. I have 14 finished novels and one 1/2 finished with another 6 planned to write in the future. I choose to write. I choose to spend my time on something that will yield a solid result and justify my time spent. Don’t be like so many who have to ask permission or wait on the approval of others. Make a plan and start today. I have every confidence. Go do good things.

>>14501835
Any published? Read? Enjoyed by others? If so, how do I, a brainlet, do the same?

>>14501835
Wow, I am unironically inspired.

>>14501845
I’m publishing this month, starting with a vampire book to get my bearings with the whole release/exposure/promotion cycle. My birthday is next week so should be soon. Cover just came back from the artist. The space opera books will follow quarterly? This year. I’ve been fortunate to find beta readers and the responses have been promising. A coworkers daughter is already creating a cosplay outfit of one of the characters

>>14501845
Video games/ tv/movies/internet kill too much of your time. Make a choice to say “I choose writing/whatever over them”. You can write on anything. I’ve been using MS Word the whole time. Some people try and buy expensive laptops and MacBooks but never start. They like the idea of wanting to be a writer but don’t want to put in the work. You don’t give someone wanting to become a race car driver a Ferrari to start. You have to work your way up learning to master the art from the ground up. I’ll tell you the truth I’m a better story teller than a writer.

>>14501835
>>14501899
>>14501936
gaskun is alive

>>14501769
>25
>Almost done with med school
>Only written two or three poems I actually like
Should I off myself?

>mid 30s
>fail to write even short stories

I honestly don’t think I’m capable of telling a story. I have no idea how people do it.

>>14502072
It means you have nothing to say.

>>14501769
Yes kys

>>14502042
Rejoice child, for I am always near even when you can’t see me

>>14502088
Hurtful.

It takes some writers all the way to their 40s or 50s to write anything worthwhile.

>Over 30
>Hasn't written a philosophical treatise

>>14501769
Céline hadn’t until his late thirties and he’s the great writer of the last 2,000 years.

>>14501769
>not writing your memoirs

>>14501769
Not really, but you must do some studying before writing your first novel. Some basic theory on crafting plots and avoiding writing vices (poor grammar, overwritten passages, inappropriate metaphors, those kind of vices). Start with a creative writing course, which can be done online for free. After finishing the course (which should take you over a month), you should start writing your first novel. Your first novel will likely be terrible, but should you follow the advice above, it shall not be as terrible as it could be had you written it blind.

The name of the game here is that the earlier you start, the earlier you'll have dealt with the most basic mistakes that keep capable writers from breaking through.

>>14501835
Can you list some of your books and their topics? Also may I beta-read one of them?

>>14503401

>>14501835
Do you have a job or do you only write?

>>14503534
Wrote my adolescent memoir by age 22

>>14501807
Even worse. No ambition.

>>14501769
for sure man. I have two in the pipeline and im 22

>DFW was 24 when Broom of the System was published
>Zadie Smith was 25 when White Teeth was published
>Marek Hlasko was 23 when Eighth Day of the Week was published
>F.S. Fitzgerald was 23 when This Side of Paradise was published
>Carson McCullers was 23 when The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published
>Tao Lin was 24 when EEEEE EEE EEEE & Bed were published
>Italo Calvino was 23 when The Path to the Nest of the Spiders was published
>Kerouac was 20 when The Sea is My Brother was published
>Goethe was 25 when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published
>Musil was 25 when The Confusions of Young Torless was published
>Hemingway was 25 when In Our Time was published
>Tatsuhiko Takimoto was 24 when Welcome to the NHK was published
>Ryu Murakami was 24 when Almost Transparent Blue was published
>Garcia Marquez was 20 when Eyes of a Blue Dog was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when "Napoleon III as a President" was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when "Fate and History" was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when Free Will and Fate was published
>Nietzsche was 19 when "Can the Envious Ever Truly Be Happy?" was published
>Nietzsche was 20 when "On Tendencies" was published
>Nietzsche was 20 when "My Life" was published
>Saramago was 25 years old when Land of Sun was published
>Dickens was 24 when Sketches by Boz was published
>Dickens was 25 when The Pickwick Papers was published
>Huxley was 25 when Limbo was published
>James Joyce was 25 when Chamber Music was published
>Proust was 25 when Pleasures and Days was published
>Mishima was 23 when Confessions of a Mask was published
>Bret Easton Ellis was 21 when Less Than Zero was published
>Kenzaburō Ōe was 23 when Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published
>Emile Zola was 24 when Contes à Ninon was published
>Balzac was 20 when Cromwell was published
>Baudelaire was 24 when Salon of 1845 was published
>Hitomi Kanehara was 20 when Snakes and Earrings was published
>Stig Dagerman was 23 when Ormen was published
>Strindberg was 22 when The Outlaw was published
>Ibsen was 22 when Catiline was published
>Milan Kundera was 24 when Man: A Wide Garden was published
>Adam Thirwell was 24 when Politics was published
>Ned Beaumann was 25 when Boxer, Beetle was published
>Norman Mailer was 25 when The Naked and the Dead was published
>Eleanor Catton was 22 when The Rehearsal was published
>Robert Walser was 23 when Schneewittchen was published
>Noah Cicero was 23 when The Human War was published
>Jorge Luis Borges was 24 when Fervor de Buenos Aires was published
>Tolstoy was 24 when Childhood was published
>Johan Harstad was 23 when Amublance was published
>Kim Insuk was 20 when Bloodline was published
>Evelyn Waugh was 25 when Decline and Fall was published
Its over bros

>>14502072
Writing is structural, and there are objective principles in the way the brain analyzes narrative events that extend past fiction and delve into how we process our senses and memory. Most people think it's easy, because it's putting words on paper, but they couldn't write a good fictional story out of nowhere. It's not sitting on your ass and throwing words at paper alone.
I think talented storytellers, whether they can write books or simply tell good anecdotes, very likely have developed that part of the brain in greater detail somehow.
I think if you read a high school physics text book you can understand this. What I mean is that the textbook will have a layered narrative in of itself, in a build up. The abstraction in explaining concepts like protons, neutrons, or forces shares principles in how we would form description, setting, and cause and effect in storytelling.
You can learn this in 1-2 classes at a community college, if you want. Of course, plenty of people do that but can't tell interesting stories, but they do write more coherently. And there's probably a lot of bad habits and narrow thinking yo might pick up second hand from MFA programs. They're postmodern these days, and I mean that in the pure sense as it applies to literature. That attitude towards subverted expectations and uniqueness is not part of the universal structure of narrative.

I'm sure it's possible to write a good novel at a n advanced age.

On the other hand, my dream of entering academia is pretty much dead and buried.

Burroughs didnt publish his first book until he was 39.
Don't worry about your biography when you haven't even written anything yet. Worry about making good art

no, you can try non fiction.

>>14503579
Ive written an Appalachian vampire book about a bourbon distillers daughter, an 11 book space opera, (like Star Wars fused with anime but Without the plot mess of the sequels or prequels) 1/2 a book about the devil after the endtimes, an edgelord book I wrote that was just an excuse to have a six hundred pound man in a gold throne on wheels that’s pulled by a rain deer team of inappropriately dressed eight year olds who is trying to eat the 13 year old Aryan MC, and the first book of a new series that will be four books total. I write mostly for kids without talking down to them. A distillation of my childhood fantasies, Saturday morning cartoons and a diet of golden age six fi books from the library

>>14504006
I’ve always worked full time, even through college. I’m actually unemployed at the moment as the company I worked for was purchased by a larger corporate entity and my position was eliminated. Oddly enough I just got an email for a phone interview. So fingers crossed. I try to write everyday but it doesn’t always happen.

>>14501899
>beta readers
Yeah... real experienced author we have here boys. Definitely take everything he says seriously.

>>14503565
This. Ignore the larping fan fic writer itt.

>>14501769
I’d rather read a book from a 30-something than a 20-something. I feel like the 30s is where you have a sort of vantage point and stability where you’re able to reminisce over the intensity of youth, which is the point where we get shaped. Don’t forget to live and feel, experience fits with writing well.

>>14504659
Most of these are not particularly good works by those authors.

>>14505580
cope.

>>14501769
>2020
>novels
Dead and obsolete medium. Complete waste of time.

Screenplays and video game scripts are the only relevant forms of creative writing.

>>14506463
That depends entirely on one's values desu

>>14503579
Sure give me an email

Are we allowed to post Amazon links to the self published novels we wrote?

>>14505361
The prequels are the best part of Star Wars though

>>14507814
The phantom menace doesn’t even have a main character.
Amadala- nope
Anakin-doesn’t show up for the first 40 mins
Obiwan- Just follows quigon, stays on ship
Qui-gon- dies
So, no.

>>14507772
Yours? No.

>>14507876
;_;

>>14501769
Guys how the fuck do I learn to write good? As in storytelling, not literally writing with a pencil.

Are you stupid? Most great writers didn’t publish this early.

>>14507872
Is that a parody or are those your actual criticisms of the phantom menace?

>>14501769
Writing is one of the few things that only benefits from age. You learn more about the world, about human behavior, whatever. The more you've learned, the more depth you can give your stories and characters. It's one of those areas where it's never too late to begin.

>>14508253
Pick out a few of your favorite books and read them with an eye to what makes them your favorites. There's no one size fits all writing style and if you want to write then you want to write the kind of stuff you personally enjoy reading. So use that stuff as a guide.

>>14508291
No, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Phantom menace is all over the place because nobody wanted to tell Lucas “no”

>>14503401
I think your point would've had more impact if Flaubert had been the one cited.

>>14508529
>t. hasn’t read Death on Credit

>>14508260
Yeah Milton, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Byron, Keats, Auden, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Proust, Beckett, Pynchon, Eggers, and Rooney weren’t great writers. Got it.

>>14504668
Tell me more about this "universal structure of narrative."

>>14507772
Do, old sport!

>>14504668
So I’m really fucking good at telling personal anecdotes in conversation; a number of my friends have told me that I’m a great story teller and that I can make slightly funny stories hilarious. From what I can tell, aside from the subject matter the two things that make my stories enjoyable are the wording and the tone (I also tend to go into lengthy digressions that only make sense at the end of a story). My problem is that I have no clue how to translate vocal intonations into my writing. Further, I’m somewhat discouraged by writers the greats. I was reading chapter 6 of Absalom Absalom yesterday and I was floored by his manipulation of the story’s order and the way he used parentheses and when I was done reading I got somewhat angry that I don’t think I’d ever be able to write something of such greatness. Forgive the long post, I had to vent. (If you have any tips I’d really appreciate it tho)

>>14504668
So how do I learn to write a story using such a structure? I’ve read several books discussing this sort of thing, but I’ve never been able to put it into practice.

>>14506463
This.

>>14503401
>>14508529
Both of them were very competent writers before that, high school Flaubert blew the fuck out of most of shit authors we have nowadays

>>14506463
>screenplays
Literally written by committees in Hollywood. You will never make it writing a screenplay.

>>14509794
Work on your own voice, anon. In my opinion that's what makes great writers great. You don't have to be like them, just develop and perfect your own style.

>>14510256
Thank you, king. I appreciate the advice.