/lit/ - Literature

>>15742477

>Penmonkeys Have Heads Like Concrete Drain Boxes

>Writing is a career that is endlessly reiterative. Talent matters, but it matters only in equal proportion to how much patience and perseverance you possess. You gotta be stubborn as a brain-damaged mule. Said for the many-th time: writing is about putting a bucket on your head and trying to knock down a brick wall. It’s either you or the wall. You’re either stubborn and pissed off enough to break on through, or eventually, the wall puts you on your ass. Up to you to conjure the fortitude.

>The successful writers, the ones who work day in and day out, are usually ones who can tell you about beating down the brick wall. And the long road to get to that brick wall. It won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen over the course of a single year. Took me over 12 years to get where I am, and I’m not even anywhere all that special, yet. A penmonkey career is a long con, not a short swindle.

>You’re either in for the long haul or you’ll be hauled out before long.

>>15742487
>Penmonkeys Are Not Stopped By Your Earthly “Writer’s Block”

>“Writer’s Block.”

>“The Muse.”

>Two sides of the same coin. A coin made of lies. And sadness. And babies.

>Yes, yes, writers get blocked. And writers can be inspired. The first: a sad state. The second: a glorious boon. But neither have power beyond what you give them. You don’t need inspiration to work. Same as you don’t need to give in to whatever’s blocking you. Neither are made of anything real. They’re just imaginary. Hallucinatory. Best of all: transitory.

>What, you’re sad? Of course you’re sad. You’re a writer. Bad day at the day job? Painful bunion? Kid won’t stop crying? Besieged by ninjas? Mind a gray gruel-like mush?

>You have to move past it. You have to shut that out. Even just writing down a string of pages-long nonsense may help jar loose the scree and debris. If you can’t get shut of it, can’t tune out the nega-frequency, then I’m truly sorry. But know that the working penmonkeys out there hammering away in the word mines don’t want to hear about your writer’s block. They’ve got shit to do. And if you’re a tough cookie, you’ll join ’em.

>Your mental state cannot stop you. If it does, know that it has a better name than “writer’s block.”

>You might want to call it “self-sabotage.”

sounds like a guy who needed a few more beatings when he was a child

>>15742503
>Penmonkeys, Like Honey Badgers, Don’t Give A Shit

>Three words. Practice them with me now: “I don’t care.”

>Or, even better: “It’s all good.”

>Bad review? Hard rejection? Someone tells you your “dream” of being a writer is bullshit? Mean person on the Internet? Self-doubt? Plague of uncertainty nibbling at your brain-stem like a passel of vampire hamsters? Fear of failure? Fear of success? Is your idea original? Will your book get published? What will the cover look like? Will anybody read it? Are you just a fraud? When will they discover you? When will they see that you’re just wearing the costume of a writer?

>Fuck it! Fuck all of it. Fuck it all right in the galactic dickhole.

>No, I don’t know what a galactic dickhole is. I’ve been drinking. Just, shhh. Shhhh.

>Find clarity in what you do. Remove noise and zero in on pure signal. All that matters is what you do. Put differently: don’t care so much. I know that runs counter to what you think, which is to care deeply, care strongly, care without reservation or reason. Note that I’m not saying to lose your passion, but eventually you need to throw up your hands (er, not puke them up because, ew — why did you eat your hands?) and say, “Fuck it.” You should care only about the thing that you’re doing, which is writing the perfect novel, script, manifesto, whatever. Any outside noise? Shut it out. At least until you finish.

>>15742626
>Penmonkeys Do Not Find Better Things To Do

>You always have the option to do something other than write. Clean your office. Run some errands. Walk the dog. See a movie. Hang out on Twitter. Digest porn. Sacrifice albino mammals to dark gods.

>Life presents you with an endless menu of options. Writing is merely one choice amongst an infinity.

>And penmonkeys make that choice every time.

onions man supreme

>>15742638
>Penmonkeys Know Their Craft

>Being a writer actually features two primary tiers of craft (with lots of niggling little sub-tiers and micro-strata): writing, and storytelling. Storytelling is the larger scope, the idea of conveying a narrative and making it count. Writing is the smaller, more technical craft: you must find a way to convey the story you hope to tell. You need both of these skills.

>My father was a great storyteller. And yet, I have a strong feeling he wasn’t a capable writer. Now, to be clear, he didn’t need to be: he was an engineer, a plant facilities manager, a gunsmith, at no point did he need to sit down and be a writer. Meaning, he didn’t want to be a penmonkey.

>You do. So learn how to write. And learn how to tell stories.

>And keep learning, too. You don’t stop just because you’ve written one thing. This isn’t a simple discipline. It doesn’t have easy margins. Penmonkeys always have more they can learn.

>>15742695
>But Also, Penmonkeys Have Permission To Suck

>You are not born a writer. Penmonkeys are made. Challenged by and forged within the fires of their own self-doubt, and pickled in a brine of gin, vinegar, salt, bourbon, and straight-up word sauce.

>(For the record, word sauce is actually just steak sauce. Don’t tell anybody.)

>Sometimes, what you do isn’t going to be great. Don’t get mopey. Don’t succumb to the Penmonkey Blues. You need to leave yourself that margin-of-error, that force field of occasional suckitude. Not everything you do is going to have that new car, new baby smell. Some of what you do is going to smell like the ruptured bile-sac of a sick possum. Penmonkeys don’t let this get them down. They move on. They fix what they fucked up or they write something new, something better, something that takes the lessons learned and puts them fast into play. Learn this phrase: “That’s okay, I can fix it in post.”

>>15742724
>Penmonkeys Write Till It’s Right

>You don’t write till it’s “Ehh, shrug, pbbt, poop noise,” you write till it’s right. Too many authors go off half-cocked. They jump in and jump out too fast — “Here’s my completed work!” — and then they submit a “final product” that has the shape and definition of a quivering blob of Ambrosia Salad.

>With raisins in it.

>With raisins.

>Once, while in a bathroom in college, I saw that someone had written on the wall in black marker:

>WORK THE CLIT.

>Not bad advice in general, and for penmonkeys, this is good as metaphor. You gotta work the clit till the cookies pop. Work the story until it’s right. Not until it’s done. It’s easy to finish something. It’s hard to finish something and do it well. You need to bring that story to climax. Until it explodes its juices all over your chin, over your cordoruys, over that weird apparatus you’re wearing. Work the clit. Write till it’s right.

>>15742734
>Penmonkeys Love To Write, Not To Get Published

>This is easy enough: the writer’s goal should be to get published, but the writer’s love should be of writing. Too many writers are in love with the idea of writing-to-be-published and too few are in love with the act of writing. But tried-and-true penmonkeys love the craft, the act, the actual telling-of-stories.

>They care about publishing. But they love to be writing.

>>15742777
>Penmonkeys Do Work — And Don’t Quit

>Penmonkeys work. Penmonkeys don’t fuck around.

>Write every day. And finish what you started. And with each day of writing, learn something new about who you are and what you do. Penmonkeys don’t merely talk about writing (though, plainly, they do that quite a lot — I can’t tell you how many times I see writers pooh-pooh on writing advice and then lo and behold they leap to their own blogs to do what now? Offer writing advice). They actually also do the writing.

>They aren’t hamstrung by fear. They don’t find better things to do. They don’t watch day in and day out as time fritters away. They don’t let others dissuade them from this path.

>They write. Endlessly anon.

>They don’t write because they “have to” — that’s an endearing writer’s myth, but a myth just the same. Penmonkeys write because they want to. They write because if they don’t, drum roll please, then nothing gets written. Writing is a difficult act of mountain climbing or cave spelunking: it’s work, hombre. But climb to the top or crawl down into the deepest dark and you’d be amazed at what you find there: rolling clouds, glowing bacteria, the cleanest air, the cleanest water, the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, cave crickets with human faces, gods and monsters and goblins and unicorns and Lady Gaga.

>On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.

>The work is purifying and perfect even when it’s not.

>This is a beautiful, if you let it be beautiful.

>Above all else: writers write.

>>15742477
>You don’t want that deal. It involves Justin Bieber.
I seriously hope he gets added to the civil case for this dumbass remark, it'd be so fucking tasty.

Sounds like his father abused him as a child and he will have a stroke at any second because he has undiagnosed coronary heart disease.

wtf is a Chuck Wendig?

>>15742477
>Chuck "count how many times I say poopy HA HA" Wendig is a professional writer and you're still writing butterfly shitporn for /lit/faggots
go figger

>this isn't a parody

oh my god

>>15742926
A writer

Chuck Wendig is a fag. I initially liked his advice pieces, until they all started sounding the same, and his exaggerated "lol randunb" humor started to get really irritating.

All he writes is sci-fi shit anyway.

>penmonkeys
He needed just one word to convey a huge raft of meaning. I was repulsed and stopped reading, but he's clearly an effective writer.

>>15742967
Have you seen his other work?

>>15742477
Chuck Wendig is one of those redditor type people that think it is cool to say stuff in a "badass" way full of pauses, emphasis, and random nasty/sexual things. He isnt a very good writer, at least going off of everything Ive read from him. Too trapped in that awful writing style.

>>15743911
no, god, I hope I never have to

>>15744543
Why people can't get into stream of consciousness?

>>15742926
It's when a Native American spirit possesses a human driven to cannibalism by starvation and driven mad by loneliness. But also it throws things.

>>15743911
wadaboudit?

>>15742477
Wendig is illiterate. His prose is shocking. The well connected corporate hack grifter incarnate.

>>15744701
"It zigzags herkily-jerkily out of sight."

i do not like this man.

>>15744605
stream of consciousness is the biggest pleb filter in all of fiction

This is the greedy retard who is going to get the internet archive shut down.

>>15744886
Whuh

I tried reading this but while doing so I was overcome with one of the strongest and deepest feelings of revulsion I have ever experienced, I almost fainted from sheer disgust and horror not only at what was written but especially at the thought that there is a man out there who writes and thinks like this and that there is a world that is capable of spawning such a specimen.

>>15744886
This shit goes so far past cringe it starts touching based.

>>15744886
uhhhh hello, based department?

this man is more frightening than "cringy"

>>15742477
who in gods name would choose to read this guy after seeing sample of this work. Incredibly unpopular teenagers?

>>15745182
lmfao

>>15744886
lmao

>>15745588
People who need a firmware upgrade in the form of "coffee".

>>15744886
I've follow Chuck's advice religiously ever since I saw this thread this afternoon. It's been working for me. Mostly because he wasn't actually telling me to do anything in the immediate and just issuing vague commandments that I could comfortably ignore at present. But now I am at a crossroads as Chuck is suggesting that I drink coffee and I don't drink coffee. What should I do?

>>15744886
>flumpty-foo
>boopty-bop
>zippity-zoom
>razza frazza wuzza wooza
never before has the english language seen such eloquence

>>15744643
Imagine Blackwood's The Wendigo, but written in the style of Chuck Wendig

>>15743248
>All he writes is sci-fi shit anyway.

That should be immediately obvious from how he writes this.

>>15746236

>>15746323
Sky

*unzips*

>>15746323
ugh

>>15744886
This man molests children

>>15746323
Do people buy this shit? I wouldn't read more of it even if you paid me

>>15746323
Wendig is also the author of this magnum opus.

>>15746323
>>15746646
Aside from the physical-cringe inducing content it flows like procrastinating 16 year old's history essay

>>15746646
No he isn't, that one was Star Wars: Join the Resistance: Escape from Vodran by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker. A lot of people keep thinking Wendig wrote that, though.

>>15746607
People will buy almost anything that has Star Wars on the cover and the only people I've seen IRL with this book are 12 year olds, who probably don't have the reading experience to tell they're reading dogshit.

>>15746607
>Chuck Wendig, comic book writer, screenwriter, and blogger, is best known for his popular website Terribleminds.com, as well as for his 2015 novel Star Wars: Aftermath, which debuted at #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list, and #4 on USA Today's best seller list. In 2013, he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

I don't know how many people really bought it to have it end up #4 on those lists. Maybe it was people who were starved for explanations of what happened in Force Awakens or something.

>>15746690
I won't ask how you know this, anon.

It actually makes it worse: rather than Star Wars hiring one terrible writer to turn out crap worse than fan fiction, they have at least three.

I'd enjoy his prose more if it wasn't dominated with weird sexual metaphors and nonsensical pauses. It has the right amount of spastic to rival a dollar-store Pynchon.

>>15744886
> I'm so quirky and special because it drink COFFEE
> It's like doing hard drugs except not for real, tee hee hee
When I'd dictator these people will be some of the first sent to the mines.

>>15742477
how are these people real

>>15746323
If you're wondering who "Bones" is, it's this character, created by Wendig for that novel:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mister_Bones

>>15744886
>>15746236
it is truly Joycean

>>15746690
>Ben Acker and Ben Blacker
You are shitting me

>>15742477
I read a couple chapters of one of his novels - every time he'd introduce a character, he'd invariably state (outright - no subtle hints here) the character's ethnicity, sexual orientation, and inevitable disability. I'm pretty sure he had a checklist.

>>15746704
Those lists don't actually represent sales.

>>15745182
Only if by touching based you mean shitting itself.

>>15742477
>>And there you are raped and eaten by sharks.
Oh no yall he just made a rape joke, let's cancel him

>>15748056
Nope. that's their names

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Join_the_Resistance:_Escape_from_Vodran

>>15748056
The world is a crazy place sometimes.

>>15746646
Its funnier if you assume Mattis is General Mattis

>>15742477
Chuck Wendig is the single shittiest cuck faggot comic writer in history and that's saying something......

>>15750864

tl;dr

neglect your chores / bills / kids and focus on your passion

Based, I agree

>>15750919
>characters poop plot

what did he mean by this?

>>15750864
>>15750919
Whoa nigga, you expect me to read All That Shit
by Chuck Wendig?

>>15750864
Most of Franzen's rules are just digs at DFW. It could only have been more clear if he'd had started with "STOP BEING SO FUCKING SINCERE WHO EVEN CARES IF SOMETHING'S WATER DAVID YOU FUCK?"

>>15750953
>tl;dr: don't make up words, drink coffee

Reading Wuck Chendig is like imagining what a pop figure would sound like if it could speak. You can hear the sudden rises and falls in tone with each sentence, imagine him getting excited then loud, laughing to himself, 'sharks that will rape you and eat you!' He flaps his hands and then says it again to himself, fingering the keys on his mac. Then I imagine him getting quiet as he tries to think of something else witty and Reddit tier random to say. Perhaps he has a little booklet, a Wendig's Wordings if you will. Each page has three columns. Around a hundred words per column. Each word a pop culture reference or animal of some kind, that he then combines for his articles. He reads pulp proudly, considers himself a great writer because he's made some coin shitting onions into Word. He doesn't care about craft, or form, or anything other than himself. He's probably killed someone. And eaten them. Like one of his sharks. Penmonkey-pseud-psychopath.

Name one person with a worse personality on the planet than chuck wendig. protip: you can't. even a methhead is more charming.
>>15742926
This.

>>15751099
...How is LotR chosen one?

>>15751099
It's all so tiresome

chuck-your-lunch wendigo has a thread with over 80 pages of straight relentless dabbing on him on kiwifarms if you want to be entertained for a week.

>>15742477
> It’s all mortgages and diapers and spreadsheets and shopping lists and cake recipes and suburban methamphetamine dealers
Based anti-marriage fag.

Also it's ironic that he wastes so much time telling people to "write instead of making excuses and wasting your time."

>>15751309
He does it on twitter so it counts as writing, especially because he's HaD hIs cOFfEe

>>15751099
I don't even like LOTR or Tolkien and find both insanely overrated; and this post still triggers me.

Although I bet the dude knows what he's doing and does it for attention.

>>15750864
This isn't even really that bad. Chuck is a spastic retard despite this

All these years later, and I'm really glad someone finally made a Chuck Wendig thread.

>>15742477
>>15744886
>>15750919

Why do normies meme coffee so fucking much? Sure, it's good and arguably better for you than drinking booze, but they treat it as if it makes good writing skills bloom at the base of your fucking dick so that you can cum your magnum opus sometime during the brief caffeine buzz.

I fucking hate le leddit xddd writers, fuck.

>>15751796
I used to drink it throughout the day. Now I can only have one or two cups in the morning and that's it, or my chest starts to feel tight. And I'm already an alcoholic, so any time my body feels different it freaks me out.

>>15751796
It's an addiction like any other. Once you're used to it, it's less about the buzz and more about not feeling like shit because you didn't get your hit yet.

It's just socially more acceptable to go coFEEE instead of talking about your morning cig/joint.

>>15751796
Pretty much any distinct part of one’s identity is rife for constant boasting these days. Whether it’s being addicted to coffee, going to the gym, playing video games, or being half a fag, you’re liable to hear about it because that’s the only way people can build character these days.

>>15751879
At least Chuck is also a writer.

>>15751974
don’t flatter yourself chuck

>>15742477
I've never heard of this retard but apparently the rest of /lit/ has. That being said if you boil his advice down and rid it of the retarded edgy non sequiturs it's pretty much
>you have to make time to write
>you have to actually write
>sometimes you're going to write garbage, that's okay
>keep working on what you're writing until it's good
which is really not that bad advice
>>15750864
/lit/ always gives franzen shit but he's honestly pretty good and certainly levels above somebody who apparently writes post-disney purchase starwars fan fiction
>>15751099
>The bigger the series, the likelier it is that it unspools into minutiae and footnotes and chaos.
>Killing characters is a cheap way of building emotional effect.
Both of these are generally true
>Read THE EXPANSE instead
I've never heard of it but it's probably fucking gay

>>15744886
There's a mass grave that's 587 people short of where it needs to be.

>>15752653
588

>>15742477
Why would I take advice from this guy? I want to be a good writer, not a hack.

>>15747019
You know sometimes “men” like Chuck can come up with some good fanfiction, or at least some decent pulp characters.
That fucking abomination you just posted is neither

Chuck Wendig or as I like to call him 'Why book burnings are right and necessary'

>>15750864
>I mean, okay. I don’t hate this. (...) so. sure.
>Ennh, I mean, I get it —
STOP

>>15751796
I’m somewhat addicted to both coffee and tobacco and coffee is definitely harder to stop

>>15742477
>Those jokes

Has this man ever written a complete sentence in his life?

He reminds me of those inoffensive, childlike middle-aged guys at a summer camp, school, or some religious club. I didn't like guys like that then, I sure as fuck don't like them now

>>15751796
I drank coffee starting when I was 6 and by the time my peers had started to as well caffeine had literally no effect on me. I can drink a whole pot and feel only vaguely more alert. Caffeine is a weaker, shittier alternative to nicotine.

>>15745182
underrated

This is basedcore

>>15751099
I always like when people say that your fantasy world doesn't have to adhere to reality, and that apparently means it needs to be constructed with an affirmative action checklist.

>>15742477

Haha just write a lot. Is it good? Who cares.

Literally who is this?

>>15742477
cringe. literally cracked 2007-tier

>>15750967
Chuck Wendig is Rick and Morty, the person

>>15754750
exactly. this is spot-on the "Cracked voice" of the early 2010s

>>15754725
The mongrel who took down the internet archive. The cuck who'll mourn the death of his 3 bitches (2 dogs, 1 "wife") in the near future

>>15752490
>which is really not that bad advice
Yeah, but it's because it's the most generic but foundational advice for any given craft.
>You have to make time to craft wood
>you have to actually craft wood
>sometimes you're going to sculpt garbage and that's OK
>keep working on your sculpting until it's good
Pretty applicable. I read and heard the same stuff from different people and websites in high school, and most people here have.

>another faggot who treats liking coffee as a personality trait
Why do they do this?

fucking top kek
the modern world is like watching the circus

>>15742477
Retarded idiot whose campaigning to get the most useful public resource and archival tool on the planet taken down because someone uploaded his shitty book to it once.

>>15744886

>>15746323
how does this fag get work?

>>15750864
bother are leftwing faggits.

>>15756449
>Darnell Brown
kek no way

>Wendig’s current legacy is a handful of mediocre novels, fan-fictions, and a nauseating linguistic pattern, but if the Internet Archive permanently closes, all of that will be a footnote compared with the material impact of his Twitter account. As an author, he should be cognizant the power of the pen better than anybody — and as the huge nerd in him should know, “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

https://medium.com/nameless-aimless/the-assassination-of-the-internet-archive-by-the-coward-chuck-wendig-5ffb4677ee49
Fuck this bastard. Im waiting on pins and needles for the day when he finally gets cancelled and (hopefully) MeToo’d so hard he can’t so much as attend a local star wars fanfiction club meeting

>>15742734
>work the clit til the cookies pop

wow I am thoroughly nauseated imagining this man attempt such a thing

>>15756449
>literally the soi face in every picture
Oh wow

>>15744886
This is so fucking cringe
What is it with coffeefags? Hunter S Thompson was so much more likeable and he was blasting cocaine all day, and the psychedelics are interesting.
But coffee really is the nigger of drugs.

>>15755054
What? This motherfucker took down archive?

>>15757109
>>15756825
Yup

>>15744886
I cringed physically for the first time in my life, thanks.

Sneed Wendig

Chukily-suckily sneedily-feedily

>>15744605
What Chuck Wendig writes is not stream of consciousness, it's just normal linear writing filled with lots of juvenile humor, and not even good juvenile humor. Anyway some of this advice is actually pretty solid, but no one should ever take writing advice from someone who puts out trash like this.

>>15742477
Literally who?
>star wars
>pen monkeys

>>15750864
kek you have to admit that is terrible "advice" from Franzen.

>>15742477
Wasn't this guy cancelled for something? Being a rapist or a pedo or whatever? I remember seeing threads about on /tv/ a while ago.

>>15742477
isnt this the crustafuckable day guy or whatever it was

>>15755137
They have a hole where there personality should be.

>>15759683
that was a different indiscriminable s0isucker. i understand your confusion, they all look the same.

>>15756449
Not jus white privilege

abusive white privilege

Say it with me

and don't forget to capitalize Blacks

>>15742477
Cuck Mandingo? Butt why?

>>15751796
Does anybody else not get noticeably buzzed from drinking coffee? Do I have some kind of deficiency or is the effect just really subtle?

>>15742516
Kek

>>15742477
why are we listening to the faggot who got the internet archive taken down?

>>15742477
He writes like a fucking CRPG character.

>>15750864
>First, writing for money is a FUCKING WIN shut up

>>15759683
I don't think so but it's only a matter of time, all these fucking guys always turn up being rapists or pedos, just look at the guy from Mythbusters who looks exactly like these Chuck Wendig cuck.

>>15757071
>coffee really is the nigger of drugs
this

>>15743313

Fuck you Chuck Wendig. You suck and your writing sucks. Nobody likes you and you are friends with Sam Sykes which means you support gropings and weird rapiness. And nobody on the planet other than you thinks "penmonkeys" conveys a huge raft of meaning. Close your fucking mouth you piece of shit whore.

>>15750864
>>15750919
>>15751099
>>15755182
This man’s twitter feed reads like a woman’s. I don’t even mean that like a cheap insult, I mean that sincerely; his prose has a feminine air of passive-aggression and aversion to authenticity in favor of adherence to what he perceives as the social norm.

Also, his criticisms of LOTR are genuinely brain-dead. Frodo isn’t more of a “chosen one” than the previous ring-bearers, and his importance is that he, as a hobbit, does not possess the same avarice and greed that a man or elf would have to misuse the Ring. Besides that point, LOTR was literally written to be a new myth for the Anglo-Saxon (who are, by modern standards, “white”) culture.

>>15751099
This man has śóy flowing through his veins, not blood.

where'dol da cringe mfs come from, lately

>>15762908
>Besides that point, LOTR was literally written to be a new myth for the Anglo-Saxon (who are, by modern standards, “white”) culture.
Then why would the Jackson estate zealously guard against disseminating it? Can I get a source on your claim?