/lit/ - Literature

yes there is. all artistic mediums go out of style eventually, but if its good people will take inspiration from it, adapt it and abstract it into other mediums in some fashion

>>16262090
You write a novel to inspire a screenwriter to write your shit for TV for burgers to consoooom. Dont lose hope anon

>tfw there will never be another Great American Novel

Why even live bros

>>16262090
>what role does a writer have
Don't be a little bitch asking for some modicum of social acceptance of your useless hobby, just write and enjoy doing so, don't bog yourself down with considerations of if anyone cares

>>16262131
This. Go to LA cafés and shill your shit to pseud near-homeless screenwriters

>>16262090
Write for people or AI in the future.

>>16262162
Masturbators are the lowest form of life.

>>16262090
No. But we don't know any better.

>>16262202
So are self defeatists, you cuck

>>16262202
Still a step above exihibitionists.

>>16262209
Being realistic isn't self defeatism.
>>16262218
Most great artists were exhibitionists.

>>16262090
Thought experiment:
>You live in South Africa and up to this point you have lived a good life full of adventures to tell.
>A publisher offers you a deal to get a novel published.
>You can be 100% sure, they will not sell a single copy in South Africa.
>You will never ever see or hear from a reader of yours in Europe and America and they won't either.
>You will get no money, but the children from your divorced ex-wife will get paid after your death.
Will you write a novel or not?

>>16262090
>Is there any point in writing a novel
self actualization
catharsis
for hobby and fun
just cuz
as a present
to work through your shit
because you hate yourself

>>16262244
yeah
an author writes stories for themself

>>16262090
I write my novel to decide if I should commit suicide or not.

>>16262397
why not a game with multiple endings

>>16262090
>tfw you realize that your 4chan posts are read by thousands of people every day

I'm a writer bros.

I'm writing a novel right now but there's something in the back of my mind that keeps bugging me.

Was or had been?

>>16262577
Based and wholesome. 5* post, anon.

>>16262577
>posters in the thread count: 14

>>16262601
that's why you should post on every single thread
even if you don't have anything to say, just reply to someone else saying "based"

>>16262671
based

>>16262691
wait, there are still 14 posters
go post somewhere else you lazy fuck

>>16262090
Light novel industry is huge in Japan

>>16262090
>Is there any point in writing a novel in the year of our lord 2020?
Depends, are you any good? There are multiple authors I am wishing to put out new publications for book series I am reading

>>16262371
No, they don't

>>16263277
you're not an author

>>16262115
What medium went out of fashion?

>>16263300
I'd like to think a good author writes the kind of story they themselves would like to read

>>16263300
Yeah, I am.

>>16263310
Opera

Name one creative occupation where this isn’t the case

>>16263300
Based dubs of truth

>>16262397
Based Goethe

>>16262090
Not really. The novel has been reduced to a refuge for people who don't have the skills and connections needed to make it in a relevant art form like TV or video games.

>>16262366
All of those can be achieved through artistic mediums that, unlike literature, aren't completely obsolete.

>>16264637
how obsolete a medium is doesn't matter to an artist.

>>16262090
The idea that novels are outmoded or irrelevant is a cope for being too lazy to write one despite wanting to.

>>16262090
>>16262162
>>16262366
>>16262397
>>16262589
>>16262904
>>16264763
If you've never written (read: published) anything before, then attempting to write a novel is probably the worst thing you can try to do. As Ray Bradbury puts it, "You're spending all this time and effort writing something you're not even sure is going to be any good." Plus the fact that, objectively, as a new writer most of your stuff is going to be garbage unless you're naturally gifted.

The best thing you can do is to write a shit-ton of short stories. Write one short story, completed and edited and ready to be read by others, per week. This forces you to practice your prose and storytelling skills with a new story or concept every week, and completing a new story every week keeps you from getting burned out and gives you a sense of accomplishment, and also serves as a kind of record of your writing, something you can go back and look over to see how you've improved over time. Writing, like mot other skills, is improved only through repetition. Bradbury also suggested for beginning writers to read one short story, one essay (scientific historical, whatever) and one poem every day. This helps bring in new ideas and also helps fight writer's block.

I've been following this routine for almost two months now and already I've seen a massive improvement in the quality of my writing and my storytelling and character-building skills.

>>16264863
>spend years practicing a dead medium so you can one day try your hand at another dead medium

What a massive waste of time.

>>16264863
>"You're spending all this time and effort writing something you're not even sure is going to be any good."
he wrote a fucking book.

>>16264893
...Ray Bradbury? He's written several books (probably most famously Fahrenheit 451), and even more short stories. He's was also massively successful while doing it. What's your point?

>>16264863
I'm trying to write my first book, which is a collection of short stories connected by a single main plot. I did this because I thought it might make it interesting, but also because I can then try to get the short stories published individually.

It's a somewhat depressing process, creating these stories while realizing that probably no one will care about them or read them. I've never published a book, but I used to write for a newspaper, and at my current job I write and edit assorted publications for a living. Everything of mine that's been published has been non-fiction, so I'm not sure whether any ability in that regard will translate into success with fiction. I still try to write every day (in addition to my paid work), and there is something satisfying to it, but it largely feels pointless when I think about how it's probable that nothing will come of it.

>>16264940
If you're writing for profit or recognition then you probably shouldn't be writing fiction desu

>>16264889
>>16264931
To pile onto the topic of short stories: short stories are great, but I wonder if the market has mostly disappeared for them. Hemingway wrote about 600 pages worth of short stories, but he also did it during a period where people's methods of entertainment (say while commuting or killing time) were severely limited; same with Bradbury. I can't think of how it would be possible for anyone to eke out a professional existence writing short stories now. (Bradbury did this, and Hemingway did to some extent, but he was also a journalist.)

>>16264931
the point is that he's saying people shouldn't waste time and effort trying to write a book

>>16264961
>If you're writing for profit or recognition then you probably shouldn't be writing fiction desu

I not really sure if that's what I'm doing. I like stories and enjoy interesting narratives. Writing also makes me feel like I'm not entirely wasting my time, and I enjoy the worldbuilding aspect of it. In terms of employment, I'm interested in doing admin work in academia, journalistic writing, or working in the public sector (I currently do government publication work).

Finished my first draft of 90k wurdz. It feels good to have made it so far.

Write something, /lit/. Write with your blood.

>>16262371
>>16263300
Based.

>>16265024
Ink or bits is a better medium than blood

>>16264973
The only short stories that have a sizeable audience are shitty horror stories posted on reddit. Outside of that there's basically nothing. Magazines with stories aren't a thing anymore and collections only work if you've already established yourself as a novelist.

It's weird. You'd think shorter fiction would be doing better in an age of short attention spans and instant gratification.

Just get a job to sustain yourself and write what you want to write. If you're avoiding short stories because commercial reasons then you're already making aesthetic mistakes.

>>16265054
There are a few places where short fiction seems to get published, like the New Yorker. But when I read some of the stories, which are sometimes quite bad, it makes me think the author probably had connections.

>>16265047
Write with your blood, as in; write with such effort that you write with blood figuratively. A writer might be so poor that he or she has to use blood. You must be very willing to write. The desire has to be strong.

>>16265217
The Abbe Faria wrote his life's work in his own blood

Fuck these blackpills in this board. Isn’t a single published writer in this thread that can drop some white pills?

>>16265741
I've been in some serious need of whitepills in general recently and haven't been able to find anything much of anything. Everything seems so bleak and pointless these days.

>>16265037
Samefag

>>16264731
Yes it does.

>>16265217
Yeah, don't worry, I got the metaphor. Threw shade cause its an overwrought cliché

>>16262090
fucking hate these threads. If suddenly you lose the motivation to write upon discovering that you probably won't get praise for it, then you don't want to write a book, you just want approval. If the issue was getting your message to the masses and making a change, then I have a feeling that you have a feeling that a book isn't gonna be the best way to do it. Sometimes I just can't STAND u lil niggas for how clueless you are about your own surface level motivations. In the least spiteful and most sincere manner, get a god damn grip.

>>16266453
Gonna cry?

How do i write something anonymously?
Patreon?

>>16262192
>Near homeless
They're definitely homeless now with cinemas and studios closed. Even gyms are nowhere near close to being able to reopen in LA

>all these pseud retards ITT who think that great artists of the past didn't seek fame and approval

>>16266510
kafka

>>16266510
Not to mention a lot of them did it so they could make a living. Look at Jack London. The man forced his way into success by sheer will. He would work random jobs for several months at a time to save up money, then use that to live off of while he slaved away at his writing projects.

>>16262090
Basement dwellers and NEETs who have spent their youths on 4chan are unironically the people with the biggest role to play in the future of the world. If they wanted to, a fairly good bunch of /lit/ posters could become some of the most influential writers of this decade and ever more after. If you want to love living, write now. For the others.

>>16267023
>Basement dwellers and NEETs who have spent their youths on 4chan are unironically the people with the biggest role to play in the future of the world.

>>16264863
What I've found myself doing is while writing, I'm occasionally reading short stories or books or even comics and it's been causing me to end up going back and rewriting early chapters to sound better.

>>16262090
Bruh
I write poetry. If novels are out of date, then what am I? You have to do things like writing out of love for the art, not a desire for fame or to play a role.

>>16267082
Believe me or not, you're not one of them.

>>16267243
This mightve passed, but you just confirmed the cope.
not the person you responded to btw

>>16267243
All these alleged years and still an unfunny faggot, fuck off retard.

>>16262090


The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s
aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of
beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criti-
cism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful
things are corrupt without being charming.
This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings

in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things

mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an

immoral book. Books are well written,
or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the
rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of

Romanticism is the rage of Caliban

not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the
subject-matter of the artist, but the morality

of art consists in the perfect use of an im-

perfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even

things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An

ethical sympathy in an artist is an un-
pardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist

can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist

instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials
for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all
the arts is the art of the musician. From the
point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the
type.
All art is at once surface and

symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at

their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at

their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really
mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art

shows that the work is new, complex, and

vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord
with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful
thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
t. Oscar Wilde.

>>16265054
>You'd think shorter fiction would be doing better in an age of short attention spans
You would think so, but that's not the case. This decade will see a surge in serialized fiction, which is going to cause shorter forms of fiction to die out. We're already seeing this on sites like Royal Road, which has gained a massive audience. People like having new chapters of a story they're invested in to read every week. It allows them to have a bunch of chapters to binge, and not have to wait long to have more to read. For the same reason, it'll be interesting to see how traditionally published novels fare with the average reader being less likely to invest in a series that could have them waiting years for a new installment. It should be no surprise that a population that overwhelmingly wants serialized content is very disinterested in reading one-off short stories (though short stories set in the same universe, and involving shared characters, could probably see success).

And that's talking about genre fiction. Literary fiction is virtually dead. It's still possible for an insanely talented writer to produce art and receive moderate success, but the market for that kind of thing is very small. You're gambling on both being talented enough to get noticed and for a publishing house to like your subject matter in particular.

>>16262090
>point
The reason I write it's literally just because it's something I enjoy that I can earn a bit of money on and hope that I get rich off my works.
It's just productive gambling to me.

>>16262366
>>16262397
This, writing is catharsis and the enjoyment of improving is worth it
>>16262090
>>16262131
>>16267357
Writing is a future proof art along with traditional visual art if you want to take a utilitarian approach. In a few hundred years, if humans are still around, we will still be reading physical books and speaking and seeing. This isn’t certain with any software based medium.
Art today is immediate and demands multiple senses. I wouldn’t be surprised if the oral tradition makes a comeback given the popularity of podcasts, particularly some new fiction I’ve seen topping charts on Apple. I’ve been thinking about continuing to write short stories, and then editing them down into a format to be recited orally, maybe even with a video element as a test run before something longer. It wouldn’t be an audiobook, but something more immediate and brief with an aesthetic element of the other senses. Thoughts?

>>16262090
>write YA softcore novel
>gets popular with casuals
>get movie deal
>maybe get tv deal
>milk YA series to death, and then some
>make profit
>....
>......
>fade it obscurity when new YA series takes spot #1

It's like you're not even trying, anon, c'mon.

>>16262397
Please don't.

You can always aspire to something like this

>>16262209
you should sing a song that will be heard. singing to yourself has it’s own place but writing without being heard is barely writing at all, though of course you have to balance them

>>16263310
Broadside

We know that the book we will never write will be bad. Even worse will be the one we put off writing. At least the book that has been written exists. It may not be very good, but it exists, like the miserable little plant in the loan flowerpot belonging to my crippled neighbor. That plant is her pride and joy, and sometimes it's mine too. What I write, knowing that it's bad, might also offer a few moments of distraction from worse things to another sad or wounded soul. That is enough, or, rather, it isn't, but it nonetheless helps in some way, and that's how it is with life. - pessoa

>>16264973
>>16265054
>be me
>rekindle an interest in writing after an interesting dream
>write a story based on it
>submit to e-zines and get rejections
>want to write more stories
>join writers group
>soon making sure to have written something to bring to the group
>it's good motivation
>submit more stories and some get accepted
>think up ideas for novels and novellas and outline them
>but still mainly write short stories
>start doing freelance work
>do a job to write erotica and had fun
>take more erotica jobs
>eventually realize clients are just turning around and selling them on Amazon
>publish my own erotica novella on Amazon
>barely make beer money
>write a couple more over the years for the hell of it
>years later gain more interest in the market and learn how to do it profitably
>publish a short erotica story every week
>sales gradually and exponentially increase
>paying bills now with erotica money
>want to write an erotica novel in my specific niche
>outline it for months while still writing shorts
>have to put it aside multiple times, including recently because of a death in the family
>still putting out shorts
>now writing another spur of the moment erotica novella, a sequel to one of my old ones
>still need to finish the outline to that novel and get writing
>all my non-erotica stories and novel outlines are collecting dust
At least I'm making money, right? So yes, there is still an audience for short stories. And it's coomers.

I'll get around to that novel some day.

>>16268161
I had started it but it's way too autistic for me.

>>16262371
>>16263277
An author writes for his imaginary readers.

>>16268639
No

>>16262090

Writing is the only known form of telepathy and time travel. If you put your best effort in your work, it will outlive you.

What you have to say is extremely important. No one else in the entire world will ever know how does it feel to be you, nor will know what exactly you had in mind if you don't share it.

Please write. Write now!

>>16268747
Yes.

>>16262577
Based, anons regularly tell me I make good posts on /lit/.

>>16266453
What sometimes gets me is that there's so many people writing good stories that should be published but they're just posting these things online for fun. So what are my odds?

>>16269047

I didn't know why I started
all I knew was that I didn't want to die
was what I told myself every day living as if I would die tomorrow, convinced I would have to write the novel before the murderer came each night
but he never did
so I wrote until I found answers I didn't know I was looking for until they were found. this went on for years. by the end of it, I was okay to die, I think. Within the Will, I found the Absolute Objective. writing was part of that. I would never have done nearly the amount that I have if I did not look my own mind in the face day in and day out. there are many benefits to writing the novel: these are just a few.

novels are leagues better than basically any other fictional medium at expressing complicated themes in a way that makes sense, movies are handicapped by being too short. gotta write for yourself, although that's easier said than done. i'm currently sitting on more writing than i'd care to admit that nobody else will ever read even people i'm close to because i seem incapable of writing anything that isn't just whinging about being sad or whatever. reading always helps me want to write more though
what were we talking about again

now I don't even want to look at it anymore
so weird how a person that was you in the past made these symbols. its not the same person. tired off my ass, this shit is eerie; been a while since I was really in the letter trenches and I can tell the pacing is off. im not as good as I used to be, but once, maybe just for a few moments, I was great

I take solace in the knowledge that all of this, one day, will be washed away. but I think upon the reverse: what if everything was saved, forever? theoretically, there might be a way to recover every lost thread that has ever been made, if some godlier beings were to have the ability to reverse engineer and record previous physics. that would be interesting. and in that case I shouldn't even feel a way about these symbols being saved or not, "anon" or not, what have you. it's all infinitely saved at some level of objectification.

the creative process of writing the novel has led me to believe that the best exists and always will exist in each and every moment. sometimes I could sit and produce, but most were empty, lifeless, should crushing, just trying to think of the right words to say I don't know why it was so hard. in situations like this I can just go and go, but creative, objective writing is not easy to come by. id be lucky to get even 300 words before id want to disembowel myself. however, if that is the best I could have done, then so be it. not like its that big a deal anyways. most of the work you'll ever do is worthless, as are your thoughts, and most everything else you might try and identify with. but it's still the best moment that can exist

>>16264863
What a load of shit. This bugman protestant ethic has destroyed writing and everything else it has touched. Writing isn't a job or a "grind". If you have something you want to write, then write and its as simple as that.

>just work hard and work everyday broo!!
shut the fuck up

>>16269162
1000% agreed. Glad someone here has some sense

>>16262090
If you are writing to fulfill a role you should not be writing.

Yes

>>16265392
That man really flourished in prison. He himself said he wouldn't have done half as much as he did if he had been at liberty.

So incarceration it is.

>>16262090
Trolling in the most visible forums is the only non-corporatized literary art left. Have you seen the shit published these days? Memoirs of a black woman times infinity. Maybe a way to trade novels for free, that could gain traction.

>>16265217

Totally wrong. You should write with your blood literally. This makes your short story a viral novelty on Instagram.

Does anyone here make money from their writings?

Yes, as a method of self knowledge and to create something you yourself find truly interesting. Why’s it gotta be for anyone else?

>>16262090
how about you write one for yourself and not for other people

>>16265741
>published writer
>on 4chinz

>>16266453
Based, unironically

>>16266493
Pen name?

>>16272699
>Does anyone here make money from their writings?

Yeah, but I write government publications. On one hand I'm glad I make a living writing and editing, but on the other hand writing about the same general topics over and over gets pretty boring.

>>16262090
Make isekai harem novels and publish on amazon.

>>16262090
If you aren't writing for the sake of writing you have bigger questions that you need to be asking yourself loser

>>16263310
opera, poetry and I think most canvas art (like painting) while not dead (or capable of dying) have become limited to the educated niche that can afford to indulge in them