/lit/ - Literature

Great entertainment these last threads. All the name calling and shit - hilarious!
On a serious note i’ve seen proof that people who actually can write at least used to frequent the threads and someone also directed me to that guy who wrote Wool’s thoughts on being an author. He had some interesting things on there.
But i think that’s it. Except for it being great for killing time when i’m too tired to work.

>>18749580
>Great entertainment these last threads. All the name calling and shit
It’s the new state of /wg/. Get used to it.

>>18749587
>get used to having fun
I’ll be ok, hopefully.

Can someone recommend a book that provides instructions on improving writing style.

I want to be able to understand how to give the best descriptions; how to give the appropriate amount of description; should I place dialogue before or after inner monologue, or does it even matter? etc etc

>>18749600
How is it fun.

What happened to these threads? I haven't been on /lit/ for about 5 weeks, last I was on there were constant maxed-out threads all the time. Did people finally lose interest? There was never anything useful here, just overwhelming crab mentality

>>18749634
>What happened to these threads?
Stop asking stupid questions.
Seek help.

>>18749634
They’re dying out.

Does anyone here use a "distraction free" writing device? Y'know, something like a word processor, or a laptop that cannot connect to the internet? Perhaps someone has gone all out and purchased a $500 "Freewrite" device.

How do you find the experience? Has it helped?

>>18749614
This, along with 90% of other questions asked by new writers, is solved by frequent reading. Here you go, this is a bit like the blind leading the blind, but I'm at least unironically published. Read the following books then see if your writing style improves (protip: IT WILL.)

>Lolita
>Madame Bovary
>Heart of Darkness
>Anna Karenina
>Middlemarch

Shouldn't take you more than a few months of casual reading. The dividends it repays will be extraordinary. Still impatient? Then you could even reduce it to

>Madame Bovary
>Anna Karenina
>Middlemarch

Seriously, anon, go do it. I dare you. I fucking dare all of you who want to master an art form without having any real passion for it, wanting to write because you love the idea of being a writer rather than the desire to create something beautiful.

>>18749658
Seek help.

>>18749669
You are mediocre and will never achieve greatness.

>>18749694
Seek help

>>18749658
Thanks for taking the time to reply, anon. I recently finished Madame Bovary, and found it to be an excellent book. I'll be sure to check out the rest of the books you have mentioned.

Here's a question; have you ever tried writing out portions of these novels? Apparently Hunter S. Thompson copied out The Great Gatsby, as well as several other novels, just to get the feel for writing at this level of excellence. I wonder if he was onto something?

>>18749722
I think it's a waste of time. It'll only help you create pastiche. Rather spend the time reading more and you'll develop 'taste', I don't really know the word for it, you'll be able to read your first drafts and improve them until they're good.

>>18749694
>You are mediocre and will never achieve greatness
Yeah, I don’t give two shits about that. I’m also pretty certain neither will you.

>>18749739
struck a nerve

>>18749762
???

>>18749705
So sad to see this.
Help is only helpful if one wants to be helps, don't you understand that?
You have sex?

>>18749762
>>18749768
Seek help.

>>18749793
Touch grass.

how realistic is to make 500 USD per month from self publishing on amazon?

t. thirld worlder

>>18749806
You are mediocre and will never achieve greatness.

>>18749812
>>18749739

butthurt samefag. I can see your IP. Stop wallowing and just fuck off.

Can't finish my stories. I always finish it to around 90% but then not know how to tie everything up

>>18749821
Seek help.

>>18749823
Stop being a pantsing retard and actually plan out and ending.

>>18749634
The mentally ill animefag frenzied when his OPs got deleted, so he now picks a fight with everybody who tries to hold a proper conversation, and then complains how the threads have died and "only animefag write", when it's impossible for anyone else to tolerate the schizophrenic samefagging

>>18749879
Isn't this just literal cope from you?

>>18749879
>"only animefag write"
Didn’t someone say in the last thread the only writers were from royal road? An anime site?

>>18749879
This is what you get when jannies don't do their fucking jobs. That being said this general was always filled with complete posers who jerked themselves off to the idea of being like their personal favorite writer from the 1800s and couldn't comprehend the actual meaning of prose to save their lives. Once the anime retard gets bored this will end up being a good thing.

>>18749634
I've been in these threads since the beginning (we've been doing this for a bit over a year now) and I've noticed a few different things which tend to derail the threads.

Anime OPs were pissing people off. I made quite a few posts about it, but after a while I made my peace with it. I still think they're not really appropriate for what we're doing, but it's possible to have decent discussions regardless. You could probably take the concept of "anime OP" and broaden it out a bit and say it's just self-absorption, but I can't think of any other reoccurring examples. Sometimes whenever you post a really scathing critique, people will blow you off and call you a bucket crab no matter how fair you were, but the bucket crab mentality actually is fairly common around here so when that happens to me I usually take a moment to self-reflect and find that I could have been less harsh.

The second and more insidious type of poster is the sneed variety. Sneedposting is when someone realizes that a certain type of behavior irritates people and begins doing it. At first it was "only animefags write" and now it's someone pretending to be Jason Bryan and telling others to seek help. I'm not sure what the motivation is ITT, but in real life people who resort to irritating others to get attention tend to be fairly ineffectual. On the other hand, I think sometimes people pose as annoying people online in order to provoke others with more well-ordered minds into explaining their own annoyance. Kind of like that old saying that you can get better tech advice by phrasing your question as a complaint (Hey applefags if the iphone is so great why can't it play webm?).

There is also the "simple questions, Dunning-Kruger answers" variety of discourse which is also fairly irritating. You'll get someone who tries to get a genuine discussion going about a simple but open-ended topic and all the responses will be from Professor Douchebag McSimpleton, University of First Page Google Results. Like "What do you think makes for a good first sentence?" and every response will be something ripped from the holy gospel of the pantheon of successful authors which may never be disputed, or my personal least favorite response: duh, you just look at your favorite books and copy what they do, idiot.

I've made several attempts to stimulate more helpful discussions but the problem is that a lot of people don't want to believe that writing is legitimate work and you can take established steps to improve, but these established steps must be followed in a personal way in order to produce insightful art. They'd prefer to approach the craft with a sense of mysticism, as if some people are simply born with the writer's spirit and some are not, or they'd rather remove all ambiguity from the process and try to "write-by-the-numbers" the same way you'd follow a recipe. These mentalities aren't specific to /wg/, they pop up in every writing forum you'll ever visit.

I haven't been on /lit/ long but I hope these threads stick around. I've gotten some great feedback on here and at times it has gotten me motivated to write more.
>>18749806
I have no experience publishing on Amazon, but I think it's very unlikely you'll make that much unless your writing is extremely popular.
>>18749614
I don't think you need to read everything >>18749658 said, but I would recommend re-reading authors whose style you like. I like McCarthy so I'm always trying to get more of him.

>>18749634
Someone made fun of my opening line, so I thought to check out all of the paperbacks I own and look at the various opening lines. Decided to re-write mine in various different styles, it was fun!

/wg/ is getting better recently. A lot of angry pseuds for sure, but also a lot of lurkers who crave the raw sort of expressions vented here.

I actually had a ton of fun doing this, re-writing the opening line over and over.

>was
A ray of sunshine settles right across Ken's tired eyes.
>new version 1
Urban clamour bellows outside the window and a ray of sunshine corners him on the couch, all-but destined to chase away anymore sleep.
>new version 2
The nearby window's urban clamour worked in tag-team with the sunshine creeping across Ken's pillow, both determined to beat him awake.
>new version 3
Resisting the sunshine turning the back of his eyelids orange is easy, but paired with the racket from outside, more sleep has no chance.
>new version 4
By listening, Ken had no idea what time it was because the racket from outside is all the same-sunshine creeping across his face means he must be sleeping in.
>new version 5
Grimacing from the noise and heat on his face, sleep is all-but destined to elude him.
>new version 6
A nuclear fireball millions of miles away somehow teamed up with the bum down the alley to keep Ken from sleeping in anymore.
>new version 7
Sleeping is impossible; fireworks and headache-bright rooms, covering his head with the pillow made it too hot.
>new version 8
Guy wakes up, too bright, shitty noise from outside, swearing, he covers his head with the pillow.
>new version 9
Sunshine dried the spittle at the corner of the tired man's mouth, a drug-fueled incoherent ranting is heard coming from the window to the alleyway below.
>new version 10
It was sometime in 2022 when a normal guy is awakened rudely by a conspiracy between sunshine and dumpster divers.

>>18749649
livingwriter.com
dark mode, invisible borders... it's GREAT!
>>18749669
Sea kelp.

>>18749900
Is there any writing site that isn’t anime?

>>18750388
>it's someone pretending to be Jason Bryan
No one pretends to be him. Guy outs himself out for being retarded.

>>18749649

yeah its called a pad and pen

>>18750751
I think you mean iPad and Apple Pencil. Common mistake.

>>18750670
I don’t fucking know. Anytime someone wants to share a site to share writing, some guy just says,
>ew, they’re writing animeshit
It’s the entire reason why we even got the animefag shit to begin with. Because a small group of people were jerking themselves off trying to write like the 17th, 18th, century writers and just shitting on anyone who didn’t.

>>18750769
>Because a small group of people were jerking themselves off trying to write like the 17th, 18th, century writers and just shitting on anyone who didn’t.
At least we got a bitching pasta out of it when some pseud shat on that Finnish anon.

>>18749900
I mean, its sort of true. They're the only ones who are actually capable of sharing what they're writing beyond tiny little excerpts.
The other group in the thread not sharing anything at all are people with delusions of grandeur that think they're going to be traditionally published, but unless they're already famous, or have serious connections, or can check off every bipoc queer person of color box - aka looka me I'm a dick sucking tranny nigger faggot and that's what my books are about - or all of the above, it simply isn't going to happen. Not in this environment.
And there's the totally unwarranted head up their ass pseud hatred of genre fiction. Except people actually read genre fiction because its entertaining and its definitely more than possible to break the mold when writing genre fiction and have an interesting, well told story in whatever genre. I, for one, encourage people to write genre fiction.
Basically what I'm saying is anyone who can actually share their work provides more value because their comments aren't merely sniping and backbiting. And that happens to be people publishing on sites like royalroad. Its a bit of a shame that other story sites aren't as conducive to new authors or we'd probably have more people sharing their non fantasy work.

>>18750745
Seek skelp.

>>18750791
Once faggots embrace the home binder and develop the skills to:
>1. sell books in person
>2. avoid social media for their personal views
>3. just purchase targeted niche ads for their novels
You'll see a renaissance of writing because people will find that they can make a living off selling 3-4 books a day, as opposed to needing to sell 50+ ebooks and 20+ retail copies to make the same money as 3 or 4 physical books.

Amazon is not your friend.
POD is not your friend.
Lulu is not your friend.
Just look how much they take from your profits!

>>18750914
Seek Help, Jason. You're a sick man.

>>18750920
Feels good bro, kills you inside to see people creating while you sit on the sidelines with:
>no women
>no fast cars
>no adventurous life
I bet you wear two masks and are fully vaccinated like a faggot

>>18750914

doesnt amazon give you like 75% of the sale price on units priced over a floor like $4 or something?

>>18750935
Seek help

>>18749649
You're telling me that you'll pay me $500 for a raspberry Pi with no internet access and a word processor?

Today I will write.
Will you?

>>18750964
>Today I will write.
No, you won't.

>>18750745
Let's pretend like that's true. Jason Bryan routinely comes to /wg/ to repeat the exact same phrases over and over, never deviating from his script in the slightest. Why would he do this? Either he believes that he can eventually convince everyone here that he is really cool (not exactly a worthy goal), or he knows that reposting the same things will always get a rise out of one or two people, who will keep responding to him in the exact same way and feeding back into his desire for attention, either good or bad. From the point of view of someone trying to have a semi-serious discussion in this thread, how is this any different from someone imitating Jason Bryan to achieve the same effect?

>>18750980
>Why would he do this?
Because he's an attention seeking whore. Guy made several threads and post on other threads with the same shit with new pictures along with it.

>>18750942
https://www.authorimprints.com/amazon-kdp-royalty-pricing/

Amazon is basically a slave farm for writers. Completely de-valuing the process, faked reviews, along with GoodReads being a 100% safe space that will ban authors and anyone who deviates from the norm. I was banned in 2013 because I dared to criticize 50 Shades of Grey. Imagine the censorship levels there now?

There was an anon stuck in a wagie cagie in the last thread talking about releasing his next book as a .99 cent download, but he was so blackpilled it didn't sound like he was going to finish it after writing several other books that he's making $1-2 bucks per sale on. Not surprising to see that writing as a market seems to be completely pozzed and has no real cultural impact, how many people are going to pour their energy into writing something for $2 a sale when if they just work a job, buy property, they can make 30%+ in a year off leveraged cash and make a few hundred thousand dollars with little to no effort. If you ever wonder why local culture is so sterile, and nothing is subversive at all in the media, then all you have to do is look at the processes that authors and other artists are forced to go through to get their work out there. Everything is designed so that the platforms pump out the most established and mainstream shit rehashed over and over and over.
>go to a writer's fest sometime, you will see all that you need to see, hear all that you need to hear
Amazon, GoodReads, etc... they are the Netflixification of books, globohomo to the max!

>>18750951
Seek jelq.

Metamorphosis knock off anon here, please give any kind of criticism you can, this is the introduction to the book, I don't want it to be too expository right off. At this point he isn't an actual cockroach, he's just bluffing.

"You have to believe me, I'm a damn cockroach, you can't get in the room and I can't get out, I swear to God" Gregor shouted sitting in front of his computer, his parents decided to turn around and stop insisting for that day, one more victory for him.

Three minutes after they had left his door he could hear his mother crying and his father yelling at her for whatever reason. He grabbed his headphones and put them on, he even pressed them to his ears in hopes that everyone around him would shut the fuck up already. Gregor had to deal with this kind of situation at least 3 times a week, always coming up with a new excuse to make him leave. Since they had started trying, his mother had already fallen down the stairs 4 times and needed his help, 2 friends from high school had come to see him with the intention of asking him out for a drink, the kitchen had caught fire 3 times (one of these occasions was true) and his father had sworn to break down that door at least 10 times. At first Gregor would cry helplessly as soon as they gave up for that day, but by the fifth month it was more of a nuisance than anything else, he had even managed to force his body to sleep through the hours it used to happen, it was as simple as this day he had had a wrong prediction and had been subjected to witnessing the whole spectacle.
He would see his father leave the house at 6 o'clock and return at about 10 pm, every day the odor of cheap alcohol drifted under his door into the interiors of the room. His mother, on the other hand, would leave at 8 of the morning and return at 8 p.m. He had them both measured in order to be able to do his business, such as eating, grabbing whatever he could find in the kitchen with both hands and throw it on his bed, drinking, refilling dozens of water bottles and stacking them on top of each other in a designated corner, and bathing, which rarely ever occured. He would limit his outings to 4 times a month, once a week.
In other times his mother would leave a plate of hot homemadefood on his doorstep, on his birthdays they would bring him the cake he loved so much as a child and, merely on paydays, they would bring him bags of cheap junk food and energy drinks that they had heard young people liked. Gone were those times, now his father would leave broken glass in front of his door with the intention of avenging his now decadent life, his mother would hide the bottles of alcohol as if they were her life savings (Today, they were, since her savings were gone) and the water faucet was turned off and removed to keep the parasite of a son they had from continuing to suck their blood. They wanted Gregor to get out or die, either way would be a happy ending for them.

>>18750572
>>18750980
>>18750989
I'm posting my writing and nobody responds. I post bait and these pseuds give out the (you)s, not my fault this place is midwit central full of incels, failures to launch and their ilk who can't even believe someone as fucking insane as me has managed to live such a fun life, meanwhile, they wallow in their bedrooms over their lives of utter misery and zero adventure. All they have to do is be less risk-adverse, take life less seriously and they'd be getting laid and enjoying life too!
>pic related
I re-sold Ken Foster's art and this guy is a complete crackhead, but he gets laid more than 99% of the /lit/ posters while living in a rat and trash-filled alleyway, all while selling more art than /lit/ could hope for. The guy is a crackhead, but even more adventurous than me, and that's why he is a successful artist. Look at the people pushing the limits outside of the mainstream, see what works and what doesn't, but whatever you do, don't just quit and become a wagie cagie.

>>18750994
>https://www.authorimprints.com/amazon-kdp-royalty-pricing/

so it's a 70% royalty possibly minus some miniscule delivery costs under fifty cents, am i missing something? that sounds pretty good, maybe not as good as targeted ads + taking close to 100% by selling thru your own delivery system, but it's not bad for a low effort selling option

and yeah bro of course publishing mediocre online fiction isn't how to get rich not sure how or why that's either here or elsewhere

>>18751060
Couple things:
>instead of at least 10 times I'd write "the door had dents on it from all the times dad's fist banged on it" or something
>alcohol drifted under this door... I'd say something like "no matter where he sat in his room, he found no respite from the stentch of dad's alcoholic odours"
>last sentence would feel like it hits harder if "die" is the last word
A good start anon, do you use grammarly at all? I think you'd find it would help cut down on the wordiness!

>>18751068
Because culture creation is much more valuable than flipping a fucking property, we live in a society that is so ass-backwards it shouldn't be a surprise that the nose-dive of culture continues unabated

>>18751063
You got several responses and you keep ignoring them. Which is more than you ever deserve.

>>18751093
>warning, this bag contains exactly what you want and it will make you feel amazing, but also it's addictive which you already know because you're addicted to it
>this message brought to you by my need to feel morally superior to others
Women

>>18751093

what are you talking about bro

>>18751068
1/3rd seems like a rip off, especially if you consider that sites like Lulu.com promise to get your books in retail stores where you will only get $2 per retail sale on a $25 book.

There was another anon on here using a POD service where his books are $23-24 bucks or so, but he only made like $9 or so a sale. These companies are not doing authors any favours, especially considering just how gamed the actual book market / rankings are. That's without even going into detail about how these companies can also cancel you at any moment and revoke your ability to sell books based on whether or not a mob forms to de-platform you. If you print, bind, and ship your own books with you own tools, you can never be de-platformed. Just don't post as yourself on social media, and buy targeted ads.

I feel like if you want to be a writer / author in the near future and be able to have integrity in your art, you'll have to take back some of the power and control from the big tech platforms. Supporting independent authors is key to resisting the future world full of Rupi Kaurs getting celebrated for posting photos on instagram of her cunt leaking blood as being sooooo brave! Holy fuck, we're really in that timeline.

>>18751095
Seethe harder you non-writing incel
>>18751111
That's no ordinary woman, that's a city councillor handing out hard drugs in front of the fucking police station. My city that I grew up in has turned into an absolute shithole in less than 20 years due to the insane progressives.

>>18751178
>That's no ordinary woman
You're right, an ordinary woman doesn't need to hand out drugs in front of a police station to feel morally superior to others, that's just her natural state at all times.

>>18751190
Here in Canada, we're at the point where the masked and vaccinated are openly calling for ostracization of the non-vaccinated, when they are the ones who are living in absolute fear like faggot pussy bitches. Fucking pathetic being surrounded by this many NPCs.

The natural state of the place. That's why I HAVE to write about this place, it is getting worse and worse every single day.

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/17-stranger-attacks-in-just-2-weeks-in-vancouver-police-say-releasing-video-of-an-incident-1.5528224

>>18749614
There's a number of questions you should ask yourself. The first should be what type of mood/tone you're trying to cultivate, which would give you an idea of what details you should focus on and how much focus you should give them.

Let's say you want to write suspense. That's a good example because suspense is something that will always keep people reading, regardless of whether you're writing cheap genre fiction or trying to plumb the depths of the human soul. Let's imagine a suspenseful scenario: our MC is trying to sneak into a heavily-guarded house. Our MC has just jumped the gate and landed in the backyard, where he finds two guard dogs waiting for him. Our MC suffers from no mental illness which might distort his perception or motivations. His only goal is to get past these dogs.

We can assume this is an important moment, far more important than whatever road the MC walked to arrive at the house or what time he woke up that morning, so we're going to focus on this moment more than we did for those two examples. These two dogs represent an immediate threat, so he's not going to waste time looking at the house to see if there is a light on in one of the windows, because that won't matter if the dogs attack or start barking.

So we're going to focus on the two dogs. The size of the dogs is important here, so we might give a sentence explaining that, but unless the MC is an autistic dog breeder, he isn't going to be able to calculate their exact size or weight at one glance. So we'll describe them in relative terms (they stand at the level of the narrator's waist), or we might just say what breed they are and trust that our reader knows enough about dogs to understand. It is common knowledge that dobermans are large and aggressive dogs, so you might just say they were dobermans.

But the most critical detail is the dog's behavior, because this variable will determine the next course of action. Have they been alerted? Does the MC need to silence them immediately, or can he sneak past them? So we're going to devote a significant amount of detail to answering this question, in a way that forms a mental picture without spelling it out in exact terms. Maybe the dogs are lying down and breathing in a rhythmic fashion, indicating they are still asleep. Perhaps one dog is doing that, but the other is sitting still, one leg paused mid-scratch by his ear, indicating that he was interrupted by the sound of the MC jumping the gate, but hasn't decided to attack yet.

This isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. Maybe getting to the house was a challenge for the narrator, because he's been falsely accused of a crime and everyone is looking for him. Or maybe this isn't meant to be suspenseful at all, and you can breezily describe your expert-burglar MC incapacitating the dogs and moving on with the job, or maybe this is his first robbery and he does mistakenly look for signs of people inside the house before noticing the dogs.

>>18751178
Seek help

>>18751247
Seethe and cope from the sidelines

>>18751251
Seek help

>>18751160

what does the delivery look like after the ad works, author website / email delivery?

1/3's high and it's not, if selling from amazon gets you XXXX more sales and readership, it seems like it'd at least be a good additional sales option, i mean it's not like when you buy something from a retail store the producer of the item is earning 70% of its sales price

>>18751264
Why would I? I'm better than you, fucked more women, drove better cars, lived a more fun life

Seems like you are the one obsessed with me, feels good knowing you are hanging on my every word. Keep bumping my threads!

>>18751292
How I envision it will work is that I will have a process that involves maintaining an inventory of books, when you wake up, you'd look at the orders that have been made the previous day and you'd print out the labels, stuff the shipping package, and drive the previous day's orders to the shipping location and drop it off. Boom, shipping taken care of for the day right off the top.

Then you'd go home, review your ad progress, calculate $ spent per sale, prune ads that don't work, niche target some new ads. Check schedule and email to see what in-person marketing you can do. Also, carry with you at all times in your car a bunch of copies, at social events I had sold 10+ books in a day a few times during street fairs just from drunken conversations and banter in beer gardens.

Once you have an idea of the type of person that would enjoy your book, you have to just figure out the most likely places you can reach them with your ads or in person. I've found that people are actually quite happy to buy a book directly from the author, you just have to make a connection with people somehow.

Amazon's entire setup is designed to reward conformity, if you want to remain an independent artist you have to figure out ways around being forced to work on the digital plantation.

>>18751305
Seek help

>>18749614

read and see what the author is doing, always diagram sentences and homerun paragraphs, notice things you like and examine how they're done

there's some utter basics to writing i feel like we were never taught in school, like defining a paragraph by its subjects, how many, the different types of subjects, their sequence, their frequency. also other basics like varying your sentence and clause structure (different parts of speech and different parts of sentence come first in different sentences or as clauses if you're working with long sentences), the flow value of gerundives/absolute phrases. you can examine writing probably to some unbound depth but there are basics that make most anything written readable, nearly non-lookawayable.

>>18751336
Going to continue to make you seethe

>>18751335

good post have you learned how to bind? i suppose there are probably blogs by authors that explain each level of production and sale

>>18751357
Yes! I purchased one of these machines and it works quite well. This weekend I'm spending some quality time with my kids and waifu, next week going to start manufacturing more books. It takes awhile to create the PDF to use to print the full book. Once you have the PDF setup properly so you can just print, chop, and bind a book in like 5 minutes. It's SUPER simple and even fun!

One thing I have to do is go to a lumbar yard and get a thin piece of scrap wood as a spacer, since I use an oddball width of paper I need to prop the unbound book up a half inch or so to enable the book binding machine's grinder to cut the spine up so that it can stick to the glue. I'll make a video of the process sometime soon, it's just so fucking hot and noisy in my neighbourhood lately, haha... t-t-two more weeks!

>>18751380

what paper stock are you using?

>>18751414
Legal paper, 20 lbs, each sheet makes 8 pages of a book!

>>18751305
I'm not sure if this is really Jason Bryan or if it's someone trolling or if you believe any of this shit, but if this is meant to be taken at face value, you're a profoundly immature person.

Not immature because you're obsessed with teenage boy status symbols, but because you have a fundamental incapacity to accept that other people are different than you. Example: since you appear to highly cherish independence as an artist, you can only assume that everyone else does too. Since you believe that self-binding your own books and selling them out of a trunk is the only path to maintaining this independence, you assume that everyone else agrees with you. Hence, when confronted with a value system that does not place you at the top, you can only interpret it through the lens of your own beliefs and arrive at the conclusion that everyone does secretly agree with you but is only pretending not to because then they would have to admit that they've wasted time and energy being different than you, and since admitting you're wrong about something appears to be something which causes you distress, everyone else must feel this same distress as well. But! Unlike a schoolyard bully or tinpot dictator, you have no means to physically compel other people to suffer for disagreeing with you. You are wasting your time here.

You are correct that we are, in a sense, obsessed with you. But I challenge you to prove that this is a good thing. People are obsessed with chrischan and it has brought him no wealth, adulation, or basic comfort. Why do you think cultivating negative obsession on an obscure literature board will benefit you, bearing in mind that F. Gardner has already surpassed you in the "obnoxious self-absorbed 4chan author" contest and does not appear to be any better off for it?

>>18751242
>>18751338

Thanks for replying, anons. I have taken a screenshot of both of these posts and will refer back to them. Sound advice.

>>18751462
Having lived such an absolutely abnormal life, I always encounter normie types that cannot even believe half the shit I have done that I talk about. The amount of dynamic life experience I have has my cup runnething over, which is why I am forced to write.

Exiting my house each and every day, I see NPCs everywhere. Even when going to the bar in 2021, where finally masks are no longer required, it is so rare to find anyone who dares to live as out-there as I do. Most people are simply following their programming and acting along the well-defined lines of conformist Canadian society. To dare and step out of these lines is to attract people who HATE YOU for your willingness to self-express. If they already hate your guts for not double masking and taking the vaccination, do you think they're going to like you for calling out society through your art work?

Undoubtedly, you are a complete conformist yourself. That's why it is difficult for me to take any criticism here seriously, because the vast majority of people here do not live any sort of daring, subversive, or interesting lives. Half of the people here are incels, another quarter are blackpilled pseuds, which a smaller population of 25% of posters who are desperate to find SOME counter-culture somewhere. That's why I'm here, because the mainstream culture is all about your post. It is all about keeping your head down and resisting self-expression if it isn't corporate-backed or follows some sort of social virtue signalling.
>oh look at my period blood on instagram!(4+million followers)
If you were an artist yourself, you'd understand that cultivating some haters is the resistance you sometimes need to desire to prove them wrong. If you had no haters, if you had no "weight" to lift, you'd just grow fat and slovenly. Equal and opposite reaction and all that. Try and be an artist someday anon, you'll figure it out on your own...

>>18751462
Gardner is fucking based as fuck!

>>18751599
Again, you seem to place an inordinate amount of value on cultivating negative attention. The people you see wearing masks don't hate you for having the courage to defy their false gods of scientism and secular humanisn, they look at you the same way you look at them: as an idiot who's been brainwashed by some cultish online movement, such as qanon or something similar.

A few years back a friend of mine posted a sentiment similar to yours on Facebook: that he had engaged in an act of self-expression and had been met with inordinate hatred from brainwashed sheeple who seethe at the notion of a true and valiant artist openly criticizing society. Turns out he'd been in a grocery store parking lot playing the guitar and ranting about Donald Trump in rhyme. Do you think people were genuinely upset that he was the only one who saw Donald Trump as the monster he was and wasn't afraid to say it, or do you think they were upset that he was making a lot of noise in public?

Assuming one were actually decent, is there really even a public appetite for poetry anymore? I used fo focus solely on writing prose but I am having much more fun with poetry lately, though I am a beginner. But when I write it I feel like I am pursuing something lost, as if the whole act is a pretence. Hard for me to explain

>>18752030
>>18719854

>>18750572
I think 6 is my favorite minus the use of the word "anymore". I think "any longer" might fit better

>>18752037
Sorry, there are always poetry guides in the OP of this general and that thread appears to be for actually posting and rating poetry, so I thought it better to ask here

>>18752044
Thank you so much for your comment, I appreciate it. I had a tie between this and #10.
>glad people made fun of my opening line so I could develop this re-write challenge for myself

>>18751829
If you are getting negative attention in 2021, you are doing something correct.

>>18751829
Holy fuck why are you even bothering with him? He's a lost cause.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I just wrote a 2(maybe 2 and a half, I'm afraid to look) page long make-out scene because that's what the story called for and I feel so fucking gross. I feel like a smut writer or something those "totally not porn" books for middle-aged women would do.

Help me feel clean again...

>>18752076
Lighten up, have some fun nerd. Waldun is far cooler than you and it makes you:
>cope and seethe

>>18752094
Wow, anon, it must hurt so much to actually write something that you need to come here to look for excuses to not to write.

>>18752098
Seek help

>>18752094
Is it good though? Like does it add to the story and characters or just make you horny?

>>18752108
Living my best life, thank you for the attention. Love you too, my fan!

>>18752094
Get over yourself faggot

>>18752114
Seek help.

>>18750791
It’s honestly not half so hard to get published as people like you claim though. But you are correct in that people not willing to share material are useless here.
As for the genrefiction thing; when every other platform on the internet is dedicated to fantasy it’s just not what anyone wants to see when they query 4channel for creative output.

>>18752103
that... that wasn't the point of my post at all.

>>18752109
Yeah, it adds to the story otherwise I would've pulled the eject chord while writing it. It just makes me feel icky because I don't want to be associated with smut and smut adjacent stuff.

>>18752115
no u

>>18752127
>It’s honestly not half so hard to get published as people like you claim though.
Delusional.

>>18752118
Living this way is going well for me, perhaps your life would be better if you became adventurous and less risk-adverse?

Love you

>>18752130
>that... that wasn't the point of my post at all.
>Please help me /wg/. I wrote two pages and it feels wrongs.
Sure, anon.

>>18752138
Seek help

>>18752131
If you are a straight white masculine male in 2021 in Canada, there is absolutely zero chance anyone is going to publish you if you are not completely on your knees sucking every mainstream opinion's dick possible. Every single fucking speaker at the last writer's fest, the mainstream published speakers, every single fucking one did a land-acknowledgement before speaking, a couple of them even ranting for 5 minutes about decolonizing literature. Look at fucking Penguin Random House's twitter, might as well be a fucking BLM hashtag on everything. Anyone who thinks a non-mainstream author can breakout in 2021 is completely and totally delusional. Guarantee they double mask and have taken the poison vaxx like good goys. Sea Kelp!

>>18752141
Bump from my fan

>>18752164
Seek help

>>18752131
It’s not, you just need an agent. I’ve worked in publishing lol
It’s not easy, but it’s hardly an insurmountable goal if you have a modicum of the dedication that anybody would have if writing wasn’t just an eighteen month phase for them.
One of the last anons I heard complaining on this subject was just pissed that it took an agent something like 4 months to read his material.
Even though it’s impossible to get people to read stuff on communities like /lit/ and reddit apparently someone is supposed to have a paid member of their staff turn it around for you over the weekend.
Now, having a book thats actually saleable enough to finance you quitting your day job? That’s totally different.
But there is absolutely no way a normal person can write and submit material for fifteen years and never get something accepted by an agent who would link you up to a small press (and there are still small presses that don’t even require agents to do your submissions for you).

Most of the complaining you see on here about how your lifelong passion will never ever give you any kind of payoff in our shallow plastic world of blah blah blah
Is just people scared they won’t be a celebrity-writer like Stephen King before their 30 (because that’s when they imagine their lives are effectively over).
And that’s not at all the same thing as never getting to see your work in print with a logo on the back cover.

>>18752208
>I’ve worked in publishing lol
Sure, anon.

>>18752173
Fan bump
>>18752208
This place is full of risk-adverse virgins who will never have a fast car, a sick loft, tons of bitches to fuck, and any book ideas with the confidence and dedication to complete them without caring if they work or not because life will find a way to continue being an adventure... that's how writers and artists live. Absolutely scared faggots all over /lit/ without any backbone needed to publish their own work.

>>18752404
Seek help.

>>18752409
Sea kelp.

>>18752404
Most of the people in question don’t have friends and can’t talk to girls. They are depending on being a “published author” shoring up the damage ten years of neglect has done to their social skills and self confidence.
Being self-published won’t give them what they imagine is going to be the tipping point between obsessing over whether or not people like them all the time and acting normal.
You can’t just risk something a girl from highschool running across a dating profile you made without having the social credit of a minor celebrity with a blue checkmark.

>>18750582
>livingwriter.com
>paying a monthly subscription for a word processor
surely you jest

>>18752480
Yeah it is fucking crazy to witness. Back in like the late 90's early 00's, even my 5'1 redheaded friend with acne scars got laid, pretty often actually once he got his own apartment. He was funny and could dance, was a bit of a clown but it totally scored him chicks. I have NO DOUBT that if the same dude grew up in recent years, he'd be an incel. There is no way that acne-scarred midget mother fucker would have had the confidence to play pool with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, dance the footloose dance, and kiss women a foot taller than him. He'd be blackpilled and locked away in a bedroom like half the poor sob incels here. I might troll these guys a lot, but honestly, if they took risks in life and got out from behind the computer, they could fix their lives.

>>18752487
Nay m'lord! It is extremely useful and worth the $10

>>18752094
>two and a half page makeout scene
jesus. I have literal sex scenes in my book and the longest is like 800 words. You may be missing the point of the scene if its that long. You're doing it to show the reader the mental states and desires of the characters as they relate to each other. Its not meant to be a skinemax time waster.

>>18752697
>You're doing it to show the reader the mental states and desires of the characters as they relate to each other
Yeah, it's that. Half the reason it's that long/detailed is so it sets up the interacts between the characters both in the moment but also going forward with the rest of the story. The other half is because I was trying to reinforce how much all the main characters troubles emptied out of his head during the whole thing. He's not worrying about XYZ, he's focused on the girl grinding into him on his lap.

>>18750964
Not today, but I'll write a bit tomrrow.

I'll never make money out of this am i?

>>18752798
No. Unless you sell your dignity to shelling out to patreon. Otherwise, get a job you bum.

>>18752798
You haven't even written anything to begin with.

>>18750968
I'll be writing soon even. In fact I'm going to drink tonight so I'll hammer out a bunch of pages and be all like
>yeah this shit is fucking GOLDEN

Sometimes I worry that the reason I treat my protag like shit is that I view myself as little more than shit.

Then I slather boobies on him.

>>18753480
Boobslather is the sign of a competent writer.

>mfw I'm going to finish my books, get published, and have a happy life, but I don't rely my happiness on the success of my creative work, its simply one more contribution to overall happiness that I derive from creating in itself anyhow

>>18752798
What have you done as an Artist?

>>18752436
Seek help

>>18753730
Sikh belt.

>>18753765
Peen jelq.

>into the final phase of my novel, bout 3/5ths there and some parts already written of this phase
>includes a setting shift
>having trouble coming to love the final setting as I did the journey along the way in order to write it with love

>>18753765
Seek help.

>>18753827
>final phase of my novel
>hasn't even begun the binding process
you aren't even not gonna make it, you ain't even gonna start

What works better?

>George heaved and wiped the sweat off of his forehead. "But... but... you can't... do that to me."

>George heaved and wiped the sweat off of his forehead. "But you can't do that to me," he stuttered.

I think the second is better, but I'm used to seeing the first everywhere.

>>18754563
Personally, I enjoy the first one. However I would probably shift it to
>"But y-you cant-you cant do t-that to me!"
The first example sounds like more of a depressed/sad outcry than a stutter. And while my example, while shitty, personally sounds better

>>18754563
Depends if you want your reader to know exactly how he stuttered it or not. In the second line I have no idea he even stuttered it until you tell me he did after I've already read the line and then have to go back and edit in the stutter. Sometimes writing in the way in which a person is speaking is unnecessary stylistic embellishment but other times its practical even if not entirely sound in terms of syntax.

Although I also don't read the first sentence as a stutter. Maybe 4chan has forced this on me but I read "B-but, you can't do this to me!" as a stutter and, "But... But... You can't... Do that to me..." as more out of breath but not necessarily stuttering.

I'm seriously about to insert the naruto "shuriken hidden behind another shuriken" thing into a final battle between a wendigo and a portal manipulator. Wish me luck

>>18754563
Sir, I have had the most wonderful evening and I would like to try to give you 10 different suggestions:

>1
Heaving, George's eyes stung from a deluge of sweat as he sputtered, "-but, but... you c-can't do that to me"

>2
Struggling to speak, George convulsed and the strain had his forehead leaking.
"But... but..." he stuttered, clearing sweat from his face with the back of his hand, "-you can't do that to me!"

>3
His nose and rips were smeared back and forth, his eyes stung. His bony knuckles kneaded his face like an angry italian pizza maker who was juist kicked in the balls.
"But-but-"
He tried to deny the betrayal, but nightmares are real.
"You can't do this to me!" he screams.
>4
Convulsing and wiping his stinging eyes profusely, George can't believe the accusations thrown at him, the consequences of this betrayal etherially weave his soul into knots. After all he gave, all he did, knifed in the back and cast aside like a saturday night special.
>5
Betrayal, he is used to it by now. Rage and hate brewing stick his arm hairs straight up. He's ready to break some faces, but his mind is broken. Pleading with his accuser at first-
"But- but-,"
His fists tighten, faces are going to break. Lives will be taken.
"You. Can't. Do. This. To- ME!"
Delta ZOG depot #4 goes into code blue as Sergeant Psyop's nose is pushed through his brain stem.
>6
Crossing the meadow near his home, George feels his heart thumping. His latest batch- something was wrong. It had been years- everything worked. He DJ'ed, played shows, everyone got high. This latest batch? He just got a text, Simone, his girlfriend, and Sam, his best friend- just found dead. Together.
"But- but-" George muttered.
The meadow stretches into the horizon, he can't seem to find the end. Every step is just through tangled weeds on an empty baseball field.
"Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, you- you-can't do this to me-"
Breathing heavy, the field wobbles, his keys are out and he drops them. Trying to keep his head up, the world begins to go black.
>7
Horjit, the kind and talented barista, stood patiently as George fiddled with the payment device.
"C'mon," he muttered, swiping his card for the 3rd time.
In the back of the kitchen, Lona, the beautiful khazar queen, made eye contact with George.
"But- but-" he whispered, suddenly on the spot.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, other patrons grew quiet as the air thickened.
He had planned this for weeks. He ordered the most ridiculous and crazy adventurous meal he could. A double buddha bowl covered like a groomed football field using finely chopped broccoli. On top, a twice baked potato, covered in spicy mango chutney. He worked there before and knew exactly how many steps it would be to make this, the kitchen already slammed busy on the long weekend.
His plan has totally backfired. His crush, she knew he was coming in and ordering crazier and crazier dishes, and now, his card isn't working.
Punching the cash machine-George screams

>>18754784
Seek help

>>18754789

>>18752208
you are wise and knowledgeable and i'm glad you're still here

Just now at work I talked to myself for 30 minutes straight replying to made up questions about my debut book like in an interview giving tips to writers and talking about my ideas.

But I haven't even started writing it.

>>18752208
In my country agents are only for big names, as a normal not published writer you just send manuscripts to publishers and lick their boots asking to please not fuck you up in contracts if someone even wants to publish your shit.

>>18755055
>mfw giving an imaginary diplomatic interview talking about how the movie adaptation of my work was good in a lot of ways and adapting it for screen was a tremendous task the director should be applauded for and all the actors were great and did a great job even though the movie was utter shit ruined by studio meddling and a retard tier director and actors
>I do this mental exercise instead of writing

>>18749534
She was not as she was before. He felt this much to be true, but held back from saying it aloud. There was no particular moment when he realized that things had changed—in fact, their routine had been left the same—but on some level of awareness he woke from their clockwork rhythm of greetings and surface-level conversations and found a deep, unattended ache lying within.

One Tuesday evening, while waiting for her to come home from work, he envisioned himself climbing to the roof of his office building and stepping out into the onrush of midday traffic. When she came through the door and squeezed his hands his palms were damp. She said that she was tired after a long day and went to bed. He followed soon afterward.

After work one evening the following week, he entered a small building, past whose yellowing doors was a well-lit hall painted a fresh white. At the end of the hall was an almost empty waiting room, where a man was seated at a desk. He asked for his name, date of birth, among other things. His name was called after some time, and he went where he was directed.

That night, he found her waiting for him. When he arrived, they exchanged a brief kiss and some conversation about their day, and he omitted and amended details as he saw fit. Their words cooled and they both went to bed shortly after.

As the weeks progressed his trips to the building increased, with successively longer durations. Leaving the place for the night left him with the sense of having purged a variety of old feelings, abandoned and left behind where they belonged. While coming home he thought sometimes of telling her what he hadn't yet been brave enough to say, but never did.

One day, he entered the building with a memory from older days in mind. He was younger and with her, who was also younger, and they were dancing, cradled in each other's arms, promising to never let the other go. As he swung the door open and saw the brightness of the hall rush out he felt a longing and compassion for who they had been, naive, unhardened, and oblivious to the doings of time.

A man left the building that night, whose initially stiff gait smoothed out upon reaching the end of the hall. From here he went home without pause and found someone waiting for him, whose thin smile he knew to the details of its very curvature, or as well as he could ever know.

She took his hand, and they danced without saying anything. He followed her cue, eventually achieving some kind of synchrony with her movements. They went on like this, not speaking, holding the other at arm's length, watching the other as the hours progressed. He learned more and more to feel at home in this skin. Their steps accentuated the house's long untrodden spaces, and as daylight collected one side of the house the two were still moving in lockstep, trying without words to convince the other that something still lay within.

>>18755229
>>18755055
I'm imagining talking to a booktuber about my work and complaining how only my genre fiction got translated into English
It's a wonderful thing, to have a dream

>>18755335
You will not go un(you)ed for posting content.

>>18754981
Seek help

I actually started writing today. I've got the first few pages of a story written and I'm excited to keep going. I know it's bad, I know it's very derivative, I know no one will ever read it - but I'm really excited to get to spend some time in this world I've started to imagine. I can't wait to see where it goes.

>>18755592
Good luck bro. I dropped my project and today I'm starting to work on a book I've always wanted to write. We're gonna make it.

Do you do chapters?

>>18755699
What a stupid fucking question.

>>18755666
I'm not even worried about making it, I'm just really happy to be doing it. We're doing it bro

>>18755592
>I actually started writing today.
Me too.
> I've got the first few pages of a story written and I'm excited to keep going. I know it's bad,
This is where we diverge. I've deleted everything and I'll never write again.
You've either got it or you don't. And if you don't you're better of playing vidya or doing any number of meaningless bullshit than writing. What's the purpose? No one will ever read it, the worse alternative being that someone actually does.
So what's the purpose? It's literally akin to masturbation. Don't wanna be a dick but it is what it is.

>>18749534
>Lisa Cron
she's not even a writer. she's a fucking ex agent janny/producer.
"brain science" ... you mean neuroscience?
why the hell should I value this retard's opinion?
why are you recommending a book by someone with zero credentials? hmm?

>>18755817
Did you expect anything better on /wg/?

>>18749534
Nice 'prose' books bro
Not a single book you mentioned talks about prose. They're just more bullshit theories on 'story', or in the becoming a novelist book, whining about irrelevant shit. Did you even read any of these?
>nobody
>woman
>woman
>nobody
>woman
>woman

Why are so many women writing 'how-to' books? They can't write for shit. The only actual modern success that wasn't artificially shilled was Rowling.

Your recommendations suck shit.

>>18752404
>publish their own work.
self publishing isn't publishing.
have fun replying to selfpromotion threads on twitter filled with other dilettante writers

What are good ways to describe if a character falls asleep in 3rd person? The only thing that comes to my mind is drifting off.

>>18755809
What's the purpose of anything? For me writing is fun, the purpose is to have fun. If you live your life doing what you think you'll be successful at then you'll end up miserable. Your post is case-in-point.

>>18755873
That depends on how they fall asleep, baka.

>>18755878
That's a good mindset. The wagie-normie mindset is the antithesis of the writing one. A lot of the time when you see posts like that on here, the filthy hands behind it have already given up, and seek now only to posthoc rationalize their cowardice and simple greed. They are destined wagies--therefore so such everyone else be. The error in logic is evident.
Anyway, for surface-dwellers such as that, this lifestyle was never theirs to be had. So giving up was, for them, the right choice.

>>18755855
dilate

>>18755891
shouldn't you be off posting about the #mc in your #wip for #nanowrimo?
Fake author.

>>18755878
To be fair I am pretty miserable.
But fun can't be the answer anon.

>>18755896
At least they write, which is more than the rest of /wg/ can do.

>>18755884
general tiredness, also when someone is really exhausted. I don't want to use always
"he fell asleep"
Or should I be more verbose about it?

>>18755905
they write shit, is the problem.
all these weekend warriors just clog the pipes for the rest of us

>>18755904
>But fun can't be the answer anon.
This is why you are miserable.

>>18755911
I'd rather be miserable than a hedonist.

>>18755909
>they write shit, is the problem.
Sure, anon, whatever you say.
>all these weekend warriors just clog the pipes for the rest of us
They're the only ones constantly writing. Which, again, is more than the rest of /wg/ can do.

>>18755906
He began to doze off.
He drifted to sleep.
Sleep overtook him.
He closed his eyes and knew no more.

>>18755384
Thank you but can i please get feedback or praise or contempt or validation of some kind!!!

>>18755922
No

>>18755922
People come here for critique? Wouldn’t it be better to just go to some forum?

>>18755335
too many commas. half of them are unnecessary

>>18755913
That's fine. If you think enjoying writing leads directly to hedonism then whatever. Problem is people are never as clear cut as narrow philosophical ideals. I can enjoy writing and not be a hedonist.

>>18755962
But if you do it for no other reason than fun, then by definition you are one, aren't you?

>>18755916
thanks.
I don't really want to describe everything in detail, because I don't think anyone is interested reading in about how the character's body functions slowed down. etc.

>>18755932
Noted. How did the story make u feel

>>18755928
>>18755923
I have nowhere/no one else

>>18749534
I'm sure those books are interesting, and I've read and very much enjoyed a little bit of The Rhetoric of Fiction, but none of that will make you a good writer. It's like watching Bob Ross or Rolf Harris to become a good artist. Same with script writing manuals. We don't need more painted-by-numbers books or films. The only way to get good at writing, and to find your style, is just by writing and reading. There are no short cuts. All these books are just exploiting your imposter syndrome, and you won't commit to writing something until you get over that. And no, it won't be alleviated by reading books like this. You will always think you just need to read a few more books to feel adequate, but you never will. Do you think any of your favourite writers read shit like this? No, they just had the confidence to write.

>>18756014
Search them

>>18755993
i felt like there were too many commas which breaks the flow

>>18756137
Kek, I'll take it thanks

>>18756243
another thing is your paragraphs are too short. there's not much to chew on before the thought breaks. so you end up with a bunch of fragmented thoughts that deserve more exploration. use connectives more to come up with a fleshier prose. statements should flow together, not be isolated logical propositions, otherwise it reads like a mathematical proof.

>>18756014
Google them. Literally anything is better than this general.

>>18756259
To this comment I cannot speak, and thus shall pass over in silence

>>18756259
Thank you. It's just the beginning, I will flesh it out in time, make it more readable. Will work on the payoff more too.

In first person, what is the best approach to dramatize an eye contact with a woman? Her eyes shone in color of (insert your favorite jewel here)?

>>18756315
remember a time you looked a woman in the eye and how you felt

>>18756315
Don't be a faggot.
Her pupils dilated as he put his hands around her neck. (I also have no idea how pupils work)

>>18756325
they work sort of like a tranny's vagina

>>18756321
Oh that's easy.
>She looked at him as if he were a non-entity, which is what he was.

>>18756329
Rent free.

>>18756335
wage free.

>>18756340
Pathetic.

>Pathetic.

>>18756352
>Wojack posting
Go back to /qa/.

>Go back to /qa/.

>>18756380
Post your work.

>>18756401
that chud is my OC. did you rike it?

>>18756407
Really reflects on how far /wg/ has fallen.

>>18756420
I wonder why this is happening. What causes shitposters to flock here? Could it simply be the nature of a general?

>>18756315
I’m thinking of putting some dialogue in first.
—A… anon. I think we should do it tonight.
—Say what, I answer in lost train of thought. Could it really be…? She squirms a little crouches forth and lashes her eyelids and smiles. Her lashes. So long. Her perfume. . .
—Anon, i think we should do, you know. . . It. She has now put aside her drink and stares me with eager face, drilling her pupils into my soul.
—Tonight, anon.
—I…i…

>>18756436
Because people here don't write and only post excerpt to give themselves the illusion of writing.

>>18756460
I'm writing, I swear. Just 539 words to go to fill my daily quota!

>>18756460
jokes on u i dont even post excerpts lol

>>18756474
Sure, anon. Whatever you say.

>>18755572
Seek felt

>>18756486
I did it! Shows what you know!

I'm terrible with naming things(characters, places, pets, etc.) so I end up with the same 15 names swirling around. Obviously I try to use different names for each character I write, but when we're talking about different stories that aren't connected, what's the etiquette for re-using names?

should add this to the OP
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/tryfon-tolides-almost-pure-empty-poetry/

>>18749534
imagine taking advice from a woman.

>>18754563
The only people who would prefer the first are those who spend their time reading fanfiction and poorly translated light novels. It's grotesquely heavy handed and just reading it makes me cringe. If you're "used to seeing it everywhere" then you need to read some real books before you try writing. God knows we don't need more garbage shat out by people who've never consumed anything except weeb junk.

>>18757082
absolutely wrong. you obviously only read boring boilerplate authors.

>>18755335
Why is this detached, overly verbose style so popular around here? What are they trying to emulate? Is it just autism?

>>18757092
Give me even one example of a real author who unironically uses the ellipsis to signify a pause in speech not even once or twice but three fucking times in a single sentence.

>>18754563
The first is marginally better, but I personally prefer em-dashes to ellipses for stuttering (ellipses imply a slow trailing off, at least to me), and I'd have a little less actual stuttering, cutting it off at "you can't" because stuttering is also one of those things that annoys people.

The second is slightly worse because you don't know he's stuttering until after you've read the text. But I think even if you rearranged it, stuttering is one of those things that works better when it's formatted to reflect actual stuttering.

>>18757116
It's litty

>>18755335
This is one of the few things I've seen in these threads which feels like it was written in the author's natural style. But your natural style and choice of subject matter is strongly similar to the "MFA pipeline" write-by-the-numbers sort of thing which comes across as bland and uninspired. I can't recommend any improvements, the detached voice/tone of the piece works well with the subject being described (a man detached from his own life). But ultimately it amounts to a pile of beautiful nothing which wouldn't be able to compete against a beautiful something.

>>18757145
nice goalpost teleport but you clearly want any kind of character to be bleached out of writing. "dialogue," he stuttered.
I couldn't think of a more boring line. I would close the book immediately.
Also there are plenty of authors who use multiple ellipses inside dialogue--PKD, Burroughs, DFW, even Kafka.
Face it you're just not well read. Go back to your genre fiction and crime fiction that all apes flaubert.

>>18757314
>Go back to your genre fiction
>half his examples of "real authors" are science fiction
What did he mean by this?

>>18749658
Echo this guy though personally I'd amend the list to be more relevant to contemporary sensibilities while capturing the formal scope of literary fiction:
>Anna Karenina
>Middlemarch
>The Magic Mountain
>To The Lighthouse
>Underworld
Flaubert himself said it is better to read the same handful of books deeply than it is to read a whole library of world literature. I see the value is multiplicity, mostly when I am stunted, my creative energies have dried up, and I need a reminder of how many narrative possibilities are out there. But if we want to get down to the business of great writing, you should study a few notable examples rather than try to gorge yourself on everything and expect to find some connecting principles.

Also, I've noticed that Story Genius is always shilled in these threads but I've found it to be a remarkably underwhelming book, and if there's one thing we want to do, it is not waste time. I recommend Larry Brooks's Great Stories Don't Write Themselves if you want to cut through the fluff of storytelling. If your anxiety as a writer is at the sentence level, I recommend you stick to traditional short stories until you have an instinctive grasp of what progresses a narrative. Stanley Fish, Steven Pinker, Francine Prose, and any number of close readings will help you with that.

>>18757116
The majority of posters on /lit/, but also especially here, are complete pseuds who have no idea what good writing looks like in the modern day and jack themselves off endlessly to the works of authors that others have told them are good. These are also the kind of people who basically never make progress because they're too busy being pretentious about their writing and trying to make every sentence a work of art on its own to get anything done. Ironically, the authors they constantly mentally and verbally fellate were much more like the kind of people they deride today than themselves.

I recently had this idea and now I'm trying to expand on it a little bit. I'll be honest, I was influenced by that whole thing about the backrooms creepypasta that was popular awhile ago, where you lose focus and accidentally slip into and endless maze of bizarre eerie hallways and rooms. I merged it with this idea that I cam up with a few years ago, where I tried to start an urban legend in my city about a creature called the Skinman, who is essentially a doppelganger, and you come across him when you are alone at night in this one particular park, and hes just a shadowy stranger in the distance walking towards you to cross your path and when you see him he looks exactly like you. I basically made it that the Skinman comes out of the backrooms and can slip back into them through any type of door or entrance through a structure that people are not perceiving and dont pay attention to in general, small alleys and abandoned buildings.

I've expanded that into this whole concept of a supernatural race of shapeshifting doppelgangers who exist in these purgatory like webways between worlds who come out into the world to stalk, study and mimic people in the real world, usually forgotten and socially isolated depressed people, lure them into the backrooms and then replace them. When they replace them they always seem very off and strange, but they're already so isolated that nobody really looks into it deeper. The doppelgangers themselves usually are isolated too, rarely interacting amongst themselves, and in their natural form look like hunched gangly grey aliens with big heads and yellow bug eyes. They dont usually have wider concerns other than escaping from the purgatory of the backrooms, where they come from is shrouded in mystery even to them.

>>18757527
It means /wg/ doesn't write

>>18757556
From there, I came up with the idea of a character who was abducted into the webways as a child, and where most people wander and languish in despair until they die alone and lost, he survived and learned the secrets of the ever changing landscape over time, and when he became an adult he began hunting doppelgangers by slipping between the doorways between worlds while wearing a jackalope mask, stalking the stalkers. Now, to humans in the normal world, it comes across as if hes a psycho serial killer in a jackalope mask stalking and killing normal humans, but hes actually killing doppelgangers who have replaced people. I'm not sure if I want to include the existence of other doppelganger hunters that are either abducted humans that have survived. I want the general story to progress in a way that several doppelgangers who rarely ever interact with each other, as they are EXTREMELY skittish and scared when they are seen in their true form even by other doppelgangers, form an alliance to try and combat the hunter protagonist as he is killing so many of them, pushing beyond replacing socially isolated loners and stalking people in positions of authority to combat him, from gang leaders at first to police chiefs at the end sending a SWAT team after him, forcing the protagonist to escalate his assassinations from killing poor and isolated people to killing high profile targets and having to escape.

My issue right now is I want to distance the webways from the creepypasta of the backrooms. I'm basing the concept of this on my own experiences of living in major cities in the midwest rust belt and not having a car and having to walk and ride a bike through so much urban decay and looking at a great deal of hidden alleys and abandoned buildings, and bizarre little patches of overgrown nature in the middle of the city and imagining that these little pockets of the world surrounded by thousands of people are totally ignored and invisible but secretly contain pathways into another world for those who do see them. Same with the doppelgangers, they target people who are isolated in society that I have seen, absolutely miserable and forgotten mentally ill and depressed people barely scraping by who could easily be replaced by a shapeshifting doppelganger and nobody would even notice. I also find the idea of a man in a jackalope mask stalking and killing people with a crossbow like a serial killer very appealing, even though hes actually a vigilante killing monsters. I want the webways to resemble all the dehumanizing factories and warehouses I worked in and the urban decay that I've lived around but I dont know if that distinct enough from the creepypasta

>>18757314
>Go back to your genre fiction and crime fiction that all apes flaubert.
Unironically most of our time would be best spent studying genre fiction to get the basics down. A lot of us are pretentious, or thing our initial ideas cut the mustard with the likes of the greats, but even Joyce spent years fermenting his greatest possible ideas, even Dostoevsky relied on conventional techniques (now popularized and mechanized most accessibly in genre fiction) before he composed The Brothers K. Graham Greene is a good line-straddler if you really must turn your nose up and the fundamentals of storytelling.

>>18757569
>A lot of us are pretentious
Speak for yourself. Just write and don't bring up dead mean as a means to motivate you, you pseudo-intellectual faggot.

>>18757596
Say something truly intellectual about writing.

>Just write
Have fun with your valueless memoir.

>>18757596
Say something truly intellectual then.

>Just write
Have fun with your valueless memoir anon.

>>18757608
And this is why Gardner is the only one who has ever made it and the sole successful writer from this General.

>>18757621
Why?

>>18757627
Because he writes.

>>18757633
Yeah so do 96% of people who end up in the slush pile. If you have nothing insightful to contribute other than "just write," then don't come to a community thread?

>>18757621
Really love his books, they're animesque. I can see why pseuds seethe and froth in anger at him.

>>18755971
No one said it was no other reason than fun. Real people aren't one dimensional and terms like hedonism don't apply as character traits.

>>18757642
Have fun never being a writer, pseud.

>>18757652
Hey if your bar for being a writer is a 4chan shill than go right ahead and peck away. Idk why you see actively writing and an active discussion about writing as mutually exclusive.

>>18757568
cool idea. reread Jekyll and Hyde, the double, and that one Robert Louis Stevenson short story. doppelganger horror is an rich genre that I think you can really engage with in some new and interesting ways.

>>18757556
>>18757568
>posting about writing in /wg/

Sounds creative and fun tho anon

>>18757666
Sure, anon, would you rather have people then post about their 500th reject letter here?

>>18757721
What are you talking about? Do you even have a clear idea of what you are advocating and what you find repellant in any of my previous statements? Or are you just busy being an asshole

>>18757687
It's really been appealing to me the last few years, I'm not sure why. I think it has something to do with the fact that Doppelganger stories are so tied into the idea of paranoia, mental illness and social isolation, things I've struggled with and seen people in my life struggle and fail against losing their minds. Also the movie Enemy had a big influence on it too, one of the best doppelganger movies

>>18757721
>500th reject letter here?
Kek, and those idiots are still so proud that they don't self-publish.

>>18757758
Check out Gogol's Overcoat. Not directly a doppleganger story but a huge influence on Dostoevsky's and a quick and dirty lesson on conditioning the reader toward the unbelievable.

>>18757547
>Story Genius is always shilled in these threads but I've found it to be a remarkably underwhelming book
no shit. it's written by an agent who can't get her own shit published, and who thinks neuroscience is called 'brain science'.

>>18757765
You know you're directly setting up a parallel here. 500 rejections = self-publishing. You're a parody of self-effacement.

In his youth back in the 1940’s, my father started determinedly breed ravens. His goal was to raise as big specimens as possible. He collected eggs from their nests and hatched them in his self-made incubator.
Young birds were fed with high quality nutriments and were weighed daily. Those specimens who grew fastest were always allowed to procreate and the rest were freed to the nature. As the years passed, average size of the ravens had started to grow.
When the ravens had reached a weight of 9 kilograms they lost their ability to fly and their wings and tails started to wither and their legs began to get sturdier. When my father died, i continued the project. Today, mature ravens weigh 52 kilograms at most.
Today their coat has changed into a fine latex-like jet black colored down. The ravens stand upright like humans and their thighs equal human in thickness.
Their wings are no more, instead they have short and strong stubs with hook-like claws distantly reminiscient of human arms. Their tails have all but vanished and their cloacae have migrated to the spot where their tails used to be.
Their beaks have shortened and now remind of eagle noses of humans. From the very beginning ravens have had a radio on for comfort in their shelter from which they have heard human speech. Later the radio was swapped for a television set and after that with a computer with an internet connection and big screens. Nowadays the ravens master couple of hundred words and are able to use them in the right context.
Their voice is metallic and low. Male ravens are very aggressive in their nature. They attempt to fornicate the very moment a human steps into their cage and without a broom or similar device they are very hard to keep in check.
Female ravens are docile but they too have always their libidos turned on. Often when a human comes near, they turn their bodies and offer their behinds so that their cloacae are exposed while contracting muscles around the cloacat, making them pulse and blink. Female ravens like it when you finger the cloaca and often start to mimic phrases they have learned from internet-sourced porn videos.
If you lie behind your back on the floor, immediately she lands over you and is able to set its cloaca on the anatomically correct spot, starting a rhytmic back and forth movement.
Suction power of the cloaca is remarkably strong, at times being no less than 9 kPa per square centimeter. It is difficult for a human to stand such forces. The project continues…

>>18757569
i was talking about the style you dipshit
way to completely miss the point

>>18757778
Why is it apart of the addendum then?

>>18757621
he hasn't 'made it'. He self publishes on amazon.
keep sucking his dick though

>>18757782
Noophags don't know how to indent

>>18757790
addendum of what?
you mean curriculum? of what course?

>>18757788
I wasn't your interlocutor there dipshit. Anyways, you have some pretty weak notions of "style" versus whatever else you may think is involved in literary creation so I don't really care about your points as points but as common shithead takes to be amended. Everything you have posted has been weak and full of resentment, trademarks of a never-to-be-published diary.

>>18757811
The OP. The Greentext.

>>18757812
keep projecting, keep whacking off to flaubert-cloning 'normal style', and keep thinking your better than everyone else when you're a dry boring faggot.
I came here to laugh at you.

>>18757556
>>18757568
Just imagine what you could accomplish if you put as much effort into writing your story as you did writing about your story.

The basic idea laid out in your first post has already been done by the film Vivarium. I had a similar experience watching the reboot of Wrong Turn that came out earlier this year, which was fairly discouraging but ultimately I was able to rework my story to handle the ideas presented in a different way.

As for the ideas presented in your second post. I don't like the jackalope mask because it's just a little too on-the-nose. I think your protagonist would prefer a more mundane disguise, probably wanting to look a bit more like bait, because I think the doppelgangers would be more frightened by the idea of an easy target suddenly turning on them than they would by the idea of some guy wearing a lunatic costume, telegraphing his murderous intentions from the moment you first see him. Much like the backrooms lure people in by their incredibly mundane, nonthreatening appearance.

You seem to have a very immature idea of escalating tension, kind of like the thing you see on r/nosleep where the author has a great idea and they're so pleased with it that they can't let it go and so they keep "jacking it up" by throwing in larger and more powerful government agencies for their monster to destroy. Pic related is a good example of what I'm talking about, you have a really creepy idea but the author couldn't resist trying to take it to the next level and the result is borderline comical.

But the things I like: you're willing to grapple with the issue of actual physical survival in the backrooms. Too many authors take the copout route of "I never seem to get hungry here..." and it just cheapens the experience. And the notion that these overgrown patches of urban decay might be hiding some magical secret is something that appeals to everyone, I know I've definitely thought it myself once or twice. I would probably read this book, but I'd be disappointed when it switches over to the "hunting down the doppelgangers" part because of the reasons previously mentioned.

>>18757818
What are you even talking about dude? Stay mad.

>>18757798
>t.pseud.

All of you need to cei qelp.

I've narrowed my novel ideas down to three. For one of them, I've already thought up a rough outline for two of the three sections I want to write.

I think I'm going to start writing and see if it sparks inspiration for the third section eventually. I feel good bros.

sorry retards but uploading poorly written memetrash to KDP doesnt make you 'published'

>>18757961
Okay, pseud.

>>18757961
Yes it does so.

keep telling yourselves that losers kek
honestly the most pathetic shit ive ever seen

>>18757820
Actually really good insights. I had similar thoughts about it, as originally I was working with the idea that the story was going to be about a third shift warehouse worker who lives by himself who frequents a 24 hour diner that has regulars at the times he goes who are people like him, 24 hour gas station workers, forgotten elderly people, foster children and homeless people with a little scraped up money who is being stalked by a doppelganger who wants to replace him, and the the entire story leads up to him being lured into the purgatory webways and the disguised doppelganger going to the diner and being weird and creepy and off but nobody really says anything about it with an ominous hint that another regular in the diner, an elderly woman has also been replaced, suggesting that this was happening to people all over the city. But I pretty much exactly did what you're saying and escalated the concept into something that almost seems like the movie Blade, a psycho vigilante that hunts supernatural monsters. I just wanted to build out the world and lore into something more extensive but I feel like I might have lost my original inspiration which was a story about lost isolated people disappearing in depressed urban decay rust belt cities

>>18758014
Okay, pseud.

>>18757766
I'll definitely check it out, depressive eastern European writing has been a huge influence on this story, I've always felt like I see such poignant similarities between my life in post industrial rust belt midwest America and older eras of Industrializing eastern Europe

>>18758019
You might also want to check out The Double with Jesse Eisenberg (who also stars in Vivarium). Not only does it deal with doppelgangers, but the setting of the film is very similar to the concept of the backrooms, except it's a functioning society.

>>18758028
loser fraud

>>18758185
Interesting, I'll check it out. There are a lot of Soviet era eastern European movies that capture this same sentiment that I'm trying to capture that I like. The Miraculous Virgin is a perfect one, where a man in an urban setting slowly descends into a surrealist alternate reality that has the visual ques of being the bizarre underbelly of the industrial society above it

>>18757798
100% pseud poster

>>18757642
"slush pile"
AKA the non-black, non-queer, non-feminist, non-mainstream story...

>>18757617
https://www.amazon.ca/City-Singles-Jason-Bryan/dp/0991825705

Lmao, I sold a bunch of copies at my local bar and like a half dozen women fucked me for writing this, enjoy your pseud incel life!

>>18758452
Did you get an actual good woman though?

>>18758598
Yes, not only is she creative, thin, tattooless, and from a wealthy, good family, but she is also a great mother. I thank God every day that I was inspired to write that book, while financially it didn't make a mint, it changed my life for the better in so many ways. Got me away from doing blow and banging hot waitresses to having an actual relationship with someone who understands my needs as an artist, someone who I don't need to be on hard drugs to enjoy time with.

One thing you never hear about on here is how much writing has improved the lives of authors.

>>18758658
Tuna melt.

>>18758658
I hope you can keep up with your momentum and make your writing into a self sustaining industry that can support you and her fully or else you're going to hit hard times. We all know writers that hit early success but dont have the work ethic to keep writing successfully throughout their lives and lose everything. You have to treat writing like you're running a corner grocery store and need to make the rent each month

>>18758452
wont buy it but I like the description

>>18758441
keep living in la la land, dilettante.
youre the equivalent of a little girl saying she's a real chef because she has an easy bake oven.

>>18758830
Living in la la land has lead me to:
>15+ years of living without a job
>made piles of cash during this time
>owned all the fast cars I've wanted to own, a supercharged S2000, T88 700 horsepower Supra, GMC Typhoon, 5.0 swapped E36 BMW, etc etc
>openly brag about sleeping with many women with a book in 2013 that lead to having a family with a wonderful lady
>lived in a foreign country for over a year, lived in Vancouver's most trendy neighbourhood for 6 years and slept with models and actresses from the hood
I'm 43, just finished my 2nd book, and have accomplished more than you, am more positive than you, and I add more value to this board that you
>incel pseud seethes

>>18758775
Thank you!

>>18758691
Now that I'm 43 and not 23, I need MUCH less money to have fun and survive. When you're young, if you want to have any sort of social life and attract women, you have to be hustlin' and grinding every day. Make that money by day, party by night. Kind of hard to do in 2021 when women have been so thoroughly poisoned, but I'm sure if you cultivate your own social group it is still possible to create a great dating pool for yourself through becoming a regular at local bars, knowing local people, going to art shows, etc

I agree with you completely, got to treat it as a business and always be selling. I'm working out the details of how I'm going to launch my book, have been thinking of a 9-11-21 launch date, 20 years after 9/11. The book is about a guy who strikes back against thieves who steal his bicycle, but ends up blackmailed while the news and police hunt him down after he is branded Canada's most wanted terrorist.

I've already gone from making a ton of money to having to work manual labour jobs to survive, so I have that experience under my belt. Feeling more confident than ever before that no matter what situation I'm in, I'll always have fun! Have a great day anon!

>>18758914
Beak felt.

>>18758938
Teak knelt

Yes, I'm writing YA.
Yes, I'm doing it because expectations for YA fiction are already at rock bottom.
Yes, I will self-publish on Amazon.
No, I won't write "adult" fiction.

>>18759065
That's awesome that you're writing, but please consider printing and binding your own books. You can get the cost down to like $1 per book, which is going to seriously help you make a living selling books compared to Amazon. Also, since you print and bind books yourself, you can sell them in person without having to pay exorbitant shipping costs for ordering 100 copies of your book. (High shipping weight and long distance + import fees to Canada = OWCH)

Amazon takes, at a minimum, like 1/3rd of your profits, and they can cancel you at any time if you say something in social media that goes against the narrative.

>>18759065
based
t. also using amazon

>>18757218
Thank you for your thoughts, and for reading.

>>18758914
Seems like you don't have a good balanced work ethic where your can maintain your own life while pursuing your own personal interests. Like you think you're owed having a major break where your genius is finally recognized and you dont have to work anymore. Any form of art you pursue needs to be treated like you in the trades working an independent contract. My old man is older than you, in his late 50s but is just is childish and uninformed as you and just doesnt get it

I have this intense feeling like I want to write something but when I sit down to write I can’t come up with anything. I’m overthinking things to the point of paralyzing myself. It almost feels like when an athlete overthinks a certain play and ends up making an error, so to correct it, they think about it more which doubles the error rather than fix it. Anyone ever deal with this? I don’t want to sound cliché but it feels like there’s something bottled up that I just can’t get out.

>>18757548
>>18757218
>>18757116
The story is about detachment and replacement. I didn't spell out what happens in the end, but I think you can figure it out if you read closely enough.

>>18759229
Just write something, good or bad. That will help you. Just put any story in paper

>>18759225
Did your old man have a massive amount of fun in his 20's and 30's? I'm very happy with how my life has turned out from where I came from!

>>18749534
462 words written today. Can I hit 1000 before bedtime? Let’s find out.
out of the four anons who read the final draft of my first chapter, everyone liked it a lot. I do it for them

>>18759479
He was a paratrooper fighting communists in south america at that age

>>18759503
Go go go!

>>18759506
Yeah, probably wasn't driving sick cars, banging hot chicks, and living in cool lofts. Poor guy. No wonder his kid is a pseud

>>18759514
Seems really materialistic. My father raises me to be an attentive bush master survivalist

>>18759528
As if you wouldn't want to be driving a 700 horsepower Supra on the way to bang your wicked hot 21 year old girlfriend?

>>18759229
Write stuff while knowing that no other will ever read it. Writing to no audience but yourself helps. You’ll have excess steam vented and your later work will be better. Maybe even consider throwing your darlings in to the firepit.

>>18756452
Oh well, i just rewrote this for editing’s sake.

She squirms a little. She crouches forth and lashes her eyelids to me and smirks.
—Anon. I think we should do it.
I almost answer to her but i couldn’t answer. Could it really be that i’ll get laid tonight…?
—Say what, I answer in lost train of thought.
She has now put aside her drink and stares me with an eager face, her dark pupils drilling into my soul.
Her eyes. Her eyelids. Her eyelashes. So long. Her perfume. . . Her opened lips as he is about to say something.
—I…umm…
—Anon, i think we should do, you know. . . do it. we should do it.
Her sincere eyes are piercing me. My crotch doesn’t know what it should do.
—I…i…
She takes my hand.
—Tonight, Anon.

>>18759782
>Could it really be that i’ll get laid tonight…?
oh god my eyes

>>18759782
>I almost answer to her but i couldn’t answer.
why would you do this?

>>18759782
LMAO IT'S SO BAD

>>18759782
What I expect from /wg/

>>18750572
that's a good exercise. you should be aware though that a character waking up from sleeping must be in the top 5 most cliched openings to a story ever, probably even #1.

You also mix up tenses a few times too btw. Like in 10, you move from past to present.

For what it is worth I like 1 the most, though I would remove 'right', because it's redundant. "A ray of sunshine settled across Ken's tired eyes". I also kinda like 10 because 10 has some intrigue to it and it feels like the dumpster diver element is about to be critical and I want to know how. I think the word conspiracy helps there, because although outside forces are mentioned in other sentences, in that sentence it sounds more like it could be an active part of the story rather than just setting.

Maybe you could try cutting too? Take a sentence and remove everything you possibly can, rework the sentence to make it as tight as possible.

>A ray of sunshine settles right across Ken's tired eyes.
>A ray of sunshine settles across Ken's tired eyes.
>Sunshine settles across Ken's tired eyes.
>Sunshine settles across his eyes.
>Sunshine across his eyes.
>Sun across his eyes.

post books that inspired you to write and why

>>18755335
Well written. The last paragraph is particularly nice, especially 'Their steps accentuated the house's long untrodden spaces'.

>he envisioned himself climbing to the roof of his office building and stepping out into the onrush of midday traffic

that is a bit confusing though, it reads like there is a road on top of the roof. a couple more words to clarify the scene would do. Also, without reading your post, it looks quite regimented. The only paragraph that extends more than 2 lines is the last. Can paragraphs be moved together or expanded upon to break up the flow?

>>18759882
Saga of Tanya the Evil. Hard to say why I was so captivated by it, I liked the characters and all the ineptness and misunderstandings that go on and the interactions between characters, even though the translated prose leaves more to be desired. I stopped at vol7 earlier this year and haven't been catching up on it though.

>>18759815
>you should be aware though that a character waking up from sleeping must be in the top 5 most cliched openings to a story ever, probably even #1.
The second paragraph of my novel is the protagonist getting up in the morning. It's because it's a major plot point that his coffee is poisoned with the first paragraph being the villain breaking in during the night to poison him. Should I consider reworking this to begin in a different way?

Anybody here Zinepilled? I'm going to start a Zine. It's the chaddest form of self-publishing.

I just read a section from Tender is the Night that absolutely floored me. How do I develop the lyrical prose that Fitzgerald makes look easy?

>>18759815
Yeah I had been thinking about the cliche aspect of waking up, my alternate beginning was he was going to be on hold with the non-emergency line to report someone moaning in distress in the alley on drugs, and he lays back on his couch and tries to sleep while kept awake at night by noise, describing it as getting worse and worse over the time he has been dating his girlfriend, finally he falls asleep at dawn and sleeps in until noon, where the book starts now.

I was chatting with someone recently at a nearby coffee shop, and they were saying the best thing you can do in an opener is immediately set the tone for the story with the most powerful opening punch you can. They really didn't provide any examples specifically, though, and even said Stephen King in particular has bland opening lines. Come to think about it, I've read a ton of fiction in my life and I can't remember a particularly stunning opener. I really loved Dean Koontz growing up as a teen, but don't remember any lines in particular.

Definitely looking at cutting words whenever I can! I've been editing and editing and stopping for a couple days before re-diving in, working out the flow and such, but I don't want to be a perfectionist, just enough words so that the reader can envision what's happening without being like you're reading a menu.

A thai food bowl
example 1
>orange, nearly transparent noodles fill the dish, their broad width mostly hidden under a layer of chicken and spicy sauce. A mountain of green cilantro for garnish sits under a white paper sheathe holding some fine chopsticks that lay across the bowl.
>example 2
The white bowl sits in front of him, steaming away, the hustle-and-bustle of the thai restaurant fading as his eyes and concentration focus on the scent of his meal. Lifting the chopsticks, pulling them from their paper pocket emblazoned with the restaurant's regal logo, the wood had a fine grain and felt polished between his fingers. Poking around the bowl, seared chicken with the skin on glistened with caramelized pastel green sauce. A trendy west coast fusion, wide pad thai noodles covered in chicken and green curry sauce would make a chef from the homeland bluster and shake his head. An arrogant amount of garnish proving the chef too ambitious to be taken seriously.
>example 3
The steamy noodle bowl arrives, complete with fancy chopsticks and the soapy odour of too much cilantro.
>example 4
Ken ordered a noodle bowl nervously. Minutes later, it arrived and didn't look anything like chicken pad thai he had before. A huge mound of cilantro and posh chopsticks, it smelled more like curry. They also forgot his spring rolls. His head swivels around for the waiter, it's so busy in here that Ken feels hopeless, but this also means he can drink from his flask without worry of being caught.

I like to plotfag it up by writing in style 3, upon edit I try and do style 1 without turning into style 2, which happens when I OVER-edit. I hate OVER-editing.

>>18760147
>Forgets to edit post before hitting post in a post about editing your writing

>>18760107
I feel that right now, people will be so much more willing to support you as a writer if you have a physical book to sell them. I can't stand looking at a screen to read a book, cannot stand it, it drives me insane! Holding a paperback is like sex without a condom, an ebook is like making a vagina out of hand lotion, a rubber glove and sticking it under your couch cushion.

While you can never read enough, how many books should a wanna be writer have read in order to not feel like a fraud?

I wasted my youth on everything but reading and now I feel like I'm playing catch up.

>>18760500
to feel like a writer with a capital w you probably need to at least read the major works of world literature. the top 200 fiction and top 100 non-fiction on this website https://thegreatestbooks.org/ should get you started.

another approach is to read books on mfa program reading lists. these tend to be more modern books but the better programs will have a few classic selections. a mix of both is necessary to write to the zeitgeist without repeating your forebears.

more important than all of this is careful study of your favorite works. outlining them to understand how they were structured. reading commentary and critique. copying passages down and analyzing them for technique (a simple exercise like keeping a list of phrases, similes, metaphors or images -- a literary palette of sorts -- can go a long way). even memorizing entire passages.

>>18760751
This 100%

You are ngmi if you do not have at least 10+ years of studying the classics and those who came before you, don't be one of those losers that self-publish when all they write is pure vanity press, zero skill wannabes.

Yes, I'm done now. I was never going to become the next Faulkner, the next Nabokov or the next Joyce, but I hid behind the language barrier to avoid criticism for months, maintaining an illusion that was fun to live in while it lasted. I had thought my country's education system to be topmost in the world, but this turned out to be utter bollocks. A child of 18, a person ten years my junior, has a greater vocabulary than I, who had to look up the word “topiary”, and no one likes the expression theory of art anymore, I am likened to a long lost dinosaur.
This will be my final post on /lit/. I've been humiliated and exposed as a fraud. My writing is pretentious, infantile, banal drivel. My observations are dull, my language grade school level. My tenses are mixed up; I use colloquialisms, ellipses and onomatopoeia. I mix tired and trite idioms together to obfuscate their unoriginality with a veneer of irony; I have continued to recite ornate Jewish chimpanzee parables with diminishing returns. The parable seemed very clearly to me to be asking me whether or not the now-grown-adult can choose. I say yes, of course, but that's not my issue.
I was never cut out for writing. I began writing my "book" on January 6th. Since then I've produced 130 thousand words for it. These words are a tide of garbage without value, without insight, without form. The themes of time, space, infinity, memory and pointless duelling are not present in my work. It was never real writing, it was anime and weebshit!
Story arcs, character arcs, narrative arcs, these are all outdated terms. You say what you hear, and only the anime fandom uses the term “arc” anymore. I am a toad! Look how many words I wrote, because apparently literature is bodybuilding and just aimlessly typing will somehow improve my writing. My appetites grew as I wrote, I set a goal of a 100 thousand words when I began, only for the cancerous growth to demand a 137 thousand words soon enough to be completed, and still I don't even know what genre it is that I'm writing. Is it autofiction? A comedy? A picaresque? Am I merely shitposting edgelord-triggering diarrhea in neo-emo gothic revivalist gestalt?
Regardless, I have failed, and even in my failure I have merely imitated how people who think they write well but write poorly write, and I couldn't even do that well. "Oh I can do that anytime if I wanted to" I thought, but no. I have put down my pen. Never again will my fingers click-clack across the keyboard. No more outlines, no more characters. Goodbye. I will take my own advice and go to the rope. Why live if you can't be a great writer, or even a passable one? And why write at all, anyway, if no one is reading anymore and Harold Bloom isn't around to insert us into the Canon? Learn from me! Learn from me!

>>18760837
This is the saddest copy pasta I've ever read

>>18760878
It's a monument to all your sins.

>>18761245
First of many

>>18760878
it shows up in every thread, gets new Yous every time

>>18761357
Doesn't get people like it used to, though.

>>18761370
People are rejecting the blackpill