/lit/ - Literature

>Harsh criticism wanted
>implying you'd get anything but

This is the story of a beta male who doesn't do anything and just fantasizes about any random girl he looks at. People probably find his constant zoned-outness creepy, especially if he's staring at the girl the entire time. He wants more, he's lonely. But he can't do more because it's just not worth with all the complications. So he will settle with his imagination and fantasies. This is similar how people on /a/ have "waifus" fictional characters they pretend are real and are in love with them.

Yours is the story of the beta.
Who wants to read about that?

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking thru the streets of Soho in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's
Gonna get himself a big dish of beef chow mein
Hoowwwlll, the werewolves of London, Howwwll

The hiss of the machine impacted his ears like a snare drum. He looked on through the haze off an early morning as the machine came slowly to life. "Shit" he thought to himself, his mind still tethered to sleep to form eloquent sentences, there is honesty to the half awake mind that one will not find in someone fully awake, a certain brevity which the rationality of the fully conscious mind seems to try to demolish. He begins his job, just like he has for the last two years. Groggily he begins to assemble the pieces of some merchandise of which he has no interest in. Already his mind begins to wander; he smiles a little as his thoughts take him far away from his exceptionally small life. Bullets zip past him as he moves from building to building, embedding themselves in stone, he wonders for a moment if the men who placed these stones ever could have imagined the violence being done to them now.

>>1987595

Said it way better than I could.

>>1987595
yep that pretty much sums it up.

Thanks for making me feel a little bit more worthless.

Glancing over at her through the miasmal fog of cliché he summoned a bizarre turn of phrase, like a fetal anecdote, to throw at her. Slackjawed and eyeing a mote in the middle distance he unspooled his all-too-real penis in her all-too-horrified direction.
Back and forth he fiddles in soi-disant aesthetic expression, jelqing his prose past the limits even of divine patience, yet only ever really permitting the pearled drop of precum that hints at larger meanings without ever achieving the orgasm of significance. Or what she would have called "a meaningful climax", of the sort that one expects in fiction.

But still, the delectable trove yielded up from the spooged-together pages of his roget's thesaurus, was able to tempt the jaded palate of his reader, even though she was busy taking the time----every fluid or weirdly-landscape-like moment of it, depending on how bizarre the mixed metaphors can get----to get the fuck away from this prolix wanker.

piling on flowery bullshit does not spectacular writing make. words like "residing" and "beckons" and clauses like "beckons him to realise itself" should, at this stage, be disregarded in favor of describing something compelling. show, don't tell. Read some Miranda July. Understand the fundamental awkwardness of the human condition. The world isn't coated with fucking fairy dust. Make your characters sound weak and flawed. People respond to that because people are weak and flawed. "no dice will be rolled today" is a masturbatory, self-congratulatory way to describe insecurity and the inability to relate to people, and deep down, everybody know's that shit's a lie.

You're welcome.

>>1987612
No problem.

I know you are supposed to "write what you know", but that needs to overlap with "what people want to read".

>>1987615
also, this is great.

>>1987627
Makes sense

>>1987624
An example would be great

Here's a lighthearted poem/song about some bandits I wrote in 30 minutes last night. Thinking of including it in the fantasy novel I'm writing. I don't normally write this kind of stuff, so let me know how bad it is.

The world lay flat before us,
The sun was high and hot,
We hid among the grasses
with a rumbling in our guts.
Then came the sound of caravans,
of wheels and hooves and feet
Our voices all fell quiet,
for we knew our paths would meet
When at last they reached us,
passed our shelter in the grass
The men burst from their hiding
As the boys sounded the brass
Arrows flew by dozens,
Our blades were at their throats,
But then we saw our grave mistake,
The color of their coats.
The yelling turned to panic,
all arrows missed their mark,
The sky grew black and cloudy,
thunder bellowed in the dark
We scattered for the grasses,
As vic’try became defeat

Each of us mourned in silence,
For tonight we wouldn’t eat
After bitter dreams of failure,
And a night in our cold huts
We hid among the grasses
with a rumbling in our guts.

Somthing a little johnnyonthespot
This is going to suck


I know what I felt at that moment, waking, my heart racing I glance at the fan spinning spirals above me endlessly whirring into a wormhole, parhaps leading to another universe, another world.
I attempt to recolect the last five minutes of my life. Five hours it seems to be.
Confusion consumes me, as I come to realize.
I just had a fucking wet dream about my best friend.

>>1987639
Right you are

>>1987633

"I looked at her from across the room and felt my instincts kick in again, my stupid instincts, with their stupid evolutionary goals. More pain, oh good. I sort of wish I could just castrate myself. But I can't really control my mind in situations like this, so here it goes, conjuring a shared history, a marriage proposal, a kiss, a few steamy minutes of totally fictionalized sexual intercourse."

"I know this is going to follow me around for the rest of the day. I guess that's good. I guess it'll eventually push me to, you know, actually mate with somebody. And it drives my imagination; I get to imagine these pretty, satisfying stories. But sometime I wonder if it wouldn't be better if I just got myself chemically castrated."

how about a little honesty. either that, or a little more life experience.

Meanwhile 2 weeks prior:
____________________________

In the night there was a man who had arrived from the darkness. He seemingly evaporated from it, a ghastly spirit he was who held tightly to the briefcase he seemed to bring directly from the grave he was buried within. There wasn't anywhere to look when he entered, for he stammered loudly between the grunts he breathed out and slopped across the floor in a slumped stance over to the counter of just another Ohio gas station diner spaced cross the plains, which apparently stuck in a good variety of holes for corpses among the corn. Not only was he loud in comparison to the hushed tone of the tight-knit biker and truck community that were all sitting a good distance from the door on his entry, but his visage was queer for the area. A suit, while caked in a grotesque amount of the dirt he assumedly had funnelled out of in his frankenstein re-birth was draped over him like an oversized robe. It had been years definitely and the bones that could not even support the clothing showed - this is why it was shocking. The suit held to its own among the ripped plaid flex shirts, the button ups of tattoo ridden boyfriends who wanted to impress their girls who were too busy throwing up in the bathroom over the orgies from before, it was like the suit spoke of a whole new world.

In the silence, where the fryers rested in a constant buzz as they grilled, burgers occasionally spurt out juices for excess sound that conjoined in a shock as he began to shrill at the crowd.

>>1987638

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deem’d it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met an host and quell’d it;
We forced a strong position
And kill’d the men who held it.

On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rush’d to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us,
But we conquer’d them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king march’d forth to catch us:
His rage surpass’d all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sack’d his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewildering,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphan’d many children
And widow’d many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen:
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoan’d them,
Two thousand head of cattle
And the head of him who own’d them:
Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

>>1987657
Yeah not bad.
I guess I was too busy wallowing in self-pity to put it that way.

Suicide seems a lot more flavorsome than castration though.

This is what you get for dating an artist.

I'd said that to my friends a million times, sort of ruefully playing it off. I thought it again while unwrapping the painting in my living room, the one she sent me in the mail, with the note on the back, “I don’t know what to do with this.” I’d paid for it. If I’m going to be honest, I really want it, even though we’ve just broken up. Even though I've just broken up with her.

It’s a female nude, the outlines done in this minimalist style she lifts from Japanese calligraphy. Japanese lit was her major and she speaks the language. She’s white as can be, with red hair. I used to tease her about it. I was always secretly impressed. The nude girl is wearing black fingerless gloves, blood on the knuckles, and she’s staggering back, squinting and wrinkling her nose, with a bloody mark of impact around her eye, a future shiner.

She'd made it one weekend awhile ago, when we'd broken up and then gotten back together. Over those few days she painted this and posted it on the internet. She doesn't fuck around.

It was extreme, everybody thought so. When I showed my therapist a picture of it his eyes widened. He understood why we broke up. Unstable situation. This kind of stuff can be overwhelming.

I wanted to punch him in the face and say, no, dammit, this is what I love about her. This isn't why I want to break up at all. She made this beautiful painting about me. Who doesn't want beautiful paintings made about them?

>>1987668

yeah, but suicide's a pretty common theme. the more specific the better. doesn't have to be chemical castration, you know whatever.

Nobody on this fucking board can write for shit.

>>1987667

So why did we break up? I was trying to trace the reasons, to understand the logic of the situation, but it kept shifting beneath my feet.

Ostensibly it had something to do with her mother.

The first time I met her mother, we went to her apartment, right across the street from the La Brea tar pits. Her mother was obviously distraught when we came in, hunched, tense, bustling around and making tea. My girlfriend hadn't mentioned what was wrong; said her mother was just having a tough time. The apartment was huge, the location was extravagant.

Her mother's eyes locked on to me, as soon as she saw me. She had an unbroken intensity of focus I'd seen before, and I was trying to figure out where.

She introduced herself and immediately started saying, this person, this awful person, she's so sorry she's feeling this way, she's so sorry I have to be dragged into this. She suffers every day. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her to explain. I wanted to help. Eliza looked uncomfortable.

>>1987674

I was thinking the same thing. And I'm almost too tired to write, but I feel like I need to show that there are people with good ideas on this board.

>>1987657
I like the humor though, definitely gives the voice a better quality.

Seems I have much to learn.

I stuck my dick in her mouth.
That's how we do down South
This isn't uncouth
It's the honest truth
I raped her throat
worked it liked a garrote
Bitch tried to bite
So I choked her out of spite
I could feel my dick in her throat
I don't mean to gloat
The slut passed out
Down her thoat I did spout

>>1987676

Her mother sat us at the table and smoked some weed and said that this man, this Dennis something, was hacking into her brain using satellites. He lived in the UK and he wanted to destroy her. He had connections, this man. He said he was involved in alternative energy but she didn't believe that for a minute.

This man made her feel pain. He projected terrifying images into her head, of him living in a filthy house, smearing the walls with feces, torturing people. He had all this sophisticated equipment. He'd designed it himself. She's talked to experts about it. It was theoretically possible. Understand, she said. She lives in hell.

I sat there, suddenly uncomfortable with the tea I was drinking, and slowly coming to terms with the fact that my girlfriend's mother is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic. A functional one, to be sure. She worked as an operating room nurse for years. Don't even get me started on that. But I thought things were pretty clear. I looked to my girlfriend for reassurance. She was focused on her mother.

Her father, too, was a problem. She and her mother were both convinced he'd committed a murder that her grandfather, his father, had taken the fall for. They showed me newspaper clippings. It was possible. I didn't know what to believe anymore.

The story, as you can see, gets twisted when you deal with crazy people. It starts to sound like a movie. How can we make the story make sense?

>>1987683

That's what her studio was for. It was a beautiful place, on Sunset, and she put so much work into it. She made it feel homey, hip, and mysterious. There was always tea brewing, it always smelled lovely, there was always a black cat around. There were the paintings and the comics she drew, her work and the work of people she loved. There were even quilts, beautiful ones, from her mother.

A lot of her work was about women, terrifying women, battered women, killer women. Women doing things, terrible and wonderful things, stepping outside the boundaries of both traditionalism and feminism to thrust their bloody issues in your face. They put their fists into your guts and looked you in the eye and said look at me, no don't look away, this is what it's about, we bleed too, and we can make you bleed. Beautiful, awful creatures, populating fairytales simple in form but terrifying in implication-- what did it mean that this woman wanted to eat her father, or that this one wanted to be roped into submission by a cowboy, or that this one had committed murder with a hatpin? No explanations, just the truth, but the truth as a story, as a picture.

This is how she found the plot, and how she made me see the plot, of her own life. Often, she was just as open as her paintings, and almost as violent. We didn't fuck or make love so much as we did both at the same time. When I was inside her, she always wanted me deeper inside. She would grab me and grip me and scratch at me and I'd retaliate with force and passion until I would bump parts of her I really wasn't sure sure I was supposed to be bumping. She always liked it, always came when I did that. She wanted to be impaled. She wanted to be wounded. I found it at first mildly terrifying and then addictively erotic.

This is what you get for dating a chimpanzee.

I'd said that to my friends a million times, sort of ruefully playing it off. I thought it again while scrubbing the flung feces from the walls of my living room, or explaining when he ate the neighbor's baby, “Sorry, the practice infanticide on rival troops.” I had paid for him. If I’m going to be honest, I really wanted a pet, even though we started having sex. Even though I started having sex with her.

She’s a female chimpanzee, the rump inflamed to signal her estrus and willingness to mate. She understands that mammals are seldom monogamous because they have developed such efficient means of rearing, and bearing, offspring. Tough shit, I think to myself, she hasn't figured out yet that we're not from the same species.

>>1987686

This is the story I was drawn into, and the story I started living. Very difficult for my own life story to compete. Mine was so coherent. Small town, religious upbringing, rebellion, college, and then a career in public relations. I'm an artist, I guess. I make things. But not like she makes things. Her story, and her art, are the jagged edges of the human experience, real things. Wounds, and you don't pay attention to much else when you have wounds. What did I have to offer that was more important?

Right now, I have seven hits of LSD in my fridge. I've done mushrooms before, but never acid. I bought it because I want to lose my mind. Because the story has started to make too much sense. And because I miss her, and what she did to me. I want to do it to myself, but I don't know if I can.

>this thread

>>1987689

i'm fucking sending that shit to her. that's great. i mean, i realize you can do it with anything, but it's still hilarious.

>>1987695

shut up and contribute toolbag

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penispenispenispenispenis vagina

>>1987696

tell her if she posts on /lit/ when i'm around, i'll do an entire performance under my tribute-band persona, "prospero august".

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>>1987702

k.

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>>1987719
UMAD BITCH?

I'm a gay bitch. I like penis. HURRR DURRRR

>>1987721

yes, desperately.

here's more.


There's no real sanity and balance involved in driving an automobile like that. The purple scream of the tires, the quiet teen-sex of the chassis slamming into itself, there isn't anything non-bipolar about it.

I understand what life is about, and it isn't about balance. God no.

What do you think I want out of this life? To wear no makeup, to get no piercings, to guild no lilies. Not even Jesus Christ thought that was a good idea.

But you know, in the midst of it all, you still want me to dream of a wife, and kids, and a little house. In the middle of it all you want me to suffer the same dream you suffered. And to balance all the things I'm supposed to with all the things I'm not supposed to. To balance at all.

Well, there is no balance. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Conception at one end, shitting yourself and rotting at the other. That's about as fucking imbalanced as you get.

The trees outside, they look so still. They don't know about any of this. So know, and be pissed about the fact that you know. You get to be conscious for the whole thing.

pussy is icky. I prefer to be sodomized.
I like digimon too.
And Magic Treehouse has the best book ever

>>1987731

What did she say to you outside by the plastic slide? what look did she give you as she coyly plucked a dandelion. You'll never remember. You'll try. You'll kill yourself trying. You'll kill yourself.

Not on purpose, no. You'll just use yourself up. Unless you can develop some kind of narrative cancer. Something that never dies. You have to metastasize yourself into your culture, or into your children, or something. Alternate versions of the same story.

This is what it's all for, in the end. This is why you're behind the wheel of this Toyota, going, going going, to get to the game. To play the game. You're playing the game right now.

Because really, where can you draw the line? You impress the boss by getting your emails out just like you impressed that girl by talking about books just like you ran the fastest in the junior olympics just like you beat your brother at Mariokart. Have you ever really stopped?

And now you're driving. And I'm sitting in the passenger seat, thinking, thank god, he's finally gone off his rocker. Thank fucking god. Because I was getting bored, and that's the only thing worse than balance. Boredom. They have this relationship.

You were wrong about the Tao Te Ching. It says all kinds of things about submission but nothing about balance.

To everyone who posted in this thread I would like to apologize.
I left my lappy open and my brother got on...
Again sorry...
Fuck I feel like a idiot

>>1987727
>>1987733

edit stuff like this together and you might have something. i'm totally serious.

>>1987745

ignore and soldier on, that's my motto.

i'm done. now to read other people's stuff. lessee

ok, contributing.... (genre is "prose poetry", so judge accordingly, i.e., if you loathe prose poetry, don't read it.)

*

If only the wet pavements would heave and buckle, lend a little credence to the perennial hope that things _don’t_ go on, that on occasion the inner catastrophe might reach outward, the revelation over tea and scones which must not for decorum’s sake lead to tears or the rending of your garment could at least provoke a fit of telekinetic spoon-bending, though the tea-party would progress nonetheless. Yet the trudging feet encounter everything, same old etcetera, and even the ankles that register each forward-directed thud onto the integral concrete cannot yield their own firmness for the sake of sentiment. People don’t swoon anymore, or I don’t anyway, and lovely as the thought is that bad news could make one’s legs give way, everything keeps to schedule here. The machinery turns on and on, with the occasional hair-raising screech as its only harmless byproduct—even the wooden sabots of indulgence or self-pity tossed into the works are crunched to flinders and cause no delay or notice. Simple physicality coheres even if nothing else does, just as Hume, out of Scotland, would have smarted with sunburn even while keeping to his pretense that the old bitch might _not_, after all, rise again next morning.

>>1987658

thought i think word agreements and overzealousness occasionally make this clumsy, i really like the physicality of some of the description. keep that broken-down quality but maybe try and simplify or smooth it over a little bit.

ex:

"Not only was he loud in comparison to the hushed tone of the tight-knit biker and truck community that were all sitting a good distance from the door on his entry, but his visage was queer for the area"

instead, maybe:

"Not only was he loud in comparison to the hushed tone of that tight-knit biker and truck community, all of them sitting a good distance from the door on his entry, but his face was queer for the area."

you could leave "visage" in, maybe. just not really my style.

just wrote this , true story
>My parents were out for the day, my brother was at work and for once I had the house to myself. Once I had expended all the usual things a fourteen year old boy does when left alone - raiding the cupboard, using up the tissues, trying to find the spare keys for the car, I was left at an impasse. Bored with the TV, bored with the internet, I decided to go for a rummage through my parent’s room. Knowing if I got caught, there would be hell to pay added to the excitement, and a tight feeling took hold of my stomach. I looked over my mum’s messy chest of drawers, pictures of me and my brother, old perfumes and jewellery littering the top. I opened the music box, hearing it creak out a tune it probably hadn’t for years – I think it was greensleeves. But inside there wasn’t anything too exciting – some old coins, some old rings, a collection of our teeth. Closing the lid, I looked around the room. Still so much to see, so much to paw through. Sitting down on the bed, I opened the bedside table drawer. A musty smell rose up at me, the smell of old papers and mothballs. The first piece of paper had my name on it – ***************. “Cool,” I thought, “maybe this is my old school records.”
I opened the plastic bag it was in, and shook out the contents on the bed. Yellowed refill paper fanned out over the bed, mixed in with official looking forms and pictures. I picked up a letter at random , and started reading.

>>1987780
>“Dear Anon,” It started “It’s so hard to think I’m giving you away, but its for the best..” I put down the piece of paper, confused, who was this Anon, and who was giving him away? I picked up one of the official forms, from the Department of Social Welfare, typed with an old typewriter. And there the answer was – I was adopted. My real name was Anon, My last name wasn’t ******. These letters were from my real mother. I started reading them, tears welling up in my eyes, the excitement of minutes ago completely washed away, along with the world I thought I knew.

>>1987773

this is fucking great. itworks just fine as straight prose, to me.

i do feel, thought, like you're sticking to a sort of "universal theme". if you could turn that descriptive equipment on a specific story or set of circumstances i bet you'd have something really insane.

http://vflo28.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/satie-2/
short story
would love to get some feedback on my writing
I'm new to creative prose writing

>>1987782
>>1987780

well and precisely written, but i feel like it needs a quirk, stylistically or narratively, to keep me interested. it's a bit pollyanna.

>>1987785

well, thank you, that was a really helpful comment. i feel like you could kind of peek behind my intention when writing it, which was to write a kind of gertrude stein "everybody's autobiography" piece. i guess the level of deliberate abstraction is noticeable. but thank you, i think you're right that the next step would be to do something more like "the autobiography of alice b toklas".

>>1987790
thanks, just something I banged out for a class. Haven't seen you round /lit/ much before , new trip? cheers for criticizing anyway

>>1987789

i'll get to this once i've started the laundry.

>>1987789

i like this a lot, but it suffers from something i've seen as epidemic: its descriptions, while elaborate, lack precision and specificity. how many times have we heard the word "electricity" used to describe the feeling in a room? I also tend to like things simpler. i think i prefer a different rhythm than you.

EX:

Her eyes watched her fingers command the piano, bending its will. Everything fell from her mind. Her chords painted the room with a resonating thunder that shivered each wall and her hands galloped against the thin keys, strangling each resolved chord with tension as she pushed the piano toward crescendo. It trembled in fear as she smashed through the motifs that littered the last few moments (THE LAST FEW MOMENTS OF WHAT? OF THE COMPOSITION? OF HER TIME BEFORE THE STUDENT ARRIVED?)

these complaints are pretty specifically targeted, so this may require more spot-editing that i'm willing to give it. overall i like it a lot.

>>1987801

no problem. i'm on occasionally, though i tend to be pretty busy.

>>1987681
How does shoving a dick on someone's throat 'work like a garrote'? I think your simile is misplaced.

>>1987861

i noticed that too. although now i'm imagining using my dick as a garotte and i can't stop laughing.

>>1987867

"You may note what indignities the thugs and dacoits have inflicted upon the people of Pondicherry," swore Nayland Smith, "when I reveal to you, Petrie, that I saw a fakir garotte a man with his own pintle, all in the name of Thuggee!"

>How does shoving a dick on someone's throat 'work like a garrote'? I think your simile is misplaced.

Technically a rhetorician would term this "hypallage" or "transferred epithet".

The cock in question is choking the fellatrix, "like a garrote" chokes a person. The problem here is that the image does not conceptually add up---choking ON something, and being choked BY someone, are very different concepts. The imagery that is required would be related to the Heimlich Maneuver, perhaps. Or anacondas unhinging their jaws to swallow an entire boar-hog.

>>1987867
I'm glad that it amused you.
I made it up on the spot.

>>1987878

the next time i'm getting a blowjob, i'm using that anaconda/boar-hog thing.

>>1987848
thank you very much for the feedback. Like I said, I'm really new to writing short stories so it's criticism like yours that help me find out what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks again for checking it out