/lit/ - Literature

>>20735132
>this is considered a "classic" for genrefags

>>20735132
Read a lot of good literature, then read some bad/mediocre genre stuff. The difference will be blindingly apparent,--and after that you won't have any issue picking out good qualities in writing, since you have a basis to compare it to. Pay attention to sentence/paragraph structure, how they flow, and the sounds of the words used. Good writing often has a very particular cadence to it.

Another important thing is paying attention to how things are described. Good writers will often describe things in a very unique and original way, while bad/mediocre writers often use cliched and bland descriptions.

I'll provide an example of a good description for you:
"As he crossed the room he saw through the corner of his eye, and framed by a glass-less window, the sinister outline of Gormenghast Mountain, its high crags gleaming against a flying sky. The rain streamed through the window and splashed on the boards, so that little beads of dust ran to and fro on the floor like globules of mercury."

The author could have just described the rain pouring in from the window, but he took it a step further and gave you a unique description of rain droplets as globules of mercury. This adds a lot to the scene and gives us the impression that the room must have been exceptionally dusty, and unused for quite a long time, for the water to collect so much dust as it rolled to look like silvery-grey mercury sliding across the floor. We're given so much description and atmosphere with a small amount of words.

>>20735132
By reading.

>>20735132
Damn. Never realized Tolkien was this dark

>>20735132
Study grammar/linguistics and criticism.

>>20735132
Read anything before World War 2. You couldn't get published unless you wrote well.

>>20735308
>You couldn't get published unless you wrote well.
lol. You really are poorly read. First half of the 20th century was a golden age for shit writing, hence the who pulp industry which while it did manage to give us some good authors the bulk was terrible.

>>20735308
>You couldn't get published unless you wrote well
This is extremely untrue. Even in Victorian England the average reader was a female who liked pulpy genre stuff, which is why penny dreadfuls were a big thing. The average novel published has pretty much always been bad/mediocre: we just focus on the few good ones that are worth talking about decades/centuries later. Even Ancient Athens had a ton of garbage plays/poetry that just didn't survive because nobody cared enough to preserve them

Post shit authors, I'll start:
Lewis Carrol

>>20735370
>because nobody cared enough to preserve them
source?

>>20735460
>source
Any book covering the history of literature through those time period? This should be common knowledge to anyone on /lit/, especially Victorian era chick lit since it was vital to the development of the novel and where it crossed over from minor form to major form.

>>20735234
I mostly read scifi. Would period classics like Moby Dick, The Call of the Wild, and The Three Musketeers be a good place to start for good literature?

>>20735599
>Would period classics like Moby Dick, The Call of the Wild, and The Three Musketeers be a good place to start for good literature?
Sure. Moby-Dick in particular is one of the best novels of all time, and has some of the best prose in the English language. Really can't go wrong with that one

>>20735599
probably not. Have you read Borges?
and if you like weird hypothetical tech and don't mint giga autistic descriptions of said tech there Locus Solus by Roussel

>>20735234
Disagree with descriptiveness and the example given. Reeks of being overwritten- If I had to read 300 pages of that it would be very tiring.
I imagine that not everything has to be described in good writing. You can have time skips of years in one paragraph, sudden POV changes, formatting disruptors - it just works because it strikes the reader and catches their attention.
Good writing writes for the reader.

>>20735785
Average /lit/ poster in a nutshell. Doesn't fully comprehend the post he's replying to, and bashes a classic, critically acclaimed novel in one post.

You're right that not everything needs to be described, and it's often better to leave most things up to the reader's imagination, but good description is definitely an element of good writing.

>>20735859
I liked the writing. What's it from?

>>20735636
I haven't read those. I'll have to check them out. Thanks for the recommendations.

>>20735864
Gormenghast
It's right there in the quote.

>>20735308
Holy hell, that is incredibly stupid. That may have been the case before the Victorian era, but afterwards it was much more censored and easier to be a shit writer who could get published.
Read stuff before the 1700's and you'll know what I'm talking about.

>>20735339
>>20735370
>>20736012
Do not disagree with me.

>>20736012
It was not even the case before the 1700s, all gou needed was money and a good amount of shit was published by well off people with zero ability. Dig through the various online archives of public domain works, plenty of long forgotten garbage.

>>20735234
>Good writers will often describe things in a very unique and original way
This is so fucking true, and it’s one of the best parts of reading. When a long dead author just speaks to your soul or describes something in life that you’ve always experienced but never considered or thought about. It’s very moving. Also obviously there’s nuance to this and not every writer’s style is about prose or whatever like >>20735859 said, there’s plenty of writers with simple or plain style where the good writing comes in elsewhere.

In my experience OP you just have to read a lot. Not “classics” or the greeks or any of that bs but literally just many different types of books. Over time you get familiar with different styles and how different books can be. I haven’t read much but in just the past few years from reading a wide range of stuff from classics to nonfiction to YA and whatever; my sense of what I like, and what is “good vs bad” is a lot more honed than it used to be. When you say “good writing” you’re essentially talking about the bones of reading and that’s something that’s going to both transcend genre and be transient throughout various genres, like there are many styes of movies but what constitutes a “good movie” is transient throughout all movies.

>>20735234
You seem to have accidentally picked an example of terrible writing.

>>20735859
No, he's right. That passage is garbage and imagery has been overused as a literary device since Dickens. Good writing tells the story. Half of that paragraph is wasted space.

>>20736351
>imagery
>overused as a literary device

Are you stupid?

>>20736351
>>20736340
Last time I try to effort post on /lit, where people don't read anyways

>>20735234
Not exactly the best example from that book. Other than 'flying sky', and the mercury part (though describing rain with 'globules' isn't particularly novel) -- the rest of the images are quite conventional. Even then, Peake is such a good writer that even while the images are conventional here, the sounds are structured to sound grave and heavy. Track the use of 'g'.

You should have just used an excerpt from the intro instead:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

>>20736795
>Not exactly the best example from that book
It's not, but I didn't really want to go for a famous excerpt from the book. I just picked a relatively normal and unquoted section because the mercury analogy came to mind as a somewhat unique description that I thought was neat. It's also relatively short, so I can pick it apart faster than one of many page long descriptions from the novels

>>20735449
Alice in Wonderland was infamously written for Alice Lidell and she was like 9 years old at the time. That's the intended audience age for the book.

>>20736799
To me, the more important aspect of good writing is the way it sounds. William Gass wrote a essay on this called 'The Music of Prose' which you should check out. Before words register as images, how they ring out within the "hall of the head" is important. With a good writer, you can flip to a completely random page in any work they've written and hear the music instantly. Like this excerpt from Cormac McCarthy:

"He saw his father at the funeral. Standing by himself across the little gravel path near the fence. Once he went out to the street to his car. Then he came back. A norther had blown in about midmorning and there were spits of snow in the air with blowing dust and the women sat holding on to their hats. They'd put an awning up over the gravesite but the weather was all sideways and it did no good. The canvas rattled and flapped and the preacher's words were lost in the wind. When it was over and the mourners rose to go the canvas chairs they'd been sitting on raced away tumbling among the tombstones."

The images alone are nice, but the force of the scene is conveyed through the way short, clean sentences builds up into "spits of snow in the air with blowing dust", where the '-ow' rhyme and the tap of 'spits' brings so much of the wind's bluster. And how 'rattled and flapped' plays off the whisperiness of the 'w' alliteration. Then you have "the mourners rose to go the canvas chairs" which reads slow and grave, due to the low rumbling 'ooo' assonance, only to suddenly twist into "raced away tumbling among the tombstones." Imagery, symbol, narrative, characterization, and whatnot are all aspects of writing that people like to focus on, but first and foremost is how it sounds.

When reading good literature, don't just the best literature. Don't go off as Gravity's Rainbow or Blood Meridian or Stoner as your criteria for good literature. That's like saying "oh you don't play baseball as well as Barry Bonds, sorry, you aren't good enough to be on my team."

And don't suddenly read bottom of the barrel trash either because it's easy to shit on something like Ready Player One, YA trash, or boomer trash like Clancy or Grisham.

What I recommend doing is reading more middle tier or upper middle tier literature. If Pynchon, Joyce, and McCarthy are AAA-tier all stars, read some A-tier secondary picks--Dennis Lehane, Stephen King, James P. Hogan, James Clavell, Larry McMurtry, Thomas Harris, James Ellroy.

Rather than explain why you should do this, I am going to copy and paste a section David Foster Wallace's syllabus for his English 102 course where he teaches some of these authors mentioned plus other comparable ones.

The aim of his course is "to provide competence in critical reading, knowledge of formal characteristics of novels and short stories, including their development as genres [...] to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up with more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed, intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction, and to write about stuff you've read. We'll use the basic analytic categories of plot, character, setting, point of view, tone, theme, symbol, etc., to take the books apart, rather than heavy-duty lit-crit or Literary Theory. [...] We'll end up being able to locate some rather sophisticated techniques and/or themes lurking below the surface of novels that, on a quick read on airplane or beach, look like nothing but entertainment."

>>20735132
it will strike you if you are ready. you don't need to worry about it

>>20735132
Is that actually Dune? Just lmao@ the lives of its fans

>>20736793
No, the difference is I read good literature. You read drivel.

>>20736793
The sad part is you put all of that effort into it and are still wrong.

Verification not required.

>>20735132
Good literature is unironically almost always about cuckolding. Just look at the giants of 20th century literature - In Search of Lost Time (literally everyone gets cucked non-stop, Swann, Saint-Loup, Marcel, etc.), Ulysses (entire novel is about Molly getting railed by Boylan - the Magic Mountain's entire final act is about how Herr Pepperkorn manages to charm Miss Chauchat with his incoherent ramblings enough that she welcomes his fat dutch sausage up her asiatic snatch, while Castorp turns into just another Wehsal who is powerless to stop it and impotently goes to listen to the anemic discussions between Naphta and Settembrini while Chauchat gets creampied.

It goes back further as well - all the Arthurian legends center around Jenevieve being a huge fucking slut who cucks whichever knight she is """betrothed" to by being the centerpiece fuckmeat of the round table, 1001 Nights literally begins it's frame story with BBC cuckolding (the Sultan witnessing the power of BBC on his wife is the reason he starts executing his wives after the first night and why Schezzerade has to keep spinning a story), Ulysses itself, the foundational story of western civilization, is about the anxiety about getting cucked if you can't get home fast enough.

So basically, just write about cucking, if it's good it's high literature, if it's shit you can make it a bit more salacious (doesn't even have to be good erotica) and sell it on amazon.

Of course, there is a very obvious pragmatic reason that so much highly rated literature is about cucking, namely that authors tend to be anemic men of observation who have exquisite first-hand experience with the seething pain of having a woman they are enamored with cream all over another mans cock.

>>20735162
Nobody considers dune a classic.

>>20737952
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books

https://www.abebooks.com/books/features/50-essential-science-fiction-books.shtml

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/best-sci-fi-books

https://bookriot.com/the-most-influential-sci-fi-books-of-all-time/

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-sci-fi-books/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/books/other-science-fiction-categories/science-fiction-classics/_/N-29Z8q8Z1828

https://www.waterstones.com/category/science-fiction-fantasy-horror/science-fiction/classic-science-fiction

>genrefag cope

>>20737952
It's absolutely a classic, what are you on about?

>>20735286
That’s not Tolkien.

>>20737952
Genrefags are brain damaged.

>>20736351
>visual descriptions bad
?

>>20737895
>his fat dutch sausage up her asiatic snatch
keked hard
good post btw

>>20735599
>Moby Dick
absolutely yess

>The Call of the Wild
>The Three Musketeers
no, absolutely not

I highly recommend the works of John Steinbeck, Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, J.D Salinger, and F. Scott Fitzgerald as "literature-lite" or "babby's first introduction to 'real literature' "

>>20735599
Anything by Jack London, if he doesn't get too political, is great. Hemingway's short stories are great, tight examples of good prose. Notice narrative structure also though, Robert A. Heinlein did this well.

Paul was a weak Mentat. Bakker's Paul, Kellhus, would have just manipulated her into cucking him, then had her fall back in love with him so that she'd abort the child out of disgrace and through that shame be even more beholden to him.

You'll note that as Chad Bakker's Mentat gains temporal power he eschews raping women and only rapes men. I assume in the final series he will only rape gods, asserting his total dominance of cause and effect.

>>20736805
>if it's for children it can't be bad

>>20737529
It's the second book, Dune Messiah.

>>20738359
I did read Of Mice and Men and thought it was good. Thanks for the suggestions.

>>20737529
the 2nd and 3rd dune books are pretty boring