/lit/ - Literature

provide an example of every single one of these or you're a fraud

>>22053729
>more than one font or font size
Lincoln in the Bardo
>thoughts in italics
GRRM's ASoIaF
>question marks when someone is confused rather than asking a question
Any bad writing on RoyalRoad.
>exclamation marks
Robinson Crusoe, e.g., "But alas! a few days wore it all off"
>word salad or gibberish
Phenomenology of Spirit and Lewis Carroll
>indices, footnotes, prefaces, endface, prologues, maps, essays, or introductions
Robert E Howard, David Foster Wallace, R Scott Bakker
>more than one language
War and Peace
>literary wank like ostranenie, polyphony, estrangement
Bertolt Brecht, Dostoevsky, and Gargantua and Pentagruel
>anti-heroes, anti-villains, or pseudo-characters that undermine villains and heroes
Kellhus from Darkness that Comes Before
>the main character is the story's antagonist or monster
Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus
>focusing too much on sound and syntax, rather than learning how to tell a story
Finnegans Wake
>titular character is a Mary Sue
Jirel of Joiry in "Jirel Meets Magic"
>characters say the title of the book anywhere in the book
Blood Meridian
>onomatopoeia
Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Chabon, Rudy Rucker
>humour without necessary build up nor timing
Thomas Pynchon, Oscar Wilde, Rudy Rucker
>idioms, puns, or sayings
Oscar Wilde
>rhyming in prose
James Joyce
>metaphors or similes that make no sense, or are extraneous to the story
Any contemporary poetry, HP Lovecraft, e.g., "reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell"
>syndeton and asydeton
Green Eggs and Ham (Dr Suess makes for terrible children's reading)
Don DeLillo's White Noise and McCarthy's Blood Meridian have no "and" so it reads like "I came, I saw, I conquered"
>too many commas, incorrect use of commas, and too few commas in a multi-clausal sentence
Cormac McCarthy's entire oeuvre
>paratext, intertext, or subtext
Lyn Hejinian, David Foster Wallace, Louis Zukofsky
>stream of consciousness
Mrs Dalloway, Ulysses, three novels of Beckett, The Cantos

>>22053729
>refrains or leitmotifs
"He spat," "They rode on," "So it goes"
>song lyrics anywhere, especially ballads
LotR, The Hobbit, Gravity's Rainbow, V.
>deus ex machina
Homer, War of the Worlds, Euripedes
>lack of conclusion and/or denouement
ASoIaF, Prince of Nothing, Dune
>any erotica or romance for older women
Fifty Shades of Grey
>spondees
Longfellow's dactylic hexameter
>overused filler words that don't add much, e.g., "really" and "very"
Lovecraft: "But the whisperers said that Dr. McNeill could shew me a very terrible relic"
>genre specific tropes that aren't rethought in any way
All fantasy, horror, sci fi, and romance from 1930s to the present
>long sentences, or sentence fragments
Long, e.g., Dostoevsky: "This upper floor contained a number of large rooms kept purely for show, furnished in the old‐fashioned merchant style, with long monotonous rows of clumsy mahogany chairs along the walls, with glass chandeliers under shades, and gloomy mirrors on the walls." Sentence fragment, e.g., Urs Allemann: "“They didn’t. They are there. Flourishing. Ribbiting. They would have to be drugged with morphine brew morphine powder. Ribbiting. Jumping into my mouth. Ribbiting. Ribbiting. Can’t be swallowed. Secreting my saliva. Sitting in my saliva. Wallowing in it. They’re inedible. Immortal. Ribbiting.”
>chapter summaries
Blood Meridian
>en dashes, em dashes, or hyphens
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, James Joyce's Ulysses

>>22053763
>>22053785

>>22053763
>The little, brown dog was lead by his owner, a man standing an even five foot ten, on a leather leash. He was gentle with the dog and did not tug on the leash to guide him, but instead allowed him to lead the way. In doing so, this man demonstrated one of the cardinal virtues of Freemasonry: benevolence. By allowing the dog to go his own way as much as the restriction of the leash would allow, the man demonstrated his mild character towards a being not possessing reason.
So according to you, this is good writing?

>>22053803
>was lead by his owner, a man standing
As King says, you could convey this with active voice and getting read of "standing" for "stood". It's not good at all.

>>22053831
I will shit on your grave.

>>22053873
You won't accomplish anything. You don't even know how to write, let alone read.

>>22053891
I shit twice on your grave, you bastard, donkey-headed mite.

>>22053895
Sure thing, Apoorv.

>>22053902
I shit thrice on your grave, you clay crab of corruption.

>>22053909
>clay crab of corruption
Needless alliteration doesn't make you witty, especially when it reads like an ESL wrote it.

>>22053701
I look like this and use these.

>>22053913
If you were literate (you are not), you would have immediately recognized "clay crab of corruption" - as well as "bastard, donkey-headed mite" for that matter - as quotes from Amanda McKittrick Ros to denigrate her critics. I am disappointed.

>>22053999
>Amanda McKittrick Ros
I don't read women. They can't write.

>>22054005
>What was that, anon?

>>22054007
>dashes
>loose meter
>terrible metaphors
Dickinson should have stayed in the kitchen.

>>22054005
>You can't write ... and you're far too short, anon.

>>22054014
>You do not do, you do not do
Needless repetition.
>Any more, black shoe
Terrible trochee, followed by three stressed syllables.
>In which I have lived like a foot
This sounds unintentionally hilarious.
>For thirty years, poor and white,
Trochee then a stressed syllable at the end. Why? Sounds bad.
>Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
More trochees, two in fact, then an iamb followed by two unstressed and a long vowel. Sounds shit. It didn't even say anything.

>>22054026
You scanned the last line incorrectly. It's a trochee, two dactyls and then a long vowel. If you're going to shit on a poet, at least scan the metre correctly. I shit on your grave.

The only ones I have in my novel are
>italics as thoughts
>exclamation points
>dashes when characters occasionally stutter or lose their composure

>>22054026
Also if you had any real knowledge of metre, you wouldn't have said "three stressed syllables", but a molossus. I shit on your grave.

>>22054042
That's rookie shit. Get rid of it.

>>22054041
Sylvia Plath didn't know what a dactyl was. If she wrote one, it was by accident. Also didn't contradict me in any way, idiot.

>>22054048
Post your poetry, retard. Oh wait, you don't actually get published in journals, do you? i'm literally huge in literary magazines.

>>22054058

The Pleroma of General Albert Stubblebine

Heigh, ho! -
It's off to gnosis we go, said Stubblebine's syzygos.
Heigh ho! -
From UT's underground nuclear facilities
upon past the cape-arena where the suitor sought his own city:
Oh, Dauid huios, ol' oily Davidovitch was cross when he crossed the river on the way to the Cross,
because there was no
river -
to cross.
And there was no
cross -
to bear.
But cross he did and cross we must the same, O my teacher, my teacher - Stubblebine!
Heigh, ho! -
Meat annoy ya? meat annoy ya?
Heigh, ho! -
Out of the land of weighed qualia,
where the maiden's reduced life slid its way in to more noble
Alcestian dirges,
free of Persians and pirates and such-like
sundries as they befit later stages of the withering surface-state Biome,
Daphne dies by his own art
But surface-state girls live again through it:
truly not the stuff of women,
but of eunuchs
and of girls reading by candlelight.
Let's leave this land,
out of the Stubblebine's bythus
past Mytilene, back up Athenaze,
Where INSCOM's own sotadic whore Sōyster will be toppled
through his own maculation of our Mysteries.
Oh, Dauid huios, ol' oily Davidovitch was cross when he crossed his river on the way to the Cross,
because there was no
river -
to cross.
And there was no
cross -
to bear.
But cross he did and cross we must the same, O teacher, my teacher - Stubblebine!
Abraxas! -
Heigh ho!
Abraxas! -
Oh, the Earth - it shakes! See, the firmament - it quakes!
But Stubblebine's bythus remains silent all the same.
Silence on the bythus, my teacher, as we make our way
back up from UT's underground nuclear facilities
To render mute Söyster's en-thymations.
Oh David huios, ol' oily Davidovitch was cross when he crossed his river on the way to the Cross,
because there was no
river -
to cross.
And there was no cross -
to bear.
But cross he did and cross we must the same, O teacher, my teacher - Stubblebine!

>>22053763
>>22053785
Retard. Post your own writing.

>>22053831
>As King says
Yeah, a two-bit hack read by genuine retards who would be incapable of seeing merit even if it was cleaning their teeth

>>22054460
I'm too famous and I'd get cancelled for it. Sorry. I have an image to uphold.

>>22054450
Baced.

>I'm too famous and I'd get cancelled for it. Sorry. I have an image to uphold

>>22054554
My publishers in Paris would pull me out of their catalogue as soon as they found out I fraternise with lowly ilk such as yourself. Luckily, I am now in international waters using a VPN (on my yacht of course) so there's no way of you finding out who I am.

>>22053701
Here's OP's favorite book.

>>22054624
If you don't read for hours a day, at a modest pace of at least one page per minute or (at most) two minutes, then you will never, ever get to experience reading. If you can't read the canon in your lifetime, then there is no point in you writing, let alone posting on /lit/. It beggars belief anyone would post on a literature forum without having read all that is to be read, and read deeply.
Even if you are a slow reader, you can read four hours a day outside of work. On weekends, you could read even more. That is at least 120 pages a day, if not more. Across a week, that would be a longish novel, or a few shorter ones. It certainly would be enough for several poetry selections.
Across a year, you should do at least 45,000 pages of reading. If you start reading from 18 until your 60s (when your mind deteriorates slowly, but you will hold onto your faculties if you read a lot), then you would have read nearly 2,000,000 pages in your lifetime. That is thousands of books.
Start now. Before it is too late. If you don't read around 5000-10,000 books, then you have not read the best that has been written, then you can't be said to have read at all.
If you're reading this now, then it means you can read books. Don't be like the rest of the plebeians who languish in obscure ignorance. Do not write if you cannot read the best that has been written, since you cannot be said to be able to think.
Do not respond to me, for it is uncouth for a son of a bondsman, a modern day Caliban, to talk to a superior. This is the final and my most terse of warnings.
I'm quite adamant you have not even read a single glyph or sentence of La Comedie Humaine, let alone the entirety of that confounding sprawl of literary permutation. So, do not think you can think nor write yet. For you are a fool inside the shadows of languid idiocy, allowed only to survive in modernity out of others' productivity and misplaced pity.

>>22054624
Stfu this book is 10/10

>>22053701
Give us a reading list of well written books, so we can read better.

>>22054685
https://www.gutenberg.org
Read around, and read deeply.

>>22054703
Idiot

>>22054705
I'll point it out to you, since you are so foolish. I bet you won't get past the first dozen or so. Start here, or languish in obscure shadows of stupidity.
>Gilgamesh; Egyptian Book of the Dead; Holy Bible (King James Version); The Apocrypha; Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth); Mahabharata; Bhagavad-Gita; Ramayana; Homer: Iliad, Odyssey; Hesiod: Works and Days, Theogony, Archilochos; Sappho: Fragments; Alkman's Works; Pindar's Odes; Aeschylus: Oresteia, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Persians, Suppliant Women; Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Electra, Ajax, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes; Euripides: Cyclops, Heracles, Alcestis, Hecuba, Bacchae, Orestes, Andromache, Medea, Ion, Hippolytus, Helen, Iphigenia at Aulis; Aristophanes: The Birds The Clouds The Frogs Lysistrata The Knights The Wasps The Assemblywomen Herodotus The Histories Thucydides The Peloponnesian Wars; Plato's Dialogues; Aristotle's Poetics and Ethics; Menander's The Girl from Samos; "Longinus" and his On the Sublime Callimachus Hymns and Epigrams Theocritus Idylls Plutarch Lives Moralia "Aesop" Fables Lucian Satires; Plautus Pseudolus The Braggart Soldier The Rope Amphitryon Terence The Girl from Andros The Eunuch The Mother-in-Law Lucretius The Way Things Are Cicero On the Gods Horace Odes Epistles Satires Persius Satires Catullus Attis and Other Poems Virgil Aeneid Eclogues Georgics Lucan Pharsalia Ovid Metamorphoses The Art of Love Heroides Juvenal Satires Martial Epigrams Seneca Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens Petronius Satyricon Apuleius The Golden Ass; Saint Augustine City of God Confessions The Koran (Al-Qur'an) The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night The Poetic Edda Snorri Sturluson The Prose Edda The Nibelungen Lied Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzival Chrétien de Troyes Yvain: The Knight of the Lion Beowulf The Poem of the Cid Christine de Pisan The Book of the City of Ladies Diego de San Pedro Prison of Love
Need I go on?

>>22054561
you have to be over 18 years old to post on 4chan.

>>22054734
Kill yourself retard.

op is a fag

>>22054772
>>22054777
>>22054794
Do not come to this board until you have acquainted yourself with all of this.

>>22054833
Many of the writers there are guilty of the aforementioned features.

>>22054851
They are masterful. (You) are not. Read, read, read.

>>22054833
The literal examples you gave as bad writing are on this list.

>>22054875
See above: >>22054853

>>22054878
Then it's not the thing that makes bad writing.

>>22054886
Yes, so stop writing if you do not read and become a maestro virtuoso.