/lit/ - Literature

>>22117923
That’s a very weird inspiration list anon.
I would add a Stevenson to it. Simple stories like his show good prose alone can make a great book.

>>22117923
you sausage roll looking twat

>>22117941
I meant inspirations as them being the authors I've read so far, apologies if I caused confusion
Which have motivated me to pursue creative writing
I did enjoy Treasure Island so I get your point I think Robert Louis is a quite cozy author

>>22117950
Ah. I would recommend going down the novel writer pipeline.
Try Poetry first, it’s difficult to write, but I learned it’s very rewarding. Completion is always right around the corner, and individual lines often fill you with a smaller satisfaction of completion. Lines just sort of burst forth from nowhere (assuming you’re really trying), and come so close to perfection that, from my personal experiences, you dare not change them. I forgot the poet, but one once held onto 3 lines he wrote in a week for years, because he could not think of a fourth, and thought the first three were already perfect.
Virgil has a rather beautiful and heroic line about this phenomenon. “It is easier to steal the club of Hercules than it is to lift one line of Homer”
Poetry also helps you make connections with yourself and nature, and it does this very rapidly, but this is anecdotal evidence.
I had just started writing poetry, about a week in, and I went to take a walk in the park. Normally I just enjoy the sun and air, maybe watch the ducks, try to find cool bugs, etc.
This walk, around a pond I saw a lone stork near the center sleeping on a solitary tree branch jutting out of the water, the branch the only non-animal thing both in the water and above it. That stork was surrounded by waddlings of ducks and a plethora of other birds. I saw in the stork, the largest bird there, the old motif of “divine right to rule”, with the tree branch acting as Gods finger thrusting him above everyone else. The ponds shimmers looked like silver and gold, groups of brown ducks followed groups of white ones, and pure white swans sat on the bank in the shade. It all helped to fuel this fantasy of a stork’s kingdom. The men chasing the women, the nobility in luxury, the solitary birds, all of them swimming on the surface of silver and gold, with a solitary throne made of God, thrusting up the largest of them to rule and by ruling, be alone. It made quite a beautiful memory.
Poetry is very difficult, every letter, every sound, every line break has to have an intent, the restrictions are heavy, and stuff falls apart and gets gridlocked very easily. The funny thing is you can just write later stanzas and lines, or a new poem entirely and then come back. It is deeply rewarding, and benefits come quick.

The next step I advise, if you find you don’t like writing poetry, would be to write short stories. They have the catharsis of poetry and they are easier to read and easier to write, but toll is the loss of the music of language (not entirely) and the almost magical/hypnotic rhymes of poetry. The benefit of seeing completion around the corner is also not lost. The only stipulation is that the stories are, well, short. I will post an excerpt written by Washington Irving, not only to show you how short short can be, which is very helpful for motivation, but also to show that a paragraph long story can be, for lack of a better word, good.

>>22118154
>>22117950
From "The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon"


“As I was once sailing,” said he [a sailing captain], “in a fine, stout ship, across the banks of Newfoundland, one of those heavy fogs that prevail in those parts rendered it impossible for us to see far ahead, even in the daytime; but at night the weather was so thick that we could not distinguish any object at twice the length of the ship. I kept lights at the mast-head, and a constant watch forward to look out for fishing smacks, which are accustomed to anchor of the banks. The wind was blowing a smacking breeze, and we were going at a great rate through the water. Suddenly the watch gave the alarm of ‘a sail ahead!’—it was scarcely uttered before we were upon her. She was a small schooner, at anchor, with her broadside toward us. The crew were all asleep, and had neglected to hoist a light. We struck her just amidships. The force, the size, and weight of our vessel, bore her down below the waves; we passed over her and were hurried on our course. As the crashing wreck was sinking beneath us, I had a glimpse of two or three half-naked wretches, rushing from her cabin; they just started from their beds to be swallowed shrieking by the waves. I heard their drowning cry mingling with the wind. The blast that bore it to our ears, swept us out of all further hearing. I shall never forget that cry! It was some time before we could put the ship about, she was under such headway. We returned, as nearly as we could guess, to the place where the smack had anchored. We cruised about for several hours in the dense fog. We fired signal-guns, and listened if we might hear the halloo of any survivors: but all was silent—we never saw or heard any thing of them more.”

>>22118159
>>22118154
>>22117950
I believe that if short stories were not to your taste, it would be because you could not fit in everything you wanted to say, and here enters the novel. It is undoubtedly the least restrained art form. Cormac abstains from commas, Pynchon, as another anon put it, makes his books a minefield of them. Melville invents words, Joyce melts the dictionary, Tolkien throws in songs, Wallace makes an encyclopedia. It’s a wild west of “do whatever you want”. But novels are long, cumbersome, and take an enormous amount of work. It can take years or even a decade for the completion of one, and its why I would advise trying it last. A new thing is hard to continue if you don’t see actual results, and a novel has so many large moving parts it’s very difficult to stay motivated. Not to mention the revisions and editing.

These posts could really be summed with the Faulkner quote
>A novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet
but I tried to show it in a non-pessimistic light.