/lit/ - Literature

>>23506066
Bump

>>23506066
Why worry about your audience? You'll never write anything great if you're not writing for the sake of the Art. Art creates audience, but audience-focused literature never attains to Art.

>>23506410
I'm not worrying about my audience however I don't want to fall into the recesses of my own mind as a result of isolation

>>23506457
That's not something you can control. You either will, or you won't.

>>23506066
>complex but not relatable vs characters that are relatable and easier to follow or get into at the expense of creativity

Private thoughts and inner monologue, intentions towards other people in the narrative can easily veer into Too Much Information. Suggestion is more powerful. So called genre-plotfags object to a lack of meat (events to graft the phenomenological on to), the others are having people talk, excessively self-obsessedly about themselves, naval gazing of a kind everyone is intimately familiar with and needs not one more second of in 'art'. Good things can be done with either, but a certain mix and balance of the two will be ideal depending on one's aims and uses.

>>23506702
>Private thoughts and inner monologue, intentions towards other people in the narrative can easily veer into Too Much Information.

That's the thing I'm most upset at in modern literature. It seems that there's this quota people have when they read stuff like they only want the essentials of character but when I write, I want, even for my own sake, to detail and narrate everything and make all those details and monologues and whatever correlate to the character, their growth and arc or used as a juxtaposition to someone else, as in the character goes and monologues about something, finding an answer to a problem another character they don't interact with has been struggling with throughout the novel. I don't like being economical. I like to present everything because I want to give my characters justice and breadth and depth.

>Suggestion is more powerful.
I disagree but that's because I'm a Victorianist and I believe in sincerity and in presenting things as neutrally and omnisciently as possible. This seems to be a Modernist trait that I understand in theory but loathe because it gives the reader too much control of the character which I don't want to have happen. I want the character to be as fully real, complex as possible without them being tainted by the reader, which suggestion entails. If it means that my stuff isn't open to a million interpretations so be it. Critics thrive in suggestion and I almost want to throw a pie in their face and tell them that a lamppost is a lamppost

>>23506702
The self-important navel gazing is how you make an unrelatable character interesting, their interior life and how it fails to relate or how it relates poorly with the world is where the art is. I think the neurotic is played out as a narrator but "relatable" people and characters don't have sublime observations and someone has to have them. You, as an authorial voice, is just another neurotic narrator. An indirect thought from a character is the only other option.

You’re not a writer. Fucking quit.

>>23506759
>The self-important navel gazing is how you make an unrelatable character interesting, their interior life and how it fails to relate or how it relates poorly with the world is where the art is.
Absolutely correct

>>23507303
I also think that some aspects of these characters are in fact relatable, though sometimes it is the form of the pathology more than the details, and readers that don't "like" that kind of thing don't want to recognize the less pronounced nature of it within themselves. Bitching on the internet about a character that bitches constantly yet tries to get the love and attention of strangers is a more obvious example. The old Holden Caulfield maneuver.

>>23506066
I tend toward Flannerh O'Connor school of thought. She got criticized for having unrealistic and unrelatable characters. But she said in response, that distortion in literature makes things more relatable, not less. The exaggeration serves to highlight the overlooked within the commonplace.
I find realism boring, and maybe the character is relatable, but only because they're not making me think. I can find plenty of relatability in real life by sitting in a coffee shop and eavesdropping on any conversation.