/lit/ - Literature

It's what I do.

I write for those who cannot.

>>3966480
i want to be a good writer

>>3966510
What have you written for me?

>>3966480
For the consolation of my friend.

I wanna make lovely constellations of words.

I want to be remembered after I'm gone.

are any of you accomplished writers?

>>3966549
Define "accomplished"

Meaness and perversity

To uphold the virtue of the innocent and persecute the guilty of their faults.

I didn't choose this life.

sometimes i wonder if i want to write for the right reasons.

sometimes i come up with cool things to write. sometimes i have to force myself to actually do the writing part. i dont often write for the pleasure of writing. maybe i say that though because im comparing the experience of writing to the experience of playing jazz music. playing piano is a less cerebral experience. the pleasure of music is much more immediate than that of reading and writing. so perhaps i am wrong to expect to feel the same when writing as i do when im playing. perhaps the pleasure of writing is not immediate. is it? is it different? are there bad reasons to write?

>>3966551
talented, good, published, read, etc.

>>3966559
I know what you're trying to say, I feel the same.

Writing is such a hard thing to make yourself do, mainly because it's rewards are not immediate, which is what humans typically seek, instant gratification.

But the rewards offered by finishing a good piece of writing are unlike any other.

>>3966562
I've been published.

People tell me I'm good, I tend to disagree, I'm still rather sure they're just being polite.

>>3966573
why do you write?

>>3966574
Because I can't do anything else competently.

>>3966579
do you enjoy it?

for her

>>3966581
Occasionally.

A lot of the time it's like pulling teeth though.

I feel like it's worth it in the end.

>>3966579
If you can't do anything well except write, then you can't write well either, because to be a good writer you first of all have to be a good man.

>>3966573
I'm the same. I've been published but I just have an ever-present feeling of doubt at the back of my head...

>>3966585

>>3966588
why?

because I'm gay

>>3966592
Sounds like bullshit.

>>3966592
I'm sorry, but that is the biggest load of shit I have ever heard. Writers aren't all perfect. Plenty of them are fucked up, yet they can write masterpieces. There's no correlation between your being a good man and your skills of writing.

>>3966596
The feeling of satisfaction I suppose.

Even if I think something I've written is terrible, at least I finished it.

I imagine a bricklayer would feel the same kind of thing when they finish building a wall.

Positive feedback too, that's always nice.

Negative feedback... not so much, although it's infinitely more useful.

>>3966592
Is that why a ton of the worlds best writers were unemployed drunks and drug addicts?

>>3966607
i feel like i have good ideas sometimes, but i often have to force myself to actually write. does that mean im not a writer? or do writers deal with that?

>>3966614
I don't know whether "writers" deal with that, but I certainly do.

The best thing to do in my experience is just try writing anything, force words out of you, if you just wait until you WANT to write, you're probably going to be waiting a long time.

>>3966616
encouraging. thanks.

>>3966606
You can't write a masterpiece and be a bad man. Show me a masterpiece and I'll show you a man who had a great love for a great virtue. Show me the literary abortions of a bad man and I'll show you a vanity that is in love with its own peculiar vice.

>>3966625
Not everyone is a "good man" or a "bad man".

Most of us are just people.

>>3966607
You seem horribly pessimistic and lack confidence in yourself. I want to read something you wrote. Would you mind sharing?

>>3966631
I'm afraid I would. sorry, but I don't want my name to be associated with 4chan.

>>3966631
>You seem horribly pessimistic and lack confidence in yourself.
>I want to read something you wrote

top lel

>>3966630
Most good men and bad men are just people too.

>>3966641

pretty sure most great writers were somewhat pessimistic

>>3966635
>>3966631

You two (receiver) should probably create a temporary e-mail address for this purpose. I'm pretty sure that's what /d/ does. Heh. Not foolproof, but, yeah.

>>3966635
Well, look. You're cynical too. Now I'm really curious. What if you shared it in a really archaic, cryptic, and round-a-bout way that would only allow me to see it? I would be the only one who associates you with 4chan. I wouldn't tell anyone. I promise.

>>3966625
Buddenbrooks
The Falconer
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

>>3966649
Pessimists aren't good at anything. The only things people are any good at is the things that they are optimistic about.

>>3966660
What about philosophers who advocate pessimism? There are good philosophers who are pessimists.

>>3966660
Just like pic related was always so optimistic about his work, right?

>>3966659
Try mentioning works we've heard of, you coward.

>>3966625

>Show me a masterpiece and I'll show you a man who had a great love for a great virtue.
Noble idea but this is exactly the kind of ideological bullshit that leads to "No True Scotsman" fallacy shit, and suddenly we start denigrating authors that don't fit this particular band.

God doesn't hold a meritocratic auction for supreme talent. He gives it to one in a billion, and if the circumstances are right, that talent grows to brilliance, and applied to the right problem produces masterpiece, and that person takes their brilliance in their own way depending on all sorts of social, economic, and moral factors.

Nowhere is a good person selected for in this process. Nowhere is a bad person selected for. The qualities selected for are ruthless tenacity, passion, work, craftsmanship, and most of all extraordinary talent. If they're also a good person? All power to them.

>>3966662
A philosopher might call himself a pessimist, but there's never been a great philosophy or was less than optimistic about the value of philosophy.

>>3966665
I have no idea what his attitude towards his work was, but I'm sure he was optimistic about horror stories.

>>3966685
There are philosophers who argue that philosophy has no value.

>>3966681
It takes more than mere brilliance or cleverness or talent to write a masterpiece. A man can be as brilliant as Lucifer but if he doesn't love anything he is useless.

You said that he also requires passion, but was is a good man other than somebody who is passionate about achieving some good? A bad man might be passionate about achieving some evil, but that man will not produce a masterpiece. He might produce some very bizarre thing that arouses a great deal of morbid curiosity in many, but he won't produce an enduring masterpiece to be he handed down the generations and never cease to be respected by men.

>>3966668

> I can't actually hold up my 'Masterpieces Need Virtue" argument because I don't read

God fucking damnit. Fine.
Celine, Roth, Miller, Chaucer, and Faulkner.
All have arguably produced masterpieces, all with questionable morals. All are also relatively easy to disclaim.
Or should I go to Thompson and Bukowski so you can shit on a writer with conviction? All your true editorial brilliance?

> Not knowing a single name out of Cheever, McCullers, and Mann

>>3966699
Yes, you might have read that, but they were lying to you.

>>3966709
Chaucer wrote masterpieces, the rest did not. Chaucer was a good man, he had a great understanding of human life and a great love for nature and God.

>>3966708
Your argument is insignificant, then. You can just dismiss any work that doesn't fit your argumentation as "not masterpiece" or claim that any writer who wrote a masterpiece was "a good man in his own way". There's no subtance to what you're saying, because you don't give any standard for "good man" or "masterpiece". You're building void statements.

>>3966668

>doesn't know Buddenbrooks

you're a fucking retard. go back to /v/.

>>3966727
But I did give a standard for each of those things.

>>3966725
I'm >>3966727
Your post examplifies what I was saying. You will nitpick the works that you will deem "masterpieces" and claim without any groundings that their writers were "good men". You can also choos to dismiss anything not written by a man considered virtuous in his own time, which is even easier.

The only thing you manage to compellingly show in your posts is that your taste is as unrefined as your ethical stances on literature. Your are born three centuries too late, arguably.

Also
>Baudelaire

because i have to (i mean spiritually and economically, the latter, that is, in order to fulfill degree requirements, eventually hopefully to get tenure blech)

i just hammered out an essay on wittgenstein and cavell and the possibility or blindness to social critique and i feel really productive and drained and hopeless. it's the first writing i've ever felt moderately confident in - i mean confident that it expresses something that i've been genuinely wrestling with - and yet i feel unpredictably ambiguous, which really is the source of my depression, my dissatisfaction with my dissatisfaction. maybe i should get drunk and go to bed. why am i watching strongbad emails and asking myself why i ever laughed at them. fuck what should i do next

>>3966725
> Implying Chaucer didn't drink a gallon of wine a day
> Implying the Tales arn't the first usage of Cunt
> Implying depraved acts don't occur throughout the masterpiece
> Implying Chaucer wrote more than one worthwhile work
> Implying that between Absalom, Absalom!, The Tropic of Cancer, The Journey to the End of the Night, and American Pastoral there isn't a masterpiece
> I still don't know who Cheever, Mann, and McCullers are

Dis nigga seriously doesn't read anything other than shitposts

>>3966733
When ? You use "good" and "masterpieces" as buzzword. There's nothing in your post to sort out the good man from the bad man, except vague generalization that are of no use.

But even if you did define them, there's still no much grounding in your point. You would be arbitrarily defining "good men" and "masterpieces" in a way that allows you to easily correlate them. This would be a sterile wordplay, that would bring no insight into literature and how to write it. The best you could do in that respect is upholding the standard of the classics who, though they were great in their way, are long dead and gone. You can deliberately choose to ignore anything written past 1715, but that would be a cowardly cop out, a useless and wasteful stance quite unworthy of a dedicated reader.

The Excellent man of reading is silently weeping for your soul.

Cause i have words in my mind bro

>>3966735
> Baudelaire
Damn near forget France, short of Celine. Balzac, Sartre, Flaubert...

>>3966741
Drink a little and sleep a lot. Enjoying a hard)earner night of sleep is the only heaven on this earth, I actually envy you.

the only time i write (in my diary) is to try and distance myself away from my emotions and events, or just to pass the time

>>3966708
>It takes more than mere brilliance or cleverness or talent to write a masterpiece. A man can be as brilliant as Lucifer but if he doesn't love anything he is useless.

Perhaps, but "mere brilliance or cleverness or talent" is a necessary condition. I hate the movie "Amadeus" but it does illustrate something really well. You can be a genius, a supreme craftsman... and still be annoying and childish as hell.

It's funny how loving ANYTHING enough to write a masterpiece qualifies someone to be a good man, as if loving liquor or loving sex or loving writing ITSELF is sufficient for someone to be good. Let me just go enhance my virtue over there by the nightstand. Sure feels good, that self-improvement. Heh.

All I'm saying is... it's a romantic view of artists that doesn't survive any serious scrutiny, or any discussion with actual artists themselves. Why don't you actually talk to a minor-league novelist now and again and see how exactly they and everyone else make the sausages, no matter how noble their ideals, no matter how beautiful their expressions.

PROTIP: Economics isn't everything, but it's pretty central to understanding artistic creation.

I don't mean to be condescending, it's just that I've heard this kind of crap before and the problem is that abstracts writing (a real process undertaken by real people) into a flighty morality/God/Chosen Few sort of tale that purports to prove that history's winners are also morality's winners, when in fact they were people in the right time and place and hit the right historical buttons in the right sequence with the right incentives with randomly distributed amazing talent and some elbow grease.

>>3966760
I'm not sure Balzac fits, but Baudelaire was a depraved, and still a master of the classical verse. The purity of his poems is up there with that of Racine's plays.

>>3966761
just opened a beer. #yolo

>>3966778
>It's funny how loving ANYTHING enough to write a masterpiece qualifies someone to be a good man, as if loving liquor or loving sex or loving writing ITSELF is sufficient for someone to be good. Let me just go enhance my virtue over there by the nightstand. Sure feels good, that self-improvement. Heh

Ah, but here's the clever part. You can't just love anything to be a good man, to be a good man you have to love what is good. Nobody is going to produce a masterpiece by loving depraved sex. He might produce depraved pornography and depraved people may call it a masterpiece, but good men will repudiate it.

>>3966480
Because.

>>3966778
>All I'm saying is... it's a romantic view of artists that doesn't survive any serious scrutiny, or any discussion with actual artists themselves.

On the contrary, my view is the one held by men for centuries and the one held in antiquity, your view is the weird modern view that nobody would have been mad enough to hold.

>I don't mean to be condescending, it's just that I've heard this kind of crap before and the problem is that abstracts writing (a real process undertaken by real people) into a flighty morality/God/Chosen Few sort of tale that purports to prove that history's winners are also morality's winners, when in fact they were people in the right time and place and hit the right historical buttons in the right sequence with the right incentives with randomly distributed amazing talent and some elbow grease.

This is where I have a right to be indignant. YOU'RE view is the romantic view, YOU'RE view is the one based on some mystical thing called 'talent' that somehow can be benefitted from the application of elbow grease. My view is the sane and reasonable view that in order to never something good the thing begetting must have some good in it.

>>3966818
>never something good
Beget something good
Phone is to blame for mistaking 'beget' for 'never'

>>3966818
>>3966745

Nigga I'm waiting for a response.

>>3966818
I mean, Jesus Christ have you ever heard something as unlikely and mystical as this?

>when in fact they were people in the right time and place and hit the right historical buttons in the right sequence with the right incentives with randomly distributed amazing talent and some elbow grease.

Only a modern scientific, rational person could believe something so mystical.

>>3966804
>depraved people may call it a masterpiece, but good men will repudiate it.

Which is the essence of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Even if something is called a masterpiece, you can attack the art and author and audience in a single strike at the foundation - "it isn't a true masterpiece, it just glorifies cheap depraved pornography. Those who call it a masterpiece are themselves depraved consumers of pornography"

Treating each of the entities involved (art, artist, audience) as separate and related entiteis is harder and more fraught with contradictions, but I would argue the essence of life is to see the earnest truth through and between these contradictions.

Which is my real problem with your argument... not that it's specious nonsense that I would use to troll when I was 19... but because it betrays a willfully simplistic and undernourished worldview that simply holds the great people of history in blind esteem, for else why would they be great? While the quaking of the mediocre and depraved will after a century break bones and fall into the earth, the great will still remain.

Only... except when a library gets burnt. Only... except when the flaws and foibles of human nature are as enduring as the good and keep us coming back to the most well-expressed renderings of the slime and sadness and lovelessness sometimes called life. Only... except when the great man can't afford a quill.

And suddenly the narrative of history is not just the withering stares that the great possess but the withering of those stares in the face of a cold and often indifferent society, leaving many great forgotten and more unrecognized while the mediocre thrive and curricula praise mediocrity simply because it happens to exemplify a genre.

The worldview behind your argument seems shamelessly optimistic in favor of quality being preserved and elevated by the good. And I can't buy in, without any idealism. I've had enough arguments with "clever parts" to know that it's always the symptom of ideological disengagement from the actual problem.

Haha, sorry I'm ranting a bit.

>>3966745
Alexander the Great was a drunk too, he was still great. A man's vices don't refute his virtues. If that were the case then the only good man to ever have lived would be Christ, and I don't think we should us such a heavenly standard when we are talking about something as worldly as literature.

>>3966818
http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/articles/issue-14/wakefield-essays
Go to bed, Dan Wakefield

>>3966847
>undernourished worldview that simply holds the great people of history in blind esteem, for else why would they be great

>To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared; and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep, or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains, and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind. Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours.

>>3966876
>>3966876
My name is Jack and I'm not ashamed of it, and I'm not as averse to drink as Dan is.

>>3966818
>YOU'RE
>YOU'RE

Funny how nobody had expressed suspicion that you could be a troll yet, only to see you show your true colors in such an unsubtle way. Your tone was too childish to be taken seriously, but now there's no possible doubt. I'd still argue with you, for you are funny, but the whole thing is now skyrocketing to levels of silly I'm not ready to reach right now.

See >>3966792 for an example of a great man who doesn't shy away from alcoholism.

>>3966908
It's five o clock in the morning, I haven't slept, and I'm typing impatiently on a phone I rarely use.

>>3966908

I think he's a bit of a troll, but a well-intentioned one. Reminds me of myself when I was younger, so I can't be too dismissive. Heh. Definitely helping me reach into the well, i.e.
>>3966847

>>3966933
Doesn't explain the childish tone and the very persistent and unjustified classicist ideal. Classicism is magnificent, don't get me wrong, but we've gone a long way from thinking that those guys could tell us what to write and what to not write.

>>3966806
This.

For the hell of it.

but that was an incomplete sentence...

I don't. I just come here to shitpost.

A few of reasons. Let's start with the most trivial.

I used to write when I was younger, and of course I was terrible in retrospect. I write so I can drown out the bad writing with better-than-average writing and get myself some redemption for the vile acts I did to that poor piece of paper.

I often find myself busting with ideas, and if left unchecked, I could start bubbling and babbling about them, finding it hard to keep it under my lid if given time to think about the subjects. I'd be out in public, giggling about a character I thought up dancing to Carmelldansen if I didn't write something about them. The act of writing them out is very enjoyable, too, like releasing an untied balloon and seeing it fly around the room is to a child.

This isn't really a old or driving reason for my writing but I believe it's the most important. Like any man, I have my thoughts and beliefs, so I wish to reflect them in my work. I don't want to overdo it, I won't let it drive me. I am an author as primarily a hobby, and an outlet.

I blog, because my opinions on things like tech and music come from years of thinking on topics people usually brush over, so I feel my opinions are worth hearing.

>>3966986
Mission success.

>>3966480
To get all the images out of my head, therapy, escapism.

>>3967072
i said don't FUCKING test me you human piece of shit
do you want fucking die irl

i will kill you irl this isn't some kind of internet beef anymore pussy boy i will murder you retard

>>3967075
Yeah okay.

>>3966480
I find that it is a secondary type of communication that, when done well, says things to other people that direct communication can't.

It reveals the shadows of our thinkings.

To become closer to being God in the act of creating something.

I will not let the patriarchy silence me. I will stand up for my sisters and the oppressed PoC masses screaming out for help. We will overcome manifold difficulties, one letter at a time.

>>3966480
Catharsis of the jolly twitches of the oozing skulljuice

I couldn't be a musician.

>>3966625
Actually, if somebody is judged to be a badman, all of his work is immediately torn apart. It is no longer good and previously earned prizes are withdrawn. The only way to not be invalidated completely is if you discovered something new that millions of people have the tools to objectively see existing, right now. Watson, for example. The best we can do with evil badmen like that is to say they stumbled upon it by chance or something. Because they're evil, idiot badmen.

>>3970963
oh god the "goodman" troll is hilarious. I love you.

>>3970989
I'm that "troll" and the guy you are referring to >>3970963 isn't me

>>3970963
>Actually, if somebody is judged to be a badman, all of his work is immediately torn apart.

Not always, often a bad man's work becomes very popular because it satisfies a certain lust in others, but it is eventually forgotten because there is nothing enduring in it. For example, erotica - there is nothing enduring in it, because you can only write erotica that appeals to the sexual appetites of the people of your age, once the age ends and new "sex symbols" arise it will be obsolete.

>>3970923
top lel

I genuinely enjoy it and I feel like it's what I was meant to do. I don't know why other than that.

>>3966480
In this issue of Dylan Dog a character appears, after his death, on a pre-recorded TV interview. He is a writer and when asked where he gets his ideas, or why he writes (can't remember), he says:
''The ancient Greeks believed that inspiration was just demons inside your head. And by writing out the story you trapped those demons in between the lines.''

I'm paraphrasing. Whether or not what the character said is true, that is somewhat the reason I write.

I write to purge myself of any and all emotions I might have. Of all of my 'demons', as it were. Most of my demons are really just emotional problems. I write so I can experience a sort of catharsis, but without the eruption of emotions. More of a slow, even draining of them.

>>3966480
I write for the same reason you or I breathe.

>>3966480
Because it's fucking fun as shit.
Why else would I do it besides the sheer enjoyment?
Fuck fame and good literature.
Just vomiting out some of your demons gives you a fucking rush.

>>3971994
This, generally.

Also, Dylan Dog is a fairly fucking cool comic.

I write in spite, and because I would have gone insane if I didn't.

To feel less lonely.

>>3966480
It's kind of like clipping my toenails.

To become immortal after my death... that's the point of all writing after all, somehow...

Because I want to prove that I'm better

I'm terrible at speaking

I write because I'm not wrong to think I'm right.

I receive commissions and assignments that require me to write in order to be paid.

Because I have to.

To feel like I'm not decaying into nothing.

>>3972672
also because I need to feel like I'm superior to the rest of the world, both internally and externally. (Which is why I'm doing two internships and a volunteering job over the summer while maintaining a 3.71 GPA at a top 15 school with a double major and third minor)

I wrote because I was under some weird delusion it mattered--somehow made me better or more immortal than anyone else. Also had the belief my life was better lived and more fruitful than others'.

I don't write anymore.

>>3972685

>>3972685
it matters if you want it to matter. although living a life that simply exists as a comparison is a sad one (which is why I despise how even our personal social lives are now commodified into marketable pictures of 'the good life' with party albums and happy statuses on facebook, all for the purpose of depressive comparisons)

>>3966480
because I do. because something drew me to it when I was young and impressionable enough and I arbitrarily chased it thinking the power I felt made me god. because when I realized the extent of my delusion, it was already too late and my mind was already too gone, and all I could do was write or be forced to face my quiet and desperate rage. because those traces of delusion left after the onslaught of revelation proved to be enough to keep my brain matter off the wall.

that's why I write I guess.

I don't write anymore, I just declare improvised poems and monologues when I'm drunk.

>>3966480
$

>>3972846
2edgy4me

I'm kinda saddened by that by doing a quick CTRL+F and typing 'fun' that only one person writes for that reason?

>>3972352

This dude has it right.

Escapism. I live through the lives of my characters. My life is mundane. There are certain sociological and psychological barriers that I can only break within my writing. It allows me a form of expression that I cannot realise in reality.

I enjoy the process. I relish that rare feeling that comes from constructing a perfect paragraph. I derive pleasure from building worlds and creating psyches.

I really fucking love words. I love the pronunciations, the feel on the tongue when spoken, and the imagery invoked. I love how the English language is so vast. I love how two seemingly like-for-like synonyms can have subtly different connotations.

There's a bunch of reasons. Pick one.

Because I got all these stories and characters in my head and when I put them down on paper they're gone from my brain.

I just want to be able to turn my imagination off

So, any advice for us procrastinator who can't work up the motivation to sit down and write?

Because I'm not good at anything else.
>I'm not that good at writing either.

>>3973543
Are you me?

I have wanted to start writing for years, I have many ideas for different settings but I just can't decide on sticking to one. So I haven't started writing... I'm sorry.