/lit/ - Literature

>>6575029
philosophy

>>6575029
Psychology
Society and Culture
Poetry

The artist should study life

Wha's the best way to seriously study literature?

What books do you recommend?

Are the Norton Anthologies good?

>>6575035
This.

If you ever want to be taken seriously as a writer, you need to know how to organise your thoughts before you put them on paper.

>>6575029
a writer shud study everything

Eliot was fluent in French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek at the age of 17. We will never be patrician like him.

Spelling. Rhyming. Reading.

All very important.

>>6575029
Theology, geometry, logic, rhetoric, Latin, Greek.

people

>>6575186
Balzac pls go
But this is the correct answer

Philosophy to learn how to think
History and Politics to learn how the world works
Psychology and Sociology to learn how people work
Biographies to learn about how specific lives work
Literature and Literary criticism because duh
And of course real world experience and an interest in people for themselves always helps

The last thing you placed is probably the most important thing.

>>6575029
Classics.

>>6575029
>>6575201
What this guy said.

But you should always keep Literature and Literary Theory at the top of your list, otherwise when you finally get to the writing part (the most important part), you'll realize you don't know how to write.

Remember: you're a writer, not a philosopher. Don't try to be both like Ayn Rand.

>>6575087
>theology

A manual on how to be a barista.

Also, some books on how to deal with frustration and humiliation will come in very handy.

Is philosophy so important? I've been flirting with it for a while, reading some books here and there but I've never sat down to study it properly.

>>6575029
I disagree with most of the answers in this thread.
The only academic subjects a writer should be serious about are Languages. His own and others.When the time to lay words on paper comes, fluency in several other languages becomes a practical, direct creative advantage.

Everything else is mild indoctrination. Why would theology be intrinsically better than say Geography? Pure mathematics and Philosophy are on equal footing with regards to forging a mind but this board specific brand of bias already advised the latter more promptly than the former. None really help writing. Not that much anyways.
Nobody even suggested Music, painting, sculpture..

I would advise a writer to learn practical, not necessarily academic-tier topics. Flying, chess, poker, woodworking, dancing, sailing, making movies.. I'm NOT advising to skip on the traditional subjects, merely to avoid starting this grandiose self study course that will trap someone at a desk after a day of studying something else or maybe working some odd job.

Why would you spend a year going through psychology textbooks when you could fly across the country reading Shakespeare and write about your trip instead?

>>6575325
This is my favorite approach, I think. Literacy is the most important thing for a writer. Studying languages and etymology of multiple languages has always been my best way of feeling better about writing.

I think one becomes a better writer by reading extensively and broadly, by having experience and by having something to say.

Honestly, though, all of the liberal arts majors who want to write professionally have as good a chance as all of the college basketball players who want to make it to the pros. If you're going to spend a lot of money on your education, get a useful degree, and not studying shit you can expose yourself to with a library card.

I was an English Lit./Philosophy major, and after graduation I drove a forklift in Berkeley for 3 years. Do not repeat this mistake.

>>6576078
I brought an English Lit girl back to my room recently and she was a little weirded out by how many books I have. I'm left wondering why she's studying English Lit.

>>6576078
>after graduation I drove a forklift in Berkeley for 3 years
so how'd you manage to get out of that

>>6576092
On a forklift.

>>6576078
What's wrong with driving a forklift? I mean that's not a minimum wage job.

I'm not paying anything for college and doing liberal arts and I kind of just want to get some sort of vocational training on the side so that when I graduate I can go in to that after my 4 year intellectual curiosity sidestep.

>>6576092
>so how'd you manage to get out of that

Moved to LA, worked in entertainment, and finally got an agent.

>>6576104
>What's wrong with driving a forklift? I mean that's not a minimum wage job.

It was close enough. These jobs are not unionized, generally. I worked in a warehouse.

>I'm not paying anything for college and doing liberal arts and I kind of just want to get some sort of vocational training on the side so that when I graduate I can go in to that after my 4 year intellectual curiosity sidestep.

If you are putting in time at school, I would urge you to put it toward something practical. In your early 20s the future seems abstract, but it's coming. Invest in yourself with a useful education.

>>6575029
Literature

>>6575071
And he still managed to only write one truly great poem.
He was a scholar more than anything else.

>grammar
>rhetoric
>history
>philosophy
>ethics
>moral
>culture
>linguistics
>theology
>psychology
>anthropology
>Other fields of literal, musical, visual, and performance art
>politics
>current affairs
>perspective

>>6575059
dam...

That reminds me of a passage in this Rilke novel I'm reading at the moment. He talks about man being unable to write until he is old, because only then has he experienced enough, forgotten enough, and retained the essence of enough to write truth. I disagree with this point, even as I agree with its purpose; you must have seen enough to write well, but you can see enough in 20 years as opposed to 60 if you are hypersensitive and aware enough. If you absorb 3x as much, you can write 3x earlier.

>>6576078
Do you think you could have taught yourself everything you learned in college though?

>>6575061
>Wha's the best way to seriously study literature?

Reading literature. Faulkner's advice is best. Read everything you can, even shit. That way you can distinguish shit from good literature and the difference between the two.

>What books do you recommend?
To learn how to write better? Classics, Aristotle's Poetics, good books. It kind of depends on what you want to write. If you have a particular genre or style you want to work within, read writers in those genres. Both good and bad.

>Are the Norton Anthologies good?
I don't know what this has to do with writing, but yes, most Norton Anthologies will give you a condensed overview of particular movements and/or geographical/historical literary works and their importance.

>>6576198
>Do you think you could have taught yourself everything you learned in college though?

I was genuinely interested in literature and philosophy, so I think I could have, yes. It's the classes that filled out requirements that benefited from the academic setting. Whatever my casual interest in botany might have been, I wouldn't have learned the Krebs Cycle on my own.

If one wants to be a student of literature, then the recommendations in this thread are very good. I think someone could read all of them and not wind up a particularly good writer for the experience, though. Writing is an actual talent, and like most talents, it gets better through its own exercise. The guy who spends the time writing that you spend reading all of Shakespeare will, by the end of that time, become the better writer for the time spent, I honestly believe.

Do you really want to be a writer, and if so, what type of writing do you want to do?

>What should a writer study?

Arses and bewbs.

>>6576439
>Writing is an actual talent, and like most talents, it gets better through its own exercise. The guy who spends the time writing that you spend reading all of Shakespeare will, by the end of that time, become the better writer for the time spent, I honestly believe.

That's partly true. The guy who writes will be much better at getting his thoughts down on paper (or the screen) and editing them, but without doing some reading he probably won't be a great writer. Not that the one who reads Shakespeare all the time will be great, hell look at Harold Bloom's attempt at fiction, but you shouldn't really think of this as an either-or thing. You need to read great works and learn from them as well as write a lot and perfect your own craft.

Capote spent three years training to become a painter... Do you have that kind of time, anon?

>>6576439
>Do you really want to be a writer, and if so, what type of writing do you want to do?
Yes, I really do want to be a writer and, tritely enough, I want to convey my own worries, fascinations, and joys to other people. I want to do it uniquely and skillfully.
I asked you that question because I"ve been training myself as a writer for about 3 months now and I'm disappointed in my progress so far. Mainly, I'm dejected at how weakly I grasp my own native English. With every sentence I type comes a multitude of frets, grammar worries, discrepancies in tone, etc.
I don't even know where to start perfecting my knowledge of English grammar or improving my concentration and I thought college courses could help me.

I don't think there's anything that you can learn that can't be beneficial for a writer. Regardless of what it is, I think a creative enough writer can put it to use.

Literature and language are the only required subjects. You can research specific topics you want to include in your writing, but above all you are a writer, not a philosopher or a historian or anything else. Don't be fooled by maximalism, you can write beautiful stories without any specialized knowledge of other fields.

>>6576587
>That's partly true. The guy who writes will be much better at getting his thoughts down on paper (or the screen) and editing them, but without doing some reading he probably won't be a great writer. Not that the one who reads Shakespeare all the time will be great, hell look at Harold Bloom's attempt at fiction, but you shouldn't really think of this as an either-or thing. You need to read great works and learn from them as well as write a lot and perfect your own craft.

I would recommend people read a lot, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend that they read Shakespeare.

>>6576764
>Yes, I really do want to be a writer and, tritely enough, I want to convey my own worries, fascinations, and joys to other people. I want to do it uniquely and skillfully.
>I asked you that question because I"ve been training myself as a writer for about 3 months now and I'm disappointed in my progress so far. Mainly, I'm dejected at how weakly I grasp my own native English. With every sentence I type comes a multitude of frets, grammar worries, discrepancies in tone, etc.
>I don't even know where to start perfecting my knowledge of English grammar or improving my concentration and I thought college courses could help me.

What kind of writing do you want to do?

Because my advice to any of you who want to write is this: if you can be happy doing anything else, do that other thing.

What makes a bad director?

>>6576889
Fiction, novels, short stories

>>6577221
>Fiction, novels, short stories

If you enjoy writing, by all means write. But set yourself up in a profession. Of all the people who want to write, very few make any money at it. And almost no one makes any money writing novels or short stories.

But if you are going to write, it's good to read the best examples of what you're interested in doing yourself. There's no point in reading all of Faulkner if you want to write, say, comedy.

To be honest, I don't see the value of reading a lot of what has been recommended here, aside from for your own pleasure. Assuming one doesn't want to write in iambic pentameter, or write Elizabethan plays, &c., the benefit of having read that stuff will be very difficult to discern in your work. I've read most of what I see recommended here, but I doubt very much you can tell.

I don't want to discourage you, though, when I say that it is both much easier and much harder than you think.

>>6575029
philosophy,
books relevant and that draw you in, you might enjoy existentialism and would be drawn towards that, follow what it is you feel you need to write about, Else you are simply an academic who can write looking to become a political figure. Are you an artist or a politician? choose wisely