/lit/ - Literature

>>7035871
>have to be wagecuck forever
>any point in continuing
if thats your thing

also
>6head
>Being called cameron.

>>7035871
no.
If you are over the age of 23 and not a published author you may as well give up right now. Either kill yourself or do something else

>DFW was 24 when Broom of the System was published
>Zadie Smith was 25 when White Teeth was published
>Marek Hlasko was 23 when Eighth Day of the Week was published
>F.S. Fitzgerald was 23 when This Side of Paradise was published
>Carson McCullers was 23 when The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published
>Tao Lin was 24 when EEEEE EEE EEEE & Bed were published
>Italo Calvino was 23 when The Path to the Nest of the Spiders was published
>Kerouac was 20 when The Sea is My Brother was published
>Goethe was 25 when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published
>Musil was 25 when The Confusions of Young Torless was published
>Hemingway was 25 when In Our Time was published
>Tatsuhiko Takimoto was 24 when Welcome to the NHK was published
>Ryu Murakami was 24 when Almost Transparent Blue was published
>Garcia Marquez was 20 when Eyes of a Blue Dog was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when "Napoleon III as a President" was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when "Fate and History" was published
>Nietzsche was 18 when Free Will and Fate was published
>Nietzsche was 19 when "Can the Envious Ever Truly Be Happy?" was published
>Nietzsche was 20 when "On Tendencies" was published
>Nietzsche was 20 when "My Life" was published
>Saramago was 25 years old when Land of Sun was published
>Dickens was 24 when Sketches by Boz was published
>Dickens was 25 when The Pickwick Papers was published
>Huxley was 25 when Limbo was published
>James Joyce was 25 when Chamber Music was published
>Proust was 25 when Pleasures and Days was published
>Mishima was 23 when Confessions of a Mask was published
>Bret Easton Ellis was 21 when Less Than Zero was published
>Bret Easton Ellis was 23 when Rules of Attraction was published
>Kenzaburō Ōe was 23 when Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published
>Emile Zola was 24 when Contes à Ninon was published
>Balzac was 20 when Cromwell was published
>Baudelaire was 24 when Salon of 1845 was published
>Hitomi Kanehara was 20 when Snakes and Earrings was published
>Stig Dagerman was 23 when Ormen was published
>Strindberg was 22 when The Outlaw was published
>Ibsen was 22 when Catiline was published
>Milan Kundera was 24 when Man: A Wide Garden was published
>Adam Thirwell was 24 when Politics was published
>Ned Beaumann was 25 when Boxer, Beetle was published
>Norman Mailer was 25 when The Naked and the Dead was published
>Eleanor Catton was 22 when The Rehearsal was published
>Robert Walser was 23 when Schneewittchen was published
>Noah Cicero was 23 when The Human War was published
>Jorge Luis Borges was 24 when Fervor de Buenos Aires was published
>Tolstoy was 24 when Childhood was published
>Johan Harstad was 23 when Amublance was published
>Mira Gonzalez was 21 when i will never be beautiful enough for us to be beautiful together was published
>Mira Gonzalez was 23 when Collected Tweets was published
>Kim Insuk was 20 when Bloodline was published
>Evelyn Waugh was 25 when Decline and Fall was published
>Ben Brooks was 18 when Grow Up was published

>>7035892
>Nietzsche was 20 when "My Life" was published.
Literally why?

>no education
>work in factory

When will it end.

>>7035892
>Ben Brooks was 18 when Grow Up was published
stop doing this, it make me sick every time i see it
i know it's there for humour but it rustles my jimmies something fierce

>>7035892
Michel Houellebecq tbh fam

>>7035882
this
also, if you're going to be 25 and crying about being too old to do whatever you want to do then in 10 years you'll just be 35 in some job you probably don't care for and wondering if you actually started giving a fuck at 25 whether you'd be something and by then you'll actually be too old

>>7035892
I think it's important to consider that these people mostly came from a very different culture. Nietzsche especially seems precocious but in reality he was publishing unremembered shit until Birth of Tragedy, which was his mid-20s, and his early professorship was unprecedented, the result of basically a decade of hardcore university study already by his early twenties and special notice by a major classicist. We just don't have anything like that in our culture. Even DFW. Look at his fucking family, the culture he lived in, and the opportunities he was given.

If you're an average schlub who works, you just can't compete with these springboards. I don't think that means you should give up, I think it means you have an even bigger responsibility to all the schlubs out there to show that schlubs can contribute too, even if it takes them a few extra years. Just don't hang yourself, put your head in an oven, or get syphilis, and you can beat them out in the long run too.

>>7035922
>THERE'S HOPE GUISE LIFE ISNT FULL OF SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING XDD
Fuck off normalslime

>>7035871
Anyone can write a profound work of literature at any age. Or do you mean are you too old to become famous while you're still alive? No, probably not. But if fame is what you seek you are wanting to write for the wrong reasons.

>>7035938
>implying greatness isn't intrinsically motivated by sex, fame and power

>>7035922
What was DFW's life like?>

>>7035922

Lots of lower classers write literature these days and start late, look at DeLillo, Ammons, and Gil Sorrentino

>>7035871
Probably not. Especially since You look like the half aborted love child of John cusack

>>7036099
his parents where both professors

>>7036339
lol, not knowing this dank meme

>>7035892
Bukowski was like 38 or something when he first got published. I know he's an outlier, but if writing is a serious passion of yours and something you want to do as a career, I don't think you should quit when you turn a certain age, especially when you're still quite young.

Guys, this thread has made me fear for my life

>finally finish novel
>over 1000 pages and packed with all sorts of deep themes
>tfw every publisher rejects it saying it's incomprehensible
>tfw some of them even say I should see a psychiatrist

>>7036406
Your fault for trying too hard your first time

>>7035910
> Implying he is not hack.

>only published authors are worth praise or have value
Nah nigga
The amount of shit valuable to literary canon that may have never been read is incredible. Never stop writing.

>tfw 18
>tfw going to libarts school
>tfw beginning to write for personal pleasure/gain
>tfw beginning to read for personal pleasure/gain
>tfw everyone else just wants to play vidya and hang
>tfw nobody to play vidya and hang out with
L-living the dream, r-right

>>7035892
Look at all those meme authors.

>>7036406
publish your broom of the system before your infinite jest you boo boo

>>7035871

Even if you get published, there's no guarantee you'll make more than pennies.

Even I wrote a fantasy book and it was published, I might earn only a few extra thousand a year, for all of that effort.

Not everyone is going to be George R. R. Martin or Tolkien.

>>7036406

Maybe they are just shit.

Keep trying.

>>7036468
>not marketing yourself on social media
>not shilling your book in every second video
>not marketing to the right crowd, one that will appreciated your work and support you in future endeavours

>>7036406
tbh, I'd never read a 1000-page book by a random faggot no-one has ever heard of

>>7036483

I can understand marketing to the right crowd, by making yourself known to fantasy circles, but shilling on Twitter and through radio, ect. just seems pathetic and dishonest.

"Buy my book, you stupid goy!"

"I want your shekels you stupid goy!"

I'd rather people find it out through a friend or on a random self in a bookstore that through the Goymansacks Broadcasting Network.

>wrote 30,000 word novella at 17
>waited a year before rereading it for emotional distance
>try to reread it
>cringe at every second sentence

>>7036501
post an excerpt

>>7036501

Everybody does this at least once.

I had friends who wrote scripts for new Star Wars movies. When they read them now, they nearly cry.

>>7036499
>random self in a bookstore
Needle in a haystack type scenario. I doubt most people walk into bookstores and just buy random stuff. Most research on what to read online, then buy it online. Your book will never be found that way

>>7036501
I did that except it was a sort of Paradise Lost/Odyssey thing. It's not actually terrible, I may revisit it some day.

>>7036522

By all means, put it up for sale on Amazon and put excerpts on whatever that Google book preview thing is, I'm only talking about overt shilling.

>>7035871
>giving up at the first sign of adversity

Pleb tier

>>7036517
oboy. Getting excoriated by lit might be a perfect way to end my involvement with this thing.

This reminds me of the thread with the guy who thought he was a "literary genius" because he could write tonnes of Pokemon fan fiction.

>>7036562
I don't know if that guy was being serious.

>>7036517
okay here's a random excerpt.
There was someone already in the waiting room when he entered it. It made no difference to the investigator, his only interest was in talking to the man he saw hit by a car.He was glad to have seen it. The accident itself had been extraordinary. The cars unlawful speed as it came down the highway, it’s smooth transition from one side of the road to the other, the comedic slowness of the man’s reaction, and the way it seemed like he was almost jumping over the car, that had all been fantastic. What the investigator found even more pleasurable was the implication the impact had to the case. The cars relatively uninterrupted speed as it passed the motel almost certainly ruled out a lack of premeditation. This implicated what was at first a simple case of abandonment to be far more nefarious, and therefore financially pleasing. But first he had to see the man who was hit, if he still retained life. He needed to know the things the man knew that had gotten him hit.The investigator sat in a seat without looking at it, and picked one of the tabloids across from him. The obese man looked at him and began to speak

>>7036565

His pastebin chapter was quite large, and he took it down once people started insulting him.

>>7036593
True, but he didn't respond to being trolled other than that, which doesn't strike me as the behaviour of someone who really thinks that writing Pokemon fan fiction makes him a genius. It's not as though it's hard to find other people's to use.
I could be wrong, it just didn't seem right.

>>7036603

Didn't someone Google bits of it and find no results?

>>7036640
I don't know. Can you remember the thread? Warousu search is down.

>>7036406

What's it about?

>>7036501
>>7036575
Tbh it lacks flow and is quite poorly worded at times but don't quit man

>>7036575
i like it

>>7036406
Post excerpt please

Be 120 pages into my novel. Going for around 700. Constantly debating the tone of my book. I want it to be taken seriously but also not to be aimed to a very small group of people. Force myself to add action scenes, just so the reader doesn't drop it after 50 pages.

Since we are discussing whether or not sentences flow, does this read correctly?

"The right of all lawful citizens to bear arms and form a militia for national defence."

>>7036682

How are you measuring what is a page, and how are you writing it?

JUST

>>7036691
One page is around 250 words, I just do the math. I write the novel chapter by chapter so I can have better control over the pacing. I have a notebook with notes of stuff that needs to be done and ideas that I haven't made up my mind on.

>>7036667
>>7036678
I think at times it was meant to be intentionally stilled because (I'm not totally sure that I had this intention in mind during most of the book's actual writing, but it seems as though I might as well have) I was emulating the obscurantism and deadening syntax Wallace used in stories like Mr. Squishy and Suffering Channel. I threw in an equally obnoxious device where all five of the main characters of the Paul Austeresque "plot" are referred to as "the investigator", which had the potential to be interesting but ultimately lead nowhere.
There was one section that was conceptually interesting wherein there's a protracted description of security camera footage depicting the conversation of two men in a waiting room, in the context of the work as a whole it's just more weightless obscurantism, but I think the idea is essentially interesting and may return to it later.

>>7036663
>>7036681

I don't want to talk about it because I think it's seriously ground breaking and I don't want people to steal my ideas.

>>7036715
*stilted*

>>7036710

So you've written 42,000 words? Impressive.

----

General question here, are pen names still a thing?

>>7036716
Somehow I doubt it, and even then you don't publish a Finnegans Wake as your first novel.

>>7036722
Jah, names that sound good sell beter

>>7036716
You might be overestimating your talent just a little bit. Most great authors were critical of themselves.

>>7036716

>>7036716
It's Naruto fan fiction?

I'm 25k words in and I predict I will finish the book at about 30k. I'm worried that the size of the book will affect whether or not it will be published.

>>7036431 get better friends anon

>>7036431
>25.
Been 15 years without friends and without talking to anyone.
>/lit/ is the only 'friend' i have
>Been writing even if i don't enjoy it, it's the only thing i can do with my life now.
>Started reading again, still i can't get myself to it.
We all have problems

>>7035871
You look like F Scott Fitzgerald's deformed brother

>>7036805

Most writers have some kind of mental illness, even if it's only minor depression.

After Sylvia Plath and the oven incident, I believe a study was done for confirm the link.

I have at least depression, OCD, social anxiety, and GAD, but I don't think I'm a good writer, so maybe the link is false, or I'm the outlier.

I have so many books I haven't read, but I just can't stop buying them.

>>7036845
I don't even know what my problem is, i just don't like anything anymore, maybe it's Anhedonia or some shit like that,i need to get a test or something.

BERLIOZ
E
R
L
I
O
Z

>25
>drinking problem
>haven't written anything since I dropped out of school
>work as bartender

>>7036888
stop drinking

>25
>have had articles in a few magazines and newspapers
>published a book with a deal setup for my next one
>still feel immense artistic inadequacy due to a lack of self confidence and the knowledge that I will never make it big enough to survive solely on my writing and thus will never be able to devote my time to working on all the stories I want to tell

I'm not even particularly ambitious, I'd be content with being able to live in a modest apartment just churning out genre fiction if it meant being able to write for a living.

>>7036961
just keep going, that's better than not having anything, im 25 too and im still here with my first book.

>>7036940
no

>>7035871
Ivan Ivanovich Kozlov was first published when he was fourty, lame and blind and he was one of those who pioneered writing poetry in Russian. He had a massive boner for Byron which influenced the poets popular with Nabokov and thus with all of the Americans people in their client states - Pushkin and in Lermontov.

>>7037050
>Americans people
Americans *and people

>>7036406
If they say you need a psychiatrist then you're in good root Anon, I would love to read your novel

>>7036845
By the looks of it you also have a bad case of hypochondria.

>wrote a novel
>proud, but also slightly insecure, so decide to come back to it a little bit later and finalize
>save copy to external SSD (not flash drive, SSD)
>now, four months later
>storage HDD with work fails very suddenly
>no problem, have SSD with backup
>turning on SSD with backups, including novel
>filesystem can't be read
>panic
>look it up
>turns out SSDs leak electrons without power, and this increases with temperature, and thus corrupt/destroy data
>it's been 35 degrees here all summer
I've been in tears all week. And the SSD companies don't mention this, nowhere on their packages or anything. Now I understand why people still use tapes for data storage - they're fail safe!

>>7035871
Not really.

Should have printed it out or something, or otherwise have a hard copy in hand.

>>7035871
Yes, it sucks but what else should I do? Give up? Fuck no.

>>7037096
>tfw backups on external HDD, RAID 1 SSD and waterproof, shockproof USB.

>>7037096
just use dropbox you fucking idiot

>26
>decide to stop writing M-rated parody one-shots on FF.net
>try to write a serious sci-fi
>don't know shit about hard science, I just think aliens are cool
>send the first six chapters to my friend so she can proof-read it
>she has a bigger vocabulary than a thesaurus
>some chapters are just pure world-building
>she said 'you're like tolkien if he wrote sci-fi'
>haven't updated it in a week
>she tells me to continue, but I can't seem to
>upload it to fictionpress
>an Indian guy sends me a PM telling me to continue writing
>still cannot find the motivation to go on

I don't get it. If someone says your story is good, shouldn't that compel you to continue?

>>7037292
Your writing is shit anon, give up

>>7037292
no because while your story may or may not be good YOU are shit

>>7035922
No, I think the implications in that post are very clear.

You working schlubs don't deserve to publish anything, hell, even teaching you pricks to read was a mistake. Now you prance around criticizing our beautiful ivory towers.

>>7037292
You shouldn't write anymore. This far your novel exists at a point in which it could be great or it could be horrible, once you finish it one of the possibilities will colapse and it might end up being shit. This is a schrodinger novel.

>>7037318
>>7037333

Is this reverse psychology?

>>7037381
The word you're looking for is autism.

>>7037393
>>7037393
>calling people 'shit' and their shitty work 'shit' is considered autism

Go eat a sphincter-splitting sausage sandwich, you cloaca.

>>7037405
See, now that's reverse psychology.
What he actually wants me to do is eat healthily.
Sometimes anons are nice. Sometimes they're not.

>>7037012
lol, hope you enjoy hating yourself in 10 years

>>7037096
jesus christ, how old are you to be so thoroughly cucked by digital media? you didn't once think to print it out?

>>7036575
Yeah, it's shit. Go figure, you were 17. Keep writing.

>>7037064

I didn't self-diagnose myself like some kind of edgy retard, I've been going to a psychiatrist for the last five years.

>>7035892
>Kerouac was 20 when The Sea Is My Brother was published

The Sea Is My Brother was published in 2011. Two thousand fucking eleven.

>>7037012

>>7036806

good eye!

>>7037096
you definitely should have had a hard copy, but i feel bad for you regardless
i couldn't imagine what i'd do if the same had happened to me

>>7035871
Jesus Christ, anon. You look like a Puerto Rican whore.

>>7036684
That's not a complete sentence