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/lit/ - Literature

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File: 62 KB, 451x700, hitchhiker-s-guide-douglas-adams-657242_451_700[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
11964344 No.11964344 [Reply] [Original]

>spend your teenage years (the prime of your life) aggressively preparing for entry to the most elite and rigorous university on the planet instead of chasing girls and having fun
>risk poverty and embarrassment and likely failure for a career in entertainment
>throwaway untold manhours as you perfect your craft, hobnob with industry figures, and pray for success
>miraculously manage to not only publish, but publish a bestseller
>eke out a modicum of recognition from the world
some NEET on 4chan, in reference to your life's work (the end product of all your suffering and effort):

>"lmao this is reddit af"

>> No.11964467

>>11964344
No, nice try though. There are lots of people who worked harder than Douglas Adams and are much less well-known or successful than he is. From his Wikipedia summary he didn't work hard at Cambridge at all, and most people that get into Cambridge also have social lives. He probably suffered a lot less than the average person. This book is fine for pre-teens and redditors, but not for anyone else.

I get the point, though. I think every writer on this board has a paralysing and existential fear that if they did somehow manage to fulfil their dream of getting a successful and published novel, /lit/ (the only people whose opinions really matter) would call them a hack and completely disregard their life achievement.

>> No.11964504

>>11964344
Just because he suffered doesn't make it ok to write a Reddit as fuck corpus.

>> No.11964507

>>11964467
4channers are always going to be averse to anything that's contemporary and popular. Why worry about what anyone on here thinks. In 500 years book in OP might become a cult hit on this board - or something very similiar to this website.

>> No.11964539
File: 69 KB, 500x525, 2kkq55.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
11964539

>>11964344
>

>> No.11964547

>>11964507
I don't know if you've read Hitchhiker's Guide or not, but in 500 years no-one will remember it because it's not literature.

>> No.11964554

>>11964344
I loved Douglas Adams when I was a kid, and still do for that reason. I doubt very much that he would have agreed with your rendition of his life, and I think he would have had a great life if he had never published anything at all. After all, life is what you make of it, not what people make of you.

>> No.11964558

>>11964547
It is literature, but it'll be forgotten for other reasons.

>> No.11964584

>>11964547
Don't be daft, it's near the pinnacle of the fantasy canon. Second on the NPR 100 Scifi/fantasy list, fourth in the big read, THHGTG is about as big as it gets. It might not have the read rate it does now but people still read Gargantua and Pantagruel. You can be fairly confident it will have academic study of the weirdness of nerd-dom pre-internet and that alone will guarantee reads.