/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13835008]

I'm only good at writing in short spurts. For example, I can write a good opening paragraph that flows well and drifts smoothly into the next one, but from there my writing starts deteriorating and I find myself writing extremely formulaically and without spirit. How do I stop this? How did writers like Cervantes and Melville manage to tune every single sentence of every single paragraph of every single chapter to perfection with each succession of words moving beautifully into the next without any sort of blemish or resistance?

Please tell me it's just something that will come with practice.

Also, general writing thread.

[Anonymous No.13835012]

>>13835008
Write more

[Anonymous No.13835031]

>>13835012
I write 3/4 times a week. Haven't recently because I've been on vacation for 2 weeks but coming back and seeing how sub-par my work is really disheartens me. I will try to keep at it though.

[Anonymous No.13835144]

Bump

[Anonymous No.13836274]

One or twice a month or three I vomit up a couple dozen thousand words and then the rest of the time I either minutely edit those bodies of writing or I do not write anything at all.

[Anonymous No.13836279]

>>13835008
my dick smells worse than my asshole

[Anonymous No.13836905]

>>13836279
Jordan Peterson.jpg

[Anonymous No.13837127]

>>13835008
Reminder that Tolstoy wrote the entirety of War and Peace in a period of eight months. Melville wrote Moby Dick just shy of years length in time. Shakespeare wrote his plays every few months.

Some people are born this way, in the same way some people are born 7 feet or with 20/40 vision. Either you have the talent (and make no mistake, the perfectionist obsession, the will and work ethic is part of that talent) and will produce great works of lasting beauty, or you won't.

[Anonymous No.13837157]

Try haibun. They are traditionally a combination of poetry and prose travelogue. Usually it was haiku followed by relatively short paragraphs of journaling . Matsuo Bashō is one well-known master of this form.

[Anonymous No.13837293]

>>13837127
Melville would also work sometimes 10-12 hours a day on very little (we’re talking a page). He would have his wife chain him to his desk and lock him in his study, and he would tell her not to bring him food until he had finished his work. He wrote Moby-Dick once through and then went back and completely rewrote it a second time.

They definitely had immense talent but for many of the greats it took putting themselves through immense mental agony and stress to produce what they did.

I imagine if you wrote every day 7 days a week, minimum 5-6 hours per day, working on the same book for a year, you could come up with something pretty decent. Maybe not Moby-Dick but something good.

[Anonymous No.13837351]

>>13837293
Like I said the obsession, the perfectionism, the mania, is part of the talent. It's not something you can choose. it's something given to you by circumstances beyond your control, god or the universe or some set of polymorphisms in your genetic code, some sequence of epistatic changes because your father used to put out his cigarettes on your palm or because you picked up a volume of Homer by accident when you were 12.

[Anonymous No.13837462]

>>13837127
>>13837351
Not the whole picture. Kafka went for long agonising stretches without writing. Woolf spent seven years on her first novel. Mann spent three hours every day writing and usually only produced about a page. Gass spent thirty years on The Tunnel. Flaubert was deliberately and pain-stakingly slow in his writing. Even a prodigiously fast writer like D.H. Lawrence spent two years on Sons and Lovers.

[Anonymous No.13837672]

Slowly but surely chugging along on the revising the first arc of my novel and pecking away at some revisions to a novella I had put aside for a while. Surrounded by literature that I enjoy and inspires me. Feels good.

>>13835008
What is editing?