Critique thread

[Anonymous No.14406096]

A snippet from an experimental novel I’m writing.

The drug was losing its hold, but could still brush upon my senses. The colours sparked between the waves from some kindled chemical in my brain. I am now and all the persons I’ve believed were me now dead by progress. Inwards, between the pinions of breath stirred in my lungs are the seconds I take and let pass as the tide is turned chisel by time to the rounded rocks. I am nonsense describing itself with a second language, fanning order out of accidental rule breaking and rebuilding in the Savannah’s of golden revolutions in survival and fire building. I’ve spoken in structure, an architect of flat speak, now is the moment the tent is raised and burned, syllables speckled as ash, upwards to sable clouds, invisible in the night. I am now.

[Anonymous No.14406192]

>>14406096
I think it is a little too personal and obscure. Writing for others, you have to say it in words they will connect with. Make the experience more universal. Joyce did this in a lot of ways, albeit alongside a fucking rude insistence upon his private school education

[Anonymous No.14406200]

>>14406096
How is this experimental?

[Anonymous No.14406246]

>>14406200
Throughout the book it clings to narratives, but drops them as the narrator turns to another direction. The through line of the book is the narrator exploring itself through stream of consciousness, with anecdotal flickers grounding it from becoming nothing, but prose poetry.

It’s only going to be 60 pages or so: I’m hoping that the style doesn’t become too tiresome, but honestly it’s not meant for everyone as I see it.

[Anonymous No.14406275]

>We were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold.

[Anonymous No.14406287]

>>14406200
The experimentation is that the narrator’s ideals change as the work progresses, with it ending in a completely different message than the themes early on. I want it to reflect the nature of philosophy and how people pick them up then drop them throughout life, especially while young.

[Anonymous No.14406293]

>>14406275
I’ve never read fear and loathing, but that’s a fair critique.

[Anonymous No.14406297]

Billy was a good kid; good in this case not actually meaning good as in skilled or some general conception of goodness, but in the contemporary sense of obsequiousness. By this I mean that he attended school, only questioned authority in obvious and immoral instances, and undulated through the usual endeavors that occupy a busy young person. However, it was clear that he was also good in another academic or more accurately a social sense as he attended Columbia University where he was a senior and set to graduate with a degree in finance in the coming spring. Naturally, this made his parents very happy which is the goal, whether blatant or latent, of every young person, but unfortunately it also put him under a great deal of distress. It’s tough to live up one’s expectations and almost always preferable to go under-the-radar, but that also can be anxiety-inducing. It is safe to say that young people in our generation (and perhaps every generation) live very stressful lives and this fact is usually disregarded by both those who are older (perhaps from pride, insouciance, or disdain) and those younger—generally for similar reasons and an inherent youthful apathy.

[Anonymous No.14407201]

>>14406096
If English is not your first language I can forgive your grammar mistakes. This is as inscrutable as something you'd read on a fridge.
>I am now and all the persons I’ve believed were me now dead by progress
You can throw sentence structure out the window and call it 'experimental' but don't expect anybody to read it.
>Savannah’s of golden revolutions
There are two plural nouns in that clause; you use an apostrophe in one but not the other. Is that because you're not sure which way is right so you're hedging your bets?

[Anonymous No.14407237]

>>14407201
I am now and all the persons I’ve believed were me, now dead by progress.

savannahs of golden revolutions

That’s how it’s meant, the mistakes are from a combination of autocorrect and a lack of proofreading.

[Anonymous No.14407242]

>>14406297
You have the same problem I do; you read so much classic literature you can't escape from 19th century style. It's hard as hell to avoid but it's important to at least be aware you're doing it.
Not to say you shouldn't write in a certain style if you like doing so -- but 2/3rds of all the words in this paragraph are redundant. If you have a point, make it; don't prance around like a verbal ballerina. All the fluff between "Billy was a good kid" and "he attended school" achieves absolutely nothing, communicates nothing. If you need to say "by this I mean" then you should have said that to begin with.
Take my advice and cut the thesaurian acrobatics; there's no earthly reason why you need to use the word 'obsequiousness' when any one of a hundred more humble words would do. As a general rule I favor Anglo-saxon words and use Latin words only when I have a clear reason to do so. The Germanic alternative to 'inherent youthful apathy' is a simple, punchy 'angst'.

[Anonymous No.14407246]

>>14407201
Sorry, this is the correct version.

I am now and all the persons I’ve believed were me, now, dead by progress.

[Anonymous No.14407280]

>>14407242
Many great writers have written in archaic prose for their time, but it was usually to serve a purpose and because it fit the setting of their writing. Something about writing anachronistically for a contemporary story misses the point for me.

There’s nothing wrong with being verbose so long as it’s meaningful. Fancy words for fancy’s sake is trashy to me.

[Anonymous No.14407650]

I've been pondering about the nature of Heaven and what sort of differences a place like that would have in comparison with your everyday life, in our world we have things like physics, mathematics, the nature of life on Earth that imply to us uncomforting thuths about the future of our universe. We like to think the natural evolution of the specie through external pressure would create a "better creature" but wouldn't that mean the most brutaly efficient amoral being would come to existence considering if this process could run forever through out the aeons? In a all eternal place like Heaven would such evolutionary process exist? How does Heaven even looks like? I will try to barely rely on biblical text because many of their orignal meanings have been lost through time due to translations or corrupted by the evil amoral game of politics. I will use a more traditonal simplistic meaning of Heaven, a place of blissfulness that transcend our universe. Also, I will see good as what we universally considered to be good, things like health and the certainty of good. In such place there won't be any contrast because there is no evil there or maybe there might exist a third path in which it is neither good nor evil nor amoral that constrast with the good that resides there, what such thing would be like? Anyway, since our brain is hard wired to the evils of this world our mind would have to be completely change to something beyond alien, I'm talking about maybe noticing the world without mental labels as we do, maybe even a full 360 degree vision including horizontally and vertically but who knows? Anything can happen. This question of Heaven always facinates me since as long as i've been alive, mainly because of my father and many other people that i've met throught out my life. My observations lead me to believe that we miss something that we never fully experience, and that is Heaven. We get angry at how unheavenly the world is, we try to change it, we try to even harm others for their unheavenly ways and we even go as far as to sentence our world and brethren to death for not being perfect like God even though we don't fully understand it or fool our selves into thinking what Heaven and God is.

One thing that facinates me about life is this weird thing that we and some animals do that we call curling like a ball, there are many reason we do that like when we are crying out of sadness that is unconsciously implying that we want to go to the darkness of our mother's womb that we once enjoyed. In the japanese phylosophy of the five elements there is this one element that is called 空 kū which is equivalent to "Void" or "Heaven". Which made me think, is the Void the lack of all like in a womb or, dare I say it, Heaven? But the whole concept of a absolute nothingess is paradoxal on itself for it doesn't have any laws of physics or even logic. What does that mean? Is the Void just that? The most empty word in a metaphysical level? Just a illusion?

[Anonymous No.14407698]

>>14407650
Here’s some writing I’ve done on the subject from a different angle.

Humans are creatures of longing, our brains evolved in hunters and gatherers. Because we are natural seekers when we sit idle our mental health decays and because hunting implies intrinsic reward when we perform work that holds no meaning or reaps no rewards our mental state decays. Now, everlasting paradise is a broad statement. Is this paradise a pure stream of euphoria running to the soul? My question then would be, euphoric relative to what? For pleasure to even be understood it requires discomfort or pain. Now that's assuming that nirvana would be incorporeal, incognizant or impossible to understand with our minds, Noumena. Following a more fundamental understanding that heaven is earth-like in its functioning, then a larger flaw becomes apparent. Are there goals in heaven? If hope is the defining virtue of humanity then is there despair? A little hell in paradise. No emotion or feeling after all goes without its binary opposite.


Personally, I find the idea of a divine hamster wheel just as scary as nothing. A cosmic scratching for an itch that never goes away, a sine wave of bliss and displeasure into profusion. There's something comforting in a final rest, an eternity of any waking existence to my mind would result in insanity. Certainly not everlasting peace.

[Anonymous No.14407718]

>>14407242
Lol, when I try to make it terse and contemporary I get berated and called sexist. I've posted it on here and people absolutely hate it. I've written loquaciously such as before for years now, and I go on so many digressions. My only hope is to perfect my style and luckily stumble into a great book. Thanks though, I'll try to simplify it but I struggle with the iceberg style lol.

[Anonymous No.14407727]

>>14406096
>From my diary desu


My mind is an infinite plane, infinitely limitless and infinitesimal at the same time. Space and nothing but space, my thought flys through, the mind pushes on through an infinite horizon a hill was no plateau forever climbing upward. The reaches of the mind are far but my thoughts focus lacks discipline. It lacks the ability to inspect one of the crevices but rather skips over each and every crevice moving forward and forward attempting to see everything, looking for something. It leaves me in disarray, a panic, it gives anxiety. I sit and wander on. A zigzag like a pingball my ming but it never succumbs. The mind stretches far and wide; search the crevices, attempt to record them, record the journey.

[Anonymous No.14407739]

>>14407727
Not bad but many spelling errors. Is english not your first language? Either way a bit schizo and narcissistic, share more.

[Anonymous No.14407742]

>>14407718
Maybe if the consensus on the literary board is that you’re being sexist in your writing, a community that reads works thousands of years old, just maybe you are in fact sexist. I don’t think covering it up in esoteric, verbal diarrhea is going to help with that.

[Anonymous No.14407753]

>>14407739
I think most of the grammatical mistakes in these threads are due to lazy writers wanting free editing. That being said, not all famous writers were masters of grammar, or spelling, many a masterpiece has been fixed in the edit.

[Anonymous No.14407771]

>>14407742
>Maybe if the consensus on the literary board is that you’re being sexist in your writing, a community that reads works thousands of years old, just maybe you are in fact sexist.
I meant people outside of 4chan (mainly the pseudo-Bohemian's that I'm friends with and it's only because I make my characters male and don't criticize them or overanalyze them for being male and "privileged"). People on here do not say that at all lol. I should have specified

[Anonymous No.14407799]

>>14407771
Ah, well if they can’t recognize themes deeper than race-driven identity politics, that’s their intellectual loss. Imo the ppl that complain about discrimination in the first world, from campuses with political investment in affirmative action are the equivalent of ppl complaining that their lace garments chafe.

[Anonymous No.14409278]

Idk what to do to improve this but I wanna submit

[Anonymous No.14409284]

>>14409278

[Anonymous No.14409286]

>>14409284

[Anonymous No.14409526]

>>14406096
For all of the talk, we don’t even know what drug has been taken. Your details are thin and cliched while the prose is so flat and grey that nothing takes off. The attempt at a revelatory voice here sounds quite corny. We don’t see how the speaker becomes “now” we are just told through flat description, barely any images that this happened.

Why does this need to be a drug trip specifically? And what will the side effects be because of it? There have been a good number of other stories or books exploring consciousness at its limits without resorting to the specificity of a drug trip. If you’re going to use that, we need to understand why. Otherwise, we’re not getting motive.

[Anonymous No.14410992]

>>14409526
Could you give me an example of the prose being flat?

[Anonymous No.14411102]

Gyren looked upon the book and as he did his throat ran dry, parched as one would be as died in a duned wasteland and its words flowed like those of a mountain spring, pouring into his very being. This tome was everything.