/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15834646]

I write like shit

[Anonymous No.15834650]

>>15834646
i shit like i write

[Anonymous No.15834657]

>>15834650
That’s unhealthy!

[Anonymous No.15834744]

>>15834646
you probably read like shit too

[Anonymous No.15835622]

>>15834646
at least you write

[Anonymous No.15837071]

write more

[Anonymous No.15837087]

same fren. we'll get better. keep it up

[Anonymous No.15837097]

>>15834646
for writing practice you ought to try writing a web novel. use it to improve your writing and you will have actual evidence of incremental improvement. use each chapter to improve with whatever you have most recently learned about style, paying no attention to inter-chapter consistency. and you might end up with an audience who can give you feedback and even follow you to paid formats like published works.

[Anonymous No.15837170]

>>15834646
>>15837087
Same

[Anonymous No.15837281]

You are not alone.

[Anonymous No.15837371]

>tfw you will never know as many words as DFW

[Anonymous No.15837614]

>>15837371
do what he did and buy a dictionary then you fucking peasant

[Anonymous No.15837666]

>>15834646
In what regard?

[Anonymous No.15837678]

>>15834646
Welcome! Welcome! You're trapped here with us now, friend.

[Anonymous No.15837686]

>every time somebody critiques my work they call it pretentious
How in the fuck? I'm a half literate midwesterner who uses contractions in almost every sentence.

I mean, I am pretentious, but how do they know?

[Anonymous No.15837734]

>>15837686
You come across as smug when presenting it, even if it is good they’ll humble you out of spite. Find unbiased criticism of your writing, better yet, keep reading and writing and you be your own critic.

[Anonymous No.15837776]

>>15837734
I think 4chan posters are the most unbiased critics that can be found. They'll tell you your work is shit if it's shit. I don't trust my friends to be unbiased. I certainly am not unbiased when it comes to critiquing my friend's works myself.

[Anonymous No.15838346]

i think it was Pinker who said that many writers are too pretentious and unoriginal
I realise that writing styles are largely affected by the kind of literature that you read, but I argue that a great book is something that speaks to a lot of people.
Therefore, they must speak at their level, otherwise they are not going to read and experience it.

This is especially true in non-fiction literature. They follow a very strict language guideline that it hard for me to get the right emotion for any given sentence. This is why I prefer to listen to the author's Audiobook, because they know what they were thinking when they wrote something and that makes it a lot easier to comprehend.

Why don't people write like they write everyday?

[Anonymous No.15838503]

>>15834646
>>15838346
Anyone else unironically think 18-19th century literature, at least in terms of writing quality, is largely trash? Sure there's even more trash today but we know it's trash and don't read it.

[Anonymous No.15838514]

>>15838503
I think some type of literature reserve the right to be cryptic, mainly because they aim to be an epic
but there is no reason for a book that wants to bring ideas into the world to have a barrier of entry
What we ended up having is scholars masturbating with each other on how to best interpret a work

[Anonymous No.15838518]

>write for yourself
>write with the nagging thought of "I need to think very hard about this so it can be published"

What the FUCK do I do, /lit/?

[aaa No.15838522]

>>15837097
Do you really think web novels popular in the west and if they are where do I write?

[Anonymous No.15838528]

>>15838346
The truth is most books are 3x longer than they need to be because if not people won't buy it

[Anonymous No.15838530]

>>15838518
This

[Anonymous No.15840031]

you will make it fren. Just write 100k words per month

[Anonymous No.15840091]

>>15834646
become an academic, your terrible writing will only make your work seem better

[Anonymous No.15840103]

you should aim to write 'not like shit'; you should just write.

[Anonymous No.15840867]

>>15834646
Now that you know, you can either: 1) continue writing like shit and stop caring that it is shit, 2) do everything in your power to become a better writer. You're unlikely to ever make it as a great writer in your own right, but you'll at least be able to concoct literature that others might want to digest. I've known people who went from tone-deaf to being able to write piano works on par with some of Rachmaninoff's miniatures so there's hope; 3) stop writing altogether and pursue more lucrative hobbies.

/thread.

[Anonymous No.15841610]

>>15834646
write more and you'll get better at it, if you give up then you will remain in the same state of shitiness

[Anonymous No.15841739]

>>15834646
It is hard. I guess we must do the work. Tend one's garden as it were.

I have recently started writing enough that feasibly my skills get better but working without objective measures of quality is hard.

When one lifts weights, the number increases week by week.

I have a growing Corpus of text but is it more readable?

At the start of my writing I thought I was going to suck so much I'd give up and just hire someone to write for me (because plot, characters etc came easy to me) but I guess now I'm just hoping I start writing well.

[Anonymous No.15841762]

>Write like complete shit always second guessing my work
>Just keep writing
>Have written the word equivalent of Return of The King and have vastly improved.
>Didn't suffer embarrassment because my project was so long that I already developed better skills in the course of writing it.

Just write a big fuck huge thing that you think you can't write and by the time you get near the end you will at least be passable.

[Anonymous No.15841776]

>>15837371
Protip:

Have a degree in a science, maybe as far as PhD level.

Use the terms from it in a book where they are barely relevant.

You will write with a lexicon as big as DFW but with the added benefit of using them correctly.

[Anonymous No.15842358]

>friend writes like shit
>can't bring myself to tell him that

[Anonymous No.15843556]

>>15834650
smoothly hopefully.

[Anonymous No.15843565]

I have nothing to write.

Feels bad.

[Anonymous No.15843623]

My Ideas are too dumb

The protagonist of my book is a space marine who fights anime characters at some point in the story

[Anonymous No.15843640]

>>15834650
masterfully?

[Anonymous No.15843707]

>>15843623
Maybe you are just influenced by what you normally read watch, read more classics and perhaps your ideas will change to

[Anonymous No.15843751]

>>15843707
The book isn't based on that idea only it's just one chapter(and i don't even like anime).

[Anonymous No.15844033]

"Like shit"
-anon

[Anonymous No.15844280]

>>15841762
this

[Anonymous No.15845078]

>>15843565
write your fantasies

[Anonymous No.15845309]

>>15837666
i have the prose of a pre-teen and I reuse words too much because my vocabulary is limited

[Anonymous No.15845375]

>>15838522
it's more niche in the west for sure, but there are communities. I also tend to think that theres a good chance web novels as an industry may boom soon. as an example, there is the sister site to novelupdates: scribblehub.

[Anonymous No.15845415]

>>15845309
unironically, the only way to meaningfully improve vocabulary is to change the majority of your english consumption to well written literature. Make sure to focus on your comprehension and attempt on your own to work out the meaning of words you do not fully understand before you look up a definition, and after learning the definition make sure you think of how it works in the sentence and context given. If you seriously want to write then I suggest investing in a good dictionary (and keep it close so you'll actually use it.

[Anonymous No.15846108]

>>15845415
thanks stranger