/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16488148]

NaNoWriMo is coming and I think everyone here should try it.

I have a few ideas and looking for suggestions to what I should persue. (I have done it three times and actually won once)

1. The Machine
Interlacing Highschool drama stories that come to a head at a school shooting. A genius autist student secretly built a time machine under the school that can turn time back to just before the shooting and a certain group of students can perceive the shift (all of them in their backstory having near death experiances that caused their pineal gland to flood their brains giving them this enhanced perception to know a time shift occured) and the second half of the book is them figuring out the best way to use this device

2. The Princess and the Bastard
A grimdark low fantasy tale of a King with loads of bastard sons who proclaims that all his bastards are now legitimate and one has to prove himself worth of being his heir. The kings only legitimate child, a daughter, finds one who is a stalwart and good man, and helps him make his case to be king so she can turn him into a puppet dictator and secretly take all the power for herself.

3. The Distant
A Sci-Fi epic. Humanity dominates the galaxy and their most powerful warship, the Distant, is tasked with checking in on all the planets Humanity controls (All singular colonies of every political ideology on earth given their own planet to live how they want) First act is star treck but super fucked up. Nazi Planet, Feminist Planet, Muslim planet, ect, Every other alien race unites to overthrow humanity (Led by a jewish, homosexual, human who belives that alien culture is superior to humanities and wants to see them over thrown) MC, the captain, unites all of humanity, damn their conflicting ideologies, to fight in an epic battle against every other race in the glaxy to save earth, our homeworld.

I don't think I'm ready to write the Distant yet, I don't think I will be until I'm already an established Author with 20 books under my belt to really have the ability to get my point across and have enough money to not care about the blowback it would cause

[Anonymous No.16488158]

>>16488148
Nice bait, I replied.

[Anonymous No.16488165]

>needing a special month to have enough discipline to work on a novel
This is as reddit as it gets

[Anonymous No.16488174]

>>16488148
You're insane! I like it. 1 & 2 I would love to see. 1 doesn't remind me of anything. 2 reminds a bit of Stardust by Neil Gayman. 3 sounds like Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon.

[Anonymous No.16488243]

>>16488165
yeah no, i write 1000 words a day on a different project, but this is a fun challenge to really push yourself, i have 5 novels and 4 novellas i've published on kindle direct

[Anonymous No.16488283]

>>16488174
Dude, the villian for 2 is one of the last sorcerers in the world, they've gotten to a point where muskets are a thing and magic is just rituals that can make things happen, and the sorcerer is in an incestual relationship with his mother

His mother had him kill the first girl who was nice to him, in a ritual sacrifice to increase his power, telling him that there is power in love...

and before the final battle, he sacrifices his mother...and his last words to her , after a deep loving kiss...there is power in love

[Anonymous No.16489614]

>>16488283
that's hilarious, I would read that.

[Anonymous No.16489728]

>>16488148
For first, the genius student shouldn't tell them he did it and the students find out through your mechanism and it becomes him vs them as they seek him out. You could put him as the other and slowly develop the story to explain what happened but you might want to use or avoid the style of it being normal then finding out "everything was a time lapse" thing.

[Anonymous No.16489772]

I think about it every year, but I can't even put together a coherent short story. A novel is out of the question.

[Anonymous No.16489915]

>>16489772
>thinking you need a coherent story in a world where Inherent Vice exists

[Anonymous No.16489917]

I've been seriously considering it this year for the first time.
I have an idea that I think might have some legs, but I'd like to hear your opinions.
It's an unconventional character study of a mid-twenties office worker who spends most of his free time writing niche fetish erotica about people being absorbed into floors. It would take place during the last week of his life, and the bulk of the novel would be composed of the seven stories he writes each day until his suicide, catalyzed by the long-awaited return of his favorite floor-absorption artist. It would explore themes of sexual shame, anxiety, arrested development, escapism, and alienation.
What do you guys think?
(btw I chose "floor absorption" partially because it seems plausible as a bizarre fetish even though nobody actually has it, so if it does happen to exist please let me know.)

[Anonymous No.16489925]

>>16489917
Maybe wait for the autobiography month.

[Anonymous No.16489927]

>>16489917
Nigger you are clearly writing about the /lit/ autist whose book was about being a sidewalk so he could get stepped on

[Anonymous No.16489949]

>>16489925
There's a little bit of me in the character, but not much.
>>16489927
I promise I haven't seen whatever post you're referring to. Again, I'm open to changing the fetish he writes about if it's too close to something real.

[Anonymous No.16490000]

>>16488148
A good book can't come from something as fucking gay as this shit.

[Anonymous No.16490079]

>>16488148
Is number one not Stein's Gate; American edition?

>>16489917
You must do it, but the bulk of the novel shouldn't be the stories - because there'll be no impetus. You should give him a love affair and describe how it's spoiled at every turn by his fantasy world, new developments in the erotica presaging intricate real life disasters.

[Anonymous No.16490135]

>>16490079
I definitely intend for the heart of the story to be outside of his writings, but I'm not sure if a love affair is the right through-line. I was thinking of having the character be in a running correspondence with another fetish writer (the irony being that their therapeutic empathy to each other only hurts them both in the long run), with the negative impact his hobby has on his irl relationships being shown more implicitly, though I don't know if I'd be able to pull that off.
As for the stories being premonitory, that's an interesting idea. I obviously intended the events, characters, and themes of the erotica to reflect and indicate certain things about the "real world" of the novel, but flipping that relationship a bit might be neat.
Tbh I came up with this idea partially as a joke to myself, but I'm starting to think it might actually be worth doing, if only to help me work through some personal issues.

[Anonymous No.16490183]

>>16490135
A love story was what came to mind because you need some sort of tension and something with stakes in it. Something like American Psycho, you have the tension of a murder dragging people through the irony and ranting. I don't know what kind of hook the real-world plot needs. Searching for somebody/private detective work? Climbing the corporate ladder? Trying to extract some vital service from a bureaucracy?

[Anonymous No.16490248]

>>16490183
I see what you mean. I had an idea that the book would start with the guy having an anxiety attack on the anniversary of the death of a family member, and the character would spend the week trying to understand if that family member had something to do with some unremembered childhood trauma that might have led him to where he is now, so that might work? I don't know. I think you're right that there needs to be some more immediate tension to hold the reader's interest, I'm just not confident that I could write an effective love story.

[BRK No.16490392]

>>16490248
Do it detective style then. Fuck anon, it's your story, but I'd roll the first chapters like this:

1. Guy has been charged with taking care of dead relative's computer/emails/unfinished affairs, is depressed, finds story on computer that seems to be about him.
2. At work, busy trying to google up the story's apparent author. Colleagues interrupt, guy is stricken by sudden attack of floor fetish. Awkwardness ensues.
3. At home, doxing the mystery author and finds another story online, seems to be explicitly about his office this time. Identifies weird fan community and decides to go there.
4. Goes to an IRL meetup of these writers searching for author. Colleague happens to pass by. Guy tries to greet colleague, hide that it's a porn meet and battle off recurrent floor boner all at once. End chapter cliffhanger - gets a message from the author...
5. There's a new story, disappointingly seems to have less direct relevance to him. But when guy goes to work, there's a new colleague in the office, and the events of the new story begin to occur for real.

[Anonymous No.16490439]

>>16490392
That's some good shit, dude. I doubt what I end up writing will bear much resemblance to that, but you've provided solid inspiration.

[Anonymous No.16491453]

>>16488148
I half-finished a couple of years ago (grad school bullshit got in the way), but this year I'm really going to attempt the full thing.
I have a couple of short-story ideas fleshed out, they're mainly horror, my favorite genre. Trying to see if I can flex the mystery/horror aspect without crossing the "cheesiness" line.
Main one about a dark spot appearing in the corner of the living room ceiling. Thinking its a water spot, the couple who live there attempt to fix it, but realize that there is no external cause. They try to scrape it off, figure out what its made of, what it smells like, and what it could be. It grows over time, slowly, and it drives the current couple into paranoia about what it is, what it means, and why it keeps getting bigger. It eventually devolves into derangement; the idea is to flesh out the downward spiral of this couple's mental state along with some symbolism for/from "the spot".
Inspired by the Cipher and The Neighbor (Dario Argento short film). I want to try and channel that same grimy feeling you get from reading The Cipher, but with more concrete attachment to reality and less schizo-metaphor-symbolism. I don't want an unreliable narrator until close to the end of the book.