/lit/ - Literature

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730562]

>Wrote a novel.
>Was aware of it's amateurish nature and excessive Bret Easton Ellis influence, however I was invigorated by my small accomplishment.
>Dropped out of school to write a second novel ("Fuck it, now or never," was my meager defense).
>Three years later:
>Still living with my parents.
>Handful of rejection slips from The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Atlantic Monthly, etc. for short stories I coughed up in my downtime.
>Second novel remains unfinished.
>My promotion at Savers to floor manager this afternoon was more of an insult than a reward.
>Turns out I'm actually a pretty bad writer.
>my dad's face when we all realized I count as a failed writer now.

I should have listened to Bukowski.

[jew !!6P/WhzicJTl No.1730570]

Oh well. I'm a college drop out too. I know that feel.

[None !KPok7x0csI No.1730571]

hi. do you <3 your parents?

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730576]

>>1730571
My father can be kind of a dick sometimes but I really have to give them credit for putting up with me since I dropped out.

[Anonymous No.1730581]

i've always been afraid of this. but this year i'm in the last year of an honours degree so if i drop out they'll just give me a regular degree instead. but then again, an undergraduate in psychology isn't worth shit; it's like an arts degree but you're uncreative. oh well we've gotta die eventually right - can't worry for too long.

[Anonymous No.1730583]

dude you do know the majority of writers take years to get anywhere

for every mary shelley there's writers who spend half their lives writing before they get anywhere

be proud you can produce anything and improve

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730587]

>>1730581
That was pretty much how I felt about the English Lit degree I would have earned. I figured if I got the degree, I'd come home and write until I got published, which is essentially what I'm doing now, so I didn't want to bother with it if I could be a failure for free.

[Anonymous No.1730589]

>>1730587
go participate in workshops and shit

if your writing sucks then you need someone to be there along the way that can critique you

be sure to get someone that actually reads good novels on a regular basis

also, examine the type of shit whatever the journal you target accepts

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.1730594]

Repeat after me:
"Fuck the reader."
Give it a nice lilt, now.
"Fu-UUCK the rea-DURR"
Now go work on your shit. Polish your turds. You've been practicing doing that with your life, apparently, now apply that skill to your writing.
Also you don't understand Bukowski. He was telling you to go get a nice fat belly and come back when you're unhappy with that too. That's exactly what he did, along with saying "fuck the reader." "Don't try," isn't just something he said before Yoda could come along and fuck up the syntax.
Acceptance and reward are like happiness: they're usually by-products. Sometimes they're a clue that you just might be on the right track, but by no means do they signify a good job itself.

[jew !!6P/WhzicJTl No.1730596]

post a sample of something that you've written

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730602]

>>1730594
I was making a vague, half assed reference to "friendly advice to a lot of young men," not that.

>>1730596
gimme a sec

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730603]

I'll post an excerpt of a short I wrote in three parts. bear with me.

1/3
Tom let me in whether he knew it or not. The party had just arrived and I was the first one in, walking up the stairs of the one bedroom apartment to use the bathroom, instead of going to George's apartment to get the table. As soon as I walked in, I expected to find Sara, and I wondered if we would make some sort of furtive eye contact, our own private greeting.

Sara wasn't there. In fact, the apartment was entirely empty save for a secondhand couch in the living room. Tom and Sara were just starting out in Los Angeles, so they couldn't afford the money or the time to decorate yet. I climbed the stairs to the loft, half expecting to be surprised by her, but instead, I saw where they slept.

They had no bed, no mattress. A square mat laid out on the floor under a few bedsheets. Two white pillows sat next to eachother at the top of the arrangement, and I wondered which was his, which was hers. I wondered how she felt when they slept together at night.

I came back downstairs to find Tom alone at the kitchen counter. Tom was my old roommate from college. Back when we lived together, we got to smoking weed together everyday. Whenever we weren't smoking from his bong, he was rolling joints, and Tom was one of the best joint rollers I'd ever met. Andy and Jack joined us frequently, too, and they were going to be at the party tonight. It was a reunion of the best of friends. I'd missed them.

“Hey man,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “Check this shit out,” and I presented a plastic bag filled with grass. Party favors.
“How much is that?”
“Enough for a felony,” I joked, “I was worried we might get pulled over the whole drive over here. I had serious jail time in my pocket the whole time. Aaron has even more on him, too. We're gonna get high as fuck tonight.”

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730604]

>>1730603
2/3

I walked over to the other side of the counter to put the bag down, and to talk to Tom. I saw post-it notes stuck to the counter, next to the coffee machine. One of them read, “I'll be back later. I love you,” and I couldn't tell who had written it for who, but its sincerity was endearing.

“I'll roll a joint right now and we'll smoke it when the others get back,” Tom said, taking the bag, “Then we'll save the rest for when Andy gets here later.”

While Tom rolled the joint, I wandered over to the couch and took a seat. There was a lamp in the corner on the floor, plugged into the wall. A naked stack of DVDs next to it, but no television. I thought about the bedsheets upstairs and the post-its on the counter. So very domestic. The story that the aggregate of these images presented was one of a young couple, in love, starting out to face the world together, and their potential seemed vast and unbridled. I thought of my part in it and dramatic irony hung on my heart like a damp cloth. I wondered where Sara was but I felt like my asking would be inappropriate so I held my tongue.

The others came in. The joint was lit.

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730605]

>>1730604
3/3

Anybody who smokes weed understands that the rotation is a sacred thing. The rotation is where friends are made and bonds are formed. It's intimate. Everybody facing eachother, sharing a joint or a blunt, talking, joking, everybody getting high. When everybody's on the same level like you are in a rotation, communication goes beyond words and gestures-- feelings are shared. It's a relationship with the weed and with eachother.

We passed the joint around a few times, getting higher and higher, before it went out on Tom's turn.
“Aw, shit, I hate lighting roaches.”
“You got the short end, dude.”

While I watched Tom try to relight an essentially dead and burnt out joint, I ventured to ask of Sara's whereabouts in the most casual voice I could.

I pretended to only just notice her absence. “Oh, hey, dude, where's Sara at?”
Tom answered without looking at me. “She's at work.”
“Oh okay. Here, pass me that thing.”
He passed me the roach. “Dude, she works at Six Flags.”
“Oh yeah?” I replied, lighting the roach and pretending I didn't already know that. “That's pretty neat.”

[Anonymous No.1730609]

The twilight saga exists, you can't possibly fail in writing books

[Anonymous No.1730612]

>implying you can't fail at writing but be successful at the same time

ethics. do you want to make money and churn out something like twilight or be poor and try to write americas greatest novel

[Anonymous No.1730615]

It's true - you do suck.

But you've got nothing to lose. And also, who the fuck submits to the fucking New Yorker on their first go these days?

Use Duotrope, find someone who doesn't pay but has a high acceptance rate. Get accepted. Then repeat until established.

Fucking idiots. Honestly. All those magazines are the hardest markets to get into. Even established writers get rejected in those magazines.

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.1730614]

>>1730603
How much do you edit? It seems like this hasn't really been cut down much. You're lazy with your details, or it seems like that to me because it's a common rut I fall into too.

[Anonymous No.1730617]

>>1730603
>"We're gonna get high as fuck tonight"

Stop writing about pot and rich kids with entitlement issues.

Stop trying to be a cross between Bukowski and Ellis. There's your problem. Fixed.

NEXT.

[Anonymous No.1730618]

Alright... We just read three paragraphs, what did we learn from those three paragraphs? Fucking nothing, that's what. We learned these kids like to get high, and Sara works at Six Flags.

Woo-dee-fucking-doo. If it's not necessary, and doesn't progress the story, cut it out of the story. And trust me, none of what you just posted was necessary. So cut it.

It's bad writing.

[Anonymous No.1730620]

>>1730562
Jesus Christ, this sounds like my life in a decade's time.

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.1730621]

Also writers have done drugs more than Keith Richards has done drugs.
You have to accept that they're never more than a plot device, not a subject.

[Anonymous No.1730625]

Dear OP.

This is /lit/, where we discuss books that are already written and published. We don't give a crap about your writing career. Come back when you have a published novel.

[Kowalski !!pAsAsF7aiqx No.1730627]

>>1730618
Thanks, this is actually pretty helpful.

Question though: this story is about infidelity. The narrator goes on to fuck tom's girlfriend. My intention was to establish a vague connection between the narrator and Sara early on that would keep the reader wondering what it was all about until it actually happened. How far off was I?

[Anonymous No.1730633]

lol, Buk said that you shouldn't press writing out of you like you press out a turd. It must flow through you, carry you, you shouldn't resist it. And Buk wrote shitload of stuff. Most sucked so much that even he threw it out.

[Anonymous No.1730635]

>>1730621
this. i'm so sick of fucking stoners who think they're rebels leading humanity on its way to freedom. weed ain't shit. everyone smokes weed at some time or another. it's over-rated, stop talking about it please.

also, everyone here's going to be hyper-critical of your shit so don't post it - if people ask, fuck them. we're bored and our standards are too high. even if you were the next proust 75% of us would hate your tiny excerpts - and only the hateful or hyper-desperate-for-their-own-compliments give critiques on shit.

[Anonymous No.1730638]

>>1730621
This.

We all know what it's like.

You spent three paragraphs describing a plant being on fire, and inhaled.

Think about it for five seconds. Does that really sound so interesting? Because your audience doesn't think so.

[Anonymous No.1730639]

>>1730635
this

[Anonymous No.1730642]

>Implying we aren't in the golden tail-end of the adolescence of comic books and the best way into the publishing industry is through writing stupid shit for comics
>Implying comics don't thrive on bad writing
>Implying this isn't coming to an end

Get in quick, and write some wack scifi shit.
Also, integrity comes after money and a foot in the door. COMIX, yo.

[Anonymous No.1730649]

>Anybody who smokes weed understands that the rotation is a sacred thing. The rotation is where friends are made and bonds are formed. It's intimate. Everybody facing eachother, sharing a joint or a blunt, talking, joking, everybody getting high. When everybody's on the same level like you are in a rotation, communication goes beyond words and gestures-- feelings are shared. It's a relationship with the weed and with eachother.

We passed the joint around a few times, getting higher and higher, before it went out on Tom's turn.
“Aw, shit, I hate lighting roaches.”
“You got the short end, dude.”

While I watched Tom try to relight an essentially dead and burnt out joint, I ventured to ask of Sara's whereabouts in the most casual voice I could.

I pretended to only just notice her absence. “Oh, hey, dude, where's Sara at?”
Tom answered without looking at me. “She's at work.”
“Oh okay. Here, pass me that thing.”
He passed me the roach. “Dude, she works at Six Flags.”
“Oh yeah?” I replied, lighting the roach and pretending I didn't already know that. “That's pretty neat.”

'We smoked weed and talked.'
It'll break your heart, but cut everything waaay the fuck down. Trim that hedge with a flamethrower.

[Anonymous No.1730675]

blah blah blah

look at me

i write and smoke weed

why don't you make like an Ernest Hemingway and shoot yourself in the face?

[Anonymous No.1730678]

>>1730635

yeah literally this, unless you're bringing something new to the table in discussing drugs, which it's unlikely you are, it's just all been done. and weed is such a lame sack of crap anyway that i find it hard to believe anyone would have ever bothered writing about it in the first place

for the most part drugs only becomes interesting if you start looking at them in wider social terms

mephedrone was a huge thing for about 6 months here in the UK for instance, and not much has been written about it, but there's some pretty interesting things surrounding it

for one it was the most prominent example of the 'legal high' phenomenon so you had a whole range of people who would otherwise never do drugs taking it as though it's safe etc. when in fact it's probably worse for your heart than any other drug, and it doesn't really bring about any shift in perception or consciousness, it's more like baby's first cocaine than anything

then there's the actual drug itself, which if fitted into a broader history of drug culture in the UK brings up some interesting points, for instance the way that in the 90s everyone was on ecstasy and going to raves, feeling like they could change the world, that utopia was possible, forming a real sense of collective love for humanity etc.

but fast forward to now and with shit like mephedrone we have something which is like the inverse, perfectly reflecting the mindset of a generation adapting to the narcissism of facebook and the hopeless aggression of dubstep in the inertial landscape of late capitalism. it's main trait is basically turning you into an huge, overly talkative egotist who, as soon as you start coming down, simply wants to consume more of the stuff

[Anonymous No.1730684]

lol whats up with your main character? is he a tard or something?

[Anonymous No.1730706]

Hey dude, don't give up. Learn what the publishers like. For example I live in Czech Republic and lots of publishers have unsetled score with commies, so as long as your novel message is "commies = pure satanic evil" you get published. As you live in much larger and diverse country you'll gonna have it a bit harder, but with a bit of legwork, you should be published in no time even if your novels are steaming piles of shit.