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/lit/ - Literature

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6754344 No.6754344 [Reply] [Original]

Any tips on becoming a better screenwriter (or writer in general)? I realize this is /lit/ not /tv/, but it seems a board dedicated to literature is more appropriate than one dedicated to arguing over GoT deaths.

Not obvious stuff, things you've learned from extensive writing that struck a chord with you personally.

>> No.6754377

>>6754344
No writers on this evening?

>> No.6754388

>>6754344
"There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”—Kafka

>> No.6754392

>>6754388
Interesting quote, thanks anon.

>> No.6754395

>>6754344
It's hard to know what to tell you without knowing how long you've been writing and how far you've gotten professionally.

>> No.6754397

>>6754377
>writers
>on lit
You really are from /tv/, aren't you?

>> No.6754400

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q_kEDJSywQ

>> No.6754406

>>6754344
Borges is based:

"Intelligence has little to do with poetry. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom. It's a thing of its own; it has a nature of its own. Undefinable."

"... The Shadow Line. In that foreword he (Joseph Conrad) said that some people have thought that the story was a fantastic story because of the captain's ghost stopping the ship. He wrote—and that struck me because I write fantastic stories myself—that to deliberately write a fantastic story was not to feel that the whole universe is fantastic and mysterious; nor that it meant a lack of sensibility for a person to sit down and write something deliberately fantastic. Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious.”

"But I think the whole root of the matter lies in the fact that when a writer is young he feels somehow that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament, under words taken from the seventeenth-century writers; or, if not, and he sets out to be modern, then he does the contrary: He's inventing words all the time, or alluding to airplanes, railway trains, or the telegraph and telephone because he's doing his best to be modern. Then as time goes on, one feels that one's ideas, good or bad, should be plainly expressed, because if you have an idea you must try to get that idea or that feeling or that mood into the mind of the reader. "

>> No.6754413

>>6754395
4 years, won some competitions but nothing more. I consider myself capable, but not exceptional.

>> No.6754417

>>6754400
Good link, I've seen it, but for others I agree it's worth a watch.

>> No.6754421

Dooferw:

"What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality--and then if it's authentic, and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

>> No.6754428

I don't know why nobody likes James Chapman.

Anyway, this is what he said:

"Like, here you are, you are Brandon, you exist on this planet now. You’ve never been seen before. Your experience and your emotions are completely unique, like a fingerprint. So why, HOW would you write a book that sounded like Dashiell Hammett, or Kathy Acker, or Don Delillo? How could that even happen? If you write as yourself, it’s going to be a voice I’ve never heard before. And then if you’re also amazing, that’s what I want to publish."

>> No.6754430
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6754430

I'm sure by now I'm starting to sound like a broken record. Or whatever one might say these days.

>> No.6754431

>>6754428
I really like this, haven't heard it either.

>> No.6754443

>>6754430
Seen this. Great advice, but how does one consciously set aside the desire to succeed? How do you abandon the need for affirmation when we're becoming smaller and smaller within society?

>> No.6754446

>>6754443
Maybe exchange the universal for the particular?

Write for one person whom you love or just for yourself.

>> No.6754464

>>6754446
Surprisingly simple idea, haven't fully considered it. Not bad.

You /lit/ anons aren't a bad bunch.