/lit/ - Literature

>>4201501

i didn't say "brb i'm gonna write that because it's good"

It depends what point you are trying to argue.
The best thing would be practice, of course.

>>4201466
>partly because I had an idea for a fantasy story myself but that'll come later and partly because I just wanted to read some fantasy without dragons and srs busins political chess crap.

I know these feelings.

If I read one more story with a fucking dragon or an elf in it I'm going to go on a killing spree.

>>4201430

Pointless as fuck unless your character's driving characteristic is something related like being a narcoleptic greyhound bus driver who keeps waking up just before he plows into a tree and kills like 80 people, but somehow he miraculously survives the wreck uninjured and passes it off on mechanical failure each time because he knows that being diagnosed will cost him his job and as the story goes on he struggles to reconcile the guilt over his rapidly increasing body count by attempting to self-medicate for his condition with oodles and oodles of crystal meth

holy fuck brb i'm gonna write that story

>>3907612

Concise is one thing but I'll searbate all I want, thank you.

And yeah that's why I never finished it, it's ass.

>>3906767

I started to say that you suffer from the classic thesaurus abuse, but it might be more accurate to say that you're just trying to over-describe and arriving at the same feeling of being 'overwritten' (trying too hard).

If you want to see what I mean: take your first few sentences, write them out, then read over them and underline every adjective. You've got one stuck on to almost every noun there! "Appearance" is "genteel", "approach" is "courteous", "doubts" are "uncongenial", "nature" is "true" and "eyes" are "cold", and that's just in one sentence.

You don't have to be going for minimalism to be well-served by a little restraint, especially when the words you're choosing are so un-conversational; writing with a more academic or sophisticated tone is fine but remember that an uncommon word poorly placed is ten times as conspicuous to the reader as one they'd be more likely to hear on the street. Exercise reservation.

Try scratching all the adjectives out of that sentence and re-reading it, then adding them back one by one starting with whichever you feel is most vital to your meaning. Re-read after every one you re-add and really think about how it sounds; say it out loud as if you were reading it to someone (really do, because this is the most important part) - I bet you'll find there's a structure you're comfortable with the feel of long before you've had to re-add them all.

I hope this helps, but sorry in advance if I've made any mistakes in advising. As my other post shows, I'm no expert at this stuff either.

>This is the awful opening of an awful short story I was writing to submit to TAR (Yes I know, >TAR) last year. There's a lot more than this but I lost faith in it because my writing is shit, and gave up hope on ever finishing it. Kill me.

---

The ship's bow broke through the crest of the last high surge at the bay-mouth, and with that it settled into the open sea. The lurch of the deck almost tossed its passenger backward into the wheelhouse. He caught onto one of the siderails instead.

“Careful now, Silas!” Through the safety glass of the front window he could see the Captain of the craft laughing at him. The chubby older man looked down at the instruments, then back up, and rapped his fingers on the pane. “You're paying me for a round trip, not one-way with a burial at sea.” He was shouting like the cabin doors weren't open on either side of him.

Silas pulled himself up, a sore pain in his elbow from the jerk of catching his weight on the handrail. “I haven't been on a boat in decades,” he yelled back. It was still his fault, of course; he'd been leaning over the side of the craft, trying to get a better look at the horizon. “I wanted to sight the lighthouse. I didn't realize it'd be so rough leaving the harbor.” The captain shook his head and tossed a thumb back over his shoulder, toward land. The marina still barely looked to be behind them.

“Go out of your way trying to beat a hurricane, and you don't expect to get knocked around a little?”

>>3810470
>Again, I just admit shit and no-one seems to notice or care.

Nice to run into you, Bateman, but I don't think you'll like what the people here have made of your image.

I'm a hypochondriac and I probably have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Usually I can can that shit up in public but occasionally I will freak someone out making repetitive left-to-right movements with my eyes over and over while talking to them.

In before somebody tries to take advantage of my hypochondria by telling me this means I have a brain tumor. I got an MRI and a CAT to check for shit like that recently.

Are people who debate moral values over the internet engaging in Spooky Action at a Distance?

I like it. Are polymaths really a thing gone by?

>>3641768
>They were both professors at the same university

Wait, were they? I didn't know they were at the same one.

Imagine what it would've been like to go to that university and have both of them.

"Keaton" is, according to my mother, the name she would've given me if I'd been born the opposite gender. Everyone tells me it's not androgynous but it sounds like it should be to me, so I decided there was no harm in using it.
"Shake" because I used it as a fake surname while on a misadventure with some friends in college.

Polite sage because I don't think my answer is very /lit/erary.

>>3637428

I like the name, though I read "Loe" as "Lee" a couple times before I got it right. I can relate to your reason for taking it, too.

>>3637008

That's New Vegas. (Admittedly, I had to google to remember where I'd seen it). You must have adopted it fairly recently?

>>3602096

Reading that and getting to the last part reminded me of this image

A better question would be "Who are some famous, mentally stable writers?"

If I had to take a swing at answering technically, I'd say - and please forgive me if I fuck up the terminology, my formal knowledge of grammar is weak and always has been -

"Greentext compresses a narrative into a punctuated series of events, each briefly described in sentence fragments from which the Subject is often omitted."

If I had to come up with an academic name for it based on this, I'd probably call it something like "Punctuated Implied-Subject Style" which I like both because it involves
>implying
and abbreviates to PISS.

100, 100, 100, 93.
Fucking whomever.

"I’ve only had the opportunity to hold a hamster once," said Dakota Fanning on Gmail chat.

>>3577177

Hemingway could have felt that feel in three words, son. Read a little more!

>>3533562

Dropped in to say that I read this a year or so back, and - while I haven't read most of the other recommendations in here and so can't compare the usefulness of its advice - it was a lot of fun, and the hands-on way that it illustrates missteps (using excerpts of intentionally terrible text) is hilarious as well as helpful.

It's a bit like learning about bugs by having an entomologist show you live specimens in jars, except instead of beetles and roaches they're fanfiction.net users. I'd recommend it; even if you don't learn anything new, you're going to have a good time reading it.

>>3511403
>Talking to someone about reading
>"Oh I read all the time!"
>Ask them what they read.
>They start talking about Halo books.

But why?

>>3505661

Why would someone grill an egg?

>>3425929

It's... complicated. When I said "cutting out most of the bullshit", I -really- meant it. That, and I think it sounds very silly to just talk about. It's enough to say that transhumanism is a thematic focus at the later stages of the story, and those elements are supernaturally driven rather than technologically. There's a lot about the idea of identity in there, so I guess it's a subset of that.

The whole thing is very ridiculous. If I get talking about it, I probably won't shut up.

>>3425865

Cutting out most of the bullshit? It's about a high school kid who runs away from home after his best friend gets abducted. The setting is nonspecific, geography-wise, but the tone and technology is about ~1950s USA. If you mean thematically, that's a different case.

Unfortunately it has supernatural elements so /lit/ would hate it and I don't really talk about it here. It's really just something I do for my own satisfaction, because I've had the idea in my head for years and it won't go away. I don't have any illusions about it being great or publishing or anything like that. Excessive length still bothers me though, because I don't want it to be garbage even if nobody else ever sees it.