/lit/ - Literature

>>16043098
Wouldn't it be better to just write more instead of getting distracted with that kind of stuff? I queried my book to 50 agents and mostly got form rejections, and like three somewhat encouraging form rejections, but also a few encouraging comments like pic related. I feel like I'm 'close-ish' to getting published, but I'm lacking some secret or insight that'd make my books feel more real.

It also doesn't help that I'm an ESL writing in English, so my dialogue skills are really hard to develop as I don't have the opportunity to listen to real people speak. I've been watching Joe Rogan and old reality tv just to hear people talk in English in a way that's not a screenplay simulacrum.

I think it's the characters that are the weakest point in my writing. They just lack soul, they lack something that'd make them feel real. I don't know how to get it, how to reach it. I really struggle with that. When I was 13-15 years old, I was stupid enough to think of my characters as real people, and somehow that made me write them better.

Now that I'm 24, all my technical writing skills are better, but I've lost that spark of real character because I can no longer fool myself that they're anything but a construct.

It's sad. I guess the post-modern way is to just construct, not to intuit. Most people won't tell the difference but to me there's something missing. Sorry to be rambling, it just keeps me up. It's 10am, I haven't slept. I wrote 176 words of my book today, I can't do any more because I get an existential dread feeling that it's all pointless. But I write every single day, so I can crank out a novel in a year despite the low daily wordcount.