/lit/ - Literature

/lit/, I've spent the past decade of my life pursuing a state of consciousness I found inside myself more profound than any happiness I ever knew but now I realize it was only profound because I wasn't capable of comprehending happiness and confused the absence of immediate suffering with joy.

i thought I was destroying myself for something that felt more meaningful, and I had hope because it's so much easier to destroy than fix. Now I realize I'm fighting the exact same unwinnable battle everyone else has for millions of years, and the only difference between me and them is that I was conceited enough to believe I found something better than winning.

/lit/, I have a problem. A few years back I wrote my first novel and it turned out terrific. Now I'm struggling to repeat it

the issue is, I look at the work I churn out now and it's worse than the stuff I wrote before. It's not just my taste getting better, I've gone back and compared.

I can only think of three possible reasons for this
>1: I've gotten stupider or learned bad habits that I don't know how to unlearn
>2: I'm misremembering how bad the first novel was before editing
>3: It's because I lost my passion back in august and still haven't gotten it back

I'm not sure what the issue is, and I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I just know that I need to write to respect myself, and that writing badly is demoralizing. Any tips?

Life's never going to back to normal, is it?

/lit/, I'm getting worse and worse at writing the more I practice and it's shredding my soul. What am I supposed to do?

>in b4

>just keep writing, you'll get better
>writing is a process of incremental improvement
>it's two steps forward and one step back
I've been writing on and off for five years and I'm only getting worse. when is this "incremental improvement" supposed to happen?

>don't compare yourself to other people
>focus on how much you've grown
>don't worry what other people think, just write something you think is good
I'm not even showing my writing to other people. I'm comparing myself to myself and seeing that I've only gotten worse

>you can't expect your writing to look good the first time
>nothing looks good before you edit it
the first time I wrote a novel it was better than this from the start.

>take a break
I took one for two months. I didn't get any better

/lit/, I lost interest in writing back in september but kept writing for four months because I was afraid of losing my desire to write permanently. So far I still haven't gotten it back and I'm also not writing anymore

I've lost hobbies before /lit/, I don't want to lose my writing

dammit /sffg/, I'm not sure what I can do at this point. I stopped writing long enough for my anxiety to catch up to me, and now I'm overwhelmed by the idea of going back to it knowing how much shit I'm going to have to re-write and how bad the scene I left off on was. this sucks.

>>14738867
honestly, I don't consume a lot of zombie fiction, but I just re-read This Book Is Full Of Spiders, and for a zombie book that's pure fantasy – and comedic fantasy at that – It has some of the best scientific analyses of zombies I've ever seen. The trick is It's a sociological dissection rather than an epidemiological one. It not only addresses the role and symbolism of zombies in pop culture, but heavily implies the villains engineered the virus to be zombie-like and intentionally followed a whole bunch of zombie tropes just so they could use zombie apocalypse psychology to control the masses