/lit/ - Literature

>>15695100
I'm rather famous in my imagination

As soon as I'm done with comp sci and get my degree I'll start writing, for now I'm gathering material for my light novel.
Oh I have to get a wagie job to slave away first.
Oh and I have to reach a certain position that would allow me some free time.
I'd say in 20 years I can start writing my light novel.

>>15695304
:(

>>15695100
>Saving up money to spend two years writing and travelling.
>Mother kicks me out without warning
>Sets off a chain of events that wastes more than 2 years of my life
Not good, anon. I feel like death. Thanks for asking.

>>15695100
Can I post a short excerpt from my novel and get an honest opinion?

>>15695304
There's always time to write

>>15695431
Yes anon, I want to read it with my breakfast.

>>15695100
I've quite a few decent fragments, sentiments, and lines I've written down over the years but no stories. I can't even think of a character or premise.

>>15695431
Of course

>>15695437
Arekusandoru Bayramoglu put down the book he was reading and took a long drag from the hookah. The mint-flavored smoke freshened his throat for a few moments, then, expelled, it dissolved quickly.
Bayramoglu caressed the cover of the tome he had been reading :an anthology of translated Basho’s haikus that included parallel original texts. The translation was obviously very superfluous for him, but he enjoyed the soliloquial comment of the translator’s lemmatic choices. Bashō in particular was one of his most beloved poets, along with Kovačić and Montherlant, although his wide-ranging readings had familiarized him with authors from virtually all around the world and with most genres. In the last years he had dared composing some verses himself, on a diary hidden, according to the cliche, in one of his desk’s drawers.
His exquisite humanistic culture had not prevented him from excelling in business, and that is why, as a forty-five years old man, he was leading one of the country's most known and successful brokering firms, in building which he was helped by, it has to be said, his psychological Dark triad (machiavellism, narcissism and psychopathy) and by his many links to criminological Yellow triads.

>>15695100
Published once this year (by an actual journal with a wikipedia) and two in small indie online journals (doesn't really amount to anything, but I get to flex a bit)

>>15695468
Decent anon, can't pick much wrong with i.

>>15695468
>>Arekusandoru Bayramoglu put down the book he was reading and took a long drag from the hookah.
stopped reading there

>>15695506
Please elaborate on this

>>15695100
I'm currently planning a litrpg I can shill for patreonbux, with any luck I'll be getting up to 100 dollars a month

I work in STEM making $126k/yr
So my writing career is going badly :(

13k words. i can probably push it to 25 but have no idea how i could make it novel length

>>15695559
>Tfw 19
>Tfw 750k net worth

>>15695506
>>15695468
same also stopped reading there
I don't want to read that longass pajeet name

>>15695559
>>15695571
>18 years old
>make 800k a day
>no time to write
>mfw

>>15695437
Not when you're a prooooocrastinatooor
>>15695468
>Arekusandoru Bayramoglu
Top fucking kek

>>15695604
Start writing right now, write a 1000 word story that'll take fuck all time.

>>15695100
Does shitposting count?

>>15695100
Slow but steady. Self-published trash, self-published slightly better trash, took a year off and improved basic writing skills dramatically, got a deal with an indie publisher, a couple of books with them, positive reviews but no breakout success, self-published a bit more. Goal this year is to finish my next book and find an agent. Learning what I can about the publishing industry and storytelling. Each book is better than the last. Made a significant leap with my last one.

>>15695100
got to make my trash books

>>15695100
I got a boost of confidence after participating in the Coronameron. Right now I'm looking at 4 different writing contests that I'm thinking of participating in.
>1 is to write a crime short story
>2 is to write 35k words about the theme "forest"
>3 is a fantasy/sci-fi novella
>4 is a YA novel
I don't expect to succeed with any of them, but I still feel like actually giving it a go for the first time in my life.

>>15695468
Dude, it’s bad. Not “you should give up” bad, but “you just like to hear yourself talk “ bad. Though you manage to squeeze in a lot of information in paragraph, you convey no emotion. Thus, the character feels fake. I gather that this guy should be cool (rich, cultured, underworld-connected), but he ends up making your prose feel try hard. My advice is that you scrap this part entirely and try to convey the same information through action, maybe him interacting with another character. Maybe he gifts that book of haikus to another businessman who is a philistine, but the later still indulges him because he wants to suck up to him, because he is such a big shot. Just an idea. Also the name is fucking stupid.

>>15696085
How did you increase your basic skills and how do you KNOW that you did?

>>15696430
Mind sharing the links to contests anon?

>>15695581
>mfw Elon Musk
>mfw not Isaac Asimov

>>15695100
i've given up before i even tried

>>15695100
Got a contract with a big 5 publisher for a political thriller (scheduled end of 2021). Anything in mind I could add to icen the cake?

>>15696617
Good advice, thanks. If you felt that this was pretentious the original language version is probably even worse, kek

>>15696876
With pleasure.

It’s easier to cut than to put in. Cut out some of the modifiers (adverbs and adjectives). Use the backstory and make the Bayram dude do something before you tell us about him.

>>15695100
I'm still in the stages of copying what I like and tweaking it to fit a different narrative.
I'm having a lot of trouble with deciding what kind of prose to use; whenever I post in /crit/ aping McCarthy's style I get praise but I can never transfer that to a genuine story.
I feel like I'm much better at writing something that borderlines on poetry than I am writing in my default style.

I'm working on the last third of my first novel. I want to keep it at a nice, compact 50k, maybe 55k.

>>15695100
I've given up. It's a waste of time

I get published like once or twice a year, usually in mid sized mags, Keep trying for the big ones but so far they're not crazy about my stuff.

I'm working on my 6th book now, haven't had any of them published. This one might very well be my masterpiece, it's fucking nuts. It's actually driving me a little bit crazy as I write it, i think, that and the fact that I can only get like 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night anymore.

Earlier this year, I wrote a journalistic piece about covid, sent it off to a fairly big name place that was looking for covid pieces. They wrote me back a few days later and said they'd publish it immediately. I was really on cloud-9 after that....then a few hours later they wrote me back and said they were so sorry, but they made a mistake, somebody pressed the wrong button to accept it, and they actually won't be publishing it.

I can't even described how pissed off and humiliated I was. I think I wrote a reply back that was basically just a bunch of spastic fuck yous. After that though, I was like shit, now everything has happened.

>>15697204
Apparently 60k is the industry standard anon.

>>15697219
want to share anything?

>>15697279
Not really, bad things happen when you break anonymity, bromo.

I just pirated scrivener, so I feel like I'm really starting.

>>15695559
>>15695571
>>15695581
We all know these feels.

>>15696736
But constantly reading it back to yourself and self-analyzing what does and doesn't work.
>KNOW
Share it with friends/family/peers so they can read it and give feedback. Obviously you have to vet them a little bit so you don't get 100 mom responses of "it's great honey I loved it"; know that at least some of the people will give you honest, hard critique. If you know nobody like that in real life AND don't trust your own judgement/quality-assessment, I'm sure there's plenty of resources online to pay somebody to edit your stuff, at the very least. Also keep in mind that if you're not self-publishing, the publisher will assign you an editor before the product is considered finalized.

>>15697259
That's why he said compact.

>>15697386
For publishing though.

I’m doing everything in fountain pen these days, I organized all my notebooks by ink color. Working on one genre per ink color I have... One of these is bound to be successful.

>>15695100
abyssmal

>>15696824
Congrats. That's amazing news. What was your advance? What agency are you with?

>>15696736
I increased my skills by copying out well-written novels in order to analyze them and also by working as a copyeditor for a high-end client. It's not that I learned the specific style of the novels or my client, but rather that working with words all day for a long period of time taught me how to build sentences and paragraphs. From a grammar/technical perspective, switching styles is relatively easy. It's just playing around with words and punctuation. Switching storytelling styles is much more difficult.

I know that I did by looking back on my old work and noticing many ways to improve it that I did not notice before. Also, my subsequent novels are better on a technical level but also in storytelling. More foreshadowing, distinct character tags, snappier dialog, much tighter chapters, much better pacing, wrapping up plotlines in a more satisfying manner, and creating character arcs. There remains much for me to improve, but it feels good to know that I am improving and heading in the direction I want to go.

Finished my first draft few days ago, 146000 words in total. Of course I will trim it down to two third of that amount. Also started the second draft yesterday and discovered that editing and beautifying words are much more enjoyable than shitting out plot development and scenes

>>15696085
Well done, mate. That's the way to do it.

>>15696744
No but can you read and write Finnish?

Poorly overall. Read my stories. Buy my books.

https://awfiction.wordpress.com/

>>15697704
What are they about?

>>15697704
>Ward
TINKER

>>15697723
Mostly essimistic speculative fiction type stuff. One is about a janitor in a kind of exaggerated transhumanist future. One, which a magazine is actually supposed to publish and pay me for this summer, is about aliens returning to earth to recover their dead after a war.

>>15697815
I hope you do well!

>>15697682
I am afraid not. Thanks anyway pal and good luck with the contests. I suppose I should look for some english ones.

It's not.

>>15696085
How much time do you put in on a daily basis?

>>15697259

A very basic search of novels that clock in under 60k (or even 50k) words will steamroll this comment.

>>15698582

There is no industry standard to length.

From a publisher's view, length is never that big of a factor, unless of course it's way too big and bloated.

>>15697204
>>15697259
I'm fooling myself. My endgame was 90K after chapter planning, and I've only got 13K so far.
Literally going to die before I finish.

>>15698745
>>15698582
I've been going off my own research and I saw most big publishers want the works to be 60k or so depending on genre. I don't give a fuck what length somebodys book is.

>>15698745
Publishers want different lengths for different genres. For example, there is a 40-80k difference between middle grade and adult SFF. Debut novels are usually on the shorter end of the spectrum, as the production is more expensive and there is greater risk involved.

>>15698567
It varies depending on my work load. If I have an intensive day job contract, then I might not do anything more than outline and plan until I'm through the crunch, which can take as long as two months. But normally I write every day and aim for 3k/day, which is achievable and sustainable if I am caffeinated and focused. I find blocking off sections of the day for specific tasks to be very useful. I also learned the hard way to stick to my daily word count goal.

>>15695501
What

>>15699151
>Publishers want different lengths for different genres. For example, there is a 40-80k difference between middle grade and adult SFF. Debut novels are usually on the shorter end of the spectrum, as the production is more expensive and there is greater risk involved.

The length of the book, and general costs of making the book in general, is pretty minuscule compared to things like marketing. Especially these days when printing technology has become so advanced.

That's one thing amateurs constantly obsess over, but publishers don't put all that much thought into it.

>>15695100
I don't know what to write. Fantasy, SF, or an autoobiography maybe. Really idk

>>15699374
I agree for the most part, but there are expectations from both publishers and readers. A publisher will never release a 120k debut middle grade novel. That word count is on the high end for an adult SFF debut. Publishers don't think about it because agents do not approach them with wildly unsuitable manuscripts.

>>15699680

Like I already said...unless a novel is like ridiculously big, that's for the most part what they're worried about.

They don't put all that much thought into it otherwise. You can always spot clueless internet board lurkers in their query letters because they always brag about how short their novel is and how cheap it'll be to publish.

>>15699700
Like I already said...word count matters for genre. This is common knowledge. Pitch a 120k middle grade to an agent. See what happens.

>>15695355
what happened dude?

>>15699859
>This is common knowledge

Yeah...to idiots.

I bought an pack of envelopes, printed copies of a few of my poems and short stories and I was ready to send them in to a few journals, but I chickened out at the last moment because I realised it's all cringe shit, no matter what the people who've read them tell me.

>>15700196
Only idiots pitch a middle grade novel written to an adult length.

Terrified to actually write because I'm surveillance technology/AI is at the point where probably somebody could dig up my old 4chan posts and connect them to me within the next ten years, and whereas artists and intellectuals of the past used to be considered cool and sexy for writing socially subversive literature now they just get socially blacklisted and economically filtered.

Thinking of starting a secret society though.

Hadn't written anything in over two years, but Fellini inspired me recently. Working on my first novel has so far been the most fun I've had in some time.

I’m a casual writer, so writing is more of a hobby for me. But, I push myself to write 2000 words a day. I realized I need a schedule and that I’m not one of those on the whim writers.

I wrote a few erotica stories on smashwords and I have made 11 dollars from them

haven't been writing lately bc I got surgery on my balls and I'm scared to get horny lol

>>15700420
>Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
this /tv/ guy? why?

i need to chop my novel into 2 (or even 3) and rework it. fundamental story is good but the presentation isn't the best, namely due to self imposed word count limits. (and no, it isn't /sffg/ shit.) just been too lazy (frantic with other things) to start this behemoth of a task.

>>15695100
Submitted to a literary publication for the first time today. I finally have a handful of polished pieces of short fiction from the last year or so that rise above anything I've done in the handful of years that I've been actively working at writing. I'm in a writing workshop groupchat that gets contributed to semifrequently and my submissions often have the fewest criticisms. My goal is to get 30 rejection letters by the end of this year.