/lit/ - Literature

>>16508590
What are you writing about?

>>16508590
>Do you think you can write a 50,000 word noven in 30 days?
IDK, in september I went back to writing and wrote three short stories, each with 7-8k words.

>>16508717
Oh y'know, the usual solipsistic nonsense.

>>16508590
I get ideas I want to write about, but I don't write them down and forget about them after. The only thing I write ATM is smut, which I don't think counts.

Will postmodernism truly die soon and make the novel relevant again? Because right now I don't see the point of writing novels.

>>16508748
there never was a point besides entertaining bored homestuck women. just ask jane austen.

>>16508748
>postmodernism
>don't see the point of writing novels.
can you explain this to me? I'm a brainlet.

>>16508737
Have you done it before? I did twice when I was in high school and then I tried again a few years later but really just lost interest. The third go was definitely more on the solipsistic nonsense side and I think that's where I lost interest. Not the first two were any better but they had an actual plot and characters and I planned them out pretty well. I'm more into writing short stories now so I doubt I'll do it this year but I always like seeing the ideas thrown around in these threads.

>>16508590
I have 2 chapters of a fantasy novel written but I haven't touched the manuscript in a few weeks. It would be good to work on it more but I'll be studying for my finals in November so the timing is bad.

>>16508770
He's trying to make an excuse for his laziness and lack of discipline. Those who truly have vision carry out their work whether it reaches 10 people or 10,000.

>>16508806
>Have you done it before?
Tried and failed many times until last year. I was the only person in the discord to reach the goal. A few others got close though.

Remember you don't necessarily have to write a novel if it doesn't fit your idea. You could just work on enough short stories to hit 50k. The whole purpose of the event is simply to force you to write.

>>16508736
I'm so jealous. I wish I could go back to writing without failing.

>>16508846
Why can't you?

>>16508846
>>16508896
You just gotta beleeb in yourself and push forward, friend.

>>16508899
Yeah, man. Fake it till you make it.

>>16508896
>>16508899
Whenever I start a story I get so excited and optimist but once I stop to go to sleep or whatever and try to keep on writing it, it just makes me feel nauseous. I've been told that I need to soldier on and ignore this feeling but it's just so hard. I used to love doing this, why can't I love it now?

>>16508927
Yeah I think you're placing too much emphasis, perhaps not even consciously, on needing to feel inspired to write. Writing is a lot like vomiting, I think. Once you do it once you generally don't have to do it again but if I go on a bender and chug half a handle of Fireball I really need to be on top of throwing up again to get that shit out of me, even if my stomach is momentarily appeased. That's all I got. Don't drink Fireball.

>>16508590
I wrote a 9000 word short story in a couple weeks back in April, a 13,000 word short story in August and a 19,000 word novella in September.

>>16508590
I’ve lost and won and lost again and I’ll give it another shot. Too bad write ins are cancelled, I’ve met some cool people through past ones.

>>16509614
>Too bad write ins are cancelled

I will take your word for that but I really cannot imagine meeting anyone who wasn't painfully embarrassing at such a gathering.

this seems pretty neat but all I've been doing is prompts daily for the last 2 or 3 month, I have a bunch of settings in my brain but I'm not very good at long stories so I just write dumb vignettes. I'm fine writing something terrible to learn something though, got any advice team?

>>16508590
Yeah, I failed last time, but the 30K I managed gave me salvageable material for an 8K story that I think worked out okay. Looking forward to whatever crazy shit anons try out this time.

>>16508827
Have you gone back to your NaNo novel after finishing the first draft?

Did NaNo last year, the Discord was great. Discovered some things about myself as a writer, got around 35k words out. Scrapped my first story, since it was melodramatic hamfisted shite. Think I've got something with this novel I'm working on now.

>>16511378
Yeah but I haven't put much effort into revising it.

I've been writing daily for 25 days now, and just hit the 30k word mark

NaNo is broken as a concept, but how do I get a link to the discord server? This is a 4chan discord server for nano, not a nano discord, right?

>>16510219
Yeah. Writing prompts is pretty good. I was doing it some time ago, too. As for writing long stories, I expanded some of these prompts, the ones which I enjoyed liking the most, for instance; most of what I wrote for these prompts were vignettes too, or just short scenes of 100-1k words (yeah, I know), however some of the ideas stayed with me and I later expanded on them, turning some into 7-10k words short stories.

so is this meant to just bang out poorly written drafts?

>>16511935
You can do it bossman.

>>16511951
I don't know if anyone has made the discord yet. We're still a month out after all.

>>16508927
take methylphenidate

>>16513632
I mean, why not? There's planning to be done

>>16508590
This tradition is cancer. The kind of disease that's celebrated in the age of information.

>>16513750
Why?

>>16513750
Queer. You aren't unique and neither are your interests.
>>16513755
He wants writing to be some exclusive little club like it was when 12% of the Western World was literate.

>>16513632
Could try using the site forums again. I liked watching other anons' word counts creep upward. Then stall.

>>16514265
>Then stall
The absolute brutality of being the only dude in the discord with more than 30k with 7 days ago only to finish 4th.

>>16508590
Does it count if you write erotic literature?
That's the only thing I'm good at.

>>16513750
To get good at writing you should be writing 2k words a day *anyway* so I don't' see why this is such a problem.

> have an idea for a shitty fantasy novel that won't get out of my head
> learn about NaNoWriMo

In your experience is it better to just jump in with a shitty idea or wait until I have a concept I have confidence in?

>>16514317

jump into the shit train

>>16514341
Ah fuck. I was worried that was the answer.

>>16514316
That's an arbitrary word goal. I think it's more accurate to say that you should work on it nearly every day. Personally, I do enough to feel I've at least started an idea and realized it onto the page.

But you should also be reading and researching on the daily too. The split of time between writing, researching, and reading, or hell even watching shows with plot, will shift targets around on the fly.

>>16512011
hey now thats an idea, I'll go through and look at everything I've written so far that I liked, one of these has to be worth expanding, right?

I typically take a minimalistic approach to writing since the majority of my stuff is syllable-counting poetry that takes around 30 minutes to craft a stanza.
I find myself spewing out stream of consciousness to meet my goal of 2500 words a day for this challenge. It feels awful but maybe I can use some of it for my usual poetry?
Anyone got any similar feels?

>>16514360
I wouldn't let confidence stop you, but definitely make sure you have some passion/idea of what you want from the fantasy story or else you'll risk running out of steam.

>>16511951
>>16513632
>>16514265
I say we wait to see if J Bone comes back. he was a good leader.

>>16512021
yes pretty much

>>16514383
>Arbitrary
Not really. 2k words a day is an average of 60k a month which is a bit over a nanowrimo a month yeah? Leaves plenty to edit and all that.

>>16515876
Nano is broadly considered to be an utter slog to manage if you aren't a full time (or at least part time) writer

>>16515898
will going through nano make me a better writer from the stand point of it not being such an utter slog when its over?

>>16516400
I think so.

>>16516400
Well, I've never succeeded in Nano, and I consider myself to be a good writer.

The issue is Nano encourages you to just keep going even when you know you've made mistakes. It's better if it's just National Writing Month

As long as you write something, you're improving. Write the cool scenes in whatever order you want. Jump over to a short story. Write some world building for a different novel. etc.

What are the official prizes of Nano? Do you get a free keychain or book or mug?

>>16516533
People write differently. Even outside of Nano I like to zerg a first draft fast as possible. I don't' worry about spelling or name changes or word choices or anything like that. Instead I just get to the end, step away for a day, then edit.
There are exceptions. like, if it's a really big change that affects the entire story or something I'll fix it. Otherwise, I just pretend as if the change is done already and go from there.

The problem is editing sucks, but it's a part of life. Even if you write slower as you do, fixing the details as you go, you will still likely make some changes.

>>16516572
>What are the official prizes of Nano?

The satisfaction that you wrote a draft for a book?

>>16516758
nooo I want trinkets

>>16508748
Read McLuhan; we're in the twilight age of the novel.

>>16516533
Even in drawing there are practices where you focus on to just moving the pen. You don't stop to fix mistakes or correct individual lines, you keep going and see where it takes you. It's a fun thing to try every now and then.

>>16508590
Let's brainstorm an outline together, frens!

>H. P. Lovecraft dies and meets God
>God tells him that he can excuse his racism and xenophobia, because he's pretty racist himself
>However, he can't excuse Lovecraft for naming his cat "Niggerman", that was too edgy
>As a punishment, he sends Lovecraft into the future, in a cyberpunk setting
>Lovecraft faints in horror when he sees all the race-mixing, the amalgam of languages, the body modifications...

What happens next?

>>16517379
epic
simply epic

>>16517379
>Lovecraft becomes the very thing he warned against in his stories, the researcher that goes to far in his Faustian bargain.
>He looks to put a stop to this once and for all and enlists the help of a Japanese-German-WASP admixture assistant, one he looks upon with minimal admiration, maximum restraint.
>Together they look to bring about a solution to the Techno-Hellscape they see.
>Lovecraft sets about using gene-splicing to bring about the last gentleman he heard of that stood up to the foul Brown Horde, a man he surmised must have failed in his attempt.
>He finds, through an arcane manuscript and a tomb-heist, a fragment of bone.
>He grows a new specimen from the fragment and brings about the exact clones of Adolf Hitler.
>Reluctant to support him fully, he sees him as a game of societal Russian Roulette, total destruction of the opponent and all out horror, or annihilation for himself.
>Lovecraft recoils in horror as his creation tears down the cyrberpunk landscape and yet all Anglo civilisation with it.
>Quaint English and Dutch-style reformed churches are replaced by megalithic Gothic G*rman structures.
>Jolly country clergymen are supplanted by the dreaded Catholics, the wicked Papists and Rapists.
>Tea in the afternoon has been moved off the mortal coil, all the tea pots smashed by gigantic beer steins.
>All Anglos are forced into union with busty Germanic frau und fraulines, great hulking milk maids that snap the Anglo pee pee off if they use too much force, rather than dainty and jolly Welsh girls that HP would prefer.
>Daily Milkings take place that repulse Lovecraft's carefully crafted sense of inceldom, and the Anglo genes now perish from a newer, better, more refined kind of race-mixing.
>Horror sets in as he realised his race was doomed from the start.
>He becomes frenzied as a shaking Nigel Horstein-Suzuki burns his notes so this mistake can never happen again.
>He loses his last shred of sanity as Horstein-Suzuki-san tries to comfort him and tell him that curried sausage isn't that bad, at least it isn't the raw fish so renowned from his own homeland.
>"Fish?" Lovecraft bellows "Raw... FISH?!"
>He leaps from the upper story garret window, still scrawling his final notes and signing off as he plummets to his demise.

>>16509833
>who wasn’t painfully embarrassing
I’ve been to many write ins in three cities. Yes there are introverts trying to get be social and a lot of people writing sci-fi/fantasy but you have a mistaken idea of what write ins are like.

>>16516942
>>16516572
You win the winner video, winner gifs, and can buy yourself the winner tee shirt without feeling like a fraud

>>16517609
>great hulking milk maids that snap the Anglo pee pee off if they use too much force

>>16517703
glad you like anon :)
here is a screenshot if you wanna share

I wrote three paragraphs today. Some of the only writing I've enjoyed and I'm more comfortable with my idiosyncrasies now. However still feel I'll pull the old put all my writing in a trunk and find posthumous success 100 years from now.

I'm committing to it. I do literally nothing most days at work so I've got no excuse not to bust out my daily words. I'm doing an outline for the first time and it's going to be a bit of an experience but I'm excited.

>>16508590
I could but this sounds like an American thing so it doesn't matter if I can or not.

>>16518334
Everyone in the world can participate, and there are associated forums in virtually every language.

No, I've got published the second time this August in 5 years, so to keep up with my nonexistent recluse image, I have to disappear for another five years

>>16517609
I've been here for 11 years and somehow this website still makes me laugh

>really want to write my book idea
>have to find job or else I'm out on the street

>wrote 2500+ words yesterday
>felt good
>go to write again today
>after a mere 200 words I'm burned the fuck out
maybe I'll just write a stanza of a poem each day instead

>>16508590
I have written a grand total of 89 words today and you expect me to churn out 50k by december?

>50,000 word novel due at the end of the month
>haven't started yet because I haven't finished the 300 word essay that was due last week
I don't think I'm going to make it...

>write 5k~ words
>read it over
>feel inadequate
>rewrite
>again
>and again
This happens a few times a year and every time it disheartens me. How do I resign to mediocrity while I learn

>>16519092
I miss these simpler, more innocent memes

>>16519117
>he doesn't realize that writing a novel is 80% revision

ngmi

>>16518937
by November

>>16519470
Isn't nanowrimo during november?

Am I the only one who has trouble figuring out how to make the novel last 50k words? I have the idea in my brain, something that looks like a skeleton of the plot and other shit planned out, but I have no idea how to make that shit into a 50k word novel without having to go into retard tier purple prose or forcing myself to add in a bunch of unneeded scenes.

Also, any cool writing software I can use, or will notepad / ms word be enough?

>>16519470
>>16519486
You start writing on November 1st and end on the 30th

>>16519490
I think a lot of us have that concern. What really helped me was writing out everything I knew I wanted to get out first. Just put the exciting ideas first and it'll flow. Then you can focus on making the interlinking plot points.

I used FocusWriter last year and it tremendously helpful.

>>16519513
So I'm right, I would have to churn out 50k words by the 1st of december

>>16518671
>run 25km yesterday
>feel good
>go to run again today
>after a mere 200m I'm burned the fuck out
It truly baffles the mind

>>16519513
Oh, I thought it was October-November. I got confused by this thread.

This is good. I thought I had missed the start. Maybe now I'll make an account at their website. I thought I missed the start

>>16519524
Thanks for the help. A slight problem I have is that it's more of a collection of stories told in a bigger framing sequence, so there aren't that many key plot points to really write off first, but it will definitely help.
>FocusWriter
Checking it out rn. From what I read it sounds like a cool web text editor, which I find pretty comfy when they aren't filled with a bunch of retarded js and extra shit that literally only exists to make them look more like desktop apps, talking about shit like office 365 or google docs.

>>16519490
Honestly, a lot of this is just not being any good yet. First time round I wrote out a complex plan with chapter action maps and everything then when I wrote it everything was 2/3rds of what I'd expected. On revision a bunch of shit was not fleshed out.

>>16519490
I don't know how to squeeze any idea down to just 50k words.

>>16519545
Not difficult if you can manage ~1700 a day. Some days of course you will have a lot more than that. Last year my best day was just over 8000.

>mfw writing almost ceaselessly for 6 straight hours

Probably not. These year I'm wage cucking it, on top of trying to learn to code and a foreign language. Even without all that, I still think a month is not enough to complete a 50k page long novel. I do have a lot of stories that have been bouncing around my brain for months, though. I just wish I had the time to sit and do them justice.

>>16520492
Man, I wish I could write like that, but I usually struggle at the 200 words mark and I come to a halt at 350

Burgerpunk as a concept is 1.5 years old, nearly exclusive to this site, and was born on a board where nearly every participant is an aspiring writer. Yet not a single Burgerpunk or burgerpunk adjacent novel has come out of this place.

Is /lit/ confirmed fraudulent? Is Burgerpunk too nebelous of an idea to be a setting or an aesthetic for a novel?

>>16508748
Making visual essays on youtube is the medium and artwork of our generation.
If you care at all about reaching a large audience or making an influential impact this is how you do it.

All I managed to write today
The St. Lawrence ran out from some great depository of sound and ice deep in the heart of Hodinoshoni wood. The running heart of Niagara bleeds blue green and red brown when it is habitable for skin to sky. It runs white with ice floats and black in color in the winter months, straining - torrentially simmering in reverse fire, sucking rock and stone and leveraging imagination to silence like frozen white foam hanging from baby blue cliffs.
When the King’s first Daughter stepped out onto the Island Lawrence for the first time, the blue green was bleeding out.
The written history and law is clear: The Fils du Roi came unwilling to an unfamiliar land, at the expense and under the imperative of the Sun King Louis IVX. They were prostitutes, scraped off the parisian reddish lights, and adopted by Lou himself. Legally speaking, the king had a thousand daughters. Shipped off over the course of ten years, the Fils came to Quebec, a colony of criminals, fur traders and trappers, fishermen, Mohawk, freezing winter, pleasant to look at on a map, grand imagination, competition, north west dreaming, to one day be swallowed by Britain, to be a dwindling minority, oddity within the francophone world, mocked for their accent, mocked for their unwilling status, mocked for their history, conquerors of empty wood, resentful, doomed, and enchanting. Don’t you know the secret history? Don’t you want to hear? Why does ST LAWRENCE give birth to a million monarchs butterflies, winding across the continent, journeying to Spanish Mexico and back - mirroring the old border in the older world, france above spain, this time a thousand prostitute princesses, sent outward into the storm and the sand and the totem poles, like some ancient gaulic skull cup, like the aftermath of Jugurtha King Louis offering a thousand daughters to Caesar, hostages for his good behavior.

>>16508590
Wait what, what is this, seems interesting.

>>16520815
I finished mine but it's just going to take me another year to revise it

>>16521013
>Making visual essays on youtube is the medium and artwork of our generation.

I'll probably try again this year. I have tried the last three years. The first year, 2017 I got the closest to finishing something. I was right at the end of the story but I was so burnt out and just didn't know how to finish, or if i was going to continue the story into a longer novel or a second book.

I actually wasn't working during that time either, so I don't know how much success I will have trying to do it while working, but we will see. IT didn't go o well the last two years, but maybe this year will be different.

Assuming the average word to be five letters long, with the field length of a post on /lit/ cut off at 3 000 characters, it would take three full body posts per day for thirty days to write a novel.
That's easily doable. I probably have been writing that much on here anyways, this whole time I could have been cranking out a book a month.
Expect installments of my avant-garde masterpiece to start showing up here at the beginning of next month. Themes will include my diary, desu, why women won't sleep with me (or why won't woman sleep with me?), and the fully articulated extent that I hate everything and everybody so damn much.
No other book has ever involved the audience to such an extent that my future oeuvre will, nor has (will) any other book been written and published in such a pure and anonymous form.
Set a note on your calendar anons, coming next month I will change the face of literature.

>>16515600
https://discord.gg/AVN622
would've made it sooner but i've been banned

>>16522770
https://discord.gg/UxJaqgC
this one won't expire

>>16522770
>would've made it sooner but i've been banned

This guy. Never change, J Boner.

>>16522694
okay then jump in the discord and we'll see if you're up to it

>>16514013
>He wants writing to be some exclusive little club like it was when 12% of the Western World was literate.
We had better quality and fewer writers. Makes you think.

>>16523712
Would you rather live in a desert or a jungle

>>16523931
not him but i would pick jungle because you can always cut down trees and tame the land but with a desert you basically are stuck with scrub land or just straight up sand depending on what you mean by desert.

>>16524104
Just making an anology for his statement that having less literacy led to fewer and higher quality writers.

Would he rather live in a desert with almost no writers or a jungle where you have to tear through the overgrowth to find what you're looking for.

And also great answer.

I made a thread over on the NNWM site. It should really only be useful as a reliable place to connect with each other when there's not a thread up on /lit/. We do have the Discord up too >>16522802

https://forums.nanowrimo.org/t/nano/209817

>>16522802
So uhhh, can I join even if I know I won't be able to even remotely meet the deadline?

>>16523712

>in capitalism, more companies means more competition, which means we get things of better quality
>"we should have more writers too to create competition-"
>OH NO NO NO

>>16520707
The only way is to power through, anon

>>16520815
There is a guy over at /wg/ writing a Burgerpunk story on RR. Burgerpunk supercedes the novel and should never be so confined.

>>16525176
I mean, the reason I write so slowly is that I don't really do drafts, I write (or at least I try to) as if what I put down on the page is final

>>16525219
Writing is revising, anon.

Just write

But pretending I'm totally going to write the greatest story ever one day that isn't today is much easier!

>>16516758
Gay

>>16526446
>I'll be ready to write as soon as I research and play video games for 10 years

>>16508748
In all seriousness, what did you think made novels relevant before?

>>16526668
no tv, no internet, no telephones, nothing to do all day

>>16526686
That's the stupidest thing I've read on /lit/ in a while. Books are our most effective method of communication. Modern mediums do not reach the same depth as traditional word. People did not write books because they were just bored all day. Absolute midwit. Attempt to see humanity from a greater timescale and not just your feeble little modern perspective.

>>16526708
Wrong. In regards to giving information images and sounds are superior, the written word excels in giving understanding. For those not interested in depth, what reason would they have to read over watching TV or listening to the radio?

>>16527088
>In regards to giving information images and sounds are superior

You are fucking retarded. Words transmit the essence of things directly into the mind. Images and sounds have an extra layer of processing.

>For those not interested in depth
Unironically, go back to r*ddit

>>16527626
> Words transmit the essence of things directly into the mind
> Images and sounds have an extra layer of processing
Yeah, that's why animals and infant children are best given words. That's the best way of processing, not sounds or sight and shieeet

>>16508590
Who else is going to write autofiction?

>>16527760
nevermind

>>16527626
>Images and sounds have an extra layer of processing.
that's the exact opposite of the truth

>>16527626
Unironically read more you damn moron

bump

I think I am just an inherently selfish person. I want to write something so I can read it but because it's my own work and I know what will come to pass I don't fancy reading it. Then I stop writing. I wish I could write something and give myself the most brutal head smashing in order to forget what I wrote so that I may enjoy it but I do not enough braincells to spare.

>>16529643
Write whatever you want, put it away for a couple years and voila

>>16529741
I would but I am also an inherently impatient person.

>>16529752
Write something else in the meantime then. I've got enough ideas for something like 2 novels and 3 short stories, all completely unrelated between each other, whenever I get burn out on one of them I switch to another one

Who do you guys recommend studying from as a beginner writer? Some people say to try write like another writer or copy excerpts from their book in order to get a sense for writing.

What particular system for writing is the best in your thoughts? There's tons of methods but which one works for you?

Also, if anyone has a good resources list for beginner writers that would be good, right now I'm just watching Alexa Donne and Stephen King videos on Youtube...