/lit/ - Literature

>>19522659
I know, but I won't tell you.

Who knows? But you know it when you see it.

Good prose is defined most concretely by the quality of being good.

>>19522670
Seriously should I try to have a rhythm in my works or something?

It reads good.

>>19522769
>should I try
You should let.

>>19522659
Wrote long post, lost it, rewrote, lost it (drunk). Fuck this, quick and dirty this time.

Attention to the patterns and rhythms created and broken through morphology, syntax, sentence, paragraph, section, chapter and overall structures.
Attention to how the various patterns and rhythms relate and interact
Words always serving those established rhythms and patterns as much as meaning
Understanding of words and their usage beyond literal definitions
Use of that knowledge to provide nuance and depth beyond the literal surface meaning
Patterns in meaning and meanings in patterns

Cormac is good but not great, pretty much castrated himself at puberty with the whole avoidance of punctuation thing and his prose has not grown much as a result, he no longer has the brashness of youth but never gained the wisdom of age.

>>19522769
You have to have rhythms, rhythms and patterns everywhere. Cormac is decent for learning this from since his avoidance of punctuation severely limits the rhythms he can create, the structures are simple. DFW goes into some amazing and complex rhythms that are second to none, Pynchon has his moments, James was insane, Hemingway was a master of broken rhythms and would go pages with never completing one. But you need to remember that the rhythms of language are not the rhythms of music or poetry, there can be overlap especially in dialog but in prose they are more about creating and breaking a flow, not a beat or meter.

>>19522793
As an aside, complex rhythms can be created with little or no punctuation, but you end up in Finnegan's Wake territory pretty quickly.

>>19522793
Do you have any more buzzwords to spam?
As an aside, how is CM not good at rhythms when his prose is some of the most rhythmic out there.
>punctuation is important for rhythm
Literally what? Are you such a simpleton that you think infinite subordinate clauses are somehow the only way to create patterns and rhythm? Have you read McCarthy's 20 line sentences?

>>19522793
>his prose has not grown much as a result
Missed this. Lol. Try reading him. The leap in syntax from Blood meridian to The Road is bigger than even early and late James.

>>19522793
>Cormac is good but not great

>>19522806
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Get a hold of yourself.

triggered the cormac fan club it seems.

>>19522871
Where did I say he was not good at them? I said his avoidance of punctuation limits him to simpler structures, which makes him good to learn that aspect of prose from.
>Literally what?
Punctuation provides another way to structure sentences, more ways you have the more complex that structure can be since you can stack them. You are thinking of rhythm in very simplistic terms, notice I said rhythm and pattern, they are very closely related in prose.
>>19522878
Hell of a lot more to prose than syntax.
>>19522879
From a prose standpoint, there is more to writing than prose, Cormac knows this.
>>19522900
I have no idea but you can not explain it for OP or explain why I am wrong?

>>19522793
>Cormac is decent for learning this from since his avoidance of punctuation severely limits the rhythms he can create, the structures are simple. DFW goes into some amazing and complex rhythms that are second to none, Pynchon has his moments, James was insane, Hemingway was a master of broken rhythms and would go pages with never completing one.
Can you provide some examples? Thanks in advance.

>>19522906
I know who you are and how shaky your credibility is. I knew you would be here. Console yourself.

>>19522911
Is he the Wish Mountain guy, you think?

>>19522906
>Punctuation provides another way to structure sentences, more ways you have the more complex that structure can be since you can stack them. You are thinking of rhythm in very simplistic terms, notice I said rhythm and pattern, they are very closely related in prose.
Which for you only means subordinate clauses. A strategy last 3 century of writers in English have been copying from Thomas Browne to write long sentences, with the exception of Mccarthy. Complex sentences have no bearing on good prose and nor are rhythms dependent on how many times a flow is broken. Rhythm, rhyme...your definition that excludes both the form of music and the aural nature of prose is highly simplistic. Great prose has always aspired to the form of poetry and great poetry has always prized aural elegance (not to be confused with lyricism). Try analyzing his prose, his insistence on 'and' is not simply to link declarative sentences; a distinct but not always remarked upon mark of his prose is the affluent use of monosyllabic words which allows him to control the sound, alliteration and the patterns of his writing to an enormous degree. (He uses repetition of phrases to a great degree as well). He can maintain the flow of a sentence for over a page and can also break it repeatedly in only 6 word sentences. He is one of the most rhythmic writer out there, irrespective of (reasonable) definition.
All of this without falling on the tired strategy of falling back upon endless subordinate clauses to make your writing look erudite.

The Road also differs in lyricism, not just sentence length.

>>19522659
An author not being an illiterate moron not being able to write a proper sentence is a good start.

>>19522906
what exactly do you refer with patterns?. i have a vague impression but cant see it clearly.

>>19523000
Don't worry about it. If you have the literary pattern brain, you already know what he's talking about implicitly and are searching for the connection between the words and the process. If you don't have the literary pattern brain, you never will, and an intellectual comprehension of what it is will be useless to you. That's what all this is ultimately: useless. Any writer applying analysis to their own processing is doing it strictly in a post-hoc fashion. It has no connection whatsoever to the actual, contemporaneous action of writing as it exists in its moment of execution. It can only ever be a fuzzy retrospective, as in the process of writing, the brain is too preoccupied with the task at hand to worry about silly shit like analysis. Writing is intuitive.

>>19523019
i agree. i just asking for the post-analysis. what is a pattern in a post-analysis of writing?. its not to "improve" my writing, just curiosity.

>>19522910
I am a tad drunk and it is a bit late for me to go into much depth here but Cormac is wonderful with this in his descriptions in Suttree and Blood Meridian, the ones in Suttree are my favorite, particularly drifting down the river and Suttree in the wilds after his sons death but Cormac does it better in Blood Meridian from the standpoint of pattern and rhythm. My favorite of DFWs is probaby chapter 5 of The Pale King (Stecyk) but chapter 22 (wastoid novella) is probably better to learn from and more complex, both repeat heavily which makes identifying patterns easier. I am passing out but perhaps tomorrow before work I will have time to offer more.
>>19522911
Who am I?
>>19522970
>Which for you only means subordinate clauses
Because if you use commas you can not use semi colons, em-dashes and conjuctions as well? Punctuation is not read, they divide without adding syllables this is fairly powerful. I never said complex means good. Never said rhythm is dependent on how many times a flow is broken (but there are some wonderful examples of creating larger rhythms through breaking smaller rhythms. I forgot rhyme but hey, I am drunk, my lost post brought of the tools of rhetoric which covers much of that, but what ever.
>>19523000
They are everywhere in literature, could be a repeated sentence structure, could be repeated words, could be a mix, could be a sound repeated in the same place in subsequent sentences. Most books are overflowing.
>>19523032
Don't listen to him, most anyone can learn this stuff.

>>19523042
>most anyone can learn this stuff
If this were true, Bloom's Flight to Lucifer would have been the work that defined literature of—at the very least—the twentieth century. Who has better command of literature in the abstract than the greatest critics? Who better understands the arrangements of its nuts and corresponding bolts? Who else would know best which gear needs most its grease? Sure, anyone can "learn" these things. My point is that the learning doesn't imply the implementation. It doesn't imply the ability to take what you've learned and apply it. For reasons outlined above, I believe this is because of the primarily intuitive nature of the writing process, which defies analytical "learnings" and exists in a separate container. Never the two will meet.

>>19523058
Keep swinging to the fences. Bedtime for me.

>>19523068
The only fence I'm swinging for is your thick skull. Critics and academics who laud their learning and the semiotics of status and success have no answer for this one simple question: if analysis and learning and intellectualism are so important, why can't the smartest, most learned intellectuals like Bloom write to save their lives? If it's enough to have an intellectual understanding of "the patterns and rhythms created and broken through morphology, syntax, sentence, paragraph, section, chapter and overall structures," what's the formula? State explicitly the nature of the relationship between all these things so the subset of "most anyone" currently lurking this thread can apply it and become the next [great writer of your choice]. Vindicate all these critical concepts and show all the unwashed yokels how pivotal it is to have an analytical understanding of what makes prose great.

>>19523042
>Punctuation is not read, they divide without adding syllables this is fairly powerful.
Yes they aren't read, but they are a necessary signpost for fragmenting a sentence and let the brain parse it, otherwise you are essentially writing nonsense.
Besides, you were going on about how no punctuation gimps his writing but are now conceding conjunctions, which he employs to a great degree, as a faithful alternative. So what is it? I haven't read TPK but getting used McCarthy's sentence in BM and Suttree was a longer process than DFW's IJ, which wouldn't be the case if his structures were simplistic.

>>19522659
If I had fun reading it

>>19523129
>punctuation is necessary
For you, maybe.

>>19523103
>he smartest, most learned intellectuals like Bloom

>>19523366
>>19523372
>bargain-bin, avatarfag shitposting with off-site filenames

>>19523366
If you are that guy, then you have gone back on your original stated point and are basically dumb.
Make sense of this:
>Trying to recover here for recognition the germ of my idea I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a “plot" nefarious name in any flash upon the fancy of a set of relations or in any one of those situations that by a logic of their own immediately fall for the fabulist into movement into a march or a rush a patter of quick steps but altogether in the sense of a single character the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman to which all the usual elements of a “subject" certainly of a setting were to need to be super-added.
Finish one full book, any book before posting again.

>>19523357
/thread

>>19522659
My brain

>>19522659
That's the million dollar question but it's basically >>19522663
Reading Lolita really demonstrated that for me as I'm a moralfag but Nabokov's prose is just too damn good

>>19524967
Good at being bad, I agree.

>>19522659
The communication of ideas in the perfect words necessary to convey it

>>19522659
For critics: being clever
In reality: being clear

>>19522659
It communicates meaning and feeling, not just one or the other.

>>19523019
Maybe you know:
Sometimes after I've read a lot, it feels easier to write on top of that writing being better. On top of that, some days, my writing seems to flow easily, other days, it seems to come out as retard speech. On the retard speech days, is it not necessary to go back, analyze your work, and try to make it better? I.e., editing.

if I like it

Read Mason & Dixon and you'll find out

>>19523103
All you do is take everything to the illogical extreme and swing between. There is more too writing than mechanics.
>>19523129
>but are now conceding conjunctions
When did I ever say conjunctions were bad?
>>19525309
Your brain has fallen into the patterns of what you read or some other pattern, you recognize that it flows better so you write more easily and freely. You should always revisit and revise, even after the good days.

>>19525362
How does one know if they have the literary pattern brain?
Additionally, it's separate from prose, but should one ever feel afraid to be arcane in their writing? I.e., talk about topics and use words your audience may not understand, while not really explaining to them what those topics or words are.

>>19525397
>>19525397
>How does one know if they have the literary pattern brain?
I don't think such a thing exists, while some may have an innate mental leg up over the rest their biggest advantage is the willingness to spend thousands of hours with a terrible work until it ceases being terrible, most people can not do that. If you look into the celebrated writers you see that what really sets them apart is that they put in the time despite there being no certainty of success. They write, revise, study, learn and research to no end, not just an hour a day.
>but should one ever feel afraid to be arcane in their writing?
If you are afraid it is because you are unsure of it's purpose. It all depends on your goals, the work, and who your intended audience is. Rewrite that sentence 20 different ways with and without that arcane word, come back to it in a week and decide which serves the purpose best, see how they each fit into the greater context. Ask yourself if sending people to their dictionaries at this point in the story is acceptable, would maintaining the flow be better? Purposefully sending people to their dictionaries can be a good thing, it forces them to stop and think, it does not just break flow, it pauses it, the look up the word and consider how it actually applies and the meaning of the sentence as a whole, forces them to be active instead of passive.

>>19525362
>There is more too writing than mechanics.
That's what the other guy has been trying to drill into your head, numbskull. Try to follow your own posts atleast, or are you still drunk after bed.

>>19522793
>Cormac is good but not great
Who is great iyo?

Read Henry James

>>19522793
>James was insane
I mean, 50 Shades of Grey was not bad, but I think you're exaggerating a bit.

>>19524967
Moralfags rise up

>>19528200
>>19524967
how does it feel to have completely misunderstood art and have ruined all discussion on it?

>>19522793
Alright where's your Blood Meridian so I can read great prose anon

>>19528225
pretty damn good

>>19522659
What the most agressive guy in this thread will say, I guess

Read Henry Miller

>>19522659
The answer is: there is *NO* objective answer, and I don't mean "Rowling is as good as Melville", but rather that even among top writers there is a very large multiplicity of what Roland Barthes would call "writings", i.e., modes of writing which people see fit to write in.
In the classical age (pre-Romanticism), writing was more or less unified, and even when people disagreed it was only about details. Everyone admitted, for instance, that "writing like Cicero" meant writing well, or at least not badly. You had models. Writing well meant choosing a model to imitate.
Nowadays, things are different, and there too many options available.

That's why Hemingway hated Faulkner who hated Hemingway and was hated by Nabokov who was hated by Borges who is hated by Gordon Lish who etc. Nobody can agree on what good writing is.
For instance: should writing follow a rigid, predetermined structure? Borges thought so, but, in his essay on Borges, Lem (author of Solaris) argues otherwise. Both had their reasons. So who is right? Nobody is right. Both ways of writing are permissible in modernity.
Just look at the contrasts between baroque authors and minimalists, realists and surrealists, formalist poets and experimental ones, and you'll see what I mean very clearly.
What's important is that you find your true literary voice, and that it be an original one, following your own aesthetic parameters, and that you work hard on it.

So the only final parameter, for me, is this: some books are original and different; others at more of the same. The rest is very variable, it's a matter of taste.

>>19526609
Show me where I said or suggested that was all there was too it. The entire time he was arguing against things never said or even implied.
>>19526708
A few off the top of my head, from a purely prose standpoint. Some of these I love, some I hate, the rest fall somewhere in the middle but all of them I can read just for their prose which is what I am using as the metric.
James - Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors
DFW - Infinite Jest and The Pale King
Woolf - To The Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs Dalloway
Proust
Joyce (Portrait of the Artist is a fantastic book to learn about prose from despite it being one of his worst from a prose standpoint)
Gaddis and Gass have moments of greatness but I have yet to see them maintain it through an entire work, have not read their big books yet and I have a fair amount of hope for them
Updike has some very impressive prose of the realist sort
Probably Stein but it has been to many years since I have read her
Gracq - Balcony in the Forest and The Opposing Shore
>>19528238
I never said I had great prose.

>>19528591
It's amazing how you manage to embarrass yourself repeatedly.

>>19525362
>When did I ever say conjunctions were bad?
You are incapable of reading a sentence to the full and then writing your reply, aren't you? It's my mistake. I shouldn't have afforded you the space. You have a high schooler's understanding of prose as is evident from your standards and complete ignorance of even the buzzwords you spam. Your idolization of DFW's prose, which you still cannot explain as to why it's good despite compressing every known buzzword in grammar and syntax, as if the mere presence of the word is sufficient information on its various uses among plethora of writers and in their writing, into your post you have still essentially said nothing of value. And there it is again! a list of writers and your vague impressions of why you think they are good, within, obviously, your very ignorant framework and standards. You would have more joy if you started off on that note, instead of trying to look more credible about things you have no idea about. Now all we have...constant backpedalling whenever cornered.

>>19528591
Wanted to add something:
>Updike has some very impressive prose of the REALIST SORT
This is one of the most embarrasing sentences I have ever read on this board. You have not read Updike, nor Stein.

Bump.

>>19528867
I read the full sentence, pointing out the false premise was all the response it needed.
>And there it is again! a list of writers and your vague impressions of why you think they are good
Again? Vague impressions? Those are indeed some very vague impression, so vague as to not have even been given. I am guessing you are >>19522911 and you think you know who I am.
>>19528873
OK, chief!
>>19530426
Why on earth would you bump this?

>>19531138
Everybody who lurked in CM threads knows who you are and your autism with particular buzzwords. You don't understand them in the least, needless to say ofc.

>>19531181
I find it humorous that you consider standard grammatical terms to be buzzwords.

>>19531290
Written by you they are. In your posts they signify nothing beyond their respective pages on wikipedia and the baggage that comes with it. Grammatical terms thrown around to look smart are buzzwords. That's different from grammatical terms actually being used by smart people to say something concrete.

>>19531325
Ok.

As an aside, this thread did convince me to do a few threads in the new year on prose analysis. Need to figure a few good works to use, probably should stick to short stories so the analysis can be more complete but idk, maybe I will take requests. Hopefully you will be there to save me from embarrassing myself too much,

>>19522659
You like it.

I like humour. Reading this page made me burst out laughing, some of the best prose I’ve read this year.

>>19531949
That's fucking funny

>>19531949
What kind of man would actively whore out his woman?

>>19528591
>The Pale King
LMFAO

>>19531476
I will be there to laugh, but I already know there won't be any thread of the kind.