/lit/ - Literature

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12746662]

Hey lit, finally getting around to attempting a novel. Would you read more?

>https://larthurhunt.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/first-887-words.pdf

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12746732]

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12746746]

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12746783]

[Anonymous No.12746793]

[Anonymous No.12746795]

what's it about

[Anonymous No.12746868]

>>12746662
>https://larthurhunt.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/first-887-words.pdf
learn extraction. i liked the premise of the car pulling over into the field. i saw exactly what you were talking about and could get behind it. but instead of dwelling on that nice moment for 2-3 pages, alluding to a bit about your narrator or where he is or his state of mind, you skip into the next paragraph falling asleep, and then right into the comedic "rude awakening" in the next. this whole sequence should take 3-5 pages and should at least hint at what's going on with this guy.

when you have an idea like this car ride, i know how it feels to think it is good. it really COULD be, but you need to extract a lot more out of what's happening. prose is servicable, just be extremely careful with similies and idioms—; what they compare to should fit naturally with the scene's mood. for example, just explaining what i mean by this, the "chainsaw" similie completely took me out of it, just because a chainsaw doesn't yet belong near this guy and his car, or you haven't yet given us a reason to suspect so.. you can use these to BUILD the mood and character, when what is compared is appropriate.

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12748240]

>>12746868

Hmmmm, okay. Thank you. I figured the chainsaw was apt. It's implied, I thought, that he was drunk as he fell asleep in the car. If he woke up hungover, the chainsaw buzz could represent the headache he might have.

I take your point. The concept of this early scene was to mash together a lot of action into one very short passage to get the reader into it. The remaining segments of the novel have a lot of exposition, and it's far more drawn out. But I thought, conceptually, the erratic pacing in this opening part was fitting. Maybe not. I don't know.

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12748888]

[Anonymous No.12748896]

>>12746662
another novel about a depressed white dude... how novel..

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12748919]

>>12746795

alcoholic lawyer becomes estranged from his family, assaults his employer, loses his job and gets disbarred from the law society. stalks his family after jail, gets the shit kicked out of him by his adult son, and then enters rehab. gets out and starts working as a groundskeeper at an upscale country club. he falls in with an older group of old money retirees, most of them former lawyers themselves. he attempts to start over and redeem himself by toiling away at his mundane job and making inroads with the older men. eventually, he is invited to secretive meetings with the men, where they reveal that they are involved in white collar crime and eyes wide shut-type child sex rituals. they imply that he can get his family back if he follows through on one of their initiation rituals, where he must either kill or rape one of their captive children. it is unclear, in the end, whether he does.

it is told in two timelines concurrently, and it is sometimes unclear which is being told. one is in the present day at the coutnry club and the other are flashbacks to his peaceful family life and its gradual collapse.

the final scene, depending on which timeline you think is being told, can be interpreted as him having won his family back (and thus having killed/raped a child) and "redeemed" himself, or it is simply a flashback to his former family life.

i feel like i butchered that description

[illiterate (www.larthurhunt.co(...) No.12748928]

>>12748896
he's a trans waman