/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14370642]

Post an excerpt from something you've written.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !mxvabIoSIE No.14370687]

Already eleven years old but this winter was the first real snowfall Rainy Berceuse had ever seen. Looking through the bare spindly branches above as she walked, the snow fell lightly but steadily through the faint glow of morning. Rainy trod the crunching ground, already a mile out from the city mound into her woods and the usual places she and the others played. Others were also out playing, but she had long passed them up. Stopping to listen to the muffled air, looking into the sea fogged horizon of trees. She thought on mother’s words for her love of clouds. The first time the life and death cycle was brought up to her that she could recall. It made her so sad that her mother had to comfort her. But she was only six or sum, and Mateo hadn’t died yet.
The last-man was gone less than a year now, and though this house guest she had known her whole life, but quiet and aloof, she felt a guilt’s clinch to forget him so soon. It seemed to her that this winter flurry wasn’t a time to play as it was a time to reflect on the dead. A somber day for the memory of the somber man. The last of his kind.

[Anonymous No.14370709]

>>14370687
I can't tell if this is a meme but if not it's quite bad my friend

[Urantia reader No.14370751]

They were all transported instantly into a higher mental plane, a superconscious realm of existence. They had not moved in space and time, but their inner realities shifted peculiarly by an unseen and irresistible force. The world had stopped and everything became new; it was a subtle change of perspective, a paradoxically smooth transition, not jarring in the least. Each one simply found themselves in a heightened state of awareness; an unparalleled alertness, increased senses and a strange clarity swiftly pervaded throughout their inner eyes. Effortlessly they each entered the most profoundest of meditation states, states which sages and masters of past ages only experienced after decades of persevering concentration and unremitting discipline.

[Anonymous No.14370756]

>>14370687
Clumsy desu. The flow is all wrong and some parts the grammar is wrong. I hope this was a very rough draft. Let me fix it for you

Already eleven years old but this winter was the first real snowfall Rainy Berceuse had ever seen. Looking through the bare spindly branches above as she walked, she saw the snow fall lightly but steadily through the faint glow of morning. Rainy trod the crunching ground, the city mound already a mile behind, nearing her woods and the usual places she and the others played. Others too were out playing, but she had long since passed them by. Stopping to listen to the muffled air, looking into the sea fogged horizon of trees, she thought on mother’s oft spoken love of clouds, both formation and dissipation. (The previous sentence and this next idea are very unclearly connected so I'm just guessing this is what you meant) Rainy had asked in that probing manner of children what the words meant, and Mother's eventual obligement had been the first time the life-death cycle was brought up to her that she could recall. That made her so sad that her mother had to comfort her. But she was only six or sum, and Mateo hadn’t died yet.
<Literally don't know what you were trying to say here> It seemed to her that this winter flurry was less a time to play than a time to reflect on the dead. A somber day for the memory of the somber man. The last of his kind.

[Anonymous No.14370772]

>>14370751
Pretty good.

> an unparalleled alertness, increased senses and a strange clarity swiftly pervaded throughout their inner eyes
This part is a little clumsy

>the most profoundest of meditation states, states which sages and masters of past ages only experienced after decades of persevering concentration and unremitting discipline
This sentence is much worse than the rest, and not just because of "most profoundest". I think it's much too wordy. I'd write something like,
>Effortlessly they each entered the most profound of meditation states, those which ancient masters could only hope to grasp through the unremitting discipline of decades.

[Anonymous No.14370785]

I wasn't hungry. Some people don't need to eat. Some people don't need to breathe air or drink water. It's nothing to be ashamed of either, most people are happy to be distracted with function. I'm happy to get to sleep. I don't dream though, I think I have before but I don't know. No mostly I just think with my eyes closed until I run out of things to say. Would probably be good to rehearse the
instructions.
I'm not here for no reason, on the contrary I'm here for the best reason, the greater good. The noble long con.
If guys like me wander the shit holes the virtuous will prosper.


I know it’s pretty choppy. I just started getting into reading so my instincts are pretty piss poor.

[Anonymous No.14370807]

>>14370785
Ironically this is the best one in the thread

[Anonymous No.14370833]

~Pray~ fell, and 513 of his limbs splashed open over the imblued Eboatine snow.
And they cast down his form he used for meals and for rites, down his sacred doll he had secreted beneath a pomegranate tree (his ancelle knew where it lay), down his truer body yet housing his soul buried under the black marble floor of his wardrobe (he had told her where it lay), and for good measure they cast down his spares he held for visitations & excursions, his sphingic & his seirenic & all his others.
And these dolls of the god hung from the million bannerpoles of his mantles, dripped over the earth, and decayed unprecedentedly. His silver bones fell from each other, his holy ankles & his holy wrists, and his lovely limbs quivered, loosened, and longened. His synthetic bloods leaked out from his electric flesh like the juice of a bitten citron. The sweet milk his dusky eyn were now barely still weeping seeped, and solidified in the ground.
His fourteen-wingèd seraphic bees, the honeycombs they worked & the bitter plants they fed upon, ornaments of his scarves & gowns, all suffocated under the cruel gaunt air. And the lamps of his crowns were shattered, the robotic arms from his helms in the fashion of Lanich writhed and died, and the down dripped from his royal cidars.
From the dayship they shot down adamantine bullets and unfolded javelins at him.
And they went down and cracked the Tiercel’s sacred spine with their bayonets. It leaked out his inhuman seed, and that killed the breathgiving algæ that resided in the frozen milks & waters below.
The dec*y of the god adored thrice a night & thrice a day, who had erected ~Miss Sachmy~ and ~Shouwa~ & ~Tifayna~ and all the Joycen-gods save ~Whore Cæsar~, who had drafted first the ships & towers & sides of the Spacemen, who concilated to us Stars & Moons, who wed himself to Black Space like God.
The work of the Earthman, Firederikh Abzulon, the Scythian.

[Anonymous No.14370981]

>>14370772
>the most profound of meditation states
>the most profoundest of meditation states

Are these both grammatically correct?

[Anonymous No.14370994]

>>14370833
K-Kirkbride?

[Anonymous No.14371006]

>>14370751
My mind started reading this in a Terrence McKenna voice lol. I'd chop up the run-on sentences and drop at least half those adjectives and adverbs. I think consciousness-altering situations like these are best conveyed with metaphors rather than direct description but that's just my opinion.
>>14370785
Great start, very attention-grabbing. Maybe give some little detail about the 'instructions' to avoid confusion (not necessarily giving away what they are) and replace 'shithole' with something classier like 'cesspool'

Anon realized he had been hoping for a moment of silence when he understood that it wouldn’t come to pass.
What affected him worst was user xTRUEcel95x’s voice. His mic was turned up far too high, and every time he spoke his shrill, pubescent voice would drown out the others:
“Omigod, look at that poster behind him, cringe taste in anime…”
“…for real though, this shit just proves how fucked it is to be born a straight white male in this cucked feminist country…”
“Get on with it, I could tie a rope faster than that when I was a boy scout…”
To be fair, these comments weren’t unique. By the time Anon had the noose tied, an impassioned debate had sprung up concerning the posters he had on his bedroom wall. Two other viewers had begun to argue over whether firearms, pills, hanging, or jumping was the most ‘based’ method. One was giving his performance a play-by-play critique, rating it rather poorly against several other livestreamed suicides he had witnessed.
Had Anon been expecting a death like Socrates? His viewers weeping quietly, cursing the gods? Did he deserve that? Perhaps not, he considered, but certainly not this either. His death was to be a spectacle for jeering fools. He stepped onto the chair.
“Wow, look at his sneakers! Classic autism shoes ahahaha!”
Anon was suddenly overwhelmed by an infinite affection toward these petty nihilists.

[Anonymous No.14371008]

I’m a jimjam. No. Not jimjam, jamjam. You know, the jamjams. I’m one of them. I’m the littlest jamjam. My daddy is jamjam, and his daddy is mr jamjam. No, I’m not kidding you, why on earth would I be kidding you? No, I am the real jamjam.

[Anonymous No.14371009]

>>14370687
butters, I wish I could read this without knowing it came from you, but that tripcode precedes you. Now I can't read it honestly anymore. Next time abandon that aura of yours and you'll see how different it will be.

[Anonymous No.14371010]

I’m a jimjam. No. Not jimjam, jamjam. You know, the jamjams. I’m one of them. I’m the littlest jamjam. My daddy is jamjam, and his daddy is mr jamjam. No, I’m not kidding you, why on earth would I be kidding you? No, I am the real jamjam. I am one of the real jamjams.

[Anonymous No.14371919]

>>14370642
A younger me would not have had the same compromise of thought and linkage to subsequent acts. I can't be sure. The motions and follow-through of intent I'd previously granted zero forethought had become caught up, it trends towards compounding. Everything required a gentle but specific plan behind it. From climbing steps to feeding myself to wiping my ass. It reminded me, in a way, of those acid summers when all the kids were back home and we'd stay out late by the fires or stood against countertops in the white-light kitchenettes of absentee parents, Floyd playing low in the adjoining room, and we'd just struggle to commune with one another, at least verbally, through the grimaces and sputtering laughter. All tasks in that state became some kind of a mission. There was a mental checklist and painstaking procedure attached to all menial tasks. I'm getting off track. That's what I'm reminded of, anyway, that's what I keep returning to. Just cut out the water-lilly visuals and god-arcs and replace them with lower back pain and all of the banal Hallmark Condolence-In-A-Basket variety packs you could even dream of stuffing into the trunk of your 2000 Pontiac Grand Am and I think the comparison holds up pretty well.

[Anonymous No.14371935]

>I don’t condone, though I cannot condemn,
>her beating heart behind the bodice' hem
2 verses i came up with for a sonnet about a tinder thot's nipple yesterday, not going to be a couplet obviously.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !mxvabIoSIE No.14371983]

>>14371009
>I’m stupidly biased
Good to know, stranger.

[Anonymous No.14371988]

>>14370642
very nice painting

[Anonymous No.14372013]

It also raises the question of, if the state of exception is a spontaneous order, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the sovereign’s rights are unlimited. Even spontaneous orders have rules, albeit complex and not universally followed. Thus, we can say that there could be unspoken and unwritten rules that impede the sovereign in the state of exception, namely, the social construction of human rights. It is likely that those carrying out the orders of the sovereign, as well as the public subject to the sovereign, would feel that there are certain actions that violate the fundamental dignity of human beings, and that violating these unspoken rules would thus still restrict the actions during the state of exception. This would mean that the sovereign is still subject to some form of social contract, even in the absence of a written constitution, and thus means that the state’s power isn’t unto itself, but still comes down to popular sovereignty. However, this solution still poses a problem for human rights as a concept, and for our particular dilemma of violations of them. Firstly, it requires us to accept that human rights are also socially constructed, and therefore are subject to public opinion. If human rights are merely socially constructed, then one could say that they are not universal or founded on human dignity, but rather simply the popular perception of human dignity, and if this is the case, then we could say that human rights differ from culture to culture. Moreover, it raises the problem of popular acceptance of the state of exception. In many states of exception, the public passively accepts the repression of civil and political rights without protest. If the social contract of the state of exception is socially constructed, then this means that it is possible for this social contract to de facto give unlimited power to the sovereign, and this would continue to hold dire consequences for human rights that must be resolved to fully address the state of exception as a concept.

A paragraph from an essay I did this semester.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !mxvabIoSIE No.14372159]

>>14370751
>a superconscious realm of existence.
Already the narrator is forcing their ideology on me. What one thinks doesn’t exist in the traditional sense of the word.
>but their inner realities shifted peculiarly by an unseen and irresistible force.
Sleep, you fell asleep.

>>14370756
High praise really. You hardly changed a thing. The end was purposely a bit of a finger sing.
It’s just a scene for no reason, taking place well after the story I’m still putting together in my head mostly.

[Anonymous No.14372764]

welp i just broke 114 days of nofap. you tempted me and scandalized me and i succumbed, but i know its my fault. this is what happens when you browse 4chan, there's no escaping the porn and everyone knows it. so i'm leaving 4chan now. my only friends, my only society: goodbye. i will be alone in the world now, but it must be done. i forgive you OP, but please: change your ways.

[Anonymous No.14372802]

>>14372764

[Anonymous No.14372820]

>>14372802

[Anonymous No.14372829]

English speaking cucks

[Anonymous No.14372847]

>>14370785
this is quite good

[Anonymous No.14372853]

It was gelatinous and moist, and as it moved farther, it was surrounded by tall concrete blocks. Light from outside began to echo. He elegantly compassed through boxes and broken glass and headed to an unknown destination. The crumbling old tree and the gas rolling under it made a memoir of what had been a life of promise and expedition, and allowed it to rot in the rotten tomb of its contact. Cretan, sympathetic to the the victim of the ceremony, loses contact with his body and eventually becomes part of the owner. The power of the number six is in fact demonstrated when one considers the nerve impulses with which it plays, ' The channels have not the right number of the ends' it estimated inputs , the polarity for the proposed channel ( ) does not seem to exist.
The cavity is deep, and so much blood must be introduced into it... Their bones are unchanged, but their neural system is de facto arranged for expansion.
The ideas protrude into the limb of the ideal and are enhanced by the action potentials of the pragmatic.

[Anonymous No.14372914]

>>14372829
кaжи ми гo пaк, aмa нe oнлaйн.
щe видиш кaквo щe ти ce cлyчи, пaлячo

[Anonymous No.14372985]

>Imagine you are walking along your typical route to school and on the way you suddenly find the scene changed and yourself telescopic; before you now are millions of small pools with millions of drowning children in them. Other people walk by and see what you see, all equally perplexed. You observe how the most agent among them wade into the muck and commendably save a child, but you also note that while they do so -- other children stray into other pools. Bewildered you remain transfixed and shortly you realize that many of these children were saved many times before, yet they defiantly return and return and plant themselves face first in these puddles. There aren't enough samaritans good or otherwise to save them. You realize the situation is beyond you and run, half intending to escape and half with hope to find help. As you progress past this seemingly interminable and bizarre landscape ever dotted with drowning destitutes you notice something else. In the distance, on the very periphery of this demented scene there is something even more perverse, some compromise between a dust cloud and a horizon, a vastness of swarthy peoples arraigned like an assembly line in the stages of life, they are engaged in the process of producing more and more children, seemingly with the sole intent of thrusting them towards the mire betwixt you and they, a soil stained Hieronymus Bosch painting made manifest. You run for what feels like days to warn them of the horror they are party to but upon finally arriving at their debauched shore you recognize the dejected faces of some of your peers. They arrived well before you on the same mission and have been deliberating among another, regrettably they inform you that it would be fundamentally wrong to limit the doings of these folk and that even thinking to suggest such to them is a gross undermining of human decency likable to the barbarous customs of our ignorant predecessors and a proof of how far we have yet to go as a society. Panic seizes you. Your farsighted fellows inform you all is not lost however, that the tribe is not without leadership and for the low cost of 5$ a month exoneration and even sentiments of savior are a possible, as this is more than enough for Okonkwo and his ilk to be able pull out children and raise them on this side of the pools fulltime until they are of reproductive age. Relieved you hand your wallet to the first fornicating coolie you see and return arm in arm with your classmates against the glow of the sun, hoping this surreal episode has not made you late for your midday lecture.
I wrote this once, response to Peter Singer's retarded drowning child thought experiment.

>>14370785
Flecks of potential but it's too unfocused, you get a sense of the person but nothing about where they are, what they're doing, or concretely what they're talking or reacting about. It's a monologue in space, at least it seems that way without context.

[Anonymous No.14373094]

>>14371983
:3

[Anonymous No.14373122]

This primary source is a document containing an address from a Pennsylvanian Democratic-Republican club. The address was drafted to defend the club’s critical stance of the government at the time, which was considered blasphemous by some. When this club was formed, America had become a sectionally and party divided nation. Disagreements had arisen among many groups and prominent societal figures about how the maintenance of liberty and the American experiment of self-government could be maintained. One prominent party, the Federalists, generally opposed popular democracy in which all sovereign citizens of the nation participated in the election of their politicians. They viewed the common man as prone to passions and anarchy that could potentially jeopardize the hard-fought independence that the nation had only just so recently obtained. They generally wanted America to become an industrial economic nation that could rival or potentially usurp Britain’s position as a global economic and military hegemony. They passed laws advocating for economic and tax/debt reform and supported a strong central government. They were commonly portrayed as elitists, made up of prosperous merchants, lawyers, and well-established political leaders. They were understood to be a product of the common 18th century view of society being composed of a well-defined hierarchy, with only men of moral (and) or economic fiber being fit for a position of leadership. Federalists argued for a broad usage of the constitution’s general welfare clause, which allows congress to pass laws that would benefit the people governed by the Union. The opposition to this party were the Republicans. They argued against the view that the common man was incapable of managing and cultivating a democratic system, and accused Federalists of being aristocratic tyrants who were abusing their positions of national power in the central government and reducing the power of state governments. Most were constructionists, meaning they adhered strictly to the powers granted to the central government in the constitution and argued that the general welfare clause could not be used to exercise such broad actions as the creation of a national bank and the wanton levying of taxes for public projects. Returning to the subject of the original address, the members of this club identified with Republican ideals and values and generally opposed those of the Federalists. They argued that a defense of a group’s political opinions was just as essential to the maintenance of liberty as the defense of the common man’s right to free speech, which was defended by the first amendment. They argued that only slaves are not allowed to freely express their thoughts, and that infringing upon their rights to expression could endanger the protection of liberty.

[Anonymous No.14373268]

>>14370642
nice painting.

[Anonymous No.14373285]

A few days before Christmas one year, Uncle Leonard cleared all the snow off the pond in the pasture behind the barn. It was three days into Christmas break, a Monday night, when he called my father to tell us to bring skates and hockey sticks to the farm on Christmas Eve. “All right then. Very good,” Dad said. I was sprawled lazily across the couch, tired and frustrated, trying again and again to read just one chapter from the history textbook which lay face-down on my stomach. I could tell from how Dad spoke into the phone that it was Uncle Leonard on the other end. He incites a strange tone of appeasement from people, as if they are willing to concur with whatever he says in order not to have to debate it. Not that Dad had any reason to debate the value of skating with the family on Christmas Eve, but I’m sure that Uncle Leonard had stated plainly how much work it had been for him to clear the snow off the pond. “Uncle Leonard says there’ll be skating on Christmas Eve, so bring your skates,” Dad said after hanging up the phone. Two days later, when we left the city for the farm, I went without my skates.

[Anonymous No.14373458]

OOOH birds bird bird birds, transvestite jackdaws are the future. Haha I sure do love those wacky lil mohawk ducks, how many of them would it take to kill me? I would like a smoke, rather than all these faggots smoking my cock. It disgusts me that people are attracted to me, they're all hideous. STOP calling my dog cute you FAGGOT, he deserves better than that and the only praise higher than "cute" would be to remark on his likeness to me (There is none but it's the lack of thought that counts). Can they stop laughing at traditional statistics? What's so funny you vapid whores, huh? Huh? Huh? You think the professor is an incel for not teaching bayesian stats? Yeah that's what I thought, shut the fuck up, I like white noise not nigger noise. I want bird bird bird bird swallow. Do swallows spit or swallow? Would Kanye really rather be a dick than a majestic swallow? Do morbidly obese waterfowl migrate (slowly) to the dead sea to float more easily? Waterfowl have spent all of their evolutionary timeline in water, we came out of the water like utter retards. They are perfect - having spent all of history (known and unknown) in their ultimate environment. We are poorly designed - having grown up in water but cast it off because you can't go swimming after eating a burger, and so we stuck on the land because of some psychotic American that was too busy eating to be able to swim again without cramps. EVOLUTIONARY TIME POINTS WASTED ON CONTRADICTORY PATHS.

[Anonymous No.14373525]

>>14370642
I write drunk so my punctuation isn't the best.
This I only wrote yesterday so I still need to edit.
>The terror reached out it's withered hand. Little Aster looked down upon it, mere inches from her face she could see every detail of its skin, nails and rough boney texture. For a moment fear subsided and was replaced with pity. The same she felt when she peeked between the cupboard doors at her frail mother, and her beautiful mangled features as she lay still on the kitchen floor. A juvenile mind finds it difficult to understand many things, emotions especially. Yet from the moment of our first breath every one of us understands pain, and kindness, and love; which is the union of the former. As such Aster, little as she may be, saa in the hand of this withered terror the same emotion she saw in her mother Gwyneth a month ago. Love, and pain, and kindness. So she reached out her own hand, and when her fingertips touched the terrors she was shocked to find they were soft.
Until they weren't, because they had disappeared, dissolved into ash and fallen away.
First the fingers, the forearm, the chest, and finally its face.
Or rather her face.But not before the bandages, for a split second Aster saw that under them were a pair of cold sunken eyes.
Eyes filled with love, and regret.Just like Gwyneth's.

[Urantia reader No.14374358]

>>14370751
The Game Masters observed them from their hidden fortress, the Crystal Citadel of Thought, knowing this new game experiment could potentially exceed all others in greatness. They resumed their brainstorming, looking for the inspiring idea and creative insight that would propel the game's mechanics.

"The game must be inherently enlightening, it's essence must be invoked from the Spirit of Games, only then will the game achieve it's true purpose."

The Game Masters nodded in unison. The sapphiric glow from the holographic reader illuminated their indescribably wise and cunning faces.

"Spirit of Games, we invoke Thee! Inspire us with your creative genius, shine your wisdom upon our minds, bless us with your brilliant presence, lead us and show us the way!"

A piercing silence and stillness shattered the enclave. Screeching winds enveloped from all sides, engulfing the Game Masters as their minds linked deeper together. Then they heard the Voice of unspeakable grandeur, and from the center of infinity the Spirit of Games spoke...

[Anonymous No.14375038]

A lot of these excerpts have poor flow. Some are good. I'd expect /lit/ to have better rhythm though. Prose and poetry aren't so different, you must always be aware of the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, the number of syllables, and where the pauses happen. This comment, for example, intentionally has poor rhythm. Now I will rewrite it to sound better. Try to spot the differences in your inner ear:

A lot of these excerpts have poor flow, though some are good. I'd expect /lit/ to have a better grasp of rhythm. Prose and poetry aren't so different; stressed and unstressed syllables beat an inner rhythm, with pauses and syllable counts equally important. This comment, for example, intentionally doesn't flow. I'll rewrite it here to sound better. If you can, try to spot the inner ear's differences amongst the two.

[Anonymous No.14375041]

[Anonymous No.14375057]

>>14375038
Post an example what you think good flow is

[Anonymous No.14375083]

>>14375038
Incredible post.

[Anonymous No.14375107]

>>14375057
The reader's eye shouldn't "catch" upon a section or word, if you don't intend it to. Good flow respects the time of the reader, and ensures he need not pause his inner voice to match an unaccustomed rhythm. Let your readers be lazy and they'll thank you. It's only when the effect is desired that you should interrupt their concentration.

[Anonymous No.14375132]

>>14374358
>indescribably wise... faces
Damn bro your face is so fucking wise

[Anonymous No.14375161]

>>14375107
Is this ultimately subjective? Like what you think good flow is may differ from person to person

>>14375132
lol thanks, how would you rewrite it?