/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16857957]

How do you deal with the fact that literary fiction is dead? You can't be a successful writer anymore unless you appeal to midwits and teens.

[Anonymous No.16858026]

>>16857957
There have never been successful literary writers. Only rich people who happen to write literature, or poor literary writer who remain poor their whole life or sustain themselves with day jobs

[Anonymous No.16858040]

>>16858026
Nabokov's family lost all of their fortunes and he had to teach and give lectures to make money but after he published Lolita he became wealthy enough to quit and write full time.

[Anonymous No.16858042]

>>16857957
Welcome to Earth. Tesla died alone, poor, feeding pigeons like a loon. Luciano Cilio wrote a single unsuccessful (groundbreaking, amazing) album before killing himself. John Toole's Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by every publisher who looked at it until he killed himself and his mother began pestering a particular person to look at it.

Being far above average is a curse in this world. Any idea or artwork far above average will never be understood by average people, and therefore never be popular. Planet Earth is a tyranny of the masses. If the masses were repressed and the worthy allowed to rule, things would be different, but that isn't the way of our world now.

[Anonymous No.16858579]

>>16858042
Based take, anon

Hope you're doing well

[Anonymous No.16858595]

>>16857957
Write for your teenage midwit self

[Anonymous No.16858604]

I'm going to write all my books to perfection, but them on a flashdrive and shoot the copies into space.

[Anonymous No.16858607]

>>16858604
But you'll need to write YA to be able to afford SpaceX money.

[Anonymous No.16859564]

>>16857957
All the good books have already been written.
>try to name a good book written after 2000

[Anonymous No.16859572]

>>16857957
Then do what some Hollywood directors have done for ages: one for them and one for you. Write some shit to make money and get the bag and then write what you want!

Have some creativity man!

[Anonymous No.16860388]

>>16857957
>You can't be a successful writer anymore unless you appeal to midwits and teens
That was always the case.

[Anonymous No.16860400]

HOW THE FUCK IS THIS FAGGOTRY REAL
LIKE NIGGA STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR EGO AND WRITE WHAT YOU WANNA WRITE

GODDAMNN

[Anonymous No.16860482]

>>16858040
Because the best director of his made a movie out of it, which is fairly rare nowadays, given that nobody wants to adapt literary fiction into movies, and that even if they do, there's so no one to watch them. Nabokov lived the perfect storm in between the age of the great novel and the rise of pop culture, and trolled both

[Anonymous No.16860484]

>>16860482
His book was already popular and he was a public figure and celebrity by the time Kubrick adapted Lolita.

[Anonymous No.16860972]

>>16859572
This.

[Anonymous No.16861100]

>>16858042
Tesla died alone and poor because he was mentally ill and spent fortune on pigeons among other things. People still loved him enough that they arranged for him to receive funds to the very end. That has nothing to do with OP's problem of marketability.

[Anonymous No.16861126]

>>16857957
Do people think that successful literature has ever done anything but appeal to midwits, teens and women? The only people who keep genuine masterpieces alive are scholars, and that has always been the case. There are rare exceptions, like Shakespeare, but for the most part actual artistically profound texts have had minuscule readerships all the way through from Don Quixote to Gravity's Rainbow.

[Anonymous No.16861158]

>>16861126
There was a time when the only people that could read were highly educated aristocrats and they dictated taste and what was considered good so the standards for being a successful writer were much higher.

[Anonymous No.16861230]

>>16861158
Yes, but even if you were enjoyed the aristocracy, that was still a tiny readership and not one that guaranteed you an income you could live on.

[Anonymous No.16861281]

>>16861158
18th century, when you still had aristocrats, and novel was, somewhat, developed and established enough, but still, most of it is a sludge, unreadable today.

[Anonymous No.16861399]

you can't write what you want, only teenagers have the time and lack of real problems to give a shit about it, adults have to work, take care of kids and old fucks

[Anonymous No.16861490]

>>16857957

[Anonymous No.16862225]

>>16858040
>>16860482
And he still had to write a shitty ageplay fetish drama-romance story to even get a movie director to look at it.

[Anonymous No.16862362]

>>16862225
It's none of these things. Have you even read the book?

[Anonymous No.16862402]

>>16857957
Or if there isn't several """"poc"""" and lgbt characters lol. Sad how the modern generation is obssessed with "representation" than a good plotline.

[Anonymous No.16862425]

>>16857957

Being a successful writer isn’t a very literary lifestyle anyways. Make knives in your garage for a living or something and write books. While being a successful author sounds like a chill career, it also sounds like it could make you go crazy. Like in the way celebrities are all detached lunatics.

[Anonymous No.16862438]

>>16858042
>If the masses were repressed and the worthy allowed to rule, things would be different, but that isn't the way of our world now.
Based

[Anonymous No.16862448]

>>16862425
>Make knives in your garage for a living or something and write books. While being a successful author sounds like a chill career, it also sounds like it could make you go crazy. Like in the way celebrities are all detached lunatics.
This. Writing (or creating any art) should first and foremost be done for ones private pleasure.

[Anonymous No.16862541]

>>16860400
This.

[Anonymous No.16862569]

>>16857957
What did you want? Money and approval from strangers for writing your shitty melodramatic/psuedo intellectual garbage? We are not entitled to patronage.

[Anonymous No.16862578]

>>16862425
>Not wanting to be a detached lunatic
Cringe>>16862425

[Anonymous No.16862584]

>>16862448
Why would you write anything if you don't want it to be read.

[Anonymous No.16862603]

Fight on. Go find, buy, read, review the men still in the arena. Write one yourself. Pic related.

[Anonymous No.16862611]

>>16862584
That isn't necessarily what I mean. I'm saying you shouldn't only write in order to please others or gain fame or whatever. Writing should be about "even if it doesn't get read at least I was gratified by writing it"

[Anonymous No.16862618]

>>16862584
Writing with the reader in mind IS the only worthwhile way to write. First and foremost it’s about communication. Everything else is like masturbation. That said, you need to be writing more than what you publish if you want to write well, and I don’t think desire for an “audience” will sustain anyone long enough. It’s just vanity if you think about looking at your own novel in a bookstore, or if you think about your picture in the back of the book.

[Anonymous No.16862619]

>>16857957
So you're just ignorant of history, then?
It's always been incredibly rare that artists are "successful" during their lives (by which I assume you mean having money). Even the ones which were relatively famous during their lives were often poor. It has ALWAYS been the case that the only people making serious money or gaining incredibly fame off of their art have been the sell-outs and the exceedingly rare hyper-geniuses. This isn't anything new.
Claiming this is somehow the death of literary fiction is pretty fucking stupid. If that's the case, literary fiction has never been alive.

[Anonymous No.16862654]

>>16858042
>If the masses were repressed and the worthy allowed to rule, things would be different, but that isn't the way of our world now.
He says while assuming he himself is one of the worthy while failing to recognize he'd be another lowly every-man ground under the heal of the worthy.
You aren't special. If you were, you'd already be successful instead of shitposting on 4chan. You'd be a serf like the rest of us and you'd never see any of those """"great works""""" of the """"worthy"""". You'd live a life of valueless inanity until you died pointlessly, having only ever supported the vapid sentimentalism of elites. That's your supposed justice in art - a bunch of fundamentally detached elitists jerking themselves off over your corpse.

You'd have a point if you'd suggested that the only true art is small-scale communal folk works that are meant to celebrate individual activity among a collective, and suggested moving society towards a contemporary version of that, but instead you're quaffing elitist cock while romanticizing being a slave-laborer. I can't even imagine being that defeatist.

[Anonymous No.16862663]

>ugh I can't BELIEVE I have to appeal to lots of people in order to sell lots of books and make money!
>I should get money just for being so smart!
Wow OP how do you come up with this stuff, you should write a book. Maybe people will buy it even.

[Anonymous No.16862694]

>>16862584
This is the correct take. A prominent genre fiction publisher in my country wrote a while ago about how the people of his generation had read everything they could in their youth, but when it came down to writing, they stepped away from what actually lit their passion to read in the first place, setting themselves away from their potential readers.
It's nice to want to do more, to add something new, to try different things, etc... but at the end of it, a good book starts with a good story, and that is what people will enjoy reading. If you can't accept that, then you shouldn't be crying about how achieving fame is impossible without pandering to this or that public.

[Anonymous No.16862722]

>>16862584
>Why would you bother thinking to yourself
Literally what are you even on about?
>>16862618
You're almost there. Communication is a multi-part system, and just saying something - no matter how well it's said or the topic at hand - doesn't guarantee communication if the other side just doesn't give a shit to communicate in the first place.
Writing with the reader in mind is the literary equivalent of How To Win Friends and Influence People™ if "with the reader in mind" is anything more than ensuring that you're expressing your thoughts as clearly, succinctly, and elegantly as possible so that you can be as understood as completely as possible by those who care. If writing without an audience in mind is intellectual masturbation, then designing your thoughts to appeal to an audience is intellectual grooming of the worst kind.

[Anonymous No.16862762]

>>16857957
This is demonstrably false. Just look at Ishiguro, Rushdie, McCarthy etc. Good literary fiction will always be readable, the issue is that there aren't as many great writers anymore.

[Anonymous No.16862787]

>>16857957
I hope to write a real crackling best seller genre fiction first. Then when I have earned enough to sustain slightly above humble living, i will trash my work and call my audience retards, then go into hiding and write /lit/ approved masterpieces exclusively.

[Anonymous No.16862802]

>>16862722
I think we’re on the same page. I’m trying to say there’s an important distinction between writing to be understood(in all the ways you mentioned) and the construction of an “audience”. The way I see it “the reader” is more valuable than “the audience”. But I could just be splitting hairs over something meaningless.

[Anonymous No.16862850]

>>16858607
Nah, just throw them at the sky.

[Anonymous No.16862902]

Litteræ panem non dant

[Anonymous No.16863159]

>>16862762
>the issue is that there aren't as many great writers anymore.
why?

[Anonymous No.16863182]

>>16862762
>>16863159
I think it's less a case of there not being great writers anymore than literary criticism becoming absolute trash. There is too much baggage these days.

[Anonymous No.16863212]

>>16862762
>the issue is that there aren't as many great writers anymore
I think the real issue is that current day literary gatekeepers in publishing are predominantly of the same rotten stripe - liberal, Jewish women situated in New York City.

[Anonymous No.16863239]

>>16863212
Based

[Anonymous No.16863303]

>>16862787
>I hope to write a real crackling best seller genre fiction first. Then when I have earned enough to sustain slightly above humble living, i will trash my work and call my audience retards, then go into hiding and write /lit/ approved masterpieces exclusively.
Based. That's the way to do it, if you could choose.

[Anonymous No.16863345]

>>16863159
Because there are more writers. Because books have become a product like any other in the capitalist market. Because writing ceased to be the privilige of a few rich, well educated, idles. Because the literary movements have already finished their circle: everything that could be deconstructed has been deconstructed, so you have a flock of individual writers of varying tendencies instead of small groups of dedicated explorers that make the genre evolve.

[Anonymous No.16864275]

>>16863212
Leftist, not liberal

[Anonymous No.16864547]

>>16863212
t.

[Anonymous No.16865154]

>>16864547
Not an argument

[Anonymous No.16865338]

>>16862654
>You aren't special. If you were, you'd already be successful.
This is a false narrative that is pushed by the slaver elite to keep people working their hardest at all times when what actually matters is opportunity, and especially today, compliance. Look at visual arts to get what the real picture is like: even mediocrity fails to get consistently rewarded in favor of pandering, titillation, pop culture references, political hot takes and other things that boil down to planned appeal to the lowest common denominator. And as time goes by, the people who stand a bit taller or have something a bit grander to say and manage to sneak through and find a public will be fewer and fewer. Honestly I already think the gateway to any kind of organic acknowledgment is completely shut. It's practically impossible to get anywhere with just the sweat of your brow. Not to mention that the audience with disposable money for culture/entertainment is teenagers or people who never grew up from being mentally teenagers.
>>16862618
>Writing with the reader in mind IS the only worthwhile way to write. First and foremost it’s about communication.
Communicating with the intent of pandering to the person you're talking to is manipulative.

[Anonymous No.16865518]

>>16857957
>You can't be a successful writer anymore unless you appeal to midwits and teens.
You can, but not that you would know since a) you don't read and b) you're an idiot.

[Anonymous No.16865623]

>>16859564
how the fuck are you this stupid? you can't name a good book written after 2000 because it takes decades for good books to rise to the surface

[Anonymous No.16865674]

>>16857957
Literary fiction as a distinctive form of literature is a wank. Much of what is "literary" was once just works of the genre of the day whose merits or peculiarities caused it to survive and be preserved through time. That people try to prop up this idea of literary fiction as a sort of consoomer genre is retarded and misses the point of what literature is. It cannot die because "selling popular literary fiction" is not really the condition of literature's existence in the first place.

[Anonymous No.16866001]

>>16859572
But then, even if you devote your entire life, mastery, and scholarship to writing, best case scenario is you would become a meme on lit, being read by a bunch of academics and other literally whos. Age of fiction, as in big long books with complex structure is over.

[Anonymous No.16866036]

>>16864275
It's the same thing these days.