/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16900667]

>mfw getting through descriptive paragraphs
I don’t care what furniture is in the room is you fucking retarded writer

[Anonymous No.16900673]

My idiot girlfriend and my retarded friend both say that they see movies in their head and all of the visuals stay put and don't fade away once they stop focusing on them, so I guess when the writer is describing every piece of fucking lint on every windowsill they are just in heaven which to me is a sign of a pleb or a faggot. My friend went on and on about how a Hemingway passage made him picture a sunny field so hard that he could feel the warmth of the sun. Fucking faggot. No wonder he can't read philosophy.

[Anonymous No.16900685]

The chair is a metaphor for the character's inner turmoil you silly illiterate frogposter

[Anonymous No.16900693]

>>16900667
You're supposed to care about the beauty in the craft of the employment of the verbal medium to convey what room is in the furniture, you midget-lobed mongrel.

[Anonymous No.16900703]

>>16900673
>We walked through the field. It was sunny. We stopped at a cafe to drink wine.
>Isn't this lovely dear?
>Almost as lovely as you, darling.

[Anonymous No.16900712]

>>16900693
Imagine chudding for a sentence about where a couch is and what color the upholstery is

[Anonymous No.16900714]

>>16900667
I don't like writing all that detailed tripe either, but some female always says, "I feel like a floating head." Quit taking your meds then, bitch.

[Anonymous No.16900718]

>>16900712

[Anonymous No.16901097]

>>16900693
this and it helps you immerse yourself so that can better feel it. like it's good communication.

[Anonymous No.16901164]

>>16901097
I don't give a shit about the furniture of rooms in real life, so no, it doesn't "help my immersion". If anything, it breaks it by going into long-winded detail on a topic I would never consider for over a few seconds.

[Anonymous No.16901184]

>>16900667
Read plays, they focus on dialogue as opposed to setting. It's why I like them :)

[Anonymous No.16901198]

>>16900673
you should be able to do both. You need the innere Anschauung for the synthetics

[Anonymous No.16901202]

A character chose that furniture and set it out just so. It can say a lot about a person.
pic related, not saying it's amazing but I do believe the definitive work of human literature will be interactive and literally involve looking at furniture. One day it will involve a method so purely interactive an alien will be able to jack into our ancient VR tech and experience being a human looking at his furniture. All of it currently distilled into a few lines your npc brain can't summon an image for.

[Anonymous No.16901270]

Read Balzac's novels, anon. It's exactly what you're looking for.

[Anonymous No.16901278]

>>16900703
kek

[Anonymous No.16901280]

>>16900667
DONT READ FUCKING OLD ASS BOOKS THEN MODERN LITERATURE HAS MOVED PAST BORING DESCRIPTIONS FOR THE MOST PART YOU ARE WELCOME ALSO DO NOT LISTEN TO /LIT/ THEIR TASTE IS PLEB I'M WELL AWARE THAT THIS IS SOMEWHAT OF A CONTRADICTION AS I AM SPEAKING TO YOU AS A MEMBER OF THIS BOARD BUT I ASSUME YOU ARE SMART ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THAT I AM TALKING ABOUT EVERY BUT ME, DONT LISTEN TO ANYBODY BUT ME, IS WHAT I'M SAYING ANON. GO READ SOME BOOKS WRITTEN AFTER 1970 AND HAVE FUN GODDAMN HAVE SOME FUCKING FUN YOU FUCKING IMBECILE GOD SPEED

[Anonymous No.16901282]

>>16900712
just a sentence? sounds like a page or two...

[Anonymous No.16901298]

>>16900667
Too many words
Me no like
Ooga booga

[Anonymous No.16901322]

>>16900667
Sometimes describing furniture describes characters, it reflects their social status, wealth and personal taste (or lack of it).

[Anonymous No.16901347]

>>16900667
Man I love descriptive prose so much.

[Anonymous No.16901355]

you say "getting through" like marshalling your imagination for a few seconds is a particularly onerous thing to do. quit your crying or surrender your imagination to TV like you really want to

[Anonymous No.16901361]

>>16900712
>chudding
lol seething insecure redditor detected

[Anonymous No.16901371]

>>16900673
Are you retarded? That's a sign of intelligence, and imagination is intelligence,

[Anonymous No.16901441]

>>16900693
>>16901097
Why doesn't the faggot author just learn how to draw to convey this shit? This is why comics are a superior medium.

[Anonymous No.16901513]

>>16900667
>In his house the old man lit a lamp and settled back in a stout rocker near the stove. He selected a magazine from a rack alongside, an ancient issue of Field and Stream, limp and worn, the pages soft as chamois, spread it on his lap and began to leaf through it who knew it now almost by heart—stories, pictures, advertisements. From time to time he could hear scuffling sounds beneath him, scratchings in the darkness under the floor where Scout turned uneasily in his nest of rotting sacks.
>He turned the pages for a while and then got up and went to the kitchen where from a high cupboard above the tapless sink he fetched down a molasses jar near filled with a viscous brickcolored liquid opaque as clay. He screwed off the cap, took a clean jelly jar from the sideboard and poured it full. Then he went back to his chair, settled the drink on its broad arm, adjusted the magazine in his lap and began to rock gently back and forth, the liquid in the glass lapping sluggishly with the motion. Now and again he took a sip, staining the white stubble beneath his lip a deep maroon. The oil-lamp glowed serenely at its image, a soft corolla, inflaming the black window-glass where a curled and withered spider dangled from a dusty thread.
>The old man rocked, dwarflike in his ponderous chair. He seemed to be weighing some dark problem posed in the yellowed pages before him.
>Toward late morning a rooster called and the old man’s window blushed in a soft wash of rose. He slept and color drained from the glass and the east paled ash-gray.
It's a matter of doing it well.

[Anonymous No.16901539]

>>16900667
ngmi

[Anonymous No.16901591]

>>16900667
>Getting filtered by simple descriptive paragraphs
>Getting told by gf and friend
>Cry about it online

[Anonymous No.16901601]

>>16901591
Meant for >>16900673

[Anonymous No.16901922]

>>16900667
Much as I love The Picture Of Dorian Grey, the "he flung himself onto the divan" line used at least 3 times in it always makes me laugh at the image, and I still struggle a bit where the orders of classical architecture are treated in more than usual detail.

[Anonymous No.16901975]

>>16900667
I THINK ITS NECESSARY TO AUTISTICALLY DESCRIBE WHERE THE CHARACTERS ARE SO THE READER CAN IMAGINE HIMSELF IN THERE SHUT UP I AM A LITERARY GENIUS!!!

[Anonymous No.16901987]

Had the same problem when I read LOTR and had to deal with Tolkien's endless descriptions of nature.

[Anonymous No.16902026]

I legitimately believe any book (that focuses on the human condition) never needs to be over 250 pages. Not once have I been proven wrong that literature over 250 pages has tons of pointless exposition. I just finished Temple at the Golden Pavilion. It was like 300 pages, and wouldn't you know it there was about 50 pages of completely repetitive and downright boring sections of the main character neurotically self analyzing himself for the umpteenth time. Beautifully written scenes too but there was just way too much of it. Like eating too many sweets after a while it just made me sick of it.

[Anonymous No.16902031]

>>16900712
>chudding
>proof that the anti-complexity retards are unintelligent redditors
kek

[Anonymous No.16902058]

>>16902026
What an absolutely retarded theory

I sincerely hope you're trolling

[Anonymous No.16902067]

>>16900712
noooooooo where's the action, where's the boom boom, don't bother me with words!!!

[Anonymous No.16902070]

>>16900673
Holy aphantasia cope

[Anonymous No.16902082]

>>16901513

Very nice, I liked this.

[Anonymous No.16902090]

>>16901164
Filtered by reality. Do you have no aesthetic sensibilities at all?

[Anonymous No.16902131]

>>16901441
Weak trolling

[Anonymous No.16902143]

>>16902131
Cope

[Anonymous No.16902151]

>>16901164
>I don't give a shit about the furniture of rooms in real life
>admitting to being a boorish oaf
>thinking that this in any way justifies your other deficiencies in taste

[Anonymous No.16902166]

Let's post some long descriptive passages. Bonus marks if they're exceptionally boring but in a good way. Off you go, Thomas Hardy:

---

The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled and secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape-painter, though within a four hours’ journey from London.

It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it — except perhaps during the droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.

---

NOTE: This description goes on for several pages more but I decided to stop here.

[Anonymous No.16902167]

i just skip them

[Anonymous No.16903111]

>>16901355
There are people who do not pay attention to concrete details such as the fabric of a couch and consequently do not care to imagine such trivial shit either

[Anonymous No.16903128]

>>16900673
You're literally an NPC, anon. Sorry to break it ya.

[Anonymous No.16903135]

>>16903111
Such people will never be aesthetes

[Anonymous No.16903152]

>>16903135
Yes, there are people who are bit more abstract than you

[Anonymous No.16903175]

>>16902026
You’re wrong, but I agree

[Anonymous No.16903194]

>>16903152
Keep up with the cope buddy. Being "abstract" and having a powerful mind's eye are not mutually exclusive. What was it that Nabokov said about knowing the species of trees and all that?

[Anonymous No.16903204]

>>16902082
Glad that you did anon. That's McCarthy's first novel in case you were wondering.

[Anonymous No.16903209]

Read Hemingway or some shit like that then

[Anonymous No.16903210]

>>16901164
doesn't matter because that's not what i was talking about. immersion for imagination. every little detail helps grow the experience of the book in your mind and deepen each part mutually. vulgar example: room detailed helps you get into the headspace of the author as they make an intellectual point that might otherwise be reducible to a simple idea with the subtlety lost.

[Anonymous No.16903306]

>>16900667
>Be OP
>Read the Iliad
>"HOLY FUCK. I DON'T CARE ABOUT WHAT ACHILLES' SHEILD LOOKS LIKE. REEEEEE"
brainlet

[Anonymous No.16903325]

>>16903306
>sheild
Learn english normie retard

[Anonymous No.16903339]

>>16903325
imagine being this much of woman that you have to nitpick a simple typo

[Anonymous No.16903373]

>>16902026
There's no exact threshold, but you're right that most books can be edited down. However, that will lose out on some details that many people will find important to the overall experience.

[Anonymous No.16904769]

The sound of the writing is more important to me than the imagery described. As are the concepts, what is really at stake intellectually. I'm not a very visual person at all-- pathologically so. I can sympathise with OP. But you just have to learn to change gears with that stuff. Read much more slowly at descriptive passages and bask in them like you would in the aura, in the presence of a museum for example.

[Anonymous No.16905044]

>>16900673
>My friend went on and on about how a Hemingway passage made him picture a sunny field so hard that he could feel the warmth of the sun. Fucking faggot. No wonder he can't read philosophy.

https://youtu.be/QT13kk8HDDo

[Anonymous No.16905231]

>>16900673
based retard unwittingly outing himself out as a retard
>No wonder he can't read philosophy.
fucking kek

[Nemo !!GgBWHLRiayD No.16905590]

>>16900667
You do not have to care for the description, but, if you have commited to reading something that contains it, you have to respect it.

[Anonymous No.16905605]

>>16900667
>can't appreciate realism

[Anonymous No.16906195]

>>16901922
You made me laugh.

[Anonymous No.16906838]

>>16900712
>chudding
Unironically, what did he mean by this?

[Anonymous No.16906909]

>>16902070
Pretty sure most humans have aphantasia. of course the 'system' doesn't consider it a disability though it literally is a lack of a very important ability.

>>16903128
Most people are sheep. I'm not even surprised /lit/ has them on it to the point of a first poster shitposting that post.

Then again this is a pepe thread. Better not forget to be a wise s a g e type poster in it.

[Anonymous No.16906917]

>>16901280
calm down

[Anonymous No.16907211]

I really FUCKING agree with ts eliot on this shit. Writers should start by emulating dante. If you try and copy some faggot whose MO is fostering a "comfy" or "melancholic" aesthetic with poncey allusions and faux delicate word choice you will humiliate yourself unless you are a master. Dante communicates in simple images that convey action, and while they are allegories, you dont need the allegory to enjoy them. Most writers nowerdays read too much faggy shit and simply want to share their insular little view of reality with the world because its oh so special and profound and immersed in dark blue light!!! They can only operate on allusion, so at worst its tedious and opaque and at best a piece for the intellectual wanking circle and nobody else. Read dante. Get a clue.

[Anonymous No.16907212]

>>16903325

[Anonymous No.16907219]

>>16900673
But Hemingway is far far far away from being the most descriptive writer.

[Anonymous No.16907273]

>>16900667
I agree, the only way you should describe the setting is by using the action of the scene.
> don't describe the chair in the room until a character sits in it.
> the dingy rug on the floor doesn't exist until character 2 inadvertently scuffs their muddy shoes on it, inciting verbal abuse from character 1
> don't tell anyone about the illegal stimulants on the counter until character 2 abuses them in full view of character 1
> leave the red landline phone out of the setting until character 1 grabs the black-as-sin Kel-Tec PMR-30 pistol next to it and points it at character 2 while using their offhand to pick up the phone and call the police.
That's all it takes. I'm with you OP, description is a device, not a crutch

[Anonymous No.16908453]

>>16900667
And yet its considered "good writing" to needlessly pontificate about mundane scenery for no reason.

[Anonymous No.16908475]

>>16900667
Look, if the book isn't the right thickness the audience feels cheated. You know its true.

[Anonymous No.16908489]

I hate when writers rattle off the names of flowers.

[Anonymous No.16909478]

>>16900667
>mfw skipping boring paragraphs i dont like
It is truly liberating to realize one can simply not read the shitty parts.