/lit/ - Literature and Writing

>>2303
My handwriting is worse. You'd think of it as some ancient hieroglyphs with curses.

>>2303
That is not a very feminine handwriting. Looks sus.

I'm interested but after a few pages she's like alcoholic, is that the power of Christian guilt?

>>2303
No human makes y's like that

>>2284
First and foremost, you need an audience to release your book to. There's a billion books on the market, and each one costs time and money to read. Most people will choose to invest that time and money into a book they're reasonably sure they'll enjoy. How does a reader know if he'll enjoy a book before he buys it? Maybe he stumbled upon a glowing review, maybe a friend reccommended it, if your daddy is rich maybe can get your publisher to market it really hard, but the surest way is if the reader recognizes the author as someone who's written a book he enjoyed before.

Thus, you'll have to put time into writing multiple decent books - and money into advertising them - in order to attract enough of those rare experimental readers for them to start reviewing your work and reccommending it to attract safer readers, who may in turn generate even more discussion to pull in an even wider audience. Lots of small time writers run blogs or youtube channels or mailing lists or whatever. This turns their core audience - once they attract one - into a group of people they can directly release new books to. If your new book is met with a wave of purchases, the algorithms on online book stores will proceed to give it more visibility, which in turn attracts more readers.

TL;DR you need connections with your consumers, and those connections will take years of time, effort, and money to build up even if your writing is good.

>>2334
where s this audience? and how good is this multiple writings be/should be?

>>2342
Better than anything you're capable of. You fuck up even a two sentence post, how can you expect to write a book anyone is willing to read?

Write really short shit for fun.

Even if it's bad, it's yours

>>2425
I try to write one story for the littyzeen every issue and it is fun.

None of those are good. Stop shitting up /art/ and this board with your inane threads.

>>2345 but they sell alot

Great art, keep working on it.

>>2361
>>2361
This. Focus on the art, not the writing.
If OP would do comics instead he would have a much bigger chance of success. No one reads comics for the story anymore; just be good at drawing and fill the pages with cool artworks, and no one will care that the story is as thin as the page it is drawn on.
Become the Andy Sidaris of comics, OP.

>>2341
You just practice every day. Practice writing, but also practice producing story ideas, 10 a day until you can ejaculate them on command like a circus freak. Try to see a few steps beyond a plot, to genre combinations and thematic ideas. As a last ditch resort, try to study 3d people, note interesting dicktion, mannerisms, those sad things people do unconsciously that show forth the pit of misery inside them. Do all that and sacrifice a few children to Moloch, and you're James Patterson.

>>2166
Perhaps I ought to have made this clear earlier, but I am a complete and utter hack, so most of my stories are a few decent scenes cobbled together to form a semi-coherent narrative.
Kubrick talked about 'non-submersible units': these are fundamental story-pieces, the irreducible core of a narrative when all the non essential 'padding' has been stripped away. Brian Adliss: "[Stanley] had a contempt for narrative, I was hooked on narrative. But he said to me: forget it, all you need for a movie is 6 or 8 non-submersible units."

I've no idea if this method works outside of film, but that is my approach to writing.
I am even guilty of J. J. Abrams' 'mystery box' approach: I come up with a mystery for the characters to look into/investigate, and then make it up as I write. As long as the reader can follow the logic in where the story and investigation goes, and I ground the story enough, it could work. Hopefully. I include a lot of details surrounding the case, details that help sell the idea that this is a real case, and the investigators know what they are doing and follow the leads, but in actuality I have no idea where it is going, or if there is anything of importance to a particular clue.

Some clues may end up becoming redherrings, while other may end up being important. If I, as the writer, have no real idea where it is going, it forces me to be creative, makes me think on how I can connect these clues in a logical and interesting way.

In my 'dramatis personæ' list I make sure to include their relationships to the other characters if that is important - relative, love interest, acquaintances, enemies, etc.
If you are lucky the bio you come up with for characters can prove to be important down the line, how characters interact and think about each other.

I'm betting people will overlook most of my stories' faults as long as there are a few scenes that really work, and the characters are engaging.

>>2168 i see… i am a complete hack myself without any chance of success. but curiously of course, wondering if the elements that makes stories good are all reliant on, cohesive pieces in a certain way?

otherwise things just looks like a mess… whether star trek's khan and …the main guy's duality or benedict cumberbatch casting against chris pine…
or the jedi sith relation?

maybe i wonder too much about it and it cripples me..
otherwise then wouldnt you be making and remaking a certain thing all the time without retaining come recycled elements that has somewhat "good" ratings in it? what do you think?

>>2169
>maybe i wonder too much about it and it cripples me..
That could be it. Fuck the haters and the fear of screwing up. Just write what you want.
Nothing I ever write will ever be published, so I may as well write what I want and put it online, rather than trying to appeal to some non-existent audience or adhere to genres and styles just because that is 'how it is supposed to be done'.

If you write just to have fun and get better, then just do it and see how it turns out. If you do put it up online you could end up getting some useful feedback. AO3 allows original fiction, but even fanfiction is helpful to get your toes wet. You can just use these existing characters and settings and scenarios and add your own plot/idea and just start writing without having to come up with all new characters on your own. That can take up so much time you could be using on just writing with pre-existing characters.
That is a helpful way to test your skills and scenarios.

>>2171 im not going all anarchist like that but yes you have a point, thank you

>>2172
I'm not saying go nuts and drop any coherent narrative, but to be less bound by traditional writing styles and techniques. That hampers creativity, I think.
If you are writing something for serious publication, then yes, write what you think will get published. But if you are writing something (mostly) for your own enjoyment, why not be more creative and focus on mood, atmosphere, and make some segments flow nicely, albeit in an unconventional way, and focus more on developing those special scenes, rather than adhering to conventional story structure and narrative?
Explore different writing styles for different characters - some characters might use more 'flowery' expressions, different words, and have an outlook on life that gives them a special and distinctive flare. Other characters might be more reserved and logical, and their POV would be noticeably different from other characters. Just small things that help set the characters apart and give an indication of their personality.

Personally I have tried to adopt Lucio Fulci's approach in literary form for some of my stories:
<Both [The Beyond & Inferno], intentionally, have no structure. We tried in Italy to make films based on pure themes, without a plot, and The Beyond, like Inferno, refuses conventions and traditional structures, while there are some threads in my other films: The House is about a monster, The Ripper is an Hitchcockian thriller, City of the Living Dead deals with Evil, Zombi 2 was death and the macabre. I like The Beyond very much because I think it was an interesting attempt. People who blame The Beyond for its lack of story have not understood that it's a film of images, which must be received without any reflection. They say it is very difficult to interpret such a film, but it is very easy to interpret a film with threads: any idiot can understand Molinaro's La Cage aux Folles, or even Carpenter's Escape from New York, while The Beyond or Argento's Inferno are absolute films.

Is it a bad idea to work on multiple projects at once? I'm getting a little bored with the story I'm working on because I've ran through the plot in my head a million times.

>>2125
Probably, but I am very guilty of this myself. I just can't force myself to sit down and write unless my muse inspires me. Some writers treat it is any other sort of work/job, but that seems so cold and mechanical to me.
So I end up writing on something that holds my interest for a while, then maybe I will be writing on something different, a wholly different genre and mood.

Anthony Trollope got up early to sit down and write for three hours before breakfast, but I simply do not have that kind of willpower, and I fear my already poor writing would suffer if I tried to force my way through it.

>>2125
If you actually sit down and force yourself to squeeze out a thousand words in one day for your current story, you'll discover new plot elements you didn't know about before.

>>2141
Once you start to write a story you keep thinking about it and the characters, and new interesting ideas emerge from that, but I always find that those ideas come when I am doing something else, not sitting down to write. It is very rare for me to come up with some new direction when I am actually sitting down to write. It has happened, but I find that sitting down lessens my creativity.
I always get my best ideas when I am active and outdoors; jogging, watching nature and the surroundings, and thinking about the story and the characters as I walk or jog.

>>2142
I'm the same way. What you do is you sit down, write til you don't know what to write next, then go do something else until you do know. Engaging your brain in intellectual activity is like engaging your body in physical activity; if you don't rest in between sets you'll become exhausted. I banged out over 2000 words today in this manner.

>>1903
Well how about a download like then you dumb prick

Here is the Excel File. My apologies for the delay. Doesn't start until November though, so there is no time lost.

https://mega.nz/file/vRURkK7A#mWlS9s4MUO1gR38AjihoGxaj1tWlq4k3rOo7ZPu1bf0

Here is the PDF version if you cannot open the Excel file. Excel file is better to write on & look at, as it has dotted lines in the days instead of solid lines, but some dumb pricks might not be able to open it.

Enjoy!

https://mega.nz/file/vM80mCjL#pLEPMWzMlBHbRnRxDekWAWOsTiU3XNvN6QmnN2rKudA

quality

>>2052
oh i ve heard this but then you cant always have one off characters become popular so how does those who you write up as recurring fills in all of your stories "properly"? seems kinda wild without any sort solid ideas or plan…

>>2048
I tend to make a list of the main characters at the beginning, just writing down all sorts of tidbits about them; physical description, likes, dislikes, family background, etc.
This is especially useful if you don't know where the story is going or how it is going to end.

Some, or most, of these bits of background/info may not even make it into the story, but I find it is useful to have established some sort of basic character before going into the story. It makes it easy to decide where that character is going, how they would react in a certain situation if you know a little about their background.


Came across these notes J. K. Rowling made when she started writing the Harry Potter books, detailing the blood status for each character was something she thought to include from the very beginning. The empty circle symbolises a pure-blood father, the filled square a non-magical father. The Star of David symbolises the mother's blood status, while the square with an 'N' inside means a non-magical/non pure-blood mother(?). Finally the letter at the end is the house they end up in at Hogwarts (Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Gryffindor or Slytherin).
I could not find anyone talking about the fact that Rowling used a Star of David to symbolise the mother's blood status; is she implying that the witches and wizards are like Jews? The serpent symbolism of Slytherin is also interesting, especially since these witches and wizards are die-hard blood purists.

>>2068
You take pictures like a 90s serial killer. How many people have you killed?

>>2073
I think he merely saved the pic, anon.

>>2073
As >>2077 pointed out I did not take it myself, it comes from the Harry Potter Wiki, and from the 2001 documentary Harry Potter and Me where Rowling shows off her earliest notes before she started writing the books.
Because it is a screenshot from a 2001 documentary that is probably the best image quality out there.
http://web.archive.org/web/20211020003906/https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_Me

No one seems to have commented on the Stars of David, or the fact that Rowling thought about the importance of the blood purity from the very beginning.
The circle around the Star might mean pure-blooded mother, while a plain Star is a Muggle mother. Still no idea what the 'N' is supposed to mean…

>>2072 that is very hilarious… i cant see how potter and king's
is related though.

Still, what do i do? how many character? how big of plots? what are the environments?

>>2075
>i cant see how potter and king's
is related though.
by being the same thing: slop

>>2076 ok sure. stil, what do i do then? climax or whatsoever, intros and exposition, how do i fill in the blanks? i cant seem to decide other than filing in names of objects but not sure how are they arranged to

Disclaimer: I have no experience writing for money or working with people who do and are successful at it.

In my opinion it's only not about how well you can write but about how well you can sell it.
You could have some awesome story and if you have no way to promote it it'll just be another work lost in the sea of self-published garbage with other gems floating around.
Find a way to cultivate an audience or find a way to get your work promoted by a publisher. Best ideas I can give.

>>2042
ok, some question:
how do you cultivate audience usually?
and in these days, what kind of "publisher" can help your writing busness… which is online now, to improve?

Submit something to the littyzine if it's worth I'll tell you the genre you need to write

>>2046
wheres littyzine