writing

[02:47] hoos: man i am productive
[02:47] hoos: drink some wine and shit out 200 words a night
[02:47] hoos: i'll have a novel in like 30 years

- oh cruel storytellers! hast thou succumbed to the effects of thine drinks?

this is still funny

for the curious here is the completed version

Can Science Fiction/Fantasy writers PLEASE stop bitching about how 'Li-Fi' really is a genre with its own conventions, and whyyyyyyyy won't Professor Smith let me turn in my space opera?

"Science Fiction/Fantasy writers" = bitter genre writers in my college creative writing program

ok i have a new story and i would like u guys to tear it to shreds if you plz

trooper

hoos i think thats really really bad

im not joking

lol never saw this thx kl0pper u a total bro for bein real about that totally shitty unfinished story that i haven't even gone back to revise/finish

maybe not 'totally' shitty but def unfinished and unpolished

I've read so many workshop stories going all grand and high-diction on the ironic-heroic deeds of young boys that I just assumed that's what you were shooting for.

-- nabisco, Friday, September 21, 2007 7:01 PM

lol i blame lethem/chabon/eggers

btw my "rejection letters" file now has 3 pieces in it. a++

that's roughly 100 less than mine

i'm young! give me some time to catch up.

young in submission time! not sayin yr old!

"Is that such a priority? Is that some sort of measure of a man's worth? To drag what's best in him out into the street so every average slob with some pretense to taste can poke it with a stick?" --Henry Fool (Hal Hartley)

i'm starting my own internet literary journal, The Burt_Stanton Tribune. submti ur stories now pls

can i submit?

nobody can submit. i was born suppliant

BURT_HOOS THE STEN DRIVER, I'll publish your stories.

I figure there's no point doing anything unless you can get as much as you can out of it so I make sure the writing I do for school is interesting to me and helpful and allows me a good reason to read interesting writers etc.

Unfortunately, the climate these days is very much ... non-literate. The best creative minds spend all their time in visual media, and a lot of the people who write get way too caught up into the MFA/workshop cult. The lit. that tends to get a lot of attention is really, really middling... and unfortunately young writers gravitate towards what gets the most exposure, and so imitate drek like Eggers, etc.

So, once being a professional writer myself, after doing my regular work, and you write your personal stuff, it's like ... "where is this going to go?"

I can see how that would happen but if you write for the love of it and you get by....

is it weird that truman capote is the only 'southern' voice i feel a kinship with

the only canonized southern voice, i mean. faulkner gives me a headache and o'connor is wonderfully apocalyptic but so damn po-faced and mccarthy is masterful but pompous

and i know capote isn't even really southern, just tackles the occassional southern subject, but he's got a wit and a sense of irony about the cold world mccarthy et al deal with

In my creative writing class, for our second to last assignment we had an option to write three poems or a play. Hey group members, all of your poems are killing me.

Using "On the Other hand" without writing "On the one hand" before: yes or no?

probably shouldn't use either, really.

do all the time though anyway.

I don't think it's confusing to use 'on the other hand' without 'on one hand'.

I'm very used to doing it, but I'm wondering if there's some sort of Composition and Rhetoric pedantry that promises eternal damnation for doing it.

does anyone on ilx write fiction of any kind? what are your methods for getting work done?

Mostly, that when I do get inspiration, I pursue it with a brief and demonic intensity, before it may lie dormant again. I have also successfully forced myself into starting when not in the mood. Generally I'll tell myself to write at least 3, 4 times a week and constantly play with ideas about it in idle moments. Often an idea left brewing is better served than one immediately attacked. There's definitely a right pace for each work. Also, it's possible to pledge three hours of writing in a day, as I'm doing now. Might not hit 3 but you will probably do something useful.

What sort of thing are you writing?

Don't be afraid of writing shit. Seriously. Editing is much easier than writing, you can go back later and reshape each sentence/make sure your dialogue isn't cringeworthy. Just keep moving forward. It's better to sketch out a scene and rewrite virtually everything than aim for perfection with every sentence first time and find yourself paralysed as a result.

Trust the little voice inside your head when it tells you something's shit, but use that to improve rather than as an excuse to junk everything. Don't expect to write pages and pages every day, or feel you have to set aside hours on end for it - if you can get 500 words down in an evening or in a snatched bit of time then that's fine. It's all about incremental progress.

Critique groups are also really useful provided you've got a balanced one with no nutters and someone good to lead the discussion.

I'm pretty lucky in that I usually have about an hour and a half each evening before my gf gets in that I can use for writing and having a limited window gives a sense of urgency.

huh matt i never thought of you like that

not that it's outside ur capability or anything - far from it - but like you've always tended to resist the giveaway florid gesture (or self-conscious pruning) of the writey writer

You can probably offer slight variations on all the above advice depending on what you're writing. I'm doing a long crawl up the 500-to-1000-page mountain myself, so a massive time-period is to be expected. My best friend has been working on the same 5-scene play for about...two and a half years now? But he wants every single word to be perfect.

Matt's the biggest pruner on ILX! Never have mod powers been so wantonly etc

pruning as in a overtly strict style not wanton abuse of mod edit obv lol xp there u go

christ we even both went for wanton

So what are YOU writing rtc? :D

nothing, ever. i've honestly never had the slightest urge to try my hand at blank-page creative writing, think i have a gland missing or something

i remember once at school for english lit when i was like 14 we had this rotund happy chappy teacher on an american exchange for a while and one of his homeworks was "write a cowboy story", god i was so deeply disgusted with the man

You're a music reviewer though aintcha?

Ah man, disgust followed by gleeful subversion of the 'cowboy story'. (I was, as you can imagine, a complete fucking nightmare at school)

Garda's absence presumably down to him being candlelit at his scriptures rn

There are quite a few technically excellent writers on ILX who I'd imagine could very well create a thorough literary novel with some effort. Shame that a few of these (darragh, nakh) are big ol' lazyboneses. Very keen for Fizzles' debut.

nah the rtc gonchong holds little ambition beyond wasting its long-suffering host's spare time

what is fizzles writing? (or fizzles what are you writing should you read this thread)

I think my writing ambitions are gone fwiw. I've rarely got time to sit down and properly attack something now. Plus I no longer particularly think I've got anything of general worth to say that someone else won't say better; and anything that's specially mine I'd rather keep to myself.

I do a lot of non-creative writing at work and I'm pretty comfortable with banging out a thousand finished words in a day when I need to. Occasionally I'll have a dab at making those a story, but it's largely a technical exercise for me I think - do the set-up like this, pose the questions in this order, drop the punchline just so. The deeper stuff you need like exploring character and so on, I don't have the urge for.

As for method, do it first thing in your day I reckon, before other thoughts get in the way. When you reach quickstand, stop immediately. But it's a personal thing obviously.

I write fiction (just finished a story). When I'm hot I write two pages a day: one in the morning (a few bit sneaked at work), one at night.

there are enough terrible writings in the world for me to add to the ranks, never mind laziness on my part

cosign fizzles and nakh to bother tho