CHOICE
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You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
I have decided to offer you a choice, /lit/. You can only choose one.
1. Publish a trash-tier novel that becomes a bestseller. You are trashed in the press by the critics and media. You become cannon fodder for bad late night comedians. The educated smirk when your name is brought up at dinner parties. Your words are prime meme material for internet forums. Fortunately for you, the book is optioned for a movie franchise that's handled better than your book and your lawyer wisely negotiates royalties.
You are set for the rest of your life. No more worrying about rent. No more worrying about food on the table. Drive nice cars. Stay in luxurious hotels. You can spend the rest of your days getting supermodel blowjobs on private jets or spend the rest of your days laying the sun on your 100-foot sailboat in the French Riviera or spend the rest of your days floating in your cliffside pool on any coast you prefer. In short, you can do whatever you want.
However, to the educated, you'll forever be considered a joke. Your family will be well off for a few generations, though they won't generally acknowledge where the family money came from. Some of them will just change their name completely. Your name will largely be forgotten to history before you're even dead. Certainly after. Maybe some grandmother from some small town in the midwest will remember you as, "wasn't he the guy who wrote that book that became that movie for teen girls?"
2. Publish a novel that goes largely unnoticed aside from, at most, some small, local press. You know how great you are and can't understand why you're not a massive success. You turn to drugs and alcohol to satiate the nagging knowledge that you're better than this. You become a joke to your family and friends. A scumbag drug addict that couldn't let his dream die. You owe money all over town. A couple close family members do what they can, as long as they can, but they can't keep it up forever. Maybe you choose to ignore the drugs and alcohol? You live the rest of your life no different than if you never published in the first place. It slowly drives you crazy. The point is, you die in tortured anonymity.
A hundred years after you're long dead and a few of your generations have amounted to little more than working class stiffs, a critic of considerable influence and renown comes across your novel. He discovers it in a dusty, used bookstore or it arrives on his desk, sent by an anonymous fan.
His praise truly means something and your novel spreads like wildfire. Your life is revisited and combed over by scholars the world over. Your lost writing becomes the subject of graduate student theses in every university. Your novel is translated into more languages than "le Petite Prince."
Long story short, you become widely regarded as one of history's greatest writers. A sad tale, indeed. Dying relatively penniless and anonymous. Ultimately, your words prevail and your legacy becomes a vital part of human history.
3. You publish nothing. Choose not to play. You continue to enjoy your life as best you can. In your spare time, you share a passion for literature and art, hopefully with friends in real life, but on the internet is just fine. You read the classics and memorize your favorite prose. You get drunk and shitpost in forums. Meh, it's fun. You go to your job during the week and get the weekend off and then you start over and do it all again. Maybe you find someone to love? Maybe not? Maybe you have kids who provide you grandkids? You like spending time with the grandkids. You, too, die anonymously, but as happy as we all can be. Life is just life.
What do you choose, /lit/?
3
my current life is better than your two options
>>7405617
I'll take #2 plz. I already am mentally unstable and live in tortured anonymity, so I will be OK dying that way.
>>7405611
i choose vidiya.
>mfw I realise Harold Robbins made this deal and chose #1
#2
Publishing a novel and contributing to the mosaic of artistic achievement is its own reward. Any recognition is just icing on the cake, regardless of whether I eat or not. What matters is that someone enjoys it.
Wow could this board be anymore undergrad (this is the worst insult by the way)
Why wouldn't I just take #1 and use my now limitless free time to write a work that redeems me in the eyes of history? I'm doing that.
>>7405792
I don't think J.K. Rowling could get respect if she published the next Ulysses tomorrow.
What good is posthumous recognition? Either I'm in heaven and don't care, in hell and don't care, or just regular dead, and can't care. What, will the new girl in heaven come up to me and say, "Wow Anon Anonson, I've been waiting to meet you, loved your book, how about a heaven blowjob?"
Option One Please.
I'll take No. 1, thanks lucifer. When i'm already dead i probably won't care much about human history.
