Do Copywork.
>Before he birthed Gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson cut his writing teeth by copying The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms on a typewriter while working at Time Magazine.
>Robert Louis Stevenson would take a passage from a great writer and carefully read it twice. He’d then turn over the passage and try to reproduce it from memory — word for word and punctuation mark for punctuation mark. At first the exercise was a tremendous struggle and his attempted copies were riddled with errors. But with practice, he was able to read huge passages and reproduce them from memory with exactitude. He continued the practice even after he became a literary success.
Your favorite passages or poetry, memorize then type it out.
Everyday, lads, if you're a pleb then no excuses.
Which greats and passages will you copy?
>implying I care about a glorified children's author or le funny drug man's processes
Interesting. I had heard about Thompson, but not about Stevenson's habit.
Should be a good exercise in concentration as well.
Exactly how long is a 'passage' and a 'huge passage'?
>>7888828
>truly noble men know no difference between poor and fellow one
>and they all return good deeds, for all the harmness done
I butchered it. Off memory only I flinched.
It's 2 lines from an old Hindu Poem.
>sun don't shine in the shade
bird can't fly in a cage
even if somebody go away
the feelings don't really go away
that's just the wave
i think that's it
>>7888833
I suggest you check out Hell's Angels or Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson is so much more than the Raoul Duke caricature that high school druggies try to reduce him to. I can't copy-paste right now, but I recommend you google the opening passage of Hell's Angels. His prose is phenomenal.
Apart from that, I'm not so sure OP is correct about Thompson learning his trade through copywriting. He wrote The Rum Diary when he was only 21-22. While it is among his weakest work, it's still passable. Was he a copywriter before that?
>>7888955
He's the VICE magazine of the 19whatever's. He's a meme. He's an MTV Hemingway. A poseur of the worst kind. He's Kerouac without the moral principles. He's a chump. A fraud. He's a method writer. An intellectual cheapskate.
>>7888931
>Let me crash here for a moment
>>7888977
Uh-huh. Your critique is pretty vacuous as it stands. Tell me, what works of his have you read?
>>7888955
>the opening passage of Hell's Angels
here:
>California, Labor Day weekend. . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levi's roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur. . . The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches. . . like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know. . . Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on. . . Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more. . . tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and ban?danas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder. . .
>>7888977
>He's a meme.
His persona may be a meme, but his good writing is still good and no teenage edgelord will ever change that (nor read it, probably).
>>7888977
>he's popular so he must be bad
Ah, right. The endless cycle, first you complain that no one reads good authors and if they do the author is shit because the masses like him.
Always gotta find a way to feel superior to others.
>>7888977
go to bed Vlad
>>7888955
I mean I've actually read a lot of his work and like him a lot. But it's not as if I (or others) aspire to write just like him.
>>7888828
Copywriting is a waste of time if you're not being paid for it and I don't think either of those guys were that great.
>>7889266
>he thinks this thread is about copywriting
>>7888931
I'm really happy with how /kanye/ lit has been lately, good shit everyone.
>>7889140
The sad thing is that post could've tried to ape Vlad's criticism style-- I mean, it's so close as it is, but it's ever so subtly off, and I can't really enjoy it.
>Better that every fiber crack
>and fury make head
>blood drenching vivid
>couch, carpet, floor
>and the snake figured almanac, vouching thay you are
>a million green counties from here
>than to sit mute, under pickling stars
>with atare, with curse
>blackening the time
>goodbyes were said, trains let go
>and i, great magnanimous fool,
>thus wrenched from my one true kingdom
It's a poem i like by plath I'm fairly sure it's at least 85% correct
Here I go:
>Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta, the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the back of the teeth.
>She was Lo, plain Lo, standing four foot ten in the morning wearing one sock. She was Dolly in slacks. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a predecessor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might never have been a Lolita at all, had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girlchild. How long ago? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
>Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I present to you what the seraphs, the misguided, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
This is the only piece of prose I've ever memorized, so I hope it's close.
>>7888828
I would suggest practicing one's style through pastiches rather than through the memorization of passages.
Memorization is essential in literature. Modern education likes to trash it, but they're completely wrong - at least for lit.
Protip: instead of listening to music while commuting, listen to Shakespeare recordings. He's been recorded by such actors as John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh and others, so it should be very pleasurable.
I myself would be listening everyday to Vittorio Gassman's wonderful reading of Dante while commuting if not for the fact that I lost my cellphone after meeting two brown gentlemen in the streets a few months ago (I live in Brazil).
>>7890790
Every great writer has copied and memorized. It's been done for centuries and centuries and centuries. Bloody Demosthenes copied the whole of Tuchydides EIGHT TIMES and shaved half his hair so as too look to ridiculous to go outside and therefore spend whole days in his study.
Copying and memorizing is very helpful. It shouldn't be done with stuff like Gatsby, in my opinion, but rather with prose and poetry of the highest order - Shakespeare's, Lancelot Andrewes' etc. In my language (portuguese), with Antonio Vieira.
>>7888828
From what I've read of Hemingway's, I thought A Farewell to Arms was his weakest. Am I the only one?
>>7890810
I agree. I do memorize poetry a lot.
But for the actual purpose of training one's style, I still believe pastiches are the way to go.
>>7890845
That is literally the book I would consider doing this with, actually.
>>7888955
>Hell's Angels
One of the most boring and pointless reads that I'm glad to have not finished nor revisited.
>Catch 22
any excuse to read that book is good enough for me
i can literally open any page on that shit and enjoy myself
>>7891313
You missed out and you might be a pleb. I'd advise you check yourself, son.
I think the merit in what OP is saying - and indeed there is - lies in the idea of trying to fathom the "voice" of an author.
You see, we readers, we are cannibals. We consume each other, crystallize each voice and concomitant life into an algorithm which we embed into ourselves.
Our greatest hope and greatest fear is that others will calculate our wave function and, upon collapsing us, don our voice as an ingredient like so much spice.
So yes: parrot, refrain and restate until you cannot tell your words from theirs.
In the end, all voices are one.
>>7891351
Keep idolizing that hogwash from your pleb-tier middle-class standing; I'd rather sink my time into something worthy of better than the trash-bins of history.
>>7891406
>he actually believes the patrician meme
highkeks.mobi
I think reading more closely over and over would do more than just blind copying, since the act of copying itself can just be a distraction while you're waiting for something to happen
>>7888922
sounds pretty based. Mind sharing the title or posting the correct version?
>>7888977
Dawkins is a meme.
>>7890804
Is the gassman reading available online? I only found one canto last time i checked
from memory then:
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds but it is all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars, no lights anywhere. Above him lift girders, old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above to let the light of day through. But it's night. He is afraid of the way the glass will fall -- soon. The fall of a crystal palace, but coming down in total blackout without a single glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long, still hot, weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow stains of dust which Quentin thought of as being dead old dry paint blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
Stately plump buck mulligan came up from the tower. "Up Deadalus, come up, dreadful kike!"
Enter Benjamin Franklin:
“About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator – I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it.
With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.
But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned then into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.
I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language.”
>>7890810
>muh traditions
Gauche pleb alert.
All the true greats have had the vision to redefine or fly in the face of traditions.
>>7891616
There's a lot of it on YouTube. If you cannot find all cantos there's also Benigni, who's pretty good too, although in my opinion on on Gassman's level.
Gielgud's readings are amazing. He's my favorite in English. He reads both for the words *and* for the music, just like Gassman, which is something actors rarely do. Many actors ignore meter completely - they don't.
>>7892022
All great scientists become great by means of making new discoveries which sometimes even substitute or show unseen faults within the old ones. Does this mean a young scientist shouldn't get a big calculus book and do all exercises in it? It really doesn't. This is the big problem with lit: everyone wants to do it, but they forget it's a technical and creative job and, like science and music, it needs real study. You don't expect to be a great violinist after, at least, some ten years of training or so and a very deep study of the greatest classics of the repertoire, but people want to be praised for their literary magnificence after just reading two or three books and writing a few scribbles while drinking coffee at Starbucks. Sometimes the literary world accepts this sort of idiocy and I think this is the main reason why it's perpetuated so much. If I were inclined to be an authoritarian, I would defend a limit of five hundred literary books being published a year. No more - maybe then people would really work.
>>7892092
>on on Gassman's level
Of course I meant 'not on Gassman's level'.
>>7892092
You're just mad because it's the age of the dilettante. The style and substance of these "time-tested" methods can easily be replicated and taken to new levels through very rudimentary uses of basic modern technology. I've read all of Joyce, and the splinters of intertextuality from his books alone along with various bits and pieces of esoteric information I've picked up throughout my life are more than enough of a base to work with.
Face it, you're just jerking off to fossils.
>>7889011
not the guy that was hating on thompson before, but this paragraph is not that good, in fact i think the beginning of 'born to be wild' by steppenwolf is much better and that's just a stupid hippie pop rock song
