Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 559. page
- Home
- Board: /lit/ - Literature
- Reading: Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 559. page
Lads I need some help.
My story recently won a scary story writing competition, the prize being that my story is published (along with the others) in a collection of horror stories. But now the editors want me to change the ending of the story to something I feel would be a huge simplification.
>Am I just being pretentious? Or are my fears warranted?
Stand by because the piece is just under 2000 words.
Anyone who could read it and give me thoughts, I would appreciate it. I will post the "alternative ending" that they want to change it to after the initial story dump.
>inb4 normie-core
I know, I know but had to work with target market.
>>8002529
The sky is burning in fast forward, the wind is blowing backwards. Formless effervescing plankton expand and dissipate, consuming one another for growth, popping like pixelated fireworks in super-imposed bioluminescence. Their silhouettes scar the conflagrant sky with a silent, salted fear. Eyes roll into darkness, the sound of grinding rocks, cracking hungry bones. The sun splits into fiery jaws, descends onto the shivering earth. Ripped skin is born from flames, shapeless matter whirrs in suspended animation. Hills are formed and defiantly rise. Mountains cough and explode in drowning fire.
Red worms are pulsing in soup. The pan is blackening, the worms ignite. Muted invertebrate screams echo. Worm-broth shudders and splits, piercing sunlight floods.
"Sir, will you please close your blind."
My eyes open slowly and I swivel to look at the speaker with the incredulity of blear, a blank, humming heat in my eyes.
"Sir? Your blind?"
Gradually, lines are forming in the whiteness. A lady in a blazer. A hat rests precariously slanted upon her head, her hair is in a tight bun. She is looking at me strangely.
"No, I can see" I say. She squints at me in bewilderment and gestures past me to a window. Beyond the panes, there is the soft lap of blue sky on cloud coast. The rising flare of a new day blushes the billows from beyond the horizon. My view is cut abruptly to alabaster infinity as the woman's hand slams the blind shut.
She rights herself and looks at me, face of confusion, waggling finger of universal reproach.
"Please keep your blind down for the duration of the flight, Sir"
>>8002535
"Who are you?" I say, kneading my scalp between my fingers and trying to focus my nervous pupils.
She keeps her eyes fixed on me and shifts her weight. She taps a silver rectangle name-badge emblazoned in dark print with 'Karen'.
"Karen" She says.
She turns to leave.
There is a pressure in my head that is building with my disorientation. She begins to walk away and I realise with an anxious twist in my guts that I want her to stay.
"Karen, wait"
She glances back at me, looking tired and bored.
"What?"
"Where are we?"
"Please keep your blind down for the duration of the flight, Sir" She says, emphasising the word 'flight'. "We are on a plane." She makes a frowning face and heads down the aisle.
I look after her, feeling betrayed without knowing why. Passing four rows she turns, quickly looking back at me, meeting my eyes, then passing out of sight.
I feel beads of cold sweat emerging from my forehead as my heart begins to pump previously docile blood. My lucidity is returning in unwelcome high-definition. The snores of my fellow passengers are increasingly transmuted to bitter rasps and the clogged pores of the sleeping woman to my left look like dirty sinkholes.
I fidget in my seat, the anxiety of reality grating on me, filing me to a sharp point, skewering my nerves. I neurotically fiddle with the buttons on my shirt, twisting one off by accident. I decide I should look out the window again. You've done it before, I think, but what if it's different this time? You're getting more and more awake now. The pills are wearing off. Try not to panic. What are the odds you die in an airplane crash? Just look out the window and don't panic, never panic. You might make a scene again. It could make everything worse, much worse and then it would really have been better to have never looked at all. You're already biting your nails. I nip into the quick of my nail by accident and blood blossoms underneath.
>>8002538
I close my eyes and press my forefingers into my temples for a moment.
Peeling the blind up a tiny bit, I glimpse the wing. It jolts up and down under the power of the wind. I recognise the Airplane's turbofan engines from Google images, but they look much bigger in real life. The noise they make seems to emit from inside my own head, the sound of dying machines, robot screams. A wintry palm grips my throat at the thought of mechanical failure. Charred rubble.
I shut the blind quickly and look around. Probing my blazer pockets, I find an amber prescription bottle and shakily unscrew the lid. I summon spittle into my mouth and coax two yellow tablets down my gullet. Leaning over my armrest, I look at the person behind me. Drowsy woman of mid-forties. Her handbag is knitted with bits of fabric and held affectionately to her stomach, her hair is clean but frayed. She looks back at me through pinched, tired eyes.
Weighing on the chair in front of me is a corpulent Colonel Sanders look-alike. His furry maw dances to the rhythms of snore.
The sound of slumbering breaths is constricting the air around me, making it heavy and claustrophobic, the incessant wail of the engines is making my eye twitch. Everyone is asleep. Why can't you be like the others?
I am jittering in my chair, uncomfortably praying for sleep when out of the corner of my eye I see movement, a leg changing positions. I lean over to get a look at the person. They are dressed in a grey suit, with a tie-less white shirt and black brogues. He is looking into the desolation of the closed blind. I cough and he turns his head towards me.
My teeth clamp together, pre-empting the surge of quivering bile up my oesophagus.
The man has no face.
Where his face should be there is a void. Like a perpetual cigarette burn on film, as if reality has not processed his face, it is not there.
He seems to look back at me, measuring, waiting.
Is Purity any good ?
It just got out in France. I never read Franzen before but the plot seems interesting.
then read the fucking book. why are you such a co-dependent pleb
Purity more like Poority lmao
Franzen is the Franzia of literature.
>imitating the style of your favorite author
>frogposting
Kill yourself.
>imitating the style of your favorite authors and including references and "in jokes" to those authors great works for shits and gigs because you know the book is that great that people will be reading it almost a century later
>>8002357
>having a favourite author
Why would you be such a cuck?
![suicide_series_icon[1].jpg___scale=w_200,h_200,t_3,q_80,r_2.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/39qyQx9.jpg "suicide series icon[1] scale=w 200,h 200,t 3,q 80,r 2")
philosophy is useless
prove me wrong
inb4 define useless
as i said you cant even pinpoint words, so inherent value=0
suicide is the only way out of this misery
>use
>suicide is the only way out of this misery
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
useless for what? it's been a buttload of use in giving me fun stuff to think about.
Rousseau was the most based social contract theorist, and the best writer out of the lot.
Prove me wrong. Protip: you can't
Link for those who haven't read yet: http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm
>>8001150
>Rousseau was the most based social contract theorist
That would probably be Montesquieu even if Rousseau is more pleasant to read.
The reason he is appears so based is probably because he is one of the protogenitors of the spooks that possess you currently
>>8001150
plz Wolstonecraft made rousseau look like a bitch,
>>8001774
That was only on his educational philosophy, the social contract was his true masterwork, then discourse on inequality.
>>8001726
Stirner may have not believed in a state, but I think some of his critiques became a bit silly. For example, saying that even if he made the law he shouldn't be obligated to follow it because he could change his mind, nevermind the fact that if he made the law in the first place he could just change it after he changed his mind.
I also happen to believe that ideas of rights, justice and legitimacy, short of being value judgments, are useful tools for me to evaluate myself and my own compared to the power of other's wills.
Books like Her?
Him by Christopher Walken
Children of the mind- Orson Scott Card.
If you watched Her and enjoyed it the only book you should be reading is pic related
When did you realize you weren't actually talented?
Not there yet. Still in the haven't even tried yet so I can't know stage.
>>8000117
When I realized I writing anything longer then eight pages was impossible.
>>8000117
We all have our skill ceilings. Don't despair. Just make sure you are operating at your limits and true to your authentic self. At the very least you will be writing for yourself.
as Dave hung from the rafters he thought "woops".
what was his last facial expression before expiring?
oh fuck I only now get the joke about DFW being hung
>>7999925
>>8000323
please stop saving me DFW reaction images without asking first. I know for a fact that I did not grant permission for either of these. Thanks.
>>8000812
say it with me
intelpro is a _____
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8317976-fate-time-and-language
>being this much of a spook
why is he still relevant again?
My mom gave this to me. I never bothered starting it
>>7999422
fuck thats spooky
Can /lit/ reccomend me some essential works discussing film theory/criticism? I would ask /tv/ but I feel like I'd get better answers here.
http://www.amazon.com/Sculpting-Time-Tarkovsky-Filmaker-Discusses/dp/0292776241
Bazin, Benjamin and Kracauer.
>>8001969
Film Art series by Bordwell Thompson is a good introduction. The Screenwriter's Bible is pretty good for learning the basics of how hollywood style film scripts are made.
Best time travel literary novels?
Pic related
Thoughts on this? It used to be considered a great travel novel but now people say it's dated and pretentious.
I found it boring, got halfway through.
Time Traveler's Wife is quite good
Is it worth it to take a gap year between high school and college to read for a year straight like a NEET but without the same sense of shame, if there's like a 60% chance that I'll kill myself out of boredom and loneliness? I want to become a patrician before I enter college. Plus, it sounds comfy as fuck.
>I want to become a patrician before I enter college
nigga, what in the fuck are you thinking?
youll have plenty of time during college to read and do shit all
>>8001491
Thinking about becoming a patrician, dumbass
I'll revive the journal thread. You can talk about anything really, just start writing and stop whenever you feel. How does writing make you feel, /lit/? Does your opinion of your writing directly inform your opinion of yourself?
Nice trips.
I get constipated and procrastinate about writing a lot, being afraid to sit down and try in case nothing comes out. This happens a lot. But then when I get inspired, or just force myself to sit down and write... it's like the keyboard is a piano, energy like melodic water flows down my arms through my hands and fingers and through the keys onto the screen. It's wonderful.
>>7997444
nice numbers
S'pose I'll bump.
I feel frustrated, to be honest. I always have trouble writing action. For example, writing about someone running in the woods as it's happening. When you write in (for lack of a better term) present-tense like that, all action must be implied. You can't just list off everything that the character in question is doing. You have to dance around that. You really have to be clever about it, too. Otherwise, it gets much too repetitive.
Then comes the all-important question: assuming anyone will ever read this, will they care at all whether it's repetitive? Will they even so much as notice the clever methods one has to employ in order to write in this way? Why am I doing this right now, and who am I doing it for? Me, I suppose. But it's only every once in a while that I write something and enjoy it. Even when that happens, a day later I feel embarrassed about what I just wrote. Despite all this, I'm just so compelled towards it, and don't know why.
If I read George Herbert Palmer's prose translation of the Odyssey am I ruined for life? Can I still get married?
Kill yourself
>>7996320
that's hardcore i read that
>>7996320
what's wrong with that translation?
What's your way to you refute the "everything you say is subjective" argument? Obviously not to change anyone's opinion, but at least to feel good about myself
Picture is a photo objectively conveying the visual aspect of reality, much like words may convey a universally true notion
"If you thought with logic and reason, you'd be able to see past leftist subjectivism"
>>7995764
Their response is also subjective as well. It leads in circles endlessly, their interpretation of what has been said is also subjective. So if we want to base everything on subjectivity nothing can be understood, so nothing can be known, and therefore any conversation is pointless.
Also, even though it is subjective, it's a product of your experience, which is objectively a real thing which has happened.
>>7995764
The argument is self-defeating. For the position that 'everything is subjective' would itself be subjective, and we could then reject it.
