If you write just one page a day you can have a chapter ready in 20 days. You have ten days to edit and fix plot issues and refine your prose.
You can write a book in 20 months.
One page a day. One fricking page. What's stopping you, champ?
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>who needs the passion or desire to write when you can treat writing as you would a chore like cleaning the kitchen or wiping your ass
Ya an entire book will pour out of your passionate ass one day without any work ethic and commitment whatsoever
One page a day is not a work ethic and is an asinine way to go about writing, the result with be ChatGPT tier.
>Joke's on you, I'm a chump not a champ
Got it
To write a novel in such a linear fashion requires anal planing or you will experience a compounding of errors and 10 months in 10 days will be no where near enough time to revise because you will be going back over all previous 10 chapters and this will be made more difficult by your attempts to get each chapter perfect before moving on to the next, a small change fricks everything. Then we have style, someone who has never written much is going to develop their voice over those 20 months and by the end the style will have little in common with where it started, you will have to pretty much rewrite everything.
A slow day of writing for me means I only wrote for my regular 2 hours first thing in the morning, generally I will also write for another 2 hours if not more sometime in the evening. Weekends I tend to write for at least 8 hours a day.
OP is not advocating for people to spend hours a day on a single page if not a single sentence, he is trying to make it out to be so easy that anyone can do it even if they don't really care to do it.
Many writers have put such constraints on themselves, but OP is not advocating for that. If you spent 8 hours a day on that single page you would probably come up with something pretty great.
Not gonna read all of that, I'm working on my March chapter
Just find what you are passionate about and dedicate yourself to it instead of trying to life hack your way to doing things you don't care about. It is not difficult.
>when the longest post is also the worst
Shame. Not reading all this.
>One page a day is not a work ethic...
Nobody tell this dude about Flaubert.
>passion
yes, that's what gets things done
Writers treat writing like a job. They write regardless of their day-to-day desires.
You are not James Joyce.
Quick, provide an example of some prose that "frees you from the fatigue of searching for its meaning," that is not slop.
>You are not James Joyce
thank God, I don't want pink-eye
Wasn't there a dude that wrote a book like 100 words a night?
It took Joyce 1000 hours to write 15 or so pages for a chapter in Finnegans Wake. Passion and commitment are everything--not your asinine work ethic.
You know that work ethic IS passion and commitment, plus some extra?
One poem should painstakingly take you a week if you spend your whole day on it. If you write a page of prose in average ten times that size in a single day do you think your work will be worth anything?
Do you like writing? Do you like literature? Or are you another puppet to capitalism and necessity drunk on the dream of acknowledgement, on the sweet honey in truth spit and vomit of others validating your tiny existence? Doomed as all ironies in life have it, all opposites that meet, to pine for the meaningless thing (in dissonant clumsy waltz), this desire exposing your nature and your worthlessness and tracing the threads of your life as infinite jest without punchline. So you waddle your way through roads you don't belong in sharting a trail of stunk and fear in your wake. But ah, it's the grind! A few more farts and you'll reach the stars!
Why are you so afraid of yourself?
Did you suffer from an aneurysm in the middle of your post?
Take your own advice please. Your prose is like that of a mildly agoraphobic teenager who spends most of their time reading tumblr posts about novels.
Hyperfixation on prose will not deliver masterful writing, and neither will a chimeric regurgitation of different voices somehow convey emotion or thought effectively. Writing is instead a product of accumulation, wherein one gains a mastery of language through repetitive and critical practice, and novel composition becomes an exercise in thought rather than execution.
Your values seem somewhat skewed and in direct opposition to what the field has brewed throughout these last two centuries. Effective communication of thought over pathos is better left to the textbooks. Languages are tools too great to master. Composition is an exercise in engineering, sure, but the structures you build ideally seek to communicate more than what can be placidly said in mere words. The novel is a beast to obsess over and go through time and time again like a lover, not an effective method of communication. There's a million other fields where you can dilute everything into simple sentences each will interpret to their own convenience.
I never said that prose is useless, you midwit, I merely stated that obsessing over it will not produce anything of great quality. Prose is a vehicle for emotion and thought that must be honed through practice, until it becomes a reflex in itself.
In essence, your first few novels or stories will be garbage, even with an obsessive attention to detail, because structure alone is meaningless without a foundation of ideas. It is only when prose is sufficient to translate the intangible, and when this process can occur without strenuous exertion, that one is able to truly write anything of real value. Of course, you may spend years
Sounds like its hopeless then
I'm so sick of it. Why can't there be something I'm good at
No reason for your first novel or story to be garbage, if it is garbage it is still a draft. The process of revision and editing and rewriting is more important than the process of writing since it teaches you to read and evaluate your own writing. Treating your writing as garbage is the biggest mistake you can make, you never learn from it if you do that. So you sit down with it and identify what is good about it and why those bits are good, you identify what is bad about it and why it is bad and you improve the bad and build off of the good.
If you want to write a TV series then write a TV series, a novel is a whole and you can not think of it as a series since the reader will not be waiting a week for the next episode, they will be like the binge watcher who sees all the faults and inconsistencies between episodes.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens all wrote their writing as serialized fiction. Breaking your work into manageable chunks is an excellent system for crafting the whole. You are a dummy.
>nothing is worth reading if the author didn’t agonize over every letter
You must not read at all then
>write 'pee pee poo poo' x100 every day for 2 years
Congratulations, you're then a dadaist.
Chuds ITT think their competition is Dostoevsky. Guess what morons, it's Colleen Hoover. b***h pushes out a book every six months.
Most of you are homosexual losers coping. You complain about the lack of quality books in the modern age but can't write for shit. That b***h Hoover mogs every last one of you and rightly so.
I literally can't write that much though. I don't understand how people write tons of text.
Work hard, often, and smart, be kind to others, the urge to express on paper will come by itself.
>What's stopping you, champ?
I don't have a page a day of ideas to write about.
That's not how it works. You think of the entire chapter as a whole. Think of it as an episode of a TV series. Think what happens in that episode of yours. You ain't think about that particular page. The pasta will come to you once you know what that chapter is about.
The modern TV show is literally what the serialized novel used to be btw.
I can't think about the entire chapter. The current thing im writing has no chapters at all or any delineation between pages. I simply cannot make structure like that
I don’t have ideas for chapters, either. I can’t conceive of any plot or characters or subject matter.
I’m not creative enough for writing.
Trying to conceive those things is often a mistake, all you need to start is an idea or situation you wish to explore, explore it and it will suggest things like plot and character.
And the faults of the serialized format are often apparent in their works which even they realized, War and Peace the novel is quite different from its serialized earlier form. But being released as a serial does not mean it was written as a serial or conceived of as a serial, completed novels used to be broken up and released as serials.
>all you need to start is an idea or situation you wish to explore, explore it and it will suggest things like plot and character.
I don't understand how to do this.
You need a seed idea and then you can keep adding more ideas to it.
Example: a young man decides to steal trade secrets from his employer and sell them to a competitor.
With this seed idea you can start branching. Who is the young man? Craft good love and back story. Why is he stealing? Give him a motivation. Who is the employer? And on and on. You keep adding to the original until your narrative is layered and jam-packed with details.
Good lore*
The seed idea for brothers Karamazov is: a man falls in love with the woman his father is desperately trying to seduce.
How do you then (1) come up with an idea that is interesting enough to carry a story and (2) convert questions and details into a plot.
All of my attempts at creative writing ended just staring a blank sheet and getting nowhere.
I'm sure many cool ideas have come to you over the years and You've rejected them all as not being good enough. Watch out for the next one and start digging deeper.
One of the most common ways I start is with a minor detail of something I am reading, I wish it were more than a minor detail. So perhaps a minor setting the characters pass through I wish they had spent more time at, or a line spoken by a character I wish was explored and developed more, etc. I start simply with what the author provides me and do not concern myself with sticking to their characters or story but exploit them so I don't have to concern myself with such things, just build off that idea and see where it goes. Eventually more suitable characters and stories are suggested and I start developing them.
The siege of Malta in V. seemed a great setting and I wished there was more of it, loved the idea of a city under siege as setting and exploring how that would affect the lives and mental state of the citizens, how their lives and mental state would evolve as the siege goes on. So I started by filling in the details in Pynchon's bit on the siege which he skipped because they were unimportant to his story. After a few dozen very rough and quick pages building on the bits which he glossed over it was suggesting a whole different set of characters and whole different city and plots start to develop which I can build off of or toss away. I write about their lives and see where they take me.
Not quite what I meant.
That was my point.
Ok, I'll write a book.
Chapter 1:
Acquiescence to the ritual and ceremony of labor provided Rubi with the temporary serenity of the True Believer. It gave him purpose. It kept the gun out of his mouth—metaphorically speaking; in reality, he tended put the gun to his temple. He found the cold metal against his teeth too clinical, and the chance that he would botch the shot and only blow out his orbital sockets tended to give him pause—better to sweat and grunt under a weary life then suffer a Glock lobotomy. Occasionally he would put the gun to his head and see how much slack he could take out of the trigger before his resolution was inevitably overcast by thoughts of what dreams may come. He considered buying a shotgun. Statistically, with a ninety-nine percent success rate and a manageably low agony score of five, it was the surest method, but he didn’t want to leave a mess. Better to push the boulder. Better to drink a coffee and volunteer for overtime.
Rubi woke up five minutes before his alarm and saw the last rays of the sunset breaking through at the edges of the blackout sheets Velcroed to his bedroom windows. He preemptively muted the three consecutive alarms on his phone and turned off his prized white-noise box; the perpetual idling of a delivery truck below his apartment window mixed with the synchronized kick-thuds and “kiai’s!” of the young karatekas who trained at the studio below him. The thuds from the dojo tended to invigorate a fighting spirt in Rubi; he felt hope for the youth and was glad they were learning the values that Master Yoo had written on the glass windows: INDOMITABLE SPIRIT, PERERVERECNE, SELF CONTROL, DISCIPLINE, INTEGRITY, ENDURANCE, HONOR—despite them being somewhat redundant. The truck drivers, on the other hand, like the Friday morning leaf-blower wielding Mexicans, filled Rubi with an impotent rage and disdain for all mankind; the only remedy for which was a high fidelity ninety decibel white noise machine with twenty unique non-looping sound options. Truly, all you can do is drown out the noise; they’re just isn’t enough ammo for all the Mexicans.
Trash. Who the frick is Rubi? How old is he? What does he look like? Where does he live? Why should I give a frick about him? You have to solve all of these problems first. You have to have the reader invest in your protagonist.
You'll learn all that eventually, duh. He is obviously depressed, he works the nightshift, he knows Shakespeare, he lives in a loud apartment above a karate studio, he cant even properly install blackout curtains, he racist, he has hope for the youth.
Why didn't you start your book with him working the night shift? It's a cool angle. Sets the mood. Paint a portrait of this guy. Then show me what his workplace is like. What the sounds and images are like outside at night. Have a Black person show up during his shift and make Rubi seethe so I know he's racist.
Not eventually. Your first 3 pages are going to make or break your book. If I'm invested in those 3 pages I'll read the whole thing. If not, it's going into trash.
What a grim way of writing. So contrived
Its the moron's gun theory of writing; if you introduce an element into your story you must explain it in the next sentence.
i dont want to. that makes it read worse.
You are right, having the protag wake up in his bed is less contrived
Thanks for the comments. I am still deciding how I want to start the book. Rubi works in a semi-conductor fabrication plant. Maybe i should start it with him ritualistically putting on his clean-room suit and entering the fab. The embryonic idea I have about the book pulls a lot from Lewis Mumford's 'the myth of the machine' about how the forces of modern technology have been shaping modern man, robbing us of formative experiences and incorporating us into 'the machine.' Rubi is a typical superfluous, who, instead of killing himself, decides to volunteer for an assignment at a new fab being constructed where he can work as much overtime as he wants. 12 hours a night, seven days a week. He venerates the rituals and ceremonies of work, because there is no society or religion available to him.
The other members of his shift will all be consumed by the factory in various ways. Through suicide and self-sacrifice.
Thanks.
>putting on his clean-room suit and entering the fab
Good lad. Yes make him obsess over the whole ritual, it will reveal a lot about his psyche.
and I can have him walking into the factory alone, crossing the bridge as all of the dayshift people are heading the opposite direction, as the sun is setting.
entering into the yellow-light of the fab, the false sun
Nice.
Don't bog your story down with prose though. Not every sentence has to be flamboyant and extravagant.
ok ok ok. bye bye, I'm going to go write for awhile. thanks for the talk. I think I have a better idea of what I want to do with Rubi now. Less of me, more of him. Ah, this is hard.
Ruby is a girl's name. Give your character a manly name homosexual.
Rex would be better. Short for Rexford, rhymes with sex. Everyone likes sex.
Fun idea. I used to work in a fab.
First, remove your outdoor shoes and stow them in your locker. Replace them with fab shoes, covered with booties. Wash your hands before gloving up. Now, when togging, you start from the head and work your way down. It is important to do these things in the proper order. First, the hood, carefully covering hair and glasses, flowing down over the shoulders almost like a keffiyeh. Lawrence of Arabia, ready to traverse the florescent-lit silicon desert. Then the main jump suit, zipper in the front. The hood carefully tucked in underneath and snapped into place. Nitrile gloves tucked into the cuffs. Finally the boots, placed on over the your shoes, legs of the jumpsuit tucked in and snapped in place. Safety glasses on, mesh screen covering your mouth. Finally, you are no longer a danger to the environment. Step into the air shower. Raise your arms, feel the artificial breeze cleanse you of any residual dust and dirt. Wait for the interlock and then cross the threshold.
After the solitary ritual of purification and preparation, the group ritual of shift passdowns can begin.
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exactly, exactly. Don't steal my idea though please.
What idea? Guy works in a factory and lives above a dojo? And what? Not much of a heros journey just yet, is it?
hehe, touché
I'm no writer. I just think you have an interesting perspective on something that used to be a mundane daily experience for me.
what did you do in the fab? i work on lithography machines
I ran several diffusion furnaces. Wet oxidation, probably the least interesting processes in the fab. Before that, I did a lot of CVD and ALD in grad school.
neato, would it be possible for a person to incinerate themselves in one of these furnaces?
I don't think you could fit inside one They're only about a foot in diameter. There are much easier ways to have a nice day in a fab. Just splash around some HF.
good idea
no one has the effort to write a book but no ideas of their own
idea stealing is only really a thing among profitable disciplines which writing is not
English teacher tier post
Your prose is purple as frick, bud
kino
Nobody reads anymore so why would I write a novel?
What? Twenty months? That's licentious. We're on a literature board. Maybe it's just that I'm beyond the motivational phase and in the drudgery phase, but I'm able to pump out about 4 books a year.
>20 pages in a chapter
I try to keep my chapters somewhere around 3500 words, plus or minus 750
Not sure why there are so many naysayers in this thread. Practically every great writer followed a similar schedule to this. A page a day is on the low end if anything. IIRC Hemingway wrote 500 words a day (2 pages). Quality will naturally come from time spent on those 250 words. Hemingway spent ~2 hours per page.
Then there's the editing that comes after you've written the whole thing which is where the actual writing happens. Still you can't edit what you haven't written.
Usually, to produce any great or lasting work of art, you are inspired by your native genius, and don't need to put constraints on yourself. Somehow, I doubt Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Melville, or Irving had to force themselves to a set schedule to write. They did it because they loved it.
You are an idiot of the highest magnitude. You can be the greatest writer in the world but if you don't stick to a schedule and routine you are never going to accomplish anything. Discipline is a necessity for genius to shine.
Do you honestly believe there's only one form of improvement in the entire craft of writing, and it applies to every writer's personal circumstance? Genuinely curious.
Commitment and consistency are key to accomplishing any great task. Stop going to the gym for a few months and you'll lose all muscle definition.
I fundamentally disagree but that's fine
That's because you are a fool who romantices the act of creation as some extraordinary, ethereal burst of divine brilliance where the entire book just comes to the writer in one or two sittings where he furiously pounds the keys on his typewriter for days on end, writing reams of pages while sipping copious amounts of bourbon and he never stops until his masterpiece has poured out of his bleeding fingertips and he's lost 12kilos of body weight in sweat and tears.
The writers you mentioned likely discarded ten pages of writing for every one page that was published.
This is what 90% of the writing process is, btw. The rest is forcing yourself to put ink on paper.
Jake Rubidoux parked on the fourth floor of the parking garage and watched the clouds of vapor rising from the factory sparkle in the setting sun like drifting veins of specular hematite. He closed his eyes and centered his attention on his breath, grateful for another night as a component of the Machine. Another night of purpose. The walk across the quarter-mile bridge that connected the garage to the looming glass façade of the factory was a transitory ritual for Rubi. He moved upstream against the ceaseless flow of day-shifters, alone, his cowl low over his eyes. At the halfway point of the crossing Rubi felt the reverberations of the bridge in his skeleton. That Pavlovian frequency of the thousand shuffling feet were Rubi’s pipe-organ liturgy welcoming him to another night of service. He was eager to start another week; the four-day weekends had started become agonizingly long, and he felt a wave of relief as he walked through the doors, lowering his hood and scanning his ID badge, knowing that for the next ninety-six hours he wouldn’t need to concern himself with how to fill the idle hours of the night. He knew exactly what he would be doing. It was all written down, scheduled in a chart, timestamped, pre-destined.
He made his way through the corridors to the passdown room, already filled with the dozen members dayshift crew sitting hunched and pale around the conference table typing away at their laptops. A few of them glanced in Rubi’s direction and gave a cursory nod and grunt as he entered the room. He saw his manager Jim in the corner and was beckoned over with a wave. “Good *morning*, Rubi,” Jim said with a wink. “I’ve got something I want to talk with you about after passdown, it’s about an assignment at the new fab opening up in Ohio. I think you might be interested, lots of overtime if you want it.”
Rubi took a seat and spent the next ten minutes in a reverential silence waiting for the passdown to begin as he opened his laptop and started preparing his files, his check-sheets, gantt-charts, checking his emails, checking tools statuses, until the meeting began. The new Ohio fab had been a part of the governments push to secure a dominant position in the global semi-conductor market. Billons in subsidies, export restrictions to China, and a virtually unrestricted approval of work-visas had led to the construction of the largest semi-conductor fabrication plant on the planet, the Ohio MegaFab. Rubi began to shake as he imagined the size of the factory floor, curving down at the horizon, an endless procession of overhead robots racing around the thirty-foot ceilings on miles of twisting tracks carrying wafers as from machine to machine at incredible speeds. Unlimited overtime, unlimited purpose and work. He closed his eyes and began to float.
Good but the dialogue is forced.
Too expositiony.
Just him saying something like, "Ohio called. They approved your transfer," would suffice.
You can then give the context to the reader. Jim shouldn't be giving context to Rubi because Rubi already knows.
ty
Same problem 99% of anons on this board have with their writing: It's too tryhard, with a weak import and facility of language. Just the first sentence
>Jake Rubidoux parked on the fourth floor of the parking garage and watched the clouds of vapor rising from the factory sparkle in the setting sun like drifting veins of specular hematite
Screams 'please take me seriously'. But all this is, is a weak and confused image. We are pleased with an author, we consider him as deserving praise, who frees us from all fatigue of searching for his meaning; who carries us through his subject without any embarrassment or confusion. I can't say that about what you've written here.
I didnt like it either, I re-wrote it.
>Jake Rubidoux parked on the fourth floor of the parking garage and watched the hematite sparkle of the vapor veins rising from the factory in the setting sun.
It is still unclear. It is too obscure. I have to strain my thoughts to understand what this means. If we are obliged to follow a writer with much care, to pause and to read over his sentences a second time, in order to comprehend them fully, he will never please us long. I would probably set down something you've written after a page or two, if this is your style. Write however you want, but this is not for me.
mmm, thank you for the advice. I am still finding my legs.
Here's how I would edit the first few bits:
>Jake Rubidoux sat stationary on the fourth floor of the parking garage watching clouds of exhaust rise from the factory, sparkling in the setting sun like drifting obsidian veins. Eyes closed, he centered attention on his breathing technique... Just grateful for another night for the machine - another night of purpose.
Nice. Man, this is going to take a long time. Good thing I have nothing else to do.
I hope the feedback proves useful brother. Would rather give you a different perspective than go over my reasons for change after change after change
I really appreciate the feedback.
The robin’s egg sky hangs over an ocean of raucous to-be-sent-down youths, their army-greened ephebian scalps showered in apricit rays of crisp sun. A shared furor draws from the surplus of emotional ecstasy, revolutionary transcendence, (real or imagined who's to say), as they scream in a din of tongues. They are inheritors of a virulent land ripe for plowing, eager to canonize - and yes sacrifice - themselves so that future generations can reap the fruits of unseen filial labor, fulfilled or otherwise, setting sail for fortunes manifest under the itinerary of the Great Helmsman. Small red books point upward like crimson blood-soaked antennae: there is great chaos under heaven.
Nice word salad.
Revision #1
The robin egg sky hangs over a fleshed-out ocean of raucous ephebes as they depart for the countryside, the army-green surface of their caps showered in crisp rays of sun. They scream in a shared furor of emotional ecstasy and revolutionary dare I say religious transcendence, (real or imagined who's to say), words sucked into a vacuum of meaning.
They are the fancied inheritors of a virulent land ripe for plowing, eager to canonize - and yes maybe sacrifice - themselves so that future generations can reap the fruits of unseen filial labor, fulfilled or otherwise, setting sail for fortunes manifest under the excellent itinerary of the Great Helmsman. Small red books point upward like a blood-soaked Babel: there is great chaos under heaven.
come on man, this is a bit much. I know you want the grandiloquence and majesty of an author's intro, but all your imagery is getting lost and made dilute in the lengthy serpentine prolixity of your wandering over-adjectivized sentence-like meanderings. Like that. "Small red books . . ." is the clearest, starkest image, and should open the piece. At least that way the reader has a solid CCR anchor to grab onto before they drown in the rest. Good luck, please post Revision #2 and introduce us to a specific character, family or squadron emerging from the marching masses.
Scratch (real or imagined who's to say),
He sat idling on the top floor of the parking garage watching the clouds of vapor rising from the factory. The red haze of the setting sun shimmered in the immense glass façade of the building ejecting streams of workers like ants moving in tight-packed columns. The drive to work was short and his car was only just warming up. He felt the cold air from the vents turn warm and killed the engine. His ears rang in the silence. He checked his eyes with the last light of the falling sun in the mirror and saw the same dark red streaks in the sclera and purple shadows that had afflicted him for months. The optometrist told him it was ocular rosacea and that there was no curing it; the best thing would be to get plenty of sleep and use a warm-compress to mitigate the irritation. The incessant patrolling of the leaf-blower wielding Mexicans who scoured the barren cement surrounding his apartment complex made the former a hopeless endeavor, but at least the microwaved bean-bag he strapped to his face three times a day helped some. He blinked his eyes slowly and felt them stick each time they opened. He held them closed tight and took ten slow, deep breaths, and was grateful for another night of work—of purpose. His recent and total acquiescence to the ritual and ceremony of labor had provided a sense of serenity unknown to him; he imagined this was the same stoic calmness born of the trust in pre-destination and divine-will a priest must feel at a funeral, or an immolation. He closed the car door and shouldered his transparent backpack and made for the umbilical bridge across which awaited twelve hours of meaning and life through the focused mirror of labor.
Why do you make it seem like you just have to sit and write? It take considerable planning and also knowin how to set up scenes, when to end them, how they fit in to a greater narrative.. you don’t just sit down and write