Do you consider yourself a good writer?

I wrote some sci-fi pretentious 200 page wankery and when I read it I was ashamed of myself.
I sent it to an editorial and they said they would publish it but I said no because it was just too embarassing.

I can write semi-biographical stuff well enough that people enjoy reading it and want to read more, but the things I write that people are really moved by is still really hit and miss. It happens sometimes when I'm not really thinking about it and I can't really see why they prefer it to other bits.
Writing that out, it's not like I should expect to ever get beyond that.

GREAT pic. Even a broken clock like Veeky Forums is right twice a day.

>imageboard = broken clock

No lover of literature would come up with such a hamfisted analogy as that.

I try to write every day. I love to do scripts for the novel or whatever. Im incredibly creative at making up stories. I have always been. I used to tell made up stories to my friends back in elementary school. I would prefer to have a simple writing technique rather than trying to express everything as beautifully and complex as possible because I like to write fiction.

When I start writing I just think all my sentences are stupid and boring yet when I pick any mediocre book I see same kind of sentences. Guess I doubt myself too much

>Do you consider yourself a good writer?
I've written tons of poetry, so, obviusly, no. Not at all.

>Do you consider yourself a good writer?
yes. i'm a professional writer. i get work based on the recommendations of previous customers.

What part of that makes you a good writer?
Good writer =/= successful writer

ero literature that you sell on amazon doesnt cout

Hard work loses when talent starts working hard.

i'm considered to be a good writer by my customers. however, i don't entirely form my own opinion about my own writing based on their reviews. if i wasn't also reasonably confident about my own abilities, i would choose a different career.

i'm a technical writer currently on a short contract writing marketing material for a software company in the fintech industry.

C'mon lads. The fact he earns money as a writer isn't irrelevant either, is it?

I am by no means good at expressing my thoughts in writing. I'm filth.
But if I don't try to elucidate my points, and just write in incoherent ramblings, explicitly pointing out the fact that this is an incoherent rambling full of shit, continually bemoan my difficulties and detestment of the structure and tools of my native tongue, it gets received pretty well.
Of course, me being a bitch, I blame the language for it's faults at expressing MY ideas. What an idiot.

It is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

well played...

no

Not a good creative writer, no.

But I can write case briefs and reports like nobody's business.

I'm decent and improving.

Good:
Prose, dialogue, tone, surface level characterization, thematic unity

Needs improvement:
narrative hooks, character depth

I'm reasonably sure I will get my book published when I finish it but the real question is if I can rise above the midlist.

or just overall low iq

Hey that's my two-year-old post lmao

I'm cringing a little bit at some of my phrasing and my namedropping postmodernism when I didn't really know what it meant but I still stand by this as a piece of advice.

Some great artists were terrible narcissists, but they made their names in spite of this, not as a result of this. It is more important than ever that the natural narcissism of the artistic temperament should be overcome, and a mentoring relationship with past greats be fostered.

Artists are the only beings for whom gods still exist, and we oughtn't take that for granted by abusing or profaning their works.

I don't like the sound of my native language. I'm not good enough yet to write in the other languages I fluently speak. I'm in hell.

I can express my ideas very well, but I dont quite know how to make them sound beautiful.

IQ is an abstracted measurement. It's not the same as intelligence or aptitude in general. Stop worrying about it and improve yourself you stupid faggot.

I'm a good lyricist but a shit novelist.

Whenever I look at my old work, I always think that it's crap compared to what I write currently. A pile of laughably bad mistakes that I'd forgotten how to make. Each month that passes I feel like I'm slowly getting to the level of prose I want. I feel like I'm touching a level of being both publishable and able to respect the ideas I want to write.

>Study one mentor

Horrible advice. You'll end up being a xerox of them nine times out of ten.
Read widely, read a lot, and write a lot. Accept criticism from well read people.

Learning when you're using a filler word over a necessary one.
Learning when you're using excessive descriptions which detract from the story's cohesiveness: learning when descriptions are contrived or overwrought may be one of the more difficult practices of a beginner.

Really, it boils down to how well the writer has a grip on what they're writing and the style with which they are conveying it. Typically if a writer has mapped out characters, plot points, and various other motifs and thematics, it shows. Whereas if a piece is being written on the fly, it tends being more cliche, contrived, inconsistent, and overall jagged or flat. The writers voice then is also unsteady and/or , especially with amateur writers, uncertain in itself. "Almost as if ... yadda yadda ya".

You're trying to, in essence, master the language you're writing in. When skillfully applied writing is a language of language. You can paint pictures in someone's mind without them ever seeing said images. But it's only achievable through patience, moderation, and constant practice.

>jagged or flat

What's the difference? Serious question.

This was originally my advice

What I'm going to say might sound like stuffy moralfagottry, but I'm as far from a moralfag with regards to art as you can get.

This attitude, wandering aimlessly through the works of the past, in some frantic effort to "experience" them all, belies a modern problem of temperament which ought to be repressed.

I mean, surely you can see how this approach is a symptom of living in a time when history has been laid out before people, and which they are encouraged to consume it in its entirety. So they tuck in, frantically piling food into their mouth with both hands, gulping it down too quickly to taste, purging like a Roman between courses. Then they try and interest you in the contents of their puke pan, as if it could ever be as appetizing the second time round. If they had taken a second to look at the size of the meal, they would recognize the impossibility not only of tasting everything, but of tasting enough to make the ache in their stuffed gut worthwhile. But like everyone else, they put off that realization by stuffing their faces even more. The product of these decadents and gluttons of history is not merely bad art, but not art at all.

Confronted by the enormity of history, we could consider a different approach: one in which our ambition is tempered by a knowledge of our historical limits. Or do you really think that reading is the same as studying? Nothing in that image precludes reading widely. What it encourages is, instead, to clear a space in your life for careful study, which can only be done with one single corpus of one single artist.

Also, this mentor isn't chosen arbitrarily. When I read Keats, I read him with a kind of care that I simply don't have time to give to other poets. I wouldn't be able to do this, sitting for hours on end poring over single lines, if I hadn't known from the first time I read one of his poems that this was someone who was capable of inspiring this kind of devotion. Maybe, reading Keats doesn't give you that feeling, but reading someone else would, if you were looking for it.

Of course your post is so simple and pragmatic; I'm sure if O.P. follows your advice, he'll be able to frankenstein together a couple of writers into some new flavor. He might even get a short story published in a magazine. But he won't be any closer to understanding the source of artistic inspiration as such, which underlies the creation of all great art, and whose essence can only be learned through careful and affectionate study.

Ask yourself who you would rather your work be served to. Would you rather it was given to someone who would take their time with it, dispense with almost as much energy consuming it as you did producing it, someone who has enough respect for you to *learn* from it, or would you rather it was more slop for the trough?

Jagged writing lacks consistent tone, or seems to have a start-stop kind of motion to it. Flat writing is drab and purely functional.

This is great. Very well written.

Not sure I agree though. I think it's great that we have access to so much at our fingertips and the reason so many treat it as a fast food buffet is that there's just not enough time.

You mention Keats, I raise you a Nabokov, another might say Tolkien, the Russians, the Greeks, etc. If time was not a factor, who wouldn't want to devote mortal lifetimes to them and many more? No one living now or ever will truly grasp the aesthetic beauty in the network of minds and stories that centuries produced.
Looking down on people mindlessly trying to gulp down everything is easy but try to see it as a symptom and a consequence of nasty rules in a nasty world.

hi kantbot
you seem to have forgotten that people can be artistically inspired themselves and don't need petersen to tell them what he thinks it is.

What have you written?

I'm not overweight, but if that's what Kantbot believes then he's right about something at least. I don't see what Peterson has to do with what I said, I'm not political.

>people can be artistically inspired themselves
It's unbelievably naive to think people can write literature without being situated in any relationship with other writers. Name one (uno) case of a completely original work by a completely original writer. Bloom is onto something in this area but he reduces it to anxieties and hostilities because of his own Freudian influences. Which is a shame because it's an incomplete picture.

Believe me, I'm not trying to present myself as a great writer by any means. I once wrote short story with some very interesting themes, but which was let down by mediocre prose. I'm going to improve that at some time in the future. But I don't think my argument relies on my being a prolific writer.

There's a difference between having no influences whatsoever and not being solely influenced by one writer. It's absurd to think otherwise. There's no secret muse that can only be uncovered by studying one person's oeuvre.

I think you have good advice, but I'm an amateur writer grinding out the first draft of my first novel - so what do I know? Just wondered how your advice was working for you. Good luck to all of us.

I'd definitely agree that it's a symptom of an existential condition, and I definitely don't look down on people who try to consume the entirety of the great works, because that very much used to be my attitude.

I wrote the post in a hostile way because I thought it brought home the metaphor with more force. And probably because I've been overdosing on Nietzsche, which is beginning to infect my writing style.

But still, maybe the most important question is how we should orient ourselves knowing that the time we have is limited. It's not a realisation that comes naturally to us by any means.

I don't think this. The post is trying to encourage people to take part in an artistic experiment that I've found personally beneficial. Of course any writer will have a number of influences, but I don't think it's going too far to suggest one of these influences is closest to their soul.
>there's no secret muse that can only be uncovered by studying one person's ouvre
This goes against my personal experience of reading, but each to their own

Oh right, sorry for reading a hostility into your comment that wasn't there. Good to hear about the novel man, and I really hope it goes well for you.

I think I've mentioned before (but I'm not sure), the advice I'm giving is what has worked for me, and I'd recommend people try it if they think it can help them, as an experiment. But it'd be egotistical to suggest it was the only way.

Anyway, I'm repeating myself here but good luck with your novel

Horrible advice.Your whole premise rests on the assumption that Melville worshipped Shakespeare.

Proof?

inb4 it's in his writing nigga

No, it's not. Melville is way better.

Your response is limited by a kind of historicism that you constrain yourself to, and you assume that just by extrapolating the framework of it to others, that they can follow it like a cookbook to produce "great art". I disagree. Constraint can be very conductive to creativity, but it has to steer people in the right directions.

Modern people are only encouraged to experience history to very shallow depths, a point we agree on, but the breadth is really not all that broad either. History was also - to a narrower extent - laid out before the Romans towards the Greeks, Medieval Europeans towards the Romans, and those in the Early Modern and Romantic Era towards the former two. Medieval scholars would similarly whine about not comparing to the art of classical civilizations despite eventually exceeding it in many ways.

There is a selection bias present here with what we designate as some enchanted and closer-to-divine past, because nobody remembers the majority of shit authors, especially in times where prose gave way to drama and poetry in terms of social status. Acting like we are in some literary dark age is short sighted and just reflects your antiquarian biases.

>Of course your post is so simple and pragmatic

Neither of which are bad things, especially for a beginning writer. The complex quickly becomes contrived, study becomes a distraction that wholly consumes practice, and a disregard for pragmatism transmutes into redundancy or unwillingness to accept criticism.

>he'll be able to frankenstein together a couple of writers into some new flavor

All originality is somewhat going to be a Frankenstein. That's what sets influence apart from imitation or plagiarism. It doesn't have to be a conscious effort at amalgamation, ideally it won't be, but just "studying a great man" in some attempt to reflect a little bit of their sublimity into yourself is not really inspiration at all. It's exactly the reductive and methodical approach that you complain is so "modern" and removed from genuine artistic process, except it aims to recreate something intuitive which should not have a so easily discernible source or path to trace.

Your approach also somewhat downplays the importance of experimentation and risk, which is likely when you confine yourself to a safe style and designated mentor within some romanticized past. Look at how much shitty and banal genre fiction spawned from Tolkein. Bathos from imitation in literary fiction is not far removed. Heavy imitation is almost inevitable for new writers with a literary oneitis. Even for experienced writers, sticking to established foundations is a common recipe for decline after a magnum opus. The inspiration of previous authors comes from not just others before them, but their own personality, knowledge, and life experience, which is not shared by a student. He is also prone to overlook flaws of his idol which he praises over others, as dedication leads to sunken costs of time and effort.

P.S. In the story, though Frankenstein used individual body parts from many people, was combining them to create life in a groundbreaking way that nobody had done before. So your analogy blows.
You may call breadth of study over depth of study "slop", but this is a matter of quality of content, rather than something impeded by diversity. I assume even pigs prefer not to eat the same shit every day, and a favorite food can quickly become a highway to obesity. The more diverse your sources, the less likely one is to fixate on something that's shit.

I'm not absolutely abhorrent at it (My teachers always told me I have a way with words), but I'm just surprised how unoriginal are my stories and how I can clearly see the influences.
As if my mind was a machine, making a soup from all the things it ever consumed.

Is this Instruction by Ionesco?

That's what a lot of (good) art is, though.

I just feel like I'm not worthy enough to take an author's influence on me.

I've always been told I was good by the people around me. I won writing competitions at school and was considered the best journalist in my class. I never believed any of the praise, I didn't think anyone there, including the teachers, was very talented. My parents rarely read and my friends were surely just being nice. At that time, I was reading trash with the occasional classic (mostly low reading-level type stuff like 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, etc.), so I didn't know what truly great writing was. I always thought I could be good, if I put in the work. Now I feel like I'll always be mediocre. Good to those who don't read much and pedestrian, at best, to those that do. When I read Pynchon, Joyce, Gaddis, and DeLillo, I feel stupid for even trying. I write now because I enjoy it. When I sit down and try to craft a sentence in a way that reads perfectly to me, I'm genuinely having fun. I guess I'll just continue to do that and read as much as I possibly can. Maybe someday I'll write something I'm proud of. Probably not, though.

You've got to remember that you see your work in a different way than everyone else. They probably don't see all the influences that went into its creation the same way you do