How do i write about my degenerate life without being bukowski-tier cringe ?

how do i write about my degenerate life without being bukowski-tier cringe ?

If you can even get to bukowsku-tier cringe then you can ask this question you arrogant fuckwit.

Don't exaggerate with overwrought metaphors. Write honestly and simply. Listen to Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me for an example of painful directness.

Dont?

Just be earnest.
Bukowski himself had his moments of earnestness. Read his poems, they're better than his novels.

>Listen to Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me for an example of painful directness
It's direct but it's so artless. Listen to Jason Molina's Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go to hear pain worked on and expressed through poetry rather than just thrown at you. Mount Eerie's album is equivalent of reading a sad personal report and being sadden by the unfortunate events, Molina's is the equivalent of reading a beautifully written story and being moved by how artfully it expresses intense sadness.

Thanks for the recommendation, user. I don't agree that it's "so artless," and considering OP's request for advice, I figured that would be a good starting point since, as you wrote of Molina's work, it's not "worked on and expressed through poetry," at least to a tortuous degree. I'll check out the album in a bit. Thanks again.

Self-insertion is one of cancers plaguing modern literature.

Write about it from a perspective that's not your own. Hard Mode: Not even in the same historical setting.

i'm actually inclined to agree with you here. it seems like everyone is trying to write a memoir that they can pass off as a novel. i don't want to do that, but at the same time, how do i write about something that i don't know ? but therein lies the difficulty i suppose

Pseud meme. This is something people say to virtue signal on /lit.

I hope it's the image boards and piss bottles type of degeneracy and not thinking you're cool for smoking and drinking and drugging and fucking type of degeneracy.

>Jason Molina

Mah nigga

The different historical setting isn't that hard and it can result in a much more interesting and relevant work. Just find one from which you can draw parallels and study up on it.

Or you can just write about exactly what you want to, just from the point of view of someone that's not literally you. A child or an old cab driver, for some shitty examples. It can even help you draw up different conclusions than you otherwise would.

These "the Book Theif" or John Green teenage girl writing gimmicks are WAY more cringy and common than actual good attempts at self insertion (read:exploration and confession) these days. Better write about a black womyn or from the point of view of a dove to REALLY show off how versatile I am! Good books share something that NEEDS to be shared, theyre not for showing off.

look, here's how you should really do it:
write from your perspective, but change things. Don't make it a 1:1 of yourself, make the main character different from yourself, but still relatable. Tell the story from a different time period to make it more interesting. If you grew up in the 90s, base it in the 80s.
That's all you have to do to make a story about your life feel like a story and not just a memoir

Who fucking cares about your life OP? Are you a famous insurgent? A politician? Do you have a rags-to-riches story? Write some fiction instead. Don't be a pussy.

>Tell the story from a different time period to make it more interesting. If you grew up in the 90s, base it in the 80s.
This is a terrible idea. Time period should never be an arbitrary choice.

It appeals to audiences that did not grow up in said time period.
Everyone loves when they see a story take place in 1970, but it's just "eh" when a story takes place in 2010.

The environmental differences between time periods are too vast to not be a critical part of a work's foundation. Someone writing a story based in 2010 can't just move the plot to the 1970's. The 1970's were full of debauchery and carelessness as a young and wealthy population found themselves in a golden of sliver of time between the creation of cheap and effective birth control and the start of AIDS. The 2010's, on the other hand, are rife with post-9/11 anxiety and confusion as institutions are stripped bare of their moral foundations and the availability of information makes it nearly impossible for the average person to be both ignorant and truly well informed as they may know everything there is about any situation but they're unable to discern the truth from the massive influx of lies and misinformation.

Bukowski did a lot better than you will do.

Sage

Enjoyable. succinct summary of those decades, user.