Can a NEET with literally no life experience write a good book or will it invariably be riddled with shitty tropes and...

Can a NEET with literally no life experience write a good book or will it invariably be riddled with shitty tropes and inconsistent tone?

Are there any successful fiction writers who were aspies/hermits?

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you need an interesting life to write an interesting book. why don't you leave your room right now and go do some shit and talk to some people, only way you're going to have some interesting thoughts to share

It seems really unlikely user.. you probably started hiding away long before you got out in the real world and have a really skewed sense of reality. Most of the neets here have really a two dimensional understanding of people and will probably have a really hard time creating many good complex characters. Must be some way you can get out at least a little?

Proust did it. He dreamed huge, though, and read a lot of fiction. He was a sad skellington who lived by proxy but he had the most beautiful voice and wrote memorable scenes.

Dickinson was a NEET

Study the classics and sharpen your prose.

Refine your style with vignettes and short stories and then yeah sure, it's possible. Though only if you're not in it for the money. Because there won't be any.

Yeah that's the problem. I've tried going out but I cannot connect with anyone. I've never had friends. I can visualize a world and a story but I know in my heart of hearts that the characters in it would be more bland and lifeless than Morrowind NPCs.

Howard Philips Lovecraft is an example to all those who want to learn how to miss their mark in life yet, possibly, succeed in their work. Although as regards the latter point, the result is not guaranteed. In practicing a policy of total non-engagement with essential realities, one risks sinking into a comprehensive apathy, and not even being able to write anymore; and it was this that held back his progress, many times. Suicide is another danger, with which one must come to terms; thus, Lovecraft always kept near to hand, for many years, a little bottle of cyanide. It could turn out to be extremely useful, depending on whether or not he could make it through. He did make it through, but not without difficulties.

Firstly, money. HPL offers in this regard the disconcerting case of an individual at once poor and disinterested. Without ever being overcome by poverty, he had been all his life extremely penurious. His correspondence reveals painfully that he was forced ceaselessly to pay attention to the price of things, even the most basic foodstuffs. He never had the means to launch into a major purchase, like buying a car, or travelling to Europe as he dreamt of doing. The large part of his revenues resulted from his work of revision and correction. He accepted work at extremely low rates, even without charge if friends were involved; and when one of his
invoices went unpaid, he abstained in general from harrying the creditor; it wasn’t dignified for a gentleman to compromise himself with the sordid particulars of money, or to show too lively an anxiety for one’s own interests.

As for his own work, it earned him practically nothing. He wholeheartedly believed it unsuitable to pursue literature as a profession. As he wrote: “a gentleman doesn’t try to become famous, but leaves that to the little parvenu egoists”. It’s obviously difficult to appreciate the sincerity of this declaration; it might appear to us to be the result of a formidable mass of inhibitions, but it must equally be considered as the strict application of an obsolete code of behaviour, to which Lovecraft adhered with all his might. He always wanted to be seen as a provincial gentleman, studying literature as one of the fine arts, for his own pleasure and that of a few friends, without
care for public tastes, fashionable themes, or anything of that sort. Such a person has no place in our societies; he knew this, but he always refused to take account of it. And, ultimately, all that distinguished him from a true ‘country gentleman’ was that he possessed nothing; but even so, he didn’t want to take account of it.

Lovecraft was a bit more than a bit troubled. In 1908, at the age of 18, he was the victim of what we might describe as a “nervous breakdown”, and sank into a lethargy that was to last for a dozen years. At the age when his old classmates, impatiently crossing the bridge of childhood, threw themselves into life like a marvelous adventure into the unknown, he cloistered himself in his home, did not speak to his mother, refused to get up all day, shuffling about in his dressing gown all night.

What’s more, he hadn’t even started writing yet.

What did he do? Perhaps read a little. We’re not even sure of that. In fact his biographers agree that they don’t know much and, to all appearances, at least between 18 and 23 years old, he did absolutely nothing

Then, little by little, between 1913 and 1918, very slowly, things improved. Little by little, he reestablished contact with the human race. It wasn’t easy. In May 1918, he wrote to Alfred Galpin: “I’m only half alive; most of my energy is taken up just in sitting and walking; my nervous system is in a state of total disrepair, and I am completely stupefied and apathetic, except when I happen upon something that particularly interests me.” It is definitively useless to indulge in psychodramatic hypotheses here. Because Lovecraft is a lucid, intelligent and sincere man. A sort of lethargic terror had fallen on him when he turned 18, and he knew its origin perfectly well. In a letter in 1920, he reminisces at length on his childhood. His little train set, with the wagons piled up with packing cases…The slotted box where he set up his marionette theatre to perform. And later his garden, for which he himself had drawn up the plans and designed the paths; irrigated by a system of canals dug with his own hands, the garden took the form of terraces built around a small lawn, with a sundial at the centre. It was, he said, “the kingdom of my adolescence.”

Then comes this passage, which concludes the letter: “I perceive now that I am becoming too aged to feel any pleasure. Unsympathetic times have let their ferocious grip fall on me, and I am 17. Big boys don’t play with doll’s houses and pretend gardens and, full of sorrow, I must cede my world to a younger boy who lives the other side of the garden. And after this time, I will never again dig the earth or make paths and roads, because the fugitive joy of childhood will never be known again. Adulthood is hell.”

Most of history's great writers were NEET.

There is an ocean within you if you just touch your feelings. Go balance pomposity with humility for a bit.

Life experience is an act of thought not a passive reception.

Ray Bradbury didn't move out of home until he was 27 and only ever dated on girl, his wife and his stories have a wonderful insight

Too bad he was a terrible writer

good stuff

bukowski fit that bill. he was a loner and a recluse but believed that you should go out and live life and fall on your face so you have shit to say. being ONLY a neet doesn't give you any depth.

It makes me sad that such a brilliant author lived in obscurity and died penniless. But I suppose it reflects the cosmic insignificance of man of which he wrote.

...

If I recall Dickens created a lot of his characters based on people that were customers of the bank he worked at, proving that even wagecucks can do it

desu 'life experiences' flatten people out. worldly writers are the most insufferably boring, it's all 'my grandpa smelled like tobacco' shit.

I am a pathetic autist and I wrote a short story which was published recently involving a friendless aspie protagonist. It is perhaps the most embarrassing thing that's happened in my life, plus the story is now online and linked to my name with a photograph that makes me look even more weird. I cringe about it every day. The writing is perhaps 20% okay but the rest is tryhard detached-from-reality spaghetti. Wouldn't recommend. NEETs should just write Pessoa-tier stuff and hope someone likes their work after they die and it gets discovered in their room.

His dialog sucked and his characters also sucked.

The claim about cyanide is incorrect. It was actually made by one of his old (Jewish) friends in New York who later fell out with him.

He didn't create a single memorable character. All his protagonidts were copies of Poe's sensitive, intellectual, male protagonist.

He had already written a few short stories, user.

This is well written, user.

True. It is amazing how so many people here are unable to perceive that.

>It is perhaps the most embarrassing thing that's happened in my life, plus the story is now online and linked to my name with a photograph that makes me look even more weird. I cringe about it every day
This makes me laugh though and you seem well-versed in meme-speak. Future authors will be autists like yourself. You should consider writing about embarrassing situations you find yourself in more often and just embrace your inner-Wojak, user.

People of the same age will have an equal amount of life experience. Some might have more variation, but others can get insights from the lack of varietion of their life.

The life of a shut-in NEET spending years upon years in his room can provide interesting material. If anything it's more interesting than your average normie life.

>Pessoa-tier stuff
Pessoa wasn't a NEET

Anyway, link us to your story or post an excerpt here

The thing is that I didn't just write in the kind of style that I might write in on Veeky Forums, which tends to humour and entertain people. I tried to write in a literary manner, about a mundane series of events that, due to my retardation, reads like an absurd, autistic, very pathetic interior monologue of a troubled person. I have since decided never to publish under my own name again, and my only literary ambition now is to compete with Virtual Reality programmers by creating my own largely plotless literary universe. Having your name available on google / social media, with a faggy photograph and a story that reeks of autistic loserdom is not nice at all.

I'm not going to do that sorry, it makes me cringe so much that I refuse to ever google my name again or even read this story. My heart starts racing and my suicide ideation goes into overdrive. Also Pessoa wasn't a NEET, no, but he lived with his mother his entire life and only worked part-time while writing largely about defeat, despair, the virtue of inaction, dreaming and so forth. IMO he isn't the kind of person who would ever have appeared on a "Best Summer Reads of 2018! [heart-eyes emoji]" list, and his posthumous success is very fitting to his character and style, same goes for Lovecraft.

Riddled with shitty tropes and inconsistent tones but still proof NEETs can contribute. Time for you to do the same.

is this from houellebecq's essay?

I think your ability to write well is based on your reading. I think your reading should begin as soon as possible and center around the classics, not just classical, but any period of classics. I think the purpose of reading all those books and them choosing to write your own should come from within, if you are an artist. It shouldn't matter much if your own life resembles the life of a character in a film. But even with that it's incredibly hard not to become one of these people who themselves are a kind of living trope that believe just because they are lonely or their life mainly consists of pain they can or should become an artist. I think the skills are fare more important than the alienation/damaged individual factor. To be honest, I don't put much stock in that at all. Most of the intelligent people I've met during my career who have said and written interesting things about literature or produced some of their own have fit into that first model I have described. I think most of Veeky Forums fits more closely into that second type I described and that the greatest chance of them producing anything worthwhile if anything at all will be represented by the effort they put into cultivating the cognitive abilities of their children which is the last hope of a otherwise failed life.

This reads like a post-postmodernist Seinfeld episode. I'd buy it. Post an excerpt or if you are really too embarrassed just give us a vague synopsis.

>I think
>I think
>I think
>I think
Don't we all?

>same goes for Lovecraft.

Please never compare the genius with the poor person's Poe.

Anyway, a lot of what you know about Pessoa's biography is a romantic exaggeration. He had friends, some of them were great writers responsible fpr introducing modernism in Portugal, was part of the freemansons or rosacrucians( I can't recall exactly) , had a stable job and was known for having fun at pubs.

I am curious too.
There is no need to be ashamed of writing bad stuff, a writer is never remembered for his failures.

Fiction is about imagination, so why shouldn't it be possible OP?

You just need to practice writing a lot.

Not him but no it doesn't appear to be.

The thing is I don't actually want people to buy it. In fact I considered buying every copy of the collection it's printed in myself like Bloom tried to do with his first book. Also I wrote the story in about three days and submitted it without checking spelling, grammar etc in sufficient detail. I then emailed a ton of changes to the person responsible and they said the changes would be made, but of course they weren't. So not only is the story and style shit and autistic, but the spelling is often embarrassingly bad and so makes me appear like some twelve-year-old sperglord trying to trick you into investing into his shitty narrative. I am simply too weak to submit myself to the type of scrutiny and curiosity associated with publishing, nor do I care about any money that may come of such efforts. I sincerely plan to simply carry on expanding my fictional universe and to write various books set within that universe and written by individuals residing there. Also re. "remembered for his failures", people like the Scottish poet McGonagall are remembered for that (though that's admittedly rare), but there are far more cringe-tier tryhard writers with barely any talent than there are interesting, seemingly innately profound and talented writers worthy of sustained study etc. Myself being one of the former have now transitioned from a state of potential (i.e. "I wonder what the deal is with that guy. Maybe he's a dark horse, a secret genius!") to basically opening my stupid mouth after a lifetime of seclusion only to emit some autistic screech and make the few people who thought I may have potential realize I'm just a weird, creepy freak with a very limited grasp of reality and the social norms therein (i.e. "Oh wow look I googled user from highschool - you remember, user, that quiet kid - yeah and look what I found lol! What a weirdo ewwww!"). I should have just quit society in my late teens and taken a vow of silence in order to not make people aware of how cringey I am. Absolutely appalling.

nigga are you kidding me? arguably a significant chunk of authors throughout history were hermits or otherwise not living in typical social conditions. while the "writers are solitary obsessive personalities who chainsmoke and pull their brilliance from the aether" meme isn't necessarily comprehensive, there is some grain of truth to it. consider the fact that in many cultures, ascetics/hermits/monks were considered the best advice givers and some still are today. people literally went on pilgrimages just to hear the words of some guy locked in a room praying all day. catholics confess their sins to dudes who spend all their time thingken bout god and never having sex.

so while some of that might be tied up on superstition/hype, ultimately writing is a solitary activity (unless you collaborate) and many solitary individuals still produced something that interested other people. don't use your autism as an excuse, if you want to write something then ask yourself why. maybe you want to write the wrong thing, and should instead work on writing what you are capable of. every single person in this shared human experience contains a world in their own head. if you could capture that world in a particularly convincing way, your work would be valuable even if it's different from the worlds of others. I think the reason there isn't a pulitzer winner about a man eating popcorn and jerking off to anime is because nobody has had the writing chops or gumption to do it. git gud.

>Myself being one of the former have now transitioned from a state of potential (i.e. "I wonder what the deal is with that guy. Maybe he's a dark horse, a secret genius!") to basically opening my stupid mouth after a lifetime of seclusion only to emit some autistic screech and make the few people who thought I may have potential realize I'm just a weird, creepy freak with a very limited grasp of reality and the social norms therein (i.e. "Oh wow look I googled user from highschool - you remember, user, that quiet kid - yeah and look what I found lol! What a weirdo ewwww!")
pls user just give an outline, we promise we won't laugh at you.

>pls user just give an outline, we promise we won't laugh at you.
True.

Why would you care about the opinion of a bunch of anonymous people on a forum anyway?

You can limit your book to what you know and write about your environment instead of talking about "adventures" you've never had. Like Notes from the Underground except from an actual aspie

In the age of the internet where "content" is all judged to be true (like Cat Person) I would recommend doing this under a pseudonym if not anonymously.

But those authors all dealt with real turmoil and hardship during their lives. You can't compare the average socially stunted NEET who spends all day browsing an anonymous anime imageboard to a some mystic monk-like figures who intentionally deprived themselves of luxuries or social status in order to pursue knowledge or deeper understanding of some ideal back in the 1800's.

In some ways you are right, those guys probably weren't autistic NEETs even if they did eventually throw away their social lives. However, a lot of these dudes have reputations for being whacky and their sperglike qualities were sometimes what attracted people. Some of the pillar monks got naked and pissed on people. Did they do this to be profound, or where they just hyped up spastics who cashed in on the memes while actually being crazy? Probably a little of both.

But I will use the example of orthodox russian monks who live in siberia and such. These guys are by all accounts autistic as fuck and can barely talk to people because they don't think like normies anymore, but people still look up to them. So if one of these guys wrote something and found a good editor, it would probably still get some attention in russia. Also here is the meme guy in romania:

youtube.com/watch?v=ZqEDhKKPl-o

Is he really so different from ascetics of the past? Depends on which ones. Idk his literacy power level. Either way, ascetics say shit that normal people don't always grok, so really the question of whether OP has anything worth saying is less about his lifestyle and more about how he reacts to it. You can't predict humans easily. Fucking cat person is famous. I wouldn't bet on OP being a wise ascetic, I'm just saying I don't think it is impossible on principle.

Are you saying being a shut-in NEET is a desirable lifestyle and therefore comes easy?

The point is those hermits are still connected to the old ways. They probably have never even used a computer in their life let alone seen an anime, for example. They've lived hard lives in shitty Russian conditions and lived through the rise and fall of communism. The average NEET in the first world isn't reading books or learning some esoteric teachings; they're wasting away in front of their computer and habitually masturbating to overwatch SFM and playing vidya and self-inserting themselves in autistic slice of life cartoons and just simply letting their mind and body rot in a sea of meaningless, unfulfilling distractions and chicken tendies.

>Are you saying being a shut-in NEET is a desirable lifestyle and therefore comes easy?
Are you saying it isn't and it doesn't?

It is

I'd imagine being a NEET would be challenging in countries with no welfare/gibsmedats/autismbucks

There's a lot more to stories than characters and dialogue. Lovecraft was a stylist, not a screenwriter. He endures because of his striking imagery and mood, not his characters

>He had already written a few short stories, user.
He didn't publish a story until he was 26

>wasting away in front of their computer and habitually masturbating to overwatch SFM and playing vidya and self-inserting themselves in autistic slice of life cartoons and just simply letting their mind and body rot in a sea of meaningless, unfulfilling distractions

Someone actually managed to describe me down to a letter

These old school hermits really aren't doing anything more useful than modern NEETs in the end though.

At least NEETs stimulate the economy by spending their bux and they make fun memes for others to enjoy.

Dude who wrote Welcome to the NHK did it. He said he based a lot of it off his life and can't read it himself because it's too embarrassing.

see: Kafka

Proust was basically a NEET who wrote based on his books on his mundane experiences and what he heard of other people.

Don't you dare experience the lowlifes of todays age to the noble hermits of old.

literally me

>noble hermits

Most hermits of olde would be considered lower than modern homeless bums today.

Impossible. They were from a time before the corruption of the modern world.

>implying the leisure class of academics who wrote books in the 20th century had exciting lives and weren't just boring faggots whose only key difference from a NEET on welfare was that they actually facefucked the public for their wealth versus begging for it, and they had to swindle people on a regular basis so they ended up becoming proficient sociopaths through verbal practice which allowed them to write convincingly

the ivory tower is still far away from normieland. you don't need life experience, you just need to know other people well. which is still hard to do as a NEET. NEETs suck at writing because they only experience themselves, which is one of the reasons wageslaves like working: it might suck ass, but it's the last vestige of human interaction left. without either work or independent wealth you might as well just be trapped in your own shitty world. it becomes harder to empathize with anyone.

This

Both are leaches, the old ones just pulled 'muh faith' where the new ones shame progressives with 'muh mental illness'.