write novels describing in detail uninteresting characters who have nothing to do with the story being told; who the fuck has this kind of time to intellectually worship this ultimate literary conceit and waste of words? Rare is a novel which keeps my interest throughout. The true path to enlightenment and satisfaction in fiction is with the infinitely superior short story format.
>>23582439Many novels have a sort of 'fish tank' feel. You're setting up a little environment and setting these species loose in it and seeing how they interact. It's a different kind of pleasure to the short story, where everything is planned, on ruthless economic principles, to maximally contribute to the Big Idea.
>>23582466Nobody wants to write an enjoyable book anymore. Everyone wants a universe and a fandom and not let their self insert characters go.
>>23583187>nobody wants to learn the art of horse riding, they all want cars now
>>23583195
>>23583195"universe" and "fandom" are business, marketing ideas. they don't improve on the novel, they improve on the book signing tour.
>>23583219they expand past the tiny boundaries of a novel and take on a life of their own, they are literally transcendental like hamlet you pleb
>>23583223i think you're just being dumb on purpose. there's nothing transcendental about getting some lonely dorks to do free labor for you. that's marketing, not writing. you can do that shit for potato chips
>>23583270actually it's dialectic, but you're too stupid to get it
>>23583273You're right. Have a good day.
>>23583273it might be dialectic in terms of the evolution of marketing, but not the novel. nothing has changed on the level of the medium itself. a star wars novel is just a novel that sucks. the big invention is that you can sell more copies of a shitty sf novel by hastily renaming your mc to "han solo" and slapping "star wars" on the cover. then you tell people star wars is not just a movie, it's a "universe," which means instead of just paying for a movie ticket you have to also buy this novel about what han solo did before the movie started, or you're not getting the "whole picture." this is of course a lie, the han solo novel is just some other crap somebody wrote that has nothing to do with anything. the marketing promise that it will "add up" to something greater than the sum of its parts does not actually come true.
>>23583329your character is an incel loser trapped between the pages of juvenile YA lit, meanwhile millions of kids physically manifest han solo in october
>>23583368i already told you tricking people into doing free promotion is marketing, not literature. yeah some kid gets dressed up as han solo (a character from movies he hasn't seen) by his cuck of a dad, because the marketing strategy of "fandom" has convinced the dad he should display devotion to his favorite brand with unpaid labor. what does that have to do with the "han solo" in the movie or the one in some novel or his skin in fortnite or the one on a bag of lettuce? nothing. those are random unrelated things. there is no unity to "han solo," that unity is a marketing promise that remains always unfulfilled ("maybe if i buy one more thing..."), and the illusion is extremely brittle, even for the nutty dad. it's just a copyrighted name/outfit design getting slapped on lettuce. the promised transcendence did not take place. you bought all the crap and yet "the star wars universe" is as unreachable as ever, and han solo is still not your friend. next year the kid's going as a pringles can.
>>23582439whenever a writing teacher says "don't write anything unless it moves your story forward", I just assume they've never done anything creative in their life. sometimes you have to flesh out characters, ideas, descriptions that have no obvious connection to the story - maybe they will, maybe they won't.but then, you ask: why keep those meaningless characters in? well, because good art, like life, is full of random detail, and absurdity, and things often happen for no apparent reason. that's not to say a good story could consist of a string of nonsensical random events with no coherence.but it's a book. you're not telling a story at a bar, where meandering into trivial details would indeed be degrading to the story, and a social faux pas. it's a book.if there were no books with random characters and excessive detail, I would feel aesthetically deprived. but, if you want to read nothing but John Grisham thrillers and Nora Roberts romances, where the only use for any word is to drive the story forward, be my guest.
>>23583451han solo has new adventures every year on halloween in real life- he has transcended the ink on a page lucas originally had him in
>>23583481yeah, and on lettuce bags. if you keep staring at the lettuce bag long enough, he will speak to you, and you will share an adventure together. perhaps even... a kiss?
you're the uninteresting character, seether
>>23582439Literacy has been extended to plebs along with political franchise (war making and security dependent on mass, then industrial capacity). Modernism came along and made the Subject's inner world more interesting than the outer (where God's not to be found nor religion). A Joyce or Proust gets away with it by dint of technical proficiency-- your average slob today with his spiritual midgettations does not.
