I want to write in a way that hits hard, that makes you feel the heat of a character’s struggle like a fever rising in your forehead, burning with every moment. Not with flowery words or soft metaphors, but with rawness something that claws at you. I want the pain to live in the character, to burn you up with their fight, their fall. But I don’t know how to make it land like that. How to make it real, make it sizzle in your skin. How. The. Fuck. Can. I. Do. It?
>>24730538"show, don't tell" is often bad advice but it was made for situations like this. you musn't fall into the trap of telling the reader "he felt the heat of his struggle burning within him" or anything REMOTELY like that. of course, maybe you already knew that, and telling you what NOT to do is never as useful as positive advice, soAyn Rand, of all people, once said "suspense is when the author lets you in on his intentions". You need to gently clue in the reader into what is going to happen (assuming the reader has some reason to care), but leave him guessing about when and how the event will occur. ideally the event will occur in an unexpected manner that the reader belatedly realises was foreshadowed. once you've done this a couple of times the reader will naturally feel a sense of anticipation. I must stress that the events must be foreseen and foreshadowed to a certain extent, otherwise the book will feel like a cheap haunted-house ride.also if you can stomach a Japanese visual novel... read MUV-LUV.best of luck anon
>>24730538Just read my book. YOu will probably learn a lot from it.
>>24730538who is an author that has that? post an excerpt and break down why it works.
>>24730561Thanks for the detailed advice. Honestly, part of my struggle is that I feel like even if people read my story, they wouldn’t really care about it and I’m not very confident in my writing right now. So when I hear things like “show, don’t tell,” it sometimes feels like I’m failing both ways.That said, I do appreciate you breaking it down with concrete ideas like foreshadowing and suspense that gives me something more practical to focus on. I guess I just need to keep practicing and try not to get stuck in the thought that my writing sucks.I’ll probably give Muv-Luv a try, but I really hope it’s nothing like Euphoria or Maggot Baits that shit seriously traumatized me.
>>24730584give me a name
>>24730595I’m trying to do that, but it feels like I’m just a robot describing emotions. It’s similar to a school essay. Plus, I’m writing in English, which isn’t even my first language, so it always feels like I don’t really understand what makes writing good.
>>24730538You wrote all that shit and made a thread for attention when you could have written what you're describing
>>24730621I’m working on it, but it’s smut, so AO3 is the likely destination
>>24730635> it’s smut,all this handwringing over smut, and a thread had to die for this. shame on you, young man.
>>24730658>a thread had to die for thisoh no, not a /lit/ thread, whatever shall we do?
>>24730538If you want to get better at writing, only two things work: 1) reading, 2) writing.To elaborate, read good stuff that's like what you want to write and think about what makes it work (and if it turns out to not be good, what makes it not work). When you write, try to push yourself out of your comfort zone. There are books that can help guide you (Writing Down The Bones is popular in creative writing classes), but it's ultimately up to you to actually write. Share what you write with people whose judgment you trust for feedback.If you want to read books featuring characters in heightened emotional states so you can write them yourself, my recommendations would be Wuthering Heights, Lolita, and Crime and Punishment. Yeah, they're all Literature 101 books, but if you haven't given them a try, you should.
>>24730658Plenty of authors have turned smut into high literature. OP probably won't, but there's worse things to do than help him along that path.
>>24730664My problem isn’t reading I actually read a lot, but most of it is random webnovels or AO3 fanfic, so I’m not really learning from it. I understand what you mean about reading more curated material to see what works, and I’ll try to focus on books that help me understand structure and emotional impact better. I only started taking writing seriously relatively recently, not just doing school essays or random stuff, and even more recently started writing in English.
>>24730667Honestly, I don’t really get all the praise for highbrow writing. For me, good writing is just writing that grabs the reader and keeps them interested
>>24730662Yeah, who could’ve guessed that a porn site would do that
>>24730710Reading webnovels and fanfic will only teach you to write webnovels and fanfic. If that's what you want, go for it. Otherwise, you're going to have to reach higher.>>24730720Everyone's different. For me, "highbrow" books are what grab my attention. Not exclusively, mind you, but they tend to have much better prose and more subtle ideas. Too much lowbrow stuff is too obvious and plainly written to capture my interest.
>>24730734I'm probably too simple-minded to understand
>>24730538>But I don’t know how to make it land like that.You don't understand your tools and medium. Study grammar, study literature. >>24730561>suspense is when the author lets you in on his intentionsI don't think you took that right and don't quite understand what suspense is, suspense is when anxiety or uncertainty about what is going to happen or might happen, slows down our perception of time, when we focus on the anxiety or uncertainty. This always requires foreshadowing, the author must let the reader know that something is going to happen if you want the reader to get that feeling of suspension. This quote is not saying you need to be gentle, just that you need to understand the relationship between foreshadowing and suspense if you want to use suspense. For the most part, the more blunt you are the greater the suspense can be, we can pretty much stop time for the reader, the more subtle you are the longer you can draw it out. This is far from a rule you just will have to work harder at it if you want to go against it since it is going against the natural feeling of suspense that is part of our lives. What is best depends on your goals but the main thing to understand is that every time you foreshadow there is suspense, it is up to you to control that and make sure that suspense is released when and where you want it even if it is barely suspenseful, if you don't it may break that suspense you had been so carefully building. For the most part suspense rarely feels raw, raw requires fatalism, it is in the moment.
>>24730751>break that suspense you had been so carefully building.Break that other suspense you had been so carefully building, not the suspense of that barely suspenseful bit of foreshadowing. If that wasn't clear. If you want that one big moment where the suspension breaks you don't want to make sure not to break any suspension before that moment.
>>24730767To maintain suspense, we need to literally create a problem that everyone is aware of, and make it the focal point of the story. Everything should revolve around this issue, constantly reminding the reader of the potential consequences. But wouldn’t this risk making the reader too familiar with the problem, thus diminishing any anxiety or tension they might feel?
>>24730751I study writing by watching YouTube videos and analyzing the work of writers I admire
>>24730834What the suspense is building towards does not have to be known, all you need is that focal point, a character who grows increasingly anxious about the uncertainty of their future in a novel which makes clear it is going to eventually get around to that uncertain future for example. Generally the book wide sort of suspense is left to genre, to maintain the suspense on that scale requires spending most of your time on the suspense which limits how much you can explore other things, it becomes about the suspense and the event. In lit fiction suspense tends to be used in many smaller doses and often is that very short but intense sort that happens in the span of a page.In both cases suspense is mostly achieved through the subtext, often the subtext of the character themselves and their emotion, subtle cues that something is going to happen, hints the reader will not notice because they are buried in something else completely unrelated, things implied or suggested instead of stated, etc. Genre get a bit of a leg up here since it can exploit the genre itself, we know the monster will make its appearance one way or another. Not sure if you are a genrefag or litficfag so hard to say much here, far too broad of a topic. >>24730840How do you analyze those works?
>>24730896I start by carefully reading the work multiple times. Look for patterns in the author’s tone, vocabulary, sentence structure.
>>24731798That is pretty much what I figured, you are hoping to learn through osmosis. Take a paragraph you like, diagram the sentences identifying word class, phrase and clause. Then dig into meaning at the most basic level, research each word including the ones you already know, use that to figure out the various meanings of each phrase, then the possible meaning of phrase, each sentence, and then the paragraph as a whole. Write an essay on that paragraph following the paragraphs structure; intro, exposition, conclusion explaining the paragraph in depth. Reread the chapter/section the paragraph is a part of, make notes on how your understanding has changed, find the areas which your knew understanding suggests you don't quite fully understand, repeat the previous for those sections. Repeat until second nature and you do it while your read. The rest will fall into place after that. It may seem like a lot of work at first but it will be quicker than just hoping it will all just suddenly make sense if you read the same book enough.
>>24731976>figure out the various meanings of each phrase, then the possible meaning of phraseFigure out the various meanings of each phrase, then the possible meanings of each clause, sentence. Can't seem to post itt without a stupid editing error. I assume there is at least one more and possibly one in this post as well, oh well.
>>24731976>>24731981Yeah, I get what you mean breaking it down from word > phrase > clause > sentence > paragraph makes sense. Kind of like reverse-engineering the text until you can put it back together again with a clearer understanding. The method does sound tedious, but I can see how it forces you to actually engage with the material instead of just skimming.Did you find that after doing this a few times you naturally start noticing structure/meaning while reading without needing to fully diagram everything?
>>24732121I went about this by digging into descriptive grammar, which was worth doing but is a lot more work and most of what it offers the writer is getting you to actually fully parse the sentence on the semantic level. This is the big issue with prescriptive grammar, it does not teach how to parse the semantics, just prescribes usage.You will not need to fully diagram and go through all those steps for long; the first thing it will teach you is how to identify what you are not quite getting, you will see that something is off in your understanding of a sentence and generally will have a good idea about the clause or word that is throwing you off so you can be more targeted. Mostly it will break you of the habit of letting context fill in the gaps, which is fine (if not good) for the reader but terrible for the writer. But do it more than just as much as you need to, make it a habit, anytime you come across one of those sentences that really hits you hard, go through it all and put in the time to really pull apart its paragraph and understand why it worked so well.Just from your general education you actually have most of this stuff down, a few gaps to fill in and a few habits to break, so it should go fairly quickly and become automatic, a part of reading that takes no extra time or effort. People (especially here) love to make sentence diagrams out to be high school shit but once you start using them for understanding meaning and not just word class/syntax, they become quite useful, they force you to slow down and systematically work through a sentence word by word and really understand it and what makes it work. Think I got all the errors this time, been phone posting and my brain just does not work well with such a small screen.
