Authors who aspire to literary writing...

You bastards. I am stuck now thinking about what pretentious waffle I can come up with next!

I've always wanted to do a version of the joke, where the woman notices that her spouse is just sitting, staring at the TV, and not 'communicating', and she goes through a huge amount of internal dialog, looking at what he's been doing, what she's been doing, their communication, what he might be feeling, how she is influencing that etc etc etc.

And he's sitting there thinking "The car's fuel pump has failed. I wonder what is wrong with it?"

Do that for a sexual relationship. It could be both funny and pompous at the same time. Have the entire story from her perspective, and then, at the end, his is one line.

But it's a bit cruel and misogynistic, so I doubt I ever will write it.
 
I think it is an amazing honour that so many younger people and new writers are jumping in here and submitting all this stuff, admittedly, much of which is not great.

The reason they do it is because they have read a few people here who inspired their desires to write.

Some of these new writers will get a lot better than they are right now.

But the fact remains they have been inspired to write.

Exactly. :rose:

Not everyone who submits to Literotica dreams of writing for a living. The bulk of authors are normal people who want to share their fantasies and their ideas. Literotica is not a literary magazine - it is a community. This place exists as much for writers - as a place for them to share, to reach out to like minds, to gain feedback - as it does for readers.

Early on, we made a conscious decision to set attainable submission guidelines. We did this because we felt very skilled writers already had outlets. We felt it was far more interesting to read the fantasies of a wide variety of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences running the full spectrum of literary ability.

It is my impression that the masses are becoming lazy as video offers them everything they need and their imaginations no longer are required. Old movies had effects that still required you to "believe" and see past the wires, rubber costumes and other trickery, now we nearly create reality visually. This means less and less people have the inclination and perhaps the skill to use words to conjure images inside their heads, and if those folks try to write they simply use words to draw pictures.

I dunno. Thanks in no small part to the Internet, I think the masses are far more educated and informed than they ever have been. And I think the vision of some great old days when everyone was well-read and had excellent tastes is just that - a vision. The great films and books from the past are what survive and are remembered, but that doesn't change the fact those few gems are dwarfed by the mountains of utterly awful - and in their time extremely popular/lucrative - crap that has since faded into obscurity. The masses have always been drawn to easily-accessible entertainment. That doesn't mean that unpopularity denotes quality, or that everything popular is shit. :D It just is what it is.
 
Thanks in no small part to the Internet, I think the masses are far more educated and informed than they ever have been. And I think the vision of some great old days when everyone was well-read and had excellent tastes is just that - a vision. The great films and books from the past are what survive and are remembered, but that doesn't change the fact those few gems are dwarfed by the mountains of utterly awful - and in their time extremely popular/lucrative - crap that has since faded into obscurity. The masses have always been drawn to easily-accessible entertainment. That doesn't mean that unpopularity denotes quality, or that everything popular is shit. :D It just is what it is.

Otto Bettmann, founder of the Bettmann Archive, wrote a wonderful book called THE GOOD OLD DAYS - THEY WERE TERRIBLE! which quite debunked popular rosy views of the USA ca. 1850-1920. Bettmann lampshaded our selective memories. We humans tend to conveniently forget the awful -- and there's LOTS of awful! Social problems, bad/sickening foods, lousy literature, all fall under Sturgeon's Law (95% of everything is crap). We tend to remember the better 5%.

Yes, too many past best-selling Anglophone authors I have read in unfiltered historical collections are almost unreadable now, and some acknowledged 'classics' barely sold during the author's lifetime. We should also remember that much of our population has been and remains functionally illiterate. This is nothing new. So we shouldn't be surprised that trash sells -- and it's easier to write trash than good stuff. James Patterson shits-out a new book every few weeks. Sacre bleu!
 
...

Yes, too many past best-selling Anglophone authors I have read in unfiltered historical collections are almost unreadable now, and some acknowledged 'classics' barely sold during the author's lifetime. We should also remember that much of our population has been and remains functionally illiterate. This is nothing new. So we shouldn't be surprised that trash sells -- and it's easier to write trash than good stuff. James Patterson shits-out a new book every few weeks. Sacre bleu!

In England, (almost) universal literacy came with changes in the provision of education in the 19th Century. The massive increase in newspapers, magazines and books in the last 25 years of that century was led by demand from the newly literate. The provision of FREE public libraries also came then from local government and significant spending by Andrew Carnegie - Thank you, Mr Carnegie.

My family were literate for centuries before then. My paternal family were originally scriveners (public letter writers and book copiers) before they went into printing. They were also Parish Clerks from Shakespeare's era.

My maternal family were educated at the village school provided by the local squire and run by the Church of England vicar and some of his congregation. That was very rare in the 18th Century. The teaching for farm labourers' children apart from reading and writing included arithmetic, science, Latin and for the more able, Greek. The standard of literacy expected of those children would be beyond many teenagers now. The village school became a National School in the 1830s and is still in use today.

The marriage records for both sides of the family show that almost every one of them, male or female, could at least sign their name in the marriage register. Since they had all been to school at least until age 12, I would expect their literacy level to comparable to college level now.

In the 19th Century W H Smith, originally Railway Newspaper Sellers, starting selling cheap books as well. Book print runs increased from a few hundred copies to tens of thousands.
 
I do have a question about literary erotica.

Does it involve total disdain for periods and 60 word run on sentences that read like a small child telling about their day?

And then and then and then I and then we....

Just curious.

No. Smashwords has a literary erotica category and very little of it (including mine) reads like Finnegan's Wake.
 
Some of my stories are 'serious literary'. Some are not. Some are parodies of classic authors e.g. Swift and Kipling. Some are rubbish.

But I think your memory is possibly selective. The quality of the entries to the themed contests has improved significantly over the last five or so years.

What hasn't changed is the proportion of dross to worthwhile stories. There are many more stories posted every week than there used to be, but the stories worth reading are still in the minority, as they always were.

There are many authors whose stories are worth reading. It can be a disheartening experience trying to sort through all the new stories to find an exciting author you haven't read before. The good stories are there, in their hundreds, but swamped by the thousands and tens of thousands of average, poor, and [expletive-deleted] awful ones.
I know what you mean about some classic lit being crap. Did you ever read Sam Clemens' critique of Fennimore Cooper, it is hilarious. He mentions one scene in Cooper during which something like nine different Indians all jump from branches to try to land on the longboat. The very first indian (chief) misses by a little and each consecutive jumper misses by more as the boat glides down stream. In another scene, Cooper has the longboat passing a turn in the river that is shorter than the length of the boat. Of course when Twain tells it it is much funnier than my version, but I was compelled to wonder: who was his editor? lol
 
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I know what you mean about some classic lit being crap. Did you ever read Sam Clemens' critique of Fennimore Cooper, it is hilarious. He mentions one scene in Cooper during which something like nine different Indians all jump from branches to try to land on the longboat. The very first indian (chief) misses by a little and each consecutive jumper misses by more as the boat glides down stream. In another scene, Cooper has the longboat passing a turn in the river that is shorter than the length of the boat. Of course when Twain tells it it is much funnier than my version, but I was compelled to wonder: who was his editor? lol

Here's the critique. It's a thing of beauty.

http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html

"[Rules of literature] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale."
 
Camus is a case in point ogg...

I even managed to read him in French when I was much younger, and more fluent in the language. With minimal use of my French dictionary. He writes great novels in the simplest language.

Literary doesn't need to use long words. It needs to use the RIGHT words.

James Wood's 'How fiction works' is the most, maybe the only, helpful work on writing that my uni creative writing tutor ever introduced me to. It's worth reading.

I welcome all the contributions to this thread. Certainly the longest-running thread I've ever initiated!

Literary doesn't necessarily mean using long or obscure words. Literature can be written that is accessible to 8th or 9th grade level readers.

It might be harder to express the story with a restricted vocabulary but it can be done.
 
Thank you.

The responses to this thread have convinced me that it's worth persevering with posting on Lit. And I'll let this group know when my next story is up.

So a heartfelt thanks, folks. My first of three chapters is almost finalised, but won't be posted till I have the second well on its way. I empathise with readers who are frustrated with months between chapters.

Scotsman69

I think it is an amazing honour that so many younger people and new writers are jumping in here and submitting all this stuff, admittedly, much of which is not great.

The reason they do it is because they have read a few people here who inspired their desires to write.

Some of these new writers will get a lot better than they are right now.

But the fact remains they have been inspired to write.

'Literary' erotica or adult fiction in the modern era's principally digital format demands a brevity that was somewhat unusual in the past - although not entirely unknown. This is in my view something of a 'new' or 'modern' form of writing in reality and perhaps still subject to a bit of 'pathfinding.'

I certainly get the point of what the OP is saying, but then I also think the whole thing is the other way around - today's world virtually DEMANDS that any serious contemporary writer is going to have to deal with very hardcore sex, sexuality, and the transgressing through or across old social mores. It would be 'false' and artificial if a real literary writer tried to avoid those things now. A real literary reflection of modern people, modern life, modern themes, necessitates the inclusion of pretty hardcore erotic content - I think.

So what does that all add up to?

In my mind it adds up to a redefining of the word 'literary.' You can't create parodies of 'old school' phraseology and writing styles and highly studied English and then assume that you're necessarily being literary; English is a living language.

I just had a conversion with the marketing manager of a major local art gallery this morning - in the middle of a huge proxy fight in a public company meeting...! (Yep. True.) The gallery put on an expensive showing of up-to-the-minute NY and Europe-sourced high brow 'current' art/music/film. The exhibition was poorly attended.

And that's because people are snobs and don't get what's going on -, yet. Chris Martin of Coldplay is an immense talent (my opinion). He isn't any different to say, Van Gogh. His wife won't publish in Vanity Fair - what WAS the world's leading upscale, social, cultural literary venue. Dominick Dunne and Gore Vidal wrote for Vanity Fair's editions.

And I won't have anything published there either. Does that make either me or Gwyneth Paltrow literary writers or literary figures?

Yes it does.

My stories - and many or most of the writers responding in this thread's stories - here are read by more people than anything that would be printed and published in Vanity Fair today.

They are read, and presumably enjoyed too because they keep coming back.

So if you want to amp up the literary tone of some writing, I think there IS a rule to have the work try and fit into the reading styles of today's readers, but I think THIS IS the place to do it.

In the past, really great writers would compete with their perceived rivals' latest works and cutting-edge stories or writing - painters did it too.

I would thoroughly recommend the OP attempt something of the kind he is talking about, let us know in the Authors' Hangout when he sticks it up and I for one will definitely be on the look-out to read it.

To be 'literary' means to say something important about the human condition. And the human sexual condition, the erotic manners and fashions and so on, are absolutely key to any understanding of today's human being and of today's social culture. I'm not sure I ever tried to have 'something important to say' in any of the stories I have put up here so far. But it isn't a bad challenge to think about eventually doing so or trying to. And then again, maybe just straight out 'erotic' stories, ARE the something important about today's culture.

Are we, afterall, living in the best of erotic times?
 
Aye, I accept your point TxRad.

I've posted around fifty stories in six years on Lit. Before I posted here, the only folk who'd read my stories were my uni classmates in creative writing.

My stories haven't always improved. I lost my muse and lover over two years ago, and feel in my heart that my stories written and posted since then have been pretty humdrum. But I HAD to keep writing and posting occasionally, just to keep my hand in, so to speak.

Scotsman69

Just for the fun of it, how many people posting to this thread started posting their stories here at Lit or a site like it?

Maybe not the first stories you wrote but the first ones you put on line.

Have you improved since you started posting here? I know I have.

Lit is a proving ground. You talk about the bad stories but how many of those writers wrote again and again or just gave up after one or two stories. There isn't much of a way to tell but I think the good writers continued and the bad ones are replaced ever so often by a new crop.

Just MHO of course.
 
I I lost my muse and lover over two years ago, and feel in my heart that my stories written and posted since then have been pretty humdrum.


You're a Scotsman! You come from a land brimming with fiery sexy redheaded lassies, who love passionately and speak english incomprehensibly. Go grab a spare and start writing... ;)
 
NO. At least, not for me. I just need stories that grab me with the first sentence or para.

And keep me grabbed. Easy said. Not so easily realised.

I do have a question about literary erotica.

Does it involve total disdain for periods and 60 word run on sentences that read like a small child telling about their day?

And then and then and then I and then we....

Just curious.
 
So LC is still pushing his misconceptions of and looking down his nose at the literary? I'm pretty sure literary works don't use semicolons to denote possessives and contractions. :rolleyes:
 
So LC is still pushing his misconceptions of and looking down his nose at the literary? I'm pretty sure literary works don't use semicolons to denote possessives and contractions. :rolleyes:

Almost is a weak word, you should avoid it.
 
Sensible post as always..

But what do we expect from Laurel?

Exactly. :rose:

Not everyone who submits to Literotica dreams of writing for a living. The bulk of authors are normal people who want to share their fantasies and their ideas. Literotica is not a literary magazine - it is a community. This place exists as much for writers - as a place for them to share, to reach out to like minds, to gain feedback - as it does for readers.

Early on, we made a conscious decision to set attainable submission guidelines. We did this because we felt very skilled writers already had outlets. We felt it was far more interesting to read the fantasies of a wide variety of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences running the full spectrum of literary ability.



I dunno. Thanks in no small part to the Internet, I think the masses are far more educated and informed than they ever have been. And I think the vision of some great old days when everyone was well-read and had excellent tastes is just that - a vision. The great films and books from the past are what survive and are remembered, but that doesn't change the fact those few gems are dwarfed by the mountains of utterly awful - and in their time extremely popular/lucrative - crap that has since faded into obscurity. The masses have always been drawn to easily-accessible entertainment. That doesn't mean that unpopularity denotes quality, or that everything popular is shit. :D It just is what it is.
 
As man of your erudition should know ogg...

Scotland had almost universal primary education from the c16, long before England. Thanks to the many-faceted John Knox. Who was amongst other distasteful things, a misogynist, who offered primary education to girls as well as boys. Isn't history complicated? And Scotland, with about a tenth of England's population, and less of its wealth, had four universities from C16, three from c 15, compared to England's two.

And the King James Bible, which we all know and love (even auld atheists like me), was commissioned by the General Assembly of the Scots kirk, in James's presence in Burntisland, when he was James VI of Scotland. Though it wasn't completed till he'd accepted the proffered English crown. With unseemly gold-driven alacrity....

In England, (almost) universal literacy came with changes in the provision of education in the 19th Century. The massive increase in newspapers, magazines and books in the last 25 years of that century was led by demand from the newly literate. The provision of FREE public libraries also came then from local government and significant spending by Andrew Carnegie - Thank you, Mr Carnegie.

My family were literate for centuries before then. My paternal family were originally scriveners (public letter writers and book copiers) before they went into printing. They were also Parish Clerks from Shakespeare's era.

My maternal family were educated at the village school provided by the local squire and run by the Church of England vicar and some of his congregation. That was very rare in the 18th Century. The teaching for farm labourers' children apart from reading and writing included arithmetic, science, Latin and for the more able, Greek. The standard of literacy expected of those children would be beyond many teenagers now. The village school became a National School in the 1830s and is still in use today.

The marriage records for both sides of the family show that almost every one of them, male or female, could at least sign their name in the marriage register. Since they had all been to school at least until age 12, I would expect their literacy level to comparable to college level now.

In the 19th Century W H Smith, originally Railway Newspaper Sellers, starting selling cheap books as well. Book print runs increased from a few hundred copies to tens of thousands.
 
Alas, youve seen Braveheart too often

and know little of the real Scotland.

Most of us (except in Anglicised Edinburgh, a mere 55 miles from the English border) speak Scots, not English.

You're a Scotsman! You come from a land brimming with fiery sexy redheaded lassies, who love passionately and speak english incomprehensibly. Go grab a spare and start writing... ;)
 
Support for Lit

Firstly, can I say that as an appreciative Lit reader it's amusing and pleasing to see a couple of my favourite Lit authors (Scotsman, TxRad) posting on the same thread. Guys, you make a middle aged latent sub very.... fulfilled {blush}.

Secondly, yes, the majority of stories here on Lit are crap, and I can say that from a position of trying to edit a couple. But, some are also incredibly *readable* and as an occasional user, it's not hard to find your way to the good stuff. New stories are highlighted, competition winners are usually pretty good (tx - that Valentines story - woo) and we can all rate each others' stuff. The technological tools and tips are there to signpost you to the good stuff if you look for them.

And finally. Personally, I love C18th and C19th century English, sociologically aware female writers (Eliot, Gaskill et al). But I save them for days when I have more than half an hour in between coming home from work, cooking supper and getting on with the varied and various bits of clutter a 'working mom' has to do. A quick dip into Lit, for fun and sexual refreshment is, however, a quick pick-me-up, which hits the parts succinctly and easily that George and Elizabeth struggle to reach....
 
and know little of the real Scotland.

Most of us (except in Anglicised Edinburgh, a mere 55 miles from the English border) speak Scots, not English.

^^^^^Translation: He says he's a mouth breathing, knuckle walking Highlander who recently left the trees to wear underpants and beg for cigarette butts at rest stop restrooms.

The only Scots that Highlanders speak are HUH and DUH. Its a simple language.
 
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^^^^^Translation: He says he's a mouth breathing, knuckle walking Highlander who recently left the trees to wear underpants and beg for cigarette butts at rest stop restrooms.

The only Scots that Highlanders speak are HUH and DUH. Its a simple language.

you're a waste of a good skin, you trolling cunt.
 
I've posted around fifty stories in six years on Lit. Before I posted here, the only folk who'd read my stories were my uni classmates in creative writing.

My stories haven't always improved. I lost my muse and lover over two years ago, and feel in my heart that my stories written and posted since then have been pretty humdrum. But I HAD to keep writing and posting occasionally, just to keep my hand in, so to speak.

Scotsman69

this was the one: click
 
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