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Thread for those who love great writing
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| davinox |
As a young writer myself who dreams and aspires of becoming one for a living, I read literature not so much for an engrossing plot, but for jaw-dropping, eloquent writing.
Although I have many, many books to read in my life, so far the best example of this is James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
If anyone would like to share their picks for gorgeous prose, please post here. (english please, i love literature from many languages, but the eloquence is lost in the translation, and I only speak english.) |
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| placebo |
Here's something I wrote awhile back:
High School
It's another world
It's beyond our own
So many cliques
So many dicks
So many kids going insane
So many kids with nowhere to go
So many kids who need help
We're trapped
We're against the wall
We're so small
No one listens
No one cares
No one wants to hear us talk
The shun us again
And again
AND AGAIN
Instinct is controlled
You can't act it out
You can't fight anymore
You can't yell
You can't scream
You aren't allowed to dream
They back you into a wall
They might as well kill
Your self esteem
They brainwash me
They brainwash you
They don't care
What you become
They act like they do
But they just want you too fail
We're all shunned
The adults don't get it
We need to fight
We need to yell
We need to scream
We need to dream
That's why we're so ed up
That's why we have so many kids
Who shoot up their schools
That's why we have so many kids
That turn out to be fools
Get hooked on drugs
Get hooked on sex
Nowhere to go
We turn to each other
We can't trust adults anymore
We feel like they stab us in the back
We feel like they don't give us slack
They don't care
They don't know
What we deal with
It's a different world
Every child
Every soul
We just dig a deeper hole
Until it's so deep
We can't go on
We just bury ourselves in it
And look what happens
We snap
The fuse runs out
We explode
It's time to fight
It's time to rebel
To end this hell
Don't strip us
Don't ruin us
Don't mold us into what you want
We are our own people
We are out own selves
We are the future
We are not you |
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| davinox |
hey, i wrote a poem like that once, although it's completely not my style.
High-school
I walk down the halls, trying not to focus
At the bathroom stalls, writings on the wall.
Hookups, breakups, homework assigned.
Assignments aligned for maximum suffering.
More work, less talk, real world buffering.
Make-ups and breakups, relationships
Shakes up the lonely, if only, they could see
A world that isn't sex, drugs, and popularity.
A world of clarity, without bull work.
Without jerks, without superficial girls
Giggling about nothing, rushing their life,
To be sixteen, eighteen, then soon a wife,
Unhappily married to the ex-quarterback,
Football star bad-ass, now hooked on smack.
Treats his wife like crap, beats his kids.
Oh how it hits, suburbia, blue collar families
In angst and tragedy, it's sad to see,
How many failures live in the shadows
Of the success laid out by the few winners.
Night clubs simmer with money and cash
While the poor stand out like a rash.
Uneducated and never reevaluated,
Worthless as trash, it'll never stop.
The hierarchy, the race to the top
It all starts here, in this building.
Kids choose their path in life, of success,
Amongst drinks and sex, jack-off magazines.
It seems life as a teen is full of stress.
And life ain't what it seems, let it be known.
If you follow your heart, work hard and it's shown.
You'll live a good life, that's all you need.
Forget the bull, the cool , the weed.
Forget the fast times and quick lines.
The stress of expectations loses patience.
But remember, through the stress,
Just try your best, work for success.
Keep your chin up, High School will be over.
And soon you'll have bigger problems to shoulder. |
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| PeacefulWarrior |
Jonathan Franzen has an eloquent and hip tone in his writing. I've only read one of his books--The Corrections--and although I didn't like the story/characters very much his writing shines throughout.
excerpt:
"The Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.
Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would be no local news until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of "bell ringing" but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for so long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred -- she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table -- each felt near to exploding with anxiety." |
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| davinox |
not bad Peaceful Warrior, although I disagree with his usage of incomplete sentences.
Here's a random segment from the novel I'm working on.
comments of style would be appreciated.
But if one in society could look past his or her first impressions—his irregular habits, hermitic nature, and deteriorated shape—and see the man for himself, with all of his features in plain view, one would judge his appearance in a different light. Rather than feel contempt for the skinny slug, sapping society in his sloth of apathy and unproductiveness, one would cling onto the notion that he was a man burdened with thought, aged and broken with time; his eyes viewed the world glazed and delusional, his lids sinking heavy upon them like weights. He had broad shoulders, although weak and without muscle, and his face appeared to have once been handsome, though it had weathered and aged into a pale, wrinkled droop. The remains of his handsomeness were still there, buried deep in years of leaving his body to waste. His defined cheekbones were still visible, and his eyes, though never quite focused on this world, were a beautiful mix of green and blue, splashed together as if simultaneously poured down a drain funneling into his iris. His ears stuck out and sprouted little tuffs of hair, though they were rarely visible amidst his long, matted mane—a mixture of gray and brown, disgusting and beautiful and tangled in dirt, creating thick knots. It was hard to know just how long his hair was, for it was so wild and unruly that it never stayed in one form, but it was definitely much too long, and the infrequent washings made his mesh of knots nasty and foul smelling. Yet, much like his face, in all its repulsiveness, his hair had its allure. He looked uncared for, left to rot in the foulness of his own incapability. One would feel pithy for him as if the poor man had been under such a great stress or suffering that he could not take care of himself, or that it no longer mattered to him. Nothing, not even wounds or cuts were tended to, and his hygiene was atrocious by modern standards. Yellow and disarrayed lines of teeth equipped his sagging mouth, and if some poor soul were to actually get close enough to smell his breath, the victim would find a stale repulsion creep through his or her open nose. Yes, his scent was remarkably foul, his look gangly and sick, and his texture cold and lifeless, and yet he cared not at all. A trifle was all it was, a trifle and worry of society, the bustling world of idiocy. It was his mind, his plump, magnificent brain that he attended to, that he groomed and fattened and cherished, though his body remained decaying. He left his body to rot with society, dumping his worthless cadaver to the vultures as his mind and consciousness drifted up and away from this world, spiraling toward the heavens. |
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| PeacefulWarrior |
"Celebrities you would have sex with Thread" -- 77 replies
"Thread for those who love great writing" -- 4 replies
:rolleyes: |
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| PeacefulWarrior |
| quote: | | a man burdened with thought, aged and broken with time; his eyes viewed the world glazed and delusional, his lids sinking heavy upon them like weights. |
| quote: | | Yellow and disarrayed lines of teeth equipped his sagging mouth, and if some poor soul were to actually get close enough to smell his breath, the victim would find a stale repulsion creep through his or her open nose. |
nice imagery
| quote: | | He left his body to rot with society, dumping his worthless cadaver to the vultures as his mind and consciousness drifted up and away from this world, spiraling toward the heavens. |
nice
Interesting, well-written passage. I like how you used dark imagery and then contrasted it with "spiraling toward the heavens" near the very end. |
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| davinox |
why thank you.
:happy2:
one of my characters is writing a novel in my book, and his beginning is below:
The funny thing is that another character picks it apart, and tells him everything he did wrong. :D
“And what if I chose not to breathe anymore, what if I decline this putrid gift of life? What if I spit the air back into God’s face and let my lungs collapse in sweet revenge? I’ll take it gladly. I’ll let this cruel system of sex and death, of natural selection and survival of the greediest, of pain and suffering, of unfairness and ruthlessness, of millions of years of evolution that granted us a brain big enough to contemplate everything but the meaning of our existence, I’ll let this terrible system devour me. Only then I’ll feed my corpse to the concrete and not the Earth. Damn the Earth, and let me finally get a taste of Hell!”
With that, he pulled a trigger, which, consequently, funneled a small piece of metal through a barrel and out through his temple. Blood gushed from the newly made hole like oil. He immediately became unconscious but, remarkably, survived to live out the rest of his life with permanent brain damage. When he finally did die many years later, his last words were inaudible, but what he was trying to say was “Finally, no more of this white.”
In the years he had spent in the hospital, with a condition that limited his communication far greater than his thinking capabilities, he had grown even more wretched, and powerless to finish the job. He wanted to will his life away; he commanded his heart to stop and his instinct to withdraw, the instinct to survive that kept forcing his mouth open as he denied himself air. He hated the pristine sheets of the hospital bed—white, all white—and the clean, colorless paint that was, in many ways, worse then the green and brown and blue disorder that he lived in before.
The first years after he was born, however, and not many years before his death, he was a happy, fat, and tranquil infant, growing quickly stronger each day. His mother said he had wise eyes, as if he had seen the world before. |
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| bloated_cow |
How does this affect my brain patterns? Contributions at sub bass frequencies ………putting me in a frenzied atmosphere. Black clouds billowing like rice. No one can stop it. Put those chains away. Like…. Extortion….. I cannot handle this. Heavy nothingness accelerates blasphemy again. Never healing for gangrene. Lack of satisfaction is itching at me forever. I wonder if anybody will buy this stuff.
L33t eh? I can dig it. I need various objects to produce sounds inspiring to the mind and body. Early poetic prophecies from junk everywhere unravel themselves in plain view but against hypnotists. I was on a roll spewing blatant nonsense from various orifices. Spouting bleeding in a hotel room. Unrecognizable self-awareness trimming cardiovascular trees. Disrupting the space-time flow continuum. Mashed potatoes sense frailty in juices far from altering the ego. Where do I pull it from? Have I been gifted? Or maybe cursed with the ability to express? Maybe those who are gifted do not recognize themselves as being gifted. True expression through raw sounds! Crushed tortured soul on the Serengeti where boars roam through various grammatical errors like a marshy substance peeling at their feet. Barabo is not a word recognized by many, but I believe that through rigorous telepathy techniques yet to be developed, one can begin to understand the subconscious barabo. Flying upon a leviathan of sorts through a magical ship tightened by adversity from mongoloids. I reach the outer edges of everything through pulsing madness silenced by society. Chill out session highlighting early works. I feel pasty like subconcious tomatoes squished between the ego and the id. Impossible beings surge from smoldering piles of mental anguish depicted by various assortments of ear-piercing sweat inducing bladder-releasing bowel shifting utterances. Parallel lines conversing, not given figure by its creator, like the screaming part of your head that is not recognized, because you have not atoned long enough to tap its ecstasy. Capacitor inhibitors and a wall of Irish destruction from the potatoes. Tell me I’m crazy. Hydrogen and oxygen close, making something new. Atoms bonded and created everything making me feel everything and becoming happily upset for another day. Words characterize life in any way you see fit. You can make the world out to be a scary dark place, or describe an experience in early morning being driven to the dentists’ office after sleeping in the vehicle. It is cool and crisp on this dawn, the sun-mass creeps over the horizon breaking its rays on the unwanting. Listening to the early-morning disc-jockey wannabe’s. Plush velvety warmth comes from everything, leaving the suspicion of unknown virility. Another day passes making me realize the true insignificance of everyday life. Truly worth nothing to me. Emotionless feelings envelop my state of existence making nothing (as itself) important. Truth is what society tells the masses. You cannot make truth devoid of competency. Ambience convulsing on twisted tarragon. A legion of loneliness compels me to depict its tranquility in difficulty. Lacking the mood for soul crustedness. An outward pouring of hollow emotion to no one. Beauty fades, but not when written. Now I go onward to empathy. Uplifted from series of doubts of greatness. Like picking that special person out of a crowd on a foggy night, you feel as if you have been taken on a journey through music. Trickling down the moss-covered brick, reds greens purples and blacks drip and drip like old pudding and you picture it in your mind and it feels good. You do not know this person, but when your eyes meet from across the room, there is a kind of electricity in the air that is felt as (you) the DJ places a simple piece of vinyl on the platter and you feel nonexistent as the rhythmic tones flow through your body and uplift you. You do not feel the urge to dance, but to just listen and be drawn away from this world for a few minutes. Her green eyes are clearly visible in the flashing lights and the crowd has been worked into a frenzy. Screaming people adore the sounds that you have thrust forth. You feel like God himself has intervened and massed this immeasurable bliss. You have controlled them and made their lives a little better for the time being. As you put forth everything you have and all the skills you have mastered you know that you are unstoppable. The atmosphere is hot and the moistness from surging bodies fills the air. Now realizing my tattered dreams, I have reached a critical milestone in figuring out a part of my life, which I have been too stupid to realize for a long time. I should never look back. I want to seize the day for all it is worth because I know there is so much more to life than this small village. Black and green in between everything below legend. It is about 2:00 AM on a Monday night. It is not too late, but I debate the safety of those who would wake me in the morning. Near life altering experiences came from one without reality to conflict with happenings resulting from clashing neurons. Green paper walls covering wells. Back to all the same old bull forever, but can anyone stop it? All about the ftp to continue the anointed feeling of depression, yet still controllable the realization of the world being a giant split palace does flow forth from my veins and the circulation of true electrical impulses from nature that you must master for all eternity. The competitive nature of our society drives the masses into an unhappy stupor. The thesaurus is you only friend in this journey. For I am the juggernaut of the space compendium and the barrage of unholy treasures! Every one of the dedications offend thee. Carefree bass lines and sub frequency broadcasts in our massive freestyle, for we do own this thing at my house. Can you live through an unneeded torment? The real question is (do I swallow my pride for nothing at the glimpse of a slim possibility that would undoubtedly torment me for some time, yet of my sociopathic thinking it would be easier to dodge human behavior) what lies ahead? The world is full of disguise and shrouded cloaks and daggers, black magic and uneventful lust. A relatively small compilation, yet for all its worth (nothing actually) I speak in the third persons view of apocalyptic convulsions of earth leaving the anticipation worse than the result. Mentioning the Mongolian ducks (thus violating that agreement) =true
Mantra from decomposed insomnia invigorating contempt for geographical limitations (although freed by large area networks, though only accessed by use of a credit card which I have not yet acquired and do not plan on) truly inspires yearning emotions. Confiscate my leprosy clown! I stab at thee with thine own MAKEUP!!!!!!!! HIYAAAA! I am (inescapable intolerable incandescent incontinuous impetuously) yelling. I’ve felt a loop of creativity, but desire makes me live.
Thank you for wasting your time,
Bloated_cow
Undoubtedly, your mind is destroyed.:toothless |
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| Psy-T |
allthough you ppl wrote some amazing stuff, i thought the purpose of this thread is more along the lines of "what book is your fav?"
anyways, mine is currently the three post-written prequels of "dune" written by frank herbert's son - brian/bryan (however you write that name....)
im currently reading "douglas rushkoff's "extacy club" and loving every sentence.... |
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| davinox |
thanks for the recommendation.
douglas rushkoff's "extacy club" <--i'll check this out. how good is the writing?
bloated_cow: I can imagine the thoughts go through your mind as you wrote that long bit of irreverancy. I actually liked portions of it, though some I didn't. (of course, that's to be expected when you ramble about nothing) |
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| NomadaNare |
| I've read a lot of books in my short life and i figured out the way you can tell if the writing is good in any piece is if it flows. When you read it, forget about the punctuation and pronounciation because none of that exists in your mind. When you see the word, you know instantly what it means. But, focus on the meaning of the word. Many fledgling writers (and sometimes some well known critically acclaimed masters) make the mistake of carefully describing material through the use of horribly worded phrases that have nothing to do with each other. Dont get me wrong I love the painfully thought out metaphors and similes, but dont do it so much that the average reader has to reread the sentence fifteen times to get the meaning of it. By the way you guys are pretty good. What's the name of your book gonna be when it comes out? It sounds very interesting |
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