Life can be joyous and wonderful. I never believed this would

On Saturday
Anna had stayed over the previous night. We cooked a pizza covered in large black olives. I hadn't eaten olives in over a year and delighted at the taste, and she insisted that I eat them all. I felt guilty at having expressed my delight and perhaps pressured her into sacrificing whatever fondness she herself had for them, but still she was serious enough and so I ate all the olives, though I made sure to compensate for her selfless gesture by cleaning the kitchen and fetching two glasses of water filled with ice cubes to our bed later on. The bedroom is around twelve feet in width and twenty feet in length, with wood-paneled walls, a sloping ceiling on one side, a square and relatively small window, and a single bed, amongst other things. After staying in bed until ten am, Anna playfully announced that we should get up and that it was unhealthy to stay in bed all day. I was tired and desired to stay in bed longer, though eventually I joined her in the shower cubicle and we washed each other and giggled under the warm spray. The bathroom was full of steam when we stepped out of the shower. I opened the window and the steam was sucked out. We sat in damp towels on the sofa drinking coffee. I felt young and healthy as I smelled Anna's shampooed hair. We drank black coffee and ate cinnamon roles before she left for the day. I read some stories by Chekhov and the novella "The Pidgeon" by Patrick Süskind. I wrote a little over four thousand words.

On Sunday
Anna and I rode bicycles belonging to one of her grandmother's neighbours down along the water to Slåttevik and then, spontaneously, we decided to keep cycling over to Hervik, where we sat on a bench and ate ice cream while our bicycles rested against each other, an image which to me appeared to suggest they were a pair of working class lovers, that is to say we were their employers in some form of manor house while the bicycles were two servants, a male and a female, who embraced each other while we weren't looking. Anna told me her thoughts on the writing of Michel Houellebecq, and I felt a great surge of pride because I have read much of his writing and have formed a rather elaborate opinion myself, which I only summarized in a way that would not appear patronizing in response to Anna's own short speech on the matter. I did however feel something of a need to explain that, as hideous and mean-spirited as many of Houellebecq's male characters and narrators appear to be, a degree of empathy is necessary to view them as defeated and bitter men often rightly contemptuous of contemporary society, rather than simply evil individuals who serve only to espouse the disgusting beliefs of the novel's author. We sat in silence for a while and it was worth as much to me as an intimate conversation. After a while she patted my thigh and kissed my neck and we first walked beside our bicycles then cycled back to her grandmother's. Her grandmother made us dinner and then I left them to return to my cabin. I watched the movie "The Comedy" and it effected me the way few movies do, inducing a sense of guilt and self-disgust despite its laconic dialogue and sparse plot. It reminded me of the movie "Slacker" by Richard Linklater, which was similar in its slowness but almost inverted in its moral "message", in the sense that "Slacker" appeared to primarily critique the corporate culture dominant in the 1980s (though it did not portray the eponymous slackers in the movie as faultless by any means) while "The Comedy" attacks the slackers themselves, or their contemporary equivalent, which serves to provide very uncomfortable viewing for the kinds of individual who are likely to watch such a movie. Last night I wrote a short story about two neglected teenagers who build a home of sorts in an abandoned community center near their home.

I've been writing for about a month of two now. I feel like I've really begun to move forward with my aspirations and life. Im much happier now and I think it's having a positive effect on my life as a whole. My actual writing itself isn't the best yet. Though I feel I have all my ideas in place, my prose is pretty bad. Do you have any tips on how to improve prose?

>>8399749
Keep writing, keep reading. Revise multiple times.

>>8399663
Oh hey Norway bro, how's the book going?

>>8399757
what would you consider to be beautiful prose, or rather what makes beautiful prose for you?

>>8399663
I want to believe you're the real deal but there is something slightly turgid, and thus suspicious, about the way these posts are written... As if it's some imaginary character you dream up in detail to forget about your wage-slavery for a bit.

>>8399749
Read more. Imitate the greats.

>>8399761
Not that guy but,
Great prose has depth, and every sentence/paragraph carries weight. When you read great prose you may have to read over some bits several times to really squeeze all the meaning out of it. The dialogue isn't just spoken words, they have body language and emotion. Etc.

Honestly if you couldn't have answered this question for yourself you probably need to read much more. I'm not satisfied with my own answer yet, I'm just starting to develop a sense for it myself.

>>8399761
That's rather difficult to pin down. I like works that have a fluid, lyrical quality to them. Measured (that is, not seeming forced or overdone) use of alliteration, consonance, assonance, etc. A balance between economy of phrase and singularity of expression. Fuck self-conscious showboating.

>>8399749
I am yet to be published so the validity of my advice is doubtful, however I do believe I have learned many lessons in my attempt to write prose that is appealing, interesting, entertaining, and so on. I believe in a concept I myself have coined named Learned Simplicity. The finest songwriters, the finest poets and the finest prose writers have, in my opinion, mastered Learned Simplicity. Every writer begins at a point of simplicity, though this form of simplicity is uninformed, clumsily articulated, superficial, and often blunt in a way that is unappealing to read and evidence, usually, of the author's youth. The poetry one writes in one's teens ("All I know is hate / Life is disgusting and morose / I turn my head towards Heaven's pearly gates") is a perfect example, and one particular example I am acquainted with is the debut novel of John Edward Williams, entitled "Nothing But The Night", around 150 pages in length and, though containing a few interesting passages and memorable sentences, is on the whole rather rushed and ill-paced, attempting to convey something grand while ill-equipped to do so. The second stage of a writer's development, in my opinion and experience, is a result of attempting to overcompensate for the initial stage by writing Profound Complexity. What this entails is a kind of verbose, abstruse form of communication which often reads / sounds clunky and rather ugly, but appears also (due the the vocabulary used, or the novel way - often gimmicky - in which it's expressed, by clever little things like unpredictable rhymes or shock value) to contain something profound, intelligent and so forth. Examples include the music of Mountain Goats and similar bands, which possess a wide vocabulary but employ it in a way that does not produce anything that can be considered beautiful or relatable, in my opinion. Many if not most writers fit this category. The final stage, as I mentioned, is Learned Simplicity, which is in part a reversion to the initial stage but reinforced now with a calmness, a self-awareness, and a detachment that the earlier work did not possess. Writers who reach this final stage have been too worn down by life to settle for gimmicks and cries for attention, they are too embarrassed by their early efforts to allow heightened emotions to dictate the tone and content of their writing, and so their writing at this stage becomes clear, carefully articulated, emotionally subtle and sensitive to the fact that life and human existence is essentially a meaningless kind of joke in which we are all expected to be content as the lonesome punchline. The greatest novelists, lyricists, poets and so on have reached this stage. Their work can be appreciated (if not always understood, or not wholly understood) by most literate people regardless of their cultural or social background, they do not come across as advertisers of their own personal brand / image, and they seem neither overly serious nor overly facetious.

don't spend time thinking about writing - FUCK IT MAN

>>8399793
John Darnielle (of The Mountain Goats) is one of the most accomplished songwriters of our time, and if you think he's flexing with his vocabulary I'll take that as proof positive that you're hardly familiar with their discography.

I've, so far, had two recent periods of my life where I have felt happy. Not complete, of course there is always something that forces me to do something else.

Once were five months living alone in an apartment in a big city doing nothing and writing from time to time. I only had limited 3g so It was mainly 4chan and little porn, I will listen to music from 9am till night. I generally will make some exercise around 8pm with the same cd playing in the background every day.

The second period was living in Italy, in a small town with my brother doing nothing, literary nothing for about 6 months

>>8401005
>>8401005
How come you were able to do nothing for 6 months?

How did you survive financially?

>>8401064
Our parents really appreciate us. And is pretty cheap something like 600 dollars per month for both of us