Prose

>>8523084
sorry kiddo, afraid prose is one of those thing you either got or you dont

and considerin your askin this question...

read lotsa shakey and kjv

>>8523084
Who the fuck do you think you are asking if you could ever in a billion years be like Melville?
Do you have any idea of the things he went through? The life he had to deal with? The work and passion he bled day in and day out for?

Get fucked kid, stick you fist in your arse and keep it there away from any pens.

>>8523151
This post is extremely awful. Please do not post again.
>>8523084
Yes OP, you can be as good as Melville if you keep reading and writing. Ignore the submissive middlebrow cuck above.

>>8523173
>stinky fucking shit-fist giving advice

File: prefer not to.png (257KB, 415x476px) Image search: [Google]

257KB, 415x476px

>>8523084
I think it's worth saying that the great poets and prose stylists of the past were raised in a very different context from us post-moderns.Think about the painters of old. They devoted literally unimaginable amounts of time to perfecting their craft, engaged in the study of light, of angle, of colour. Their motivations for doing so were a devotion to the craft that we, by our historic skepticism, are locked out of experiencing: namely, they believed that what they were doing was in some way divine or divinely inspired. Now take modern artists; I am not a luddite or a traditionalist; I am not going to discard the fine art of the 20th century, since very much of it is just as good as the art of the past, in terms of content.

But I think it's at the least very clear that these artists are not nearly as devoted to developing their technique as their predecessors.

The reasons for this are societal. People in post-aristocratic society simply do not have the time or resources to truly devote themselves to a craft. The same applies to poets and prose writers; this is a sad fact of modern life.

You at this moment are thinking of prose stylists who are exceptions, those who both come from non-aristocratic backgrounds and are patron-less. You are thinking of Joyce (though he had a patron), or you are thinking of Nabakov (he does not compare with the older craftsmen, and his background is indeed noble).

Or maybe like O.P. you are thinking of Melville. And now, you are onto something. For Melville alone comes from humble beginnings, is patron-less, does not discover the classics until a late age (like all of us), yet is a towering prose artist, who we might expect had studied the ancients from a young age and learned their lessons in his youth, so perfectly does his prose smack of classical dignity and care.

The secret is this: Melville picked one mentor, and poured so much devotion and ego-less love into learning the lessons of this mentor, that he, alone, of modern artists made up for his historic disadvantage. This mentor, of course, was Shakespeare.

So my advice to you is this: if you desire to be like Melville, then find one poet, not a group, not a movement, but a single great poet, and study them, not coldly, not as a cerebral lemon-squeezer, but intimately and passionately, with time coming to know them as if they were more alive than any living soul you've met. Love them unconditionally; for you, this poet shall have no flaws, no short-comings; they will be everything to you.

Whether you choose Dante, Virgil, Blake, know that what you do is not done out of envy or for the sake of your won gain, but nothing less than an act of worship. These are the greatest minds; they are inhuman in their capabilities.

And maybe someday, someone will find your work, and fall upon it with this same burning devotion, and you in turn will become the mentor and the kindler of some future flame.

>>8523409
upvoted

>>8523084
plenty of big white dick

>>8523431
Don't forget Polynesian dick

>>8523084
What secret are you looking for? It takes practice and dedication. Hone yourself. That's it.

>>8523173
>Yes OP, you can be as good as Melville
He probably can't though.

>>8523409
That's kinda ridiculous, Shakespeare wrote plebby plays that mixed high and low culture for the money and the mass appeal, a lot of the interest in it comes from how he does some things meant to be amusing at the most vulgar level, and then some stuff that obviously will go over the heads of the peasants and is only meant to be understood by really fancy high-class people.

You put a lot of effort into this post, but it's kind of pretentious, bruh, and it seems like you don't really know what you're talking about

Did Cervantes think he was doing a great service to the Catholic Church by writing Don Quixote? No, art is fundamentally play, divorcing it from play and trying to make it something uber-meaningful paradoxically devalues it and places too cripplingly high expectations on it.

If you want to write like any of the great american writers pre 21st century you have to read lit only from the 1970s and before.

Avoid contemporary lit at almost all costs until you've covered all the classics.

>>8523524
This is kinda ridiculous too, a lot of authors read a lot of contemporary lit of their day and made references to it in their works/were influenced by it, no matter what you say, classics are constantly being written, doubts about the effect of media on current attention spans aside. TS Eliot read and reviewed and loved Ulysses, Dostoevsky loved Gogol and Pushkin and referred to them lovingly in his works (they were both older than him and died before he did but alive when he was), etc. Melville was buttbuddies with Hawthorne, Henry James reviewed a lot of contemporary fiction, etc.

In the end, you can't tell what modern literature is good unless you read the most acclaimed stuff/what interests you.

Not only that, but if you don't read enough modern lit, you become removed from the general zeitgeist, a strange hermit like McCarthy, whose works seem to be written in the most artificial, obtuse style possible, lifted straight from Faulkner and definitely stuck in the past, not really concerned with questions of the modern world like nuclear war, mass media, etc. Basically just something insular, reactionary, and retarded.

tl;dr read whatever contemporary fiction you want, don't be a psychopath, most authors read and enjoyed contemporary literature without having read all the classics, and what they read later became classics

>>8523551
If you are:
>not really concerned with questions of the modern world like nuclear war, mass media, etc.
Then your writing is:
>insular, reactionary, and retarded.

What the flying fuck. Do you actually believe this? There is no moral obligation for a writer to engage in these kinds of things. There are plenty of other issues, though of course not as talked about as nuclear war or mass media, that one could write about.

>>8523585
I don't care about moral obligation, I just think McCarthy is hackneyed for being so seemingly purposefully insulated from the concerns of the modern world. I just listed those off the top of my head, it's not like they MUST be included in every work of modern fiction, or else...

It makes his works seem sterile and artificial. Every modern author at least makes mentions of the existence of television once in a while, and then there's McCarthy. I just think it's fundamentally insincere and backwards. There's really no precedent for it. I can't think of any other author as purposely shut off from the world he lives in.

>>8523631
To reiterate, I think the real word for it is pretentious. There it is. It's an artificial literary world that has no relation to anything, only to books. Overly literary and pompously styled. From a guy who loves Ulysses, since at least Ulysses is related to the world, whereas McCarthy seems to care more about books themselves than the world.

File: 1461467719455.jpg (172KB, 1055x1005px) Image search: [Google]

172KB, 1055x1005px

>>8523521
>art is fundamentally play, divorcing it from play and trying to make it something uber-meaningful paradoxically devalues it

>>8523409
>The reasons for this are societal. People in post-aristocratic society simply do not have the time or resources to truly devote themselves to a craft.

I've spent the last five days spending 18 hours on average in bed. I think I have the time if I wanted to spend it

>>8523640
Well, you just listened to it.

File: 1460100198158.jpg (55KB, 525x600px) Image search: [Google]

55KB, 525x600px

>>8523139
People say the same thing about singing. Neither is true.

>>8523551

Yes and styles are a thing which are popular at a certain period in time, if you want to write like henry adams, henry james, faulkner, melville, steinbeck etc you have to read books from their era and get a grasp for their writing styles.

You just won't start writing like an american giant from olde by reading zadie smith and delilio.

>>8523658
But why write like an American giant from old? I understand you're being rational by seemingly answering what the OP is saying, but greatness in style doesn't mean you have to write EXACTLY like Shakespeare, who was clearly a great stylist. There's a difference between the style of Melville and Updike, although their styles are both great (I'm choosing Updike since hopefully the greatness of his style isn't controversial here).

Anyway, anyone who's truly interested in becoming a writer will already read older books from different places and time periods. It's just that there's no reason to prohibit reading new books, which can have a very beneficial impact on your style and general ideas for what to write. If you read too much old literature, you're not hip enough.

>>8523673

I don't have a problem with modern lit for enjoyment but it's dangerous for artists in general at this time in history to be influenced too largely by their contemporaries.

The fact of the matter is the writers of yore had largely better classical education, well versed in latin and greek, philosophy and possibly theology and a rich background and cultures to draw from in europe/rome/greece.

It's not a matter of le born in wrong generation, todays artists seem to have cast aside thousands of years of culture, with the intelligentsia being largely cast out of the picture and gone who's going to dictate to the newer society what to read or study?

Even ezra pound discredited henry james for not being well studied in classics, whether he's right or not there is a difference between those who go the extra mile and those who don't.

>>8523646
But you didn't want to, and the reasons for this are societal

>>8523651
how do i improve at singing? do i just sing?

>>8523811
>Even ezra pound discredited henry james for not being well studied in classics
And yet Ezra Pound was a nothing compared to Henry James. Why does this board suck the dick of a glorified minor poet?

>>8524936
The board at large does not, just his cultish fans. I for one herald based James

>>8524939
Sorry for the assumption.

>>8523151
now this is why I come to /lit/. thanks anon

>>8524936

I just included it to show that as far as 100+ years back education played a part in an authors writings and even giant authors shat on others for it.

It was the whole idea of modern vs classic and how even the idea of a modern education today is so marginalized.

>>8523409
well done anon

>>8523551
>...questions of the modern world...

Against such an obscenity I would like to offer a quote from Borges:

"Sometimes I am courageous and hopeful enough to think that it may be true—that though all men write in time, are involved in circumstances and accidents and failures of time, somehow things of eternal beauty may be achieved."

>>8524936
Henry James sucked. Well to be honest the only story I read of his was some interminable shit about some American whore flirting with Europeans.

Whatever secret meaning or significance it was supposed to have, it was nothing next to branches of a wet, black bough, or the green glass bottle, or the monkeys chattering in the trees or whatever Ezra's done.

>>8524997
>Whatever secret meaning or significance it was supposed to have
lmao, you're still in phase 2 and you think you're ready for James?

>>8524997

James is/was great. What are you talking about m8.

You don't have a right to talk shit on authors you've barely read more then a page or even a book on fuck off.

>>8523084
>Everyone in this thread pretending Melville was some genius

He was as much of a hack as John Green is to us today. People back then thought his writing sucked, and they're right. His prise reads like choppy poetry mixed with Whale Facts and misunderstood attempts at biblical allusions.

>>8525038
Nice try. John Green is incredibly popular, Melville wasn't.

>>8525038
>His prise reads like choppy poetry mixed with Whale Facts and misunderstood attempts at biblical allusions
Try to do that without Internet.

>>8523551
>classics are constantly being written
What are the recent classics?

>>8523409
Great post, especially the beginning.

>>8524923
you can't just sing; you can't just write.

First you have to hone your ear. Then practice pushing your voice; create resonance, and know the narrowing and broadening you need to create it consistently. Change your head voice, and make transitions between your head voice and what normally comes out smoother.

Know the masters, old and new; know the shapes of words and fit them together; know when to smear and when to punctuate.

yeah it's pretty much the same thing.