Can one truly become a great writer without a wide array

Yes, see my work.

>>9220664
Link

>>9220664
post excerpt

>>9220659

Of course you can. However you should be widely read, be thoughtful and interested in people, and have imagination.

>>9220659

Sure, but it's less likely
Also, it turns out apparently you can have a wide array of experience and still not be a great writer

>>9220659
4chan has thought me way more about humans than school or irl human friendships.

>>9220671
>>9220673
This is something I've been working on:

He ate lunch alone, on benches far from the cafeteria, listening to music—his sort of refuge that was like a tunneling in his desolation toward a greater desolation, further from others and himself, closer to the shared source of everything—with portable CD players and earphones, feeling sorry for himself, or vaguely but deeply humbled, though mostly just silent and doomed. Sometimes, thinking of how among fifteen hundred classmates only two others, that he'd noticed, were as socially inept as he—a male in his grade, an obese male one grade lower—Mott would feel a blandly otherworldly excitement, like he must be in some bizarre and extended dream, or lost in the offscreen world of some fictional movie set in an adjacent county.

>>9220659
Your issue is you have it the wrong way around, you have a wide array of experiences only from being able to create them imaginatively.

The difference between a boring every day interaction and a funny or insightful story is how you tell

>>9220696
>only two others, that he'd noticed, were as socially inept as he
or three, if you counted God.

>>9220696
>Sometimes, thinking of how among fifteen hundred classmates only two others, that he'd noticed, were as socially inept as he—a male in his grade, an obese male one grade lower—Mott would feel a blandly otherworldly excitement, like he must be in some bizarre and extended dream, or lost in the offscreen world of some fictional movie set in an adjacent county.

Wow, I know this feel. Like, it is statistically shocking that I ended up being in the bottom 0.1% of social ability at my school

>>9220704
Holy...I want more

>>9220696
generic - whiny

>>9220659

yo i was actually offended when someone suggested i attend writing workshops when i said i wanted to write like bro my 3am shitposts are the teat that gotham writers workshops have to suck on for material for the next 10 classes

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>>9220671
>>9220673

>>9220696
isn't me

>>9221300
I liked the other one more. Yours isn't bad and I understand what you're going for, but, personally, the mark of good writing for me is a clear communication of direct experience.

>>9221307
>the mark of good writing for me is a clear communication of direct experience.
How does one come to have such shit opinions?

>>9221348
By being unpretentious.

>>9222409
why don't you just read autobios?

if you're not in it for the language and not in it for the irony then why even bother reading literature?

>>9222423
I think you misunderstand me. I think prose (not so much irony) is important, but I think a novel succeeds on it's ability to capture scene and character in a language that's relatable to a reader. To do that, it has to be based on accurately captured experience, sensation that is direct and inutive. Take a book like Ulysess, when Joyce talks about "the sea, the snot green sea, the scortumtightening sea" that visual image is powerful because it triggers certain memories I've had of sensations that line up his own description. A fantastic author to me is someone who as in inutivie sense of the connections between image and experience and can bring out these links and impressions with only words.

Of course, this is only subjective anon. And I wouldn't mind reading an auto-biography, if it wasn't a genre written by hacks and ghosts.

Yeah. Someone post that Kafka quote.

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>>9220659
>wide array of experience
What is this meme?

All the great authors had DEEP experience not wide. Fucking post-modern educations ruining everything.

>Virginia Woolfe
>Aldous Huxley
>Charles Dickens
>Mark Twain

Literally ALL of them just wrote about their lives.

>>9222503
which one?

>>9222492
yeah, we misunderstand one another

I still think you're missing several layers of irony inherent in that Joyce passage. It's not just a one to one relationship, personal experience to language, especially when read against the "white breast of dim sea" line

>>9222549
What a rarely polite argument to have on /lit/. I'm glad really, that we understand we are on the same page.

On the topic of irony, I think it depends on the style. For Joyce, it is certainly relevant and it allows for a breaking away from a purely superficial reading that you are right to say I perhaps value too much. But today, I think we have become over-saturated with irony to the point that it is almost entirely superficial, because nothing remains at the surface to talk about. There's a sad gap between the ironic knowledge of a writer like Kierkegaard to the infantile excuses certain more modern authors make in any interpretation of their work.

>>9220659

The West was almost literally build by monks.

Can this "social butterflies are always doing it better" fad just fucking die already?

>>9222662
It's not about being socially capable, it's about going outside and seeing human interaction.

Sure man, Marcel Proust was a NEET who never left his bedroom

>>9220659
Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson managed it.

>>9220659
Jorge Luis Borges. Spent 90% of his life inside a library.