Please, someone tell me what makes a writer good.

Read Aessop and you'll realize he ended literature over 2000 years ago

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one possible answer: wisdom.

you read schopenhauer: he makes total sense.
you read plato: it could not be otherwise.
you read nietzsche: ofc he's right.
you read pic rel: how else could it be?
you read x: x.

if you know what you are trying to say, and you believe it, the reader will also. certain kinds of writing aren't like painting. it may very well be more like mind control, as weird as that sounds. but better to call it something else. minds are just plastic like that.

same as training to do anything else. you see somebody doing something really well, some of that rubs off on you. you can learn more about cooking from fifteen minutes with a world-class chef than from three weeks with some random dude.

ofc there are literary stylists, but this too is just the product of understanding yourself well enough to be able to say what it is that you are thinking or feeling. because it all comes from Nature or whatever you want to call the experience we live in.

i don't know. just my hot take. the more you know about a thing, the less you have to worry about What Did He Mean By This. just read everything there is to know about a given subject and then say how you feel about it. if you've read everything there to know about subject x, whatever you say will in the end be interesting to anyone else who wants to learn about subject x. it will bore anyone who is not into subject x, but who cares? you're not writing for them anyways.

just write about what you love, anon. that's all that matters. there's no point in writing about anything else except what you love and want to talk about.

>>9855441
How do you become a wise man, girardfag? Is it the by-product of reading a lot? Having a virtuous life?

>>9855495
not him but wisdom comes simply from living. but that's not to say that all people have wisdom. nor is that to say that all those with wisdom are able to articulate it well enough for them to understand.

read better, not more. i know a guy personally who has read something like 14 thousand books and he is fucking retarded. what you choose to read is important, as well as how thoroughly you study the contents within.

sometimes, imitation leads to authenticity. "fake it until you make it" if you will. it really does have a positive effect on you if you are interested in bettering yourself, and not simply pretending (like the people who buy books to show them off or virtue signal). eventually, you will shape-shift into the things you are trying to imitate to create a more unique individual interpretation of it all, be it prose, knowledge, etc.

read the bible (and the hermetica and the summa theologica), and read some theological debate. have some decency, for the most part, and don't be afraid to make exceptions but also don't be afraid not to. only you will know your personal balance between what it requires to be virtuous as well as what it takes to survive for whatever purpose you have given yourself.

Any of you philosophers actually read this guy's question, or did you just need a place to sit down?

Read Randall Jarrell's introductory essay for his collection of short stories. It gives you an idea of what all good stories and writers have.

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>>9855495
wall of girardfaggery inbound.

let's begin by saying that - of course - there are going to be 20m different answers to this question. and *humility* is rarely if ever a bad look. humility is an underrated virtue. there can be no charity, or trust, or honesty, without it. warrants mentioning. i can't give the answer. but you know this already.

the answer has to be love, doesn't it? it has to love. philosophy is literally that: the love of wisdom. how do you love anything? you have to be able to have some measure of love for yourself first. the case of friedrich nietzsche, to name one example, illustrates pretty well how complicated this idea is. nietzsche's whole thing was ressentiment, bad conscience, self-hatred. on the other side of that was his own lightning-bolt symphony, which is going to be interesting af for the next 12 thousand years.

but there's also love as respect for limitations and understanding of same. language, for instance - and time - are pretty fecking complicated. it's why Art is such an interesting thing to think about: art mysteriously resolves paradoxes of consciousness into something transmissible and, i would say, greater-than-one.

i believe there is a thing called Mind and that everyone is inseparably bound up in it. we can talk about 'piety of thought' here. places where philosophy & religion overlap. it's why i like the Tao; among many other things, it teaches respect for limitations, balance, and reciprocity. the kungfu of the soul. self-defense against the self. psychoanalysis also; wisdom as therapy, as *relief* from Truth is a thing worth thinking about.

but the basic answer is love. we are all caught up in this thing together, more like energy fields and black holes than discrete monads, i think. it's an electric world like that. i used to fantasize that things would be great if we were All On The Same Page, or telepathic. well. about that. b/c sometimes you don't want to be on someone else's page. horror & seduction are two faces of the same coin. people have to individualize, people have to nondualize, people have to move on. and on it goes.

it's easier i think to love people who already love themselves, or love something else, to some degree. that much you can build on. you can't go it alone, but you can't be everywhere at once 24/7 either. so *character* is good. and character comes with virtue, for which there is no substitute. cynicism just does not work. it's necessary, sometimes, for a time, to bust out of things, but in the end you have to go back.

now obviously i could talk for days on end about this. and i would sincerely love to. but i don't want to talk your question and run away with it: that would be uncharitable. and i don't want to give the impression of having neatly tied it up in a box: that would be selfish. the *right* thing to do would be to reciprocate in kind. so:

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>>9856223
how *about* dem virtues? how *about* dat art? maybe the deal with writer's block is that it requires us to ask ourselves, in some deep way, what it is that we really believe in?

you know who was underrated in this sense? pic rel. ayn rand. pretty popular book. now i don't share these ethics, but it's worth thinking about. maybe writing is always about philosophy in this way, and maybe as such thinking about writing means thinking about philosophy. because sure as shit imho if you try to finish with seduction, or irony, or whatever, you will feel unsatisfied. in hollywood this leads to the phenomenon known as *cheesiness.* sometimes people want cheese, sometimes they don't.

but that's the *thing* with the monomyth - and i skew heavy on the monomyth for this reason. if you're into cool literary modernist fiction, that's fine. personally i don't read that tho. i like bond films and westerns and batman. because the monomyth is a fucking galaxy-class ideological thought-smelter. *you have to end the story on a note that you believe in, or else you will never be able to complete it.* or, maybe you will, but you will be unsatisfied.

and yes, ofc, there are exceptions to this. always. but let's not get crazy. the point here is *thought,* which includes both reading, and writing, and conversation, and reflection, and
>also &

so that's basically my answer. now, how much love is there in rand? i mean there's some kind of romance going on. let's not talk about Sword of Discipline and Punish. avellone & planescape torment is also no joke. schopenhauer is a crusty old battleaxe but it's hard to argue with him, he's a fucking genius and he knows it. personally? i think the boy RG has a lot going on here: desires overcome & transmitted to the human sciences. as readers go, you can't ask for a better audience than him. but, i mean, *if you prefer* you could write for rand also. her brand of love is tough love indeed but she also means well. why? *because she has to live in the same world as you do.* and, given that that is the case, she wants it to be full of people she can get along with, maybe so that she can get along with herself, too...

so love is a thing, and honesty is a thing, and humility is a thing, and intelligence is a thing, and things are things, and maybe these converge on something we might call Truth: and while *we* are triangulating and echolocating amongst ourselves, like a fucking cirque du soleil act, *the person we are talking to is also doing the same thing.* try to keep your brain from leaking out of your skull while you contemplate all of this. shit is ridiculous.

but it cannot be any other way. you have to presume that the other knows, or might know, something you do; and you have to consider the *very* strong possibility also that *you might be utterly gloriously wrong about everything you think or know* - and so it's a good idea to listen to the other guy too. because we are all in this thing together in the end.

>>9855424
Wolfs eating grapes and shit, what an idiot

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>>9856227
personally i think it's Axial Age 2.0 or something near to it & mcluhan called that shot like Babe Ruth.

Mcluhan: One Touch of Nature
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x6725NW8vw

what a guy. what a fucking awesome live-wire prophet he was. explains a great deal, imho.

or deleuze: what *is* a book, anyways?

>a book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive. one side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity.

>what is the body without organs of a book? there are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered, their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on a "plane of consistency" assuring their selection. here, as elsewhere, the units of measure are what is essential: quantify writing. there is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. therefore a book also has no object. as an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. we will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. we will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge.

things to think about. exchange of information, you know. exchanges of energy. one vast incredible univocity. not so much human beings having a virtual/spiritual experience, but virtual/spiritual beings having a human one. it *is* the age of feels > reals: but maybe we can act accordingly also. more love, more wisdom, less knowledge, less power. more beauty, more order, less chaos, less madness. would be nice to think so anyways.

or maybe i'm just crazy & not properly oedipalized. entirely possible. and i am not a philosopher, and you should not take my opinions seriously. i am a chicken mcnugget.

that's my hot take.

>>9856090
>any of you philosophers actually read this guy's question, or did you just need a place to sit down?
>*sweats*
>*pulls collar*
>*crickets*
>&c

puns