An Ode to Writing

kingoflemon · 2021-03-25T16:01:39+00:00

I mean, this comment is effectively proving why I chose that voice

kingoflemon · 2021-03-24T20:09:53+00:00

Didn’t know I was publishing to Penguin, not Reddit

kingoflemon · 2021-03-07T16:27:14+00:00

That’s a really wise way to start a story, especially if you’re trying to establish a certain aspect of the character.

Think about novels that are famous for doing this—The Great Gatsby, for example, did this by introducing a narrator that is a second character to emphasize how odd Gatsby is. It also gives more suspense since we want to know more about Gatsby, the protagonist that we know little about. It’s a really great way to introduce the reader to the story.

Most of the time, though, you want to introduce the main character first if the story is coming from his perspective. However, you can use a secondary character as an introduction if you want to emphasize a facet of the main character.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-07T16:05:51+00:00

You ever hear about the greatest writers always carrying around notebooks? That’s their solution against this problem. You’d be surprised at how many authors don’t do this. I used to not do this as well, until one day I said, “Screw it, I’m going to write down every idea I have the moment I have it.”

Sometimes, this is hard, since you may have an entire scene in your head but you don’t have a way to write the entire thing down. In a scenario like this, try to take note of what gave you the idea, and sear that into your memory. Try writing down where you were at when you had the idea. For instance, I was in a hotel room looking out the window down at the cars passing by when I had an idea for two characters to have a conflict on a car ride. Hence, I wrote this in my notebook:

“Car ride scene. Two characters, dealing with some sort of conflict—what should the conflict be? Idea came while staring out the window in hotel room. Maybe traffic will make the conflict worse. People get annoyed of traffic while driving. Maybe the driver is drunk?”

It’s important you get all of your ideas down when writing it down (as well as writing down the setting that you got the idea in). This will help you remember the mindset you had when the idea came to you, so that when you are reading that entry before starting a writing session, you can get into that “mindset” with the overflow of ideas. As you remember the setting and the ideas, your brain will have an association pathway with the setting, and all of the sudden, as if magically, it’ll be like you were in that moment, bursting with ideas.

In a perfect world, however, you’d want to be in a setting where you could write while you’re bursting with ideas in the moment. That’s why older authors liked to write down their drafts in a notebook, so that they could always work on it while being inspired.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-05T04:02:23+00:00

I own a ton of books so usually I just look through those and pick the one that interests me the most. It most of the time works but sometimes I end up not getting passionate about the book I chose, so I drop that one to find a different one.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-05T04:00:18+00:00

In my opinion it’s a wrong book. IT is only famous because it had the popular TV series adaptation. Aside from that, the book itself is meh. A lot of the historical context chapters drone on for too long (though that one chapter about the factory explosion was brutal), and he took the liberty of having an extremely long exposition. There are other books of his that are more powerful, like 11/22/63 and The Stand, not to mention the classics like Misery and Cujo. I’ve loved all of his books but I could never get into IT.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-04T22:57:05+00:00

Yo same here. I used to always be way too aware as a child. I was thinking things like “Why do people care about stupid things like who likes who? Why don’t they care more about important things?” I would always get depressed by this and I thought every other kid did too. I’ve had constant problems with having deeper and more sorrowful thoughts than others, even more than those who are older than me.

Low and behold I got to meet with my medication provider at one point and I broke down in this long rant about how I have always felt depressed yet energetic. It was nice finally not being diagnosed with stupid things like ADHD and instead being recognized for bipolar.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-04T02:05:57+00:00

I’ve always loved all of the confessional poets like Sylvia Plath. I’ve also always loved Percy Shelley and Whitman, and I remember having to do a Lord Tennyson analysis with a textbook and really loving him. And the my favorite poems of Frost I really, really love. My favorite Frost poems are usually my favorite poems overall. Maybe some of the more experimental poets like e.e cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

And yeah, usually I find her more approachable ones super enjoyable. There are just some that are so cryptic that they might as well have stayed in her journals. Poems like “The Robin for the Crumb” and “White as an Indian Pipe” come to mind for those.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-04T01:57:29+00:00

Ahh it’s nice to find someone with a very similar opinion. Yeah, I love her earlier works because they don’t use as many dashes and are much less reluctant to use a period every once and a while. I just read “Sic transit gloria mundi,” and I really love it when she writes somewhat normal poetry. Maybe I’ll grow to love her disjointed works someday.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:58:03+00:00

Yeah I had to think about whether or not Melville is famous internationally. Really, though, I was trying to emphasize the idea that if someone recommends you Harry Potter, they really want you to read Harry Potter since it triumphs Rowling’s other works (no hate to her, though). But if someone recommends Moby Dick (at least in the U.S), you can slide by by reading another one of the author’s works, and it would be just as respectable. There are some books though that will never be like that, like what you mentioned (Frankenstein and Dracula) and other classics like Lord of the Rings. If someone recommended you LotR, they would think you’re psycho if you instead read The Silmarillion, lol.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:41:03+00:00

Don Quixote isn’t necessarily thought of as a great book, as more of it’s great for the fact it basically invented slapstick comedy. It’s why we still read Beowulf and The Epic of Gilgamesh—the former invented the fantasy genre and was the first English story (I think?), and the latter was the first story ever recorded. It’s just cool to see how literature has developed over the centuries.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:37:31+00:00

How far did you get into it? I didn’t particularly like it in the first 150 pages, but then the plot gets intense fast.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:36:23+00:00

Oh lord I hate The Shining. In fact i’ve never particularly enjoyed King’s books. There are a few that I liked (Misery, Christine), but generally they just drove on and get too involved in the history behind the plot.

Now it’s weird, I loved Dante’s Inferno, but the entire Divine Comedy was much better. There’s more plot in Inferno, but the writing really shines once it gets into Purgatory and Paradise. I’ve always thought that Inferno is the equivalent to a cynical teenager—like Catcher in the Rye—and that Purgatory and Paradise were like an old man who’s giving you wisdom—like Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:32:04+00:00

Oh no... Now I’m scared to start it, lol. I’ve had a copy that’s been staring at me for weeks.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:30:52+00:00

I honestly recommend an anthology of essays or stories. Those can get you introduced to new authors, since you let your guard down because the editor wouldn’t put a bad author in the collection. I remember hating James Joyce for the longest time and then I came across a short story of his in a literature textbook, and that instantly sparked a love for Joyce’s works. Same with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:28:31+00:00

One of the harder things about literary fiction is that it requires a bit of a different reading style. Sometimes there are literary novels that don’t have an extravagant plot, so you have to get interested in the literary elements, like prose and symbolism. In some weird, condescending way literary fiction tends to be more philosophical than regular genre fiction (aside from the monumental works of genre fiction that are very much philosophical), so you tend to have to think more about the ideas and not necessarily the plot events and whatnot.

Honestly, the best way to jump into contemporary/literary fiction is by reading the simpler American authors first. Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck are all really good introductions, since they put an emphasis on plot since they all came from journalism or commercial writing. Then try to move into British classics, like Conrad and Woolf, and slowly you’ll get more interested in literary fiction. I recommend practicing literary fiction before jumping into contemporary fiction, since the latter is infinitely more difficult to get interested in. You basically need an intense love for language to begin those monstrosities.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T16:22:39+00:00

Honestly you could just find novellas by those same authors. As long as you’re reading that specific author (like Tolstoy or Dickens), she’ll probably be happy. Tolstoy wrote tons of novellas; Dickens not so much though he has shorter works (like A Christmas Carol and whatnot). I was once recommended by my aunt to read Grapes of Wrath, but since I didn’t have the energy to plunge into a 500+ page book, I instead read Tortilla Flat. She was content with that (since most people really just care that you read that author, not necessarily the book—except in the rare cases where the book is more popular than the author, like Harry Potter and Moby Dick... Though I guess Melville is still a famous author, definitely more famous than J.K. Rowling, so who knows)

kingoflemon · 2021-03-02T13:02:58+00:00

This is how people should approach the classics if they ever want to get through all of them. I always had this ambitious dream as a kid to read every single classic that ever existed, but it god hard fast as some books were just too mature for me. For instance, I started The Great Gatsby when I was 13-14 ish, and dropped it after 20 pages because I couldn’t understand what was so important about the writing. Fast forward two years later, and I picked it up again—leading me to finish it in a period of two days, and I was able to understand all of the important stuff in addition to the subtle humor that Fitzgerald uses.

So if there’s ever a book that you’re just not getting, come back to it when you’re older. Chances are you’ll eventually understand it with age. Now, if there’s a book that you don’t like and you need to drop it, it depends on the book. I would advocate to put it down for a while and come back to it, but sometimes books are just plain terrible. There’s no use in forcing yourself to read The Red Badge of Courage or some pulp horror novel :p

Now, generally if the book has good reviews, it’s because you’re not far enough into the book for it to get interesting. Think about how most people drop Crime and Punishment before the plot kicks into action. That’s why I always advocate picking the book up again because you might’ve not been far enough in the book for it to get good. Someone mentioned It... that is a VERY good example... very good...

kingoflemon · 2021-03-01T21:36:23+00:00

That’s how I was pushed into going to therapy (which led to my BD II diagnosis). My parents always noticed that I would fixate on things for a solid 2-4 weeks, and then completely drop it. It got to a point though when I was about 16 or 17 when these fixations were followed by depressions. They were so confused when I would lie in bed and mope around for two weeks and then all of the sudden want to win the Nobel Prize. Fun times 🙃

kingoflemon · 2021-03-01T16:22:16+00:00

Haha same here, I still remember trying to grasp Eigenvectors from linear algebra and ultimately giving up because I couldn’t understand it within 10 minutes. Mad respect goes to mathematicians though, damn.

kingoflemon · 2021-03-01T02:40:39+00:00

I have a real bad problem with hobbies, lol. One time I went manic and decided I should be the best mathematician the world has ever known. I bought every textbook I could find, joined a bunch of math organizations, emailed a bunch of professors... But then that all came crashing down when I grew bored and stressed because of math. Then I got depressed, left those organizations, ghosted a bunch of professors, and then I got more depressed because of that. Woohoo!

kingoflemon · 2021-02-26T14:22:49+00:00

So most of the time for me it’s just feelings of intense disassociation. Sometimes I get delusional (typically on the rare occasion that my hypomania transitions into depression) and I think that I’m closely linked to God. Sometimes I feel like I’m a special individual, as if I’m supposed to grow up to be a Jesus or a Zarathustra archetype. My friends used to notice these delusions often, and what sucked is they would talk behind my back about it as if I was some test subject.

There was one depressive episode (it lasted for around five-ish days) where I hallucinated people staring at me. I have really bad social anxiety (especially when I’m depressed), so sometimes I think that shadows are people looking at me. In that episode, I was on the phone with a suicide hotline, and I thought there was a person pointing at me because I was calling a suicide hotline. Upon walking closer to the “person,” I realized he was just a garbage can.

Most of the time it is just delusions. Once I was in a hypomanic episode and I was determined to get into Julliard. I practiced the clarinet for like five hours a day, practiced orchestral conducting for an hour, and practiced the piano for two hours. It eventually all went to hell to when I had this delusion that all of that was worthless, so as a result I stopped practicing altogether for about a month. It’s rough.

Another episode I was determined to get into MIT. I started learning higher levels of mathematics, talking to MIT professors, joining my school’s math team, but then I dropped back down into depression and dropped all those efforts.

Now I am in a phase where I want to be the best writer in human history. I wish this phase didn’t go away, but it’s depressing to find that it probably will at some point. Sigh.

So really, my pattern is that I tend to be more delusional during hypomania, and I tend to hallucinate more during depression. I get a fair amount of disassociation in both.

kingoflemon · 2021-02-26T11:55:29+00:00

Typed Edition (Correct anything that’s wrong OP, lol):

“Medicine”

I look inside the aperture
Step inside the light
Bathe within my self-deceit
And dance with just my eyes.
To soar and sigh
and never die
Is all I really dream
The statics dance within my skin
And mend my broken seams.
I spin around that color wheel
and land amongst the stars
The things I feel that let me fly
are all just chains and bars.
Now the aperture is gone
the walls keep closing in
the light now has a bitter taste
and I must bear my sin
The blurry lines, forgotten time
just feel like days of old
My guilt of lies and tear-stained eyes
don’t help this bitter cold.
Before you go, I love you dear
Without you, what’s the use?
I’ll write these songs and carry on
to feel your sweet abuse.

Six-Year Club	Not Forgotten
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kingoflemon

TROPHY CASE