| < | 1 3 4 | > |
-80% of SOL stories take place in a vaguely defined 1980s high school universe. On the other hand, 80% of Literotica stories take place in a vaguely defined WASP business universe.
-So, now that there's been that Reddit thread, are we going to have a bunch of stories about a guy with two dicks?
-for some reason, describing women in swimsuits makes me feel a lot creepier than describing women fucking aliens and all of the other shit I've written about
-Wikipedia sure has a lot of vaguely skeevy articles on porn
-Writing erotica is a lot like academia: you need to make yourself out to be a radical while flattering your audience at the same time, following current trends is your best bet, nobody takes you seriously and your chances of making any money are slim. Or, in other words: Publish or Perish.
-I should probably be working on Saying Stay right now.
The latest chapter of Not Alone is out. It's a short one, but it brings us to a breaking point that's been coming for a long time. My post about conflict in smut might make more sense after the next few chapters.
Next up is Saying Stay Ch. 6, in which the mysterious Ellie finally takes centre stage. I was able to get my last chapter done in under a month, so hopefully this one won't take too long. See you all soon.
I'm working on the next chapter of Not Alone, and wondering what fundamentally makes a great erotic story. There are a lot of people who have written guides about this (Ken Randall is the first one that comes to mind), and it usually comes down to the same things that make a good "normal" story: characters, settings, and plot. But can we equate the needs of erotica and the needs of non-erotic fiction so easily? There are a surprising number of people that will swear that they read smut for the plot and characters, but if this is the case, why bother going to a sex story website when you can read a nice respectable literary novel that is almost certainly better written?
The first thing you learn from any writing instructor is the centrality of conflict (think of the man vs. man, man vs. society, etc. schema you learned in high school). Conflict, whether external or internal, is either the motor of the story or it IS the story, full stop. And there's plenty of conflict in erotic fiction, including most of my work. But smut is fundamentally predicated on a moment of concord, not discord. Unless you're writing non-con, your central characters have to get along well enough to have hot sex every once in a while. And when they have hot sex, I don't really want to be reminded of the larger struggles that the plot is about. For me, conflict is a bit of a turn-off. Moreover, the conflict risks becoming eroticized and fetishized by that juxtaposition. There's a lot of crazy sex in my story Not Alone, but there are also some really toxic relationship dynamics. Am I promoting toxic relationships by linking them with crazy sex?
So how do we write erotica, then? Porn without plot? A regular story that turns into porn without plot at the drop of a hat? There's always the romance, in which the conflict is resolved by hot sex, but that can often be unsatisfying in its own way (and you don't get to the sex until the end! How lame is that?) A lot of authors use the internal conflict between shame and desire to drive sex scenes, and that can be very erotic, but there are only so many times a character can be slowly seduced into losing their innocence.
I'm very wary of any schematic instructions about how to write fiction, especially of the simplistic ideas you get in writer's guides and some creative writing classes. It's certainly possible to write stories, even very good stories, without a strong narrative conflict. Maybe erotica is the written version of the "cinema of attractions", in which narrative is subordinated to sensory pleasure. Or maybe we can develop new storytelling methods centred around concord instead of conflict. If we want to take erotica seriously (and I think we have to), we need to consider the ways in which it demands as a genre a reconsideration of much of our received wisdom and common sense about writing.
My new story is finally finished -- submitted on Christmas Day, as a nice little smutty present for all of you. This started out as an attempt to do an erotic horror story that wasn't just "i fukd a vampire spooky", but of course it ended up being mostly gooey smut. I'm good at coming up with story outlines full of depravity (I have one about a newlywed getting possessed by his abusive father-in-law that will probably never see the light of day), but when I get right down to it I just don't want to put misery in my porn. (Now, my academic writing, on the other hand...)
I think it turned out okay, and I feel as though I'm finally writing the kind of sex scenes that I want to write. You can feel free to disagree, of course.
Next up is the sixth chapter of Not Alone, which ends in a shocking cliffhanger that will not be followed up for another six months. Thrill to it!
So, it's been a long time since I put up a story. I know I'm not the fastest writer on the block (mainly due to the number of non-smut projects I have on my plate), but 3 months and counting is a bit much. The past few months have been consumed with studying for my comprehensive exams for my PhD. That's more or less over with, so I should have more time to direct to writing pretentious jerk-off material (but enough about my academic work...)
Shelleytown is only a few pages from completion, and should be up some time in December (but don't hold me to that). After that we'll be going back to Saying Stay, if you even remember that story. By January I'll be in the semi-retirement phase of grad school, so updates should hopefully be more frequent. I'd like to thank my three fans for their patience.
| < | 1 3 4 | > |