I've recently added Gingerbread which is a story I wrote a couple years ago as part of a writing challenge/event held on MCForum.net, and for the purposes of eventually being added to The Erotic Mind Control Story .
The challenge was for someone to give you a list of elements to be weaved into a story. My elements added up to Hansel and Gretel with incest.
Okay, I could do that!
By then I'd already written a story about very close twin sisters who may or may not have resembled the Olsen Twins, so I was hardly opposed to incest fantasies, provided they were well-written.
Most incest stories are really, really bad, and I don't mean because they're morally questionable. I'm of the mind that anything goes in a story. Wank to whatever story you want, I say, but careful on what you make part of your reality.
No, most incest stories are particularly bad because the characters tend to have all the flavor of cardboard, and no individuality. It seems like most of these stories fail on the level of characterization.
Part of the naughtiness of the incest taboo is that the people, who have one sort of intimacy by birth, cross over into another type of intimacy. And yet that's so rarely communicated. Give these people some personalities and some quirks, please!
I have a theory on this, and it holds with other erotic writings. Anything in your personal spank bank needs extra care of you share it. People have personal fantasies, and over time they develop a shorthand when "using" that material. If there is a person who arouses them, or even a scenario, they don't have to particularly recall lot of details to get off. There's a shorthand there that needs to be translates into longhand, and I'm aware that this is a weird sentence to include in a paragraph on masturbation.
The problem is that sometimes when they share that fantasy they then leave out the stuff that the rest of us need to know. I don't really know the woman at the dog park that drives you bonkers at the dog park -- please help me to know her. I know she's vivid in your mind, but help me out!
I'm not going to presume that all incest writers are casting their own families in these stories. As an only child, I know that I certainly don't/can't, so I can't assume that everybody has a real genetic counterpart to the character of Aunt Agnes, you know? However, the theory above combined with possibly knowing the real inspirations for the characters a little too well, might explain the utter blandness of what should be a slam dunk for making most people feel something, even if that something is revulsion.
When I was assigned the elements that became Gingerbread, I was eager to attempt it. By that time I'd also written a story based on Little Red Ridinghood, and found it juicy and thoroughly delightful to play around with a story that everybody knows. I fully intend to rework more of them in the future.
One of the great things about fairytales is that they're part of our shared memories. I can write a story based on a blockbuster movie, but a fair part of my audience might have missed the source material. Few people haven't heard the basics of the most common fairytales; if you weren't read Cinderella as a child, then you saw the Disney movie, or one of the countless retellings or variations. We start out from a common place. In fact, I could probably tell it in the shorthand that I just claimed plagues incest stories. Huh. :)
I feel that I really "went for it" with Gingerbread. Incest is going to piss off some people, even if the characters are based on a fairytale, even if everybody is an adult, and even if there is a huge difference between fantasy and reality. So, if I was going to upset people anyhow, I was going to do my best to make you feel these people were siblings, with all the natural intimacy that comes with that, and then I was going to have them do the things that brothers and sisters are told they should never do, and I was going to make it all vivid, mean, and tragic for good measure.
Needless to say, comments of all varieties are always welcome!