This is number 113 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
IF I’D KNOWN it would end so soon, I’d have started earlier and done it more often with more people. That was the story of my sex life. It’s incredibly difficult to find potential partners at 75 compared to 25. But I waited, was mostly faithful, and didn’t ask much of my partners.
If that sounds like an odd way to start talking about delayed gratification, I guess every coin has two sides.
The problem as I see it wasn’t in delaying fulfillment of a consuming goal, but of being oblivious to my own needs and those of my partners. I was the one who let work, hobbies, projects, and other people take precedence over the relationship I had at home. And so were my partners.
Back 40 or 45 years ago, I read a book called The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. The title comes from a famous poem by the poet laureate of my youth, Robert Frost, titled ‘The Road Not Taken.’ While the poem actually describes two roads that to all appearances are equal, the narrator eventually chooses one and abandons the other.
The book by Peck, however, describes two very different paths, one of immediate gratification and one that delays fulfilling one’s desires. When I read the book—and don’t ask me to quote anything specific from it because it was a long time ago and I don’t presently have a copy—I realized that this had been drilled into me from a very early age.
“You have to finish your homework before you can go out to play.”
“If you want that so badly, you’ll need to earn the money for it.”
“Dessert comes after you eat your vegetables.”
But nowhere in any of those adages did it teach the value of delayed gratification. Homework was not as important to me as playing with my friends. My father took out loans to buy a car. Why suffer through filling my belly with something I didn’t like and then not having room to enjoy what I did like? As an adult, I can place values on each of these things, but the principle was not what was taught as a child.
In Peck’s book, he attempts to teach that anticipation of the goal and putting in the effort to achieve it enhanced the pleasure derived from it.
Of course, in my youth and my adolescent drive for sex, it meant saving it for marriage. That actually transferred the desire from finding a sex partner to finding a marriage partner.
I’m not going to evaluate the choice, only to say that perhaps I’d have taken the ‘road not taken.’
I have mentioned the Living Next Door to Heaven series in several posts. It is my longest series at ten volumes, and 1,572,854 words. For this post, I decided to focus on the second book in the series, The Agreement. In this book, a group of freshmen in high school band together for safety and protection from themselves.
Everyone worried that as they started to date, they would lose control, as a couple already had to some extent. They create an agreement among them that places specific limits on what they can and can’t do until they reach a certain age. Those limits, while protecting them from actually having sex all at once, prove to be a testing ground for how much they can do without breaching the agreement.
There was a lot of sex in that book—just no penetration. They agreed to delay that gratification until later. In fact, there is no ‘actual sex,’ as my critics said, until book four, Deadly Chemistry, discussed in my previous post.
The delay served to enhance the anticipation and to some degree the enjoyment of the act itself for the characters.
The Agreement and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series is available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.
I’m aware that one-handed readers might get frustrated by not having a particular sex act depicted in a story, a chapter, or even on the current page. It seems the readers themselves read for more immediate gratification rather than a long build-up, which is a feature of most of my stories.
But a lack of sexual penetration is not the only thing that readers become impatient over. What I really want to talk about is more fundamental to writing compelling stories that keep people wanting more.
Some of you will recall a television series that ran from 1978 to 1991 called Dallas. In the spring of 1980, the most popular and most hated character in the show, J.R. Ewing (played by Larry Hagman) was shot. That’s it. That’s how the episode ended. Viewers had to wait until November to find out “Who Shot J.R.?” It was a major advertising campaign and ended in the second-highest-rated television episode of all time!
The cliffhanger ending was a hallmark of the fourteen seasons of Dallas. Even the final season ended with a cliffhanger, never to be resolved.
Mystery writer Raymond Chandler, who passed away in 1959, is still quoted as saying, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Then start the next chapter.
“I was on edge while they were walking back and forth, waiting for the attack and kidnaping... knowing this was the last chapter and fearing an awful cliffhanger.”
“I hate cliffhangers! I’m not reading any more!”
“At least I know how the story ends. For me it ended today!”
“If you think I’m going to wait to find out…”
“Horrible cliffhanger. I might stop reading cause of this. Certainly not going to buy it now. You don't usually do this.”
“AAAKKKK! A Cliff Hanger! I hope it's not more than three days! Just Kidding. I was weaned on monthly S.F. Pulps so used to waiting a month. I'd detour 6 extra blocks walking the mile home from school hoping the next issue was in.”
“Oh wow, what a cliffhanger!”
If I took the time to sort through the 3,500 public comments I’ve received on my stories and the thousand emails I get every few months, I could come up with dozens of other comments decrying the use of cliffhangers. Even my alpha reader, Les, sent me a message that said, “Wow! Big bang-up chapter ending,” in reference to a cliffhanger in my current work in progress.
The truth is cliffhangers are pretty common. Authors try to keep people interested in turning to the next page or reading the next chapter. I hold that the cliffhanger is simply a facet of delayed gratification. Anticipation heightens the enjoyment when the next chapter comes.
What I have seen, however, is a lot of readers who can’t delay their gratification long enough to wait three days for the next chapter. Yes! Three days! That’s the posting schedule I have for most of my stories. A chapter every three days. And I don’t begin posting the story until it is finished, so the chapter loads in three days until the story has ended.
My advice: If you must have immediate gratification and cannot possibly wait three days for a cliffhanger to be resolved, wait three months until the story has finished posting and then gobble it up in a weekend. You’ll only need to wait another three months for the next story.
Or buy the book.