I've written this before

[NotWise]

I wrote the first sex scene in my current story, got about half way through, and stopped. I read back through it and got the strong sense that I'd written very similar scenes recently.

Consensual, one-on-one heterosexual sex, without handicaps, kinks or bondage doesn't seem to offer a lot of variety. I won't say I'm tapped out, but I need to rethink the scene.

Is it just me? Is it important, or do the readers actually like to read the same sex again?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Is it just me? Is it important, or do the readers actually like to read the same sex again?

I suspect I do something similar. I suspect also that's why people read me curled up in comfortable places, because they know what they're going to get, and are only wondering how they'll get it, this time.

It's not something I worry about - my story content ranges over a sufficiently different set of topics that I'm not formulaic, except for the bits where I am. I'll graciously accept the notion that I have a recognisable style (if kind people say that), because that's what this might be about, really .

 

[yukonnights]

I wrote the first sex scene in my current story, got about half way through, and stopped. I read back through it and got the strong sense that I'd written very similar scenes recently.

Consensual, one-on-one heterosexual sex, without handicaps, kinks or bondage doesn't seem to offer a lot of variety. I won't say I'm tapped out, but I need to rethink the scene.

Is it just me? Is it important, or do the readers actually like to read the same sex again?

It seems to me that if it bothers you, that's as important as if a reader might notice it. At the end of the day, there's only so many ways to skin a cat though. This is just out of the blue, so take it or leave it; but my first thought in reading your lament was; Is there enough tension in the scene?

 

[Hypoxia]

I try to avoid my gimmicks. Sometimes I remember. I keep a list of tropes I've used and over-used. All the excuses for group-fucks, mind-fucks, incest, and funny devices. All those burritos, hash pipes, campsites, guilty or absent parents, willing fuckers, and tennis-toned MILFs and GILFs. But how could I live without them?

 

[KeithD]

The truth, I think, is that probably most readers do want to read what they liked before. That's probably the biggest reason they chose to pick up another work by an author they liked before--their looking at least for a comfortable context they got from previous works. And it's just as likely that authors write and rewrite within some sort of framework--the same setting, the same character traits, the same themes, and/or the same "moral lessons." They'll probably continue to do so until/unless they change. Of course significant changes in their lives can make changes in what they write. The same could be said for readers.

 

[NotWise]

This is just out of the blue, so take it or leave it; but my first thought in reading your lament was; Is there enough tension in the scene?

As out-of-the-blue ideas go, that was a pretty good one for this specific scene. It was a first time sex in the relationship and there should have been more tension than I wrote into it. In a second pass, I'll probably play up the tension and play down the physical description.

More generally, I also think that KeithD is right. Repetition may not be such a problem because readers are comfortable with the familiar.

 

[Blind_Justice]

There simply are only a finite amount of options when it comes to the mechanics of actual sex. Probe. Orifice. Finger, tongue, foreign object into whichever desired hole. There's a hard limit on what any given numbers of bodies can plug into each other.

That said, for me as reader and writer both, the circumstances, characters involved and location are much more important than three paragraphs of "...and now he fucked her pussy. Then he fucked her harder. She really liked it. Still he fucked her", only differing in their relative position to each other and maybe the noises they make. How and why they got there, in elaborate, maybe even voyeuristic detail. Now we're talking.

It's been ages since I've read a really good one-take stroker, much longer since I had one which actually got me off.

 

[yukonnights]

As out-of-the-blue ideas go, that was a pretty good one for this specific scene. It was a first time sex in the relationship and there should have been more tension than I wrote into it. In a second pass, I'll probably play up the tension and play down the physical description.

More generally, I also think that KeithD is right. Repetition may not be such a problem because readers are comfortable with the familiar.

yeah, I liked what Keith said and it makes a lot of sense. For me though, it being more of a hobby and sort of a semi therapeutic exploration into my own imagination, I try to find new things to try. Currently I'm a little over 17K words into a lesbian love story...and for those who may not know; I'm not a lesbian Even at that though, there are certain phrases and emotions I explore over and over...sometimes I worry that I may get too caught up in the spiritual life of a butterfly and have to clean things up a bit

I've read some authors works that are very much the same basic story with different settings and characters...but the same end result happens. And they are effective and well written and very well received.

PS: I'm glad my input helped...and thanks for telling me.

 

[yukonnights]

There simply are only a finite amount of options when it comes to the mechanics of actual sex. Probe. Orifice. Finger, tongue, foreign object into whichever desired hole. There's a hard limit on what any given numbers of bodies can plug into each other.

That said, for me as reader and writer both, the circumstances, characters involved and location are much more important than three paragraphs of "...and now he fucked her pussy. Then he fucked her harder. She really liked it. Still he fucked her", only differing in their relative position to each other and maybe the noises they make. How and why they got there, in elaborate, maybe even voyeuristic detail. Now we're talking.

It's been ages since I've read a really good one-take stroker, much longer since I had one which actually got me off.

But, there are an almost infinite number of ways to describe the emotions...the fears...the raw lust...the love...the sadness of loss...the joy...etc. I'm usually a bit on the lean side in the descriptions of the physical and maybe too long on exploring the emotions. It's just what interests me more.

 

[ElectricBlue]

...there are certain phrases and emotions I explore over and over...sometimes I worry that I may get too caught up in the spiritual life of a butterfly and have to clean things up a no.

I didn't think butterflies were such messy creatures .

 

[Bramblethorn]

There simply are only a finite amount of options when it comes to the mechanics of actual sex. Probe. Orifice. Finger, tongue, foreign object into whichever desired hole. There's a hard limit on what any given numbers of bodies can plug into each other.

That said, for me as reader and writer both, the circumstances, characters involved and location are much more important than three paragraphs of "...and now he fucked her pussy. Then he fucked her harder. She really liked it. Still he fucked her", only differing in their relative position to each other and maybe the noises they make. How and why they got there, in elaborate, maybe even voyeuristic detail. Now we're talking.

Yep, all this. When I read a story, I tend to remember who was having sex, and why, and how they feel about it before and after. I generally don't remember the physical choreography, unless it is somehow tied in with those other things.

 

[yukonnights]

I didn't think butterflies were such messy creatures .

Oh no, the butterflies are wonderful and adorable little creatures...and with deeper insight than many humans I've known. Sure, they poo just like every living thing, but it is so tiny as to seem insignificant. It's my own mess of words spread all over the pristine landscape that I must scrub away...but heaven forbid, never the butterflies!

 

[Kantarii]

I’ve wondered about this at times. Within the same storyline, I try to avoid using the same sexual position with the characters. I suppose if I had to do it, the first time I used a certain position, I would detail it out in extensive detail. The second time, I would use detail. Heaven forbid it need to be used a third time in a storyline. At that point, it would reflect the monotony of vanilla marital sex life of a couple that desperately need some spice in the bedroom.

Now let’s say there are variable to manipulate. You could change up to location and pillow talk. Those variables aren’t as constant as say doggie style. Doggie style with a mature wife in the bedroom would read differently than doggie style with a college girl at a beach party under moonlight. It’s still doggie style, right? Just a thoughtKant

 

[Hypoxia]

I didn't think butterflies were such messy creatures .

They are vicious little brutes. Males are aggressive; females prostitute themselves for nectar; and just look at those eyes!

But I digress. Except when pandering to pervos, I try to write each story with different twists and turns. My current dry spell may be because new twists are not occurring to me and I'm bored with the old twists. I need re-twisting.

 

[TriadWriter]

I wrote the first sex scene in my current story, got about half way through, and stopped. I read back through it and got the strong sense that I'd written very similar scenes recently.

Consensual, one-on-one heterosexual sex, without handicaps, kinks or bondage doesn't seem to offer a lot of variety. I won't say I'm tapped out, but I need to rethink the scene.

Is it just me? Is it important, or do the readers actually like to read the same sex again?

I had a commenter complain about this once, saying that all my sex scenes were the same, etc. etc.

There's only so much you can do with regular sex between two people.

I don't think it is failure on the writer's part to have trouble with this.
It's like being given noodles, tomato sauce, basil, garlic, and hamburger and being told to make a thousand different dishes with only those ingredients, only to have the issuer complain that they all taste the same.
Well, of course they all taste the same, because they all use the same ingredients.

That's how it is on Literotica. You have readers interested in reading sex stories, but not all of them care for extra ingredients (fetishes, etc.), so you have to stick to certain ones to fit the widest possible reader base, or unfortunately limit your reads.
Now, while reads aren't everything, I think we can all agree that a writer's ultimate goal is to tell a story to as many people as possible, hence the issue.

However, being a true writer, my advice is going to ultimately be write what you want to write, with an additional thought: Whether it's food, or sex stories, the way you fix this problem is the same: Spice it up, and in a way that pleases you.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't think it's a surprising thing or a bad thing. It makes sense, in a way, not just because the ways to describe the mechanics of sex are limited but because it's natural that an author would want to keep coming back to issues that interest him or her.

I find there are certain themes I keep wanting to explore in my stories, but that each time I want to explore them in a slightly different way, or in a way I find more satisfying than the last. There's a lot of overlap in subject matter and treatment in stories, but I find that to be true of the stories of other authors I write as well. I see nothing wrong with it.

I don't think it bothers readers because most readers of erotica have defined erotic tastes they like to satisfy in familiar ways, again and again.

 

[Hypoxia]

There's more than missionary -- and as mentioned, missionary with Missy ain't the same as missionary with Mom.

There's more. Kama Sutra lists 245 positions for two humans of opposite plumbing and no special fetishes. Expand those with groups, queerness, and kinks, and the count goes rather higher. We have zero reason (except laziness) to rewrite the same mechanical stuff, even omitting fantasy creatures and unlikely anatomies.

Give missionaries some talking Bonobos and see what occurs. Write it different.

 

[gunhilltrain]

More generally, I also think that KeithD is right. Repetition may not be such a problem because readers are comfortable with the familiar.

It's not always easy, but you can't worry too much abut what the readers want. I've put out a few stories I thought wouldn't be very popular and they met expectations - they weren't popular! But I liked them enough to post them anyway.

 

[FEELINGLUCKYPUNK]

I suspect most LIT authors know squat about sex. In my youth I fucked gals all over the world, 100% opted for missionary. The Special Olympics fare comes with real intimacy.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I wrote the first sex scene in my current story, got about half way through, and stopped. I read back through it and got the strong sense that I'd written very similar scenes recently.

Consensual, one-on-one heterosexual sex, without handicaps, kinks or bondage doesn't seem to offer a lot of variety. I won't say I'm tapped out, but I need to rethink the scene.

Is it just me? Is it important, or do the readers actually like to read the same sex again?

I think what you're really asking is how to motivate yourself; if you are motivated then (probably!) your readers will also be interested in what you are writing.

When I looked at your stories I was wondering, "Where is this taking place?" in the sense of geographic specificity. Most fiction does have a setting, whether in a real place, a fictionalized version of a real one or some place entirely of the author's imagination. Who you're character are and what they're doing very much depends on where they are.

I just happened to find this article about the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby which is based on a real location in New York.

https://www.litkicks.com/InGatsbysTracks

 

[Hypoxia]

...I was wondering, "Where is this taking place?" in the sense of geographic specificity. Most fiction does have a setting, whether in a real place, a fictionalized version of a real one or some place entirely of the author's imagination. Who you're character are and what they're doing very much depends on where they are.

Shall we careen along this tangent? Most of my tales take place in specific locales, mostly real, often identified. I use setting as a character. Rather than writing the same sex scene too often, I describe the same places in many tales, and I try not to repeat myself TOO often. That was tricky in a series where each episode has a different narrator, all seeing and describing the same settings and players afresh.

Geometry is not destiny. Missionary fucks on the beach at Waikiki and in a Wichita hospital are not the same.

 

[NotWise]

When I looked at your stories I was wondering, "Where is this taking place?" in the sense of geographic specificity. Most fiction does have a setting, whether in a real place, a fictionalized version of a real one or some place entirely of the author's imagination. Who you're character are and what they're doing very much depends on where they are.

Yukonnights actually hit my problem some time back. I was placing too much stress on the physical acts, and not giving enough attention to the tension and emotions at play.

It seems unrelated to repetitive sex scenes, but I don't think that actual locations do that much to build my characters. A few of my stories are set in unspecified midwestern locations. Most of the stories have specific locations; Florida, different parts of Arizona and New Mexico, El Salvador, Spain, two villages on the planet of Urta. One is almost entirely inside a theater; where the theater is shouldn't make much difference.

No-one is familiar with First Village, and few people are familiar with western New Mexico or northeastern Arizona (for instance). I'd expect those locations to tell most readers nothing at all about the characters. What kind of impression do you get of someone, knowing that they grew up in the Altura Park neighborhood of Albuquerque? Or in Vallecitos, New Mexico?

 

[gunhilltrain]

Shall we careen along this tangent? Most of my tales take place in specific locales, mostly real, often identified. I use setting as a character. Rather than writing the same sex scene too often, I describe the same places in many tales, and I try not to repeat myself TOO often. That was tricky in a series where each episode has a different narrator, all seeing and describing the same settings and players afresh.

Geometry is not destiny. Missionary fucks on the beach at Waikiki and in a Wichita hospital are not the same.

It's a good tangent I think. As to the issue of repeating yourself: we've talked before about reader attention spans. A lot of readers are going to be coming in cold to a particular story and you can only do so much for them if they don't know or care about your other work. You can only hope that if you have a feel for a place the readers will get it too.

Note that authors have dealt with this before. Every time Updike returned to Pennsylvania he had to describe things that changed only slightly or not at all in ten year intervals. There are probably four or five times when he wrote another version of what Janice's house looks like or how the town of Mount Penn is laid out.

 

[yukonnights]

I tend to use location descriptions quite often. This has grown over the years. Most often it is to try and put the reader into one of those special places in nature where the "real world" disappears for awhile. I've been fortunate to have spent a lifetime in such places and they mean a lot to me. I'm sure that's why I use them, because it's what I know the best. I've also tried to be mostly accurate in describing such places, at least to the point of trying to avoid obvious mistakes. (the small voice in my head telling me, "Someone's going to read that and know it's phoney...they'll write a long and detailed comment to call you out on it too." )

 

[KeithD]

Location (and also location in a certain timeframe) ranks high in my story elements as well. I use it to bring something unique to the story and often to help set the mood/atmosphere. I use it to celebrate that I've managed to be in a lot of places too.

My coauthored Valentine's Day contest entry (related to my current avatar) is a case in point--celebrating an actual place, a villa I once rented, where Lawrence Durrell once lived and wrote segments of his Alexandria Quartet and Bitter Lemons, and where I wrote pen name novels myself. The story, one of a series, makes the location a major character in the story. There's a second such location in the story, given the same treatment, that is used in quite a few of my stories--the Tree of Idleness restaurant in the Bellapais, Cyprus, square--a real place.