Roast my first short story, please!

Technically, it's enough of a mess that it got to where I was anticipating the next spinout in tense change (four instances in the first three sentences) rather than concentrating on the content. It's forty-five and fifteen minutes, not 45 and 15. (Most numbers are written out.) You have Ricardo "replying" when no one had said anything before that. This is a porn site. You don't have to render it "f***ing"--and doing so pulls the reader right out of the story. There will be those who groan when they see you throw in a bra size needlessly. Those are just the issues I remember in only getting half way through it (despite it being very short). The setup was intriguing enough (although I didn't read far enough to discern an actual plot) but the slog through the technical issues pulled it down to where I gave up. It would be interesting to see what it looked like after it was cleaned up.
 
Fair criticism. I've been told both I don't put in enough "tags" (said, murmured, whispered, etc.) and I put too much tags. I must have tried to add some and it didn't flow naturally.

As for the initial paragraphs, I agree that the initial paragraphs were more of tell, instead of show. I can fix that. I may have forgotten to expand the outline into full prose.

Thanks for being honest.
 
"Roast?" If you insist...

You don't have a story here, you have a 'scene'. Scenes can be stories, but this isn't. Even the title, "A Random Hotel Meeting", screams: 'just a scene, nothing of consequence here'. Could be built into a story, but it's going to be one long cliche unless you really know what you're doing, and there's not enough here to convince me of that.

Your narrator switches tenses so often he should be arrested for violating causality. "He had not laid a hand on her for 24 hours, but he was in a sour mood, she can tell." That's the second sentence of your story. If you don't understand why that's a train wreck, then look into taking a basic writing workshop.

Also, 'F***ing'? No, we're not in grade school. This is Literotica, we're all (hopefully) adults, and adult language is fine. Don't censor your words. If you're not comfortable writing them, don't write them. Blurring the language with asterisks is for notes passed in a classroom, not a story posted on an adult website.

The sex is amateur-porn-level, 'fancy-seeing-your-size-32C-tits-here-but-let's-fuck' wank fodder. No emotions, far too much telling. It reads like a rough draft of something you were planning on editing later. One paragraph of sex is hardly enough to build up most readers, much less most women. Sex is more than just the physical act of two (or more) bodies humping: it's sights, sounds, smells, feelings, thoughts, and a million other things working in tandem leading up to that controlled loss of control. A quickie is one thing, but you clearly wanted it to be more than that for Chinito and Ana. Let them take their time and have their moment.

You've got the start of something here. It's not a story. It could become a story with a lot of hard work, dedication, follow-through, and a good editor. If I were rating this (which I didn't), I'd give it a 2/5. It isn't hopeless, but it's the equivalent of trying to sell a house by showing the concrete foundation you're in the process of pouring and asking the reader to imagine how it will look once you're all done.
 
Write this with just two characters I came up with based on some disparate knowledge I gathered throughout my life. A little of this, a little of that, stir-fried into what seems to be a decent beginning of a story.

Have at it:

https://www.literotica.com/s/a-random-hotel-meet

I think you've got the core of something potentially interesting here. My thoughts would be:

- I think you'd be good to put something like this in "Erotic Couplings." The reason you have comments asking you why it's in IR is that "interracial" is really about race being a kink or taboo for one party or the other or both, not just about two people of different races getting it on and/or finding love. I don't know if you're planning for that to be an element in the action going forward, but it isn't there now and I think that's fine.

- You can stand to give every element of this more breathing room, and more exploration. Areala-chan does have a point: right now it's just the bare bones of a scene. But you have lots of stuff to work with here that could flesh it out into the first chapter of a longer story. I don't have to know everything about these characters right off the bat? But something about where they know each other from certainly wouldn't go amiss, and giving them a little more room to develop and give us reason to care about them as characters would be a good thing. You can also develop the menace Juliana is fleeing from a bit more (or a lot more).

- Don't forget that especially when you're writing erotica, sex scenes can also be character development.

Aside from the usual "show, don't tell," it helps me to think of it like action scenes in an action movie. I knew a screenwriter once whose criterion for a good fight or chase scene is an action movie was: is it also a character scene? Is the action just there taking up space, or is it also telling us something about the participants, who they are and how they move through the world? You can use sex scenes in erotica the same way, to illustrate the characters' attitude toward each other, to tell us whether they remember each other from prior encounters or illustrate the kinds of fantasies they've had, and so on. Again this is something you have the bare bones of, but you could go much further with it.

Hope that helps.
 
I did ask for a roast, so yes, I need an editor badly. :D I'm feeling a bit charred.

And yes, my sex scenes are feeling a bit dry and a bit short. Got cha.

It is a fragment, one scene that could serve as an excerpted story. Got that.

And yes, it can stand to be about 3-4x longer.

Will reclassify later to erotic. Keep forgetting interracial means more taboo stuff.
 
It stinks as it is and you want me to roast it? :eek:

Just kidding, but you said roast.

Its...kind of a mess and I'll say that because you admit it. Pilot's first comment about the tense changes kept me from reading more of it because that drives me crazy. Its a scene not a full story, but if you clean this up and flesh it out somewhat into more of a story, it has potential.
 
Oh, I know, I did ask for roast. I have VERY thick skin. :) My self-edit efforts are pathetic. Right now you guys got me to nice Chinese pork with crispy skin. :D It's kinda inspiring.

I have an expanded opening, I think that works a little better as the abbreviated beginning.


I'll work on the rest of the story later.
 
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This is about three times longer than forum rules permit to be posted to the forum, so I didn't read it.
 
Oops. Okay, I'll nuke that.

There was some promise in the latest rewrite (before you took it down). You have a lot of good ideas\plot elements, but you don't have the ability and skill to weave them into a compelling story.

If you want to become a better writer, than become one -- study it -- study writing and storytelling.
 
Need practice. :) Thanks for the encouragement.

I'm better at plotting than actual writing, it seems. But the only way to get better at writing is... write some more. So, I'm doing that. Let me revise this for a couple days and push an edited version out by Friday.

I have over a dozen writing books on my shelf and in my kindle. I've all the big name books in novel writing and screenwriting. It's something I wanted to do for a very long time, but then, who doesn't have their "great american novel" planned somewhere. :D
 
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Need practice. :) Thanks for the encouragement.

I'm better at plotting than actual writing, it seems. But the only way to get better at writing is... write some more.

Actually, I've found the only way to get better is to not write more, but to write less and rewrite\perfect what you have already written, and make it right -- something most writers aren't willing to do.
 
Practice and editing are both great, but often the biggest help is to read the kind of stuff you want to write, as executed by a writer who has the ability you're aspiring to. Good luck with it!
 
Yeah, I'm doing 2-3 books per DAY on average. But quality is a little inconsistent. I'll pick more quality stuff.

FWIW, my Kindle lib is at 700+ books. Any more and I'll go KU. :)

I do edit, but I think I ended up incorporating more ideas as I edit, which made the prose uneven. Basically, I can't seem to separate editing vs rewriting. Gotta self-train on that too.

-----

Just noticed a flow problem. There shouldn't be that "gap" in the middle. Going back to re-read, I don't even know WHY I had a gap of that 4 hour in there. The sex scene should have occurred almost right away, and the conversation should be like in cuddle phase. WTF was I thinking?

OTOH, that would pretty much take care of the rewriting that other 50%.
 
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I didn't?! (searches options)

Oh, wow, never noticed that PM was off. Thanks for reminding me. :)
 
Decided to buy a couple reference books, specifically, Diana Gabaldon's guide to sex writing. (She wrote the Outlander series)

Seems while I did get the extra senses down, I can't quite get ENOUGH EMOTIONS into the scene. In fact, my whole approach was off as I didn't show enough MOTIVATION of the two characters. As Gabaldon said, "a good sex scene is really a dialogue scene with specific body language."

I'm working on that. I think you'll see some significant improvements after this EDIT
 
I don't think I've improved the sex scene much. In fact, I think I kinda pared it down, but I think I got enough emotion onto the rest of the story, mostly before the sex scene, and with a couple plot changes (moving elements around) I think I got a much tighter story now.

Just submitted the rewrite. Should be active in a couple days. I'll be back!
 
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