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New Lit Author - first story

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EmzC

Virgin
Joined
Mar 26, 2018
Posts
9
So, recently I decided to stop being annoyingly anxious and actually submit a story. It’s the first thing I’ve ever written on my own, and definitively longer than anything I’ve written before. It had a rocky start but the story has been well-received after that. I have received about a dozen comments, and a lot of votes, so I have some idea about what people think.
The comments I’ve received are nice and very appreciated, but they aren’t very constructive.

The only detailed feedback I’ve received is from my editor, and I decided to make a thread here and ask if anyone would be willing to help me become a better writer by telling me what was good and what was bad. Also I’m hoping that this thread will help me decide whether to write a sequel or not.

Anyway, a bit about the story without trying to spoil too much: it’s a long, 40.000+ word work, in the Lesbian category, with a slow build-up, written in first person. It’s nothing especially kinky or unusual, I made the protagonist’s emotions and personality the main focus of it, and her relationship with two women, one young and the other older. Most of the sex is condensed at the end of the story.

https://www.literotica.com/s/pavlovian-reaction-1
 
40,000 words is a really big undertaking, but I will try to get to it next week if you can be patient.

EDIT: I will try to start reading it on Tuesday.
 
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Well, I only read the first page. If you are going to write a long story, and want people to read it, there has to be something interesting, intriguing, unusual on the first page to catch readers' interest and make them want to read on. I'm afraid that introducing college characters, saying what colour their hair is, and how tall they are in feet and inches, and talking about their calculus lectures and what the lecture schedule is, doesn't really do that, sorry.
 
hadruprider said:
Well, I only read the first page. If you are going to write a long story, and want people to read it, there has to be something interesting, intriguing, unusual on the first page to catch readers' interest and make them want to read on. I'm afraid that introducing college characters, saying what colour their hair is, and how tall they are in feet and inches, and talking about their calculus lectures and what the lecture schedule is, doesn't really do that, sorry.
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Yeah, that was one of the things I disliked about the story, but I also disliked the dozen or so other ideas for the first page, too. :D
So I stuck with the original. Thanks for sharing your opinion. :)
 
Not my category

I don’t read stories in the Lesbian Sex category so I won’t comment on the actual story. But I don’t quite understand why you feel the need to ask for comments in Story Feedback? The ⭐️‘s it’s received are far more than any writer would normally expect to receive but we don’t know if 10, or 100, or 1000 have voted but hopefully it’s at least the 100. It does seem that there are many more people who like lesbian stories than me. Good thing that everyone’s not the same. It’s had a lot of views, which must be gratifying, but that doesn’t mean everyone actually read it to the end. It’s a better indication of popularity that 35 people have marked it as a favourite. As I say, I don’t understand why you are asking.

Two of my favourite writers have published stories in excess of 40,000 words.

One was 11 pages in one go as yours. I jumped to the end, as I always do, and was undecided because I find it difficult to concentrate for 4 pages let alone 11. I read it in two days. That’s because it gripped me from the first few paragraphs and continued to do so right to the end. The same effect that your story appears to have had on many readers.

The other was split into 13 episodes. The writer had me with the first page and as each chapter was published I couldn’t wait for the next one.

I suppose what I’m saying is although you’ve got a lot of satisfied readers would you have had many more out of that 29,000 if the story had been split into six parts and posted over six successive days?
 
But I don’t quite understand why you feel the need to ask for comments in Story Feedback?
The ⭐️‘s it’s received are far more than any writer would normally expect to receive ...
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As I've said, the story has been well recieved and that is very gratifying, of course. I thought I was clear when I posted the story but maybe not - I have recieved almost no constructive feedback. I don't know what I did well and what I didn't do well.
I've heard some of what the readers liked, and that's great, but I haven't heard much from other authors and people who can give a critical opinion.
The fact that this story is well-recieved is coincidental, I guess it'd like to know how to "do that again".

I suppose what I’m saying is although you’ve got a lot of satisfied readers would you have had many more out of that 29,000 if the story had been split into six parts and posted over six successive days?
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I considered this for quite a while. I decided to publish it in one piece because I didn't have good places in the story to make a clear, meaningful cut that would, in my opinion, make someone read on. I suppose that a lot of people who opened the story decided not to read it through to the end because of it's size, so maybe it didn't affect the view count but it did affect the number of people who decided to invest their time and finish the story.
 
EmzC said:
(A). I have recieved almost no constructive feedback. I don't know what I did well and what I didn't do well. I've heard some of what the readers liked, and that's great, but I haven't heard much from other authors and people who can give a critical opinion.


(B). I considered this for quite a while. I decided to publish it in one piece because I didn't have good places in the story to make a clear, meaningful cut that would, in my opinion, make someone read on. I suppose that a lot of people who opened the story decided not to read it through to the end because of it's size, so maybe it didn't affect the view count but it did affect the number of people who decided to invest their time and finish the story.
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(A). An excellent and logical explanation for why you started this thread.

(B). Good to hear you considered breaking it up. Your opinion that you felt there weren’t any clear places to make it into chapters is the most important opinion. Wouldn’t it be nice, speaking for myself, if we knew, out of the thousands (millions) who read our stories, who actually finish reading?
 
Embrace Chekhov's Gun.

Chekhov's gun is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed; elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play.

Think about the first Lit page (the first 2500-3500 words) of Pavlovian Reactions. How much of this information really matters?

If I could give one piece of advice to every new writer, it would be to "try to write something small". Try to figure out how to tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end, in a compact and efficient manner. Later, with experience, it's easier to write lengthier, more complicated stories, but don't start with the epics. There's so much to talk about here that it would be completely demoralizing for a new writer.

And it's not even that bad! There's just so much!

EDIT: For the most part, our advice here is for the next story you write. Don't get caught up in the perpetual cycle of trying to fix what you just put out.
 
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AwkwardMD said:
If I could give one piece of advice to every new writer, it would be to "try to write something small". Try to figure out how to tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end, in a compact and efficient manner. Later, with experience, it's easier to write lengthier, more complicated stories, but don't start with the epics. .
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This sounds like good advice, but for two things. One is that it may not fit with the author's need to get a particular story out, and it may be that the story the author's been trying to get out is a long one.

The other thing is that short stories often aren't as well liked on Literotica. Readers here, other than those looking for the short strokers, often seem to like stories that are quite a lot longer than a normal short story. My impression is those stories often rate higher.

But, Literotica and its peculiarities aside, I think this is good advice.
 
Giving advice is like teaching anything. You don't start off by enumerating the exceptions, you work on fundamentals. Core concepts. Nuances come later. When teaching someone to ride a bike, you don't explain that the brakes might be located on the handles and might be in the pedals. You teach what is in front of them.

The OP said, in one of the other replies, that there were no good breaking points to divide this into smaller chapters, and that doesn't surprise me. The impression that I got from what I read is that, in my hands, this story would be 15-20,000 words.

It's not that it's a gargantuan story, there's just tons and tons of... stuff. Filler that isn't inherently necessary to get your characters from point a to point b. Page 1 talks at length about the attendance habits of the average college student over the course of a semester. This is not information that fleshes out a story or informs the reader, it's wasted space and, if we're getting down to it, wasted time for everyone.

Now, nobody should be aiming to write the way I write. When I say that I could cut half of your story out and still end up with a readable story, my point is that there are room for cuts. Lots of them.
 
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EDIT: For the most part, our advice here is for the next story you write. Don't get caught up in the perpetual cycle of trying to fix what you just put out.
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That is exactly what I plan to do, that is, not to do. I don't plan on changing much in the story I already published, unless I find some spelling errors I've missed or something like that. I want the story to remain as it was, and use the feedback for "the next story".

It's not that it's a gargantuan story, there's just tons and tons of... stuff. Filler that isn't inherently necessary to get your characters from point a to point b.
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This is something that I'm very much aware of, and if my editor hadn't told me to "stop dragging on stuff so much" the story would have been much more unreadable. The issue I seem to have when writing is that everything I put in I put in for a reason, that often seems to be clear only to me. Which makes sense since I'm the one that "created" the characters and the plot, so of course I'm the one who's most familiar with them and I know about some obscure thing in the past that'd make them say certain things. Of course the readers don't pick up on that because they don't know about anything that I didn't write, but I can't weed out the obscure/unnecessary details yet. I suppose I don't have enough experience yet to distinguish parts that don't help the reader get a better image of the characters or scene.
Besides, English is not my native language, so sometimes I need more sentences to express what I want to say, I simply don't have the skill to do it as effectively in one or two sentences. (as we can see in this reply as well :D )
Also the way I write might have a lot to do with it too - when I sit down and start typing, the words just flow and I basically write my thoughts down. It's difficult to organize them later into shorter sentences that sound equally "good", but this is just my lack of experience again.
That lack of experience is one of the reasons why I went with such a "vanilla" story, focusing on the things I'm better at than others, like exploring a personality and snarky comments, instead of aiming at a hot and kinky shorter one. I don't think I'd be capable of writing a good short story, I need "space" to get my ideas out. Besides, the sex scene can be a little less well written when people are invested in the characters. Their investment in them seems to make the long-awaited sex scene seem better than it actually is.

This sounds like good advice, but for two things. One is that it may not fit with the author's need to get a particular story out, and it may be that the story the author's been trying to get out is a long one.
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This is also true, the original story I wrote was noticeably longer, maybe about 20% longer, I just didn't feel "right" about shortening some things in the story. As I realized later, the things that I did remove from it were completely unnecessary.


One of the recent comments on the story say something similar to this, that I left too many possible plot lines unexplored. When I was writing this story I had absolutely no intention of publishing it. I wanted to write maybe 3 or 4 times this much as some sort of fun writing and English exercise. So all those dangling loose ends weren't supposed to be loose ends, and are there so that I have an option of continuing at some point in the future; but the story also has an "ending" as it is, so that readers don't feel a complete anti-climax when they realize they've reached the end.
I do have a vague plan of writing a sequel that will explore the plot further, but I think it's best that I work on my writing skill in the meantime - like asking on Lit's forum for advice. :D

EDIT: Apparently the readers so far either gave up on the first page or went through the whole story and ended up liking it; so the first couple of pages seem to be the worst part of it.
 
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Another good tip for you would be to read the writings of others critically (ie, not for content) and pay particular attention to the way they explore their characterizations.

If backstory is important in a character's decision-making (ie, logically choice would be A but context and experience has taught them to choose B), how did the author introduce that backstory?
Was it dumped in the beginning in a big pile?
Was it sprinkled through the story?
Were you bored by the exposition, or did it keep your interest? If so, why?
Did the character act in ways that were sensible given their backstory? If not, why?

Asking yourself questions like these, and thinking about them, will help you refine your style more than anything else I've ever found.
 
Emirus said:
I don’t read stories in the Lesbian Sex category so I won’t comment on the actual story. But I don’t quite understand why you feel the need to ask for comments in Story Feedback? The ⭐️‘s it’s received are far more than any writer would normally expect to receive but we don’t know if 10, or 100, or 1000 have voted but hopefully it’s at least the 100. It does seem that there are many more people who like lesbian stories than me./QUOTE]

Is this a typically expected number of votes; "at least 100"? My story was posted ten days after this and it's only got 14 votes on just under 1000 views. It's kind of discouraging. Is not voting a polite way to the story is garbage?
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TANSTAAFL58 said:
Is this a typically expected number of votes; "at least 100"? My story was posted ten days after this and it's only got 14 votes on just under 1000 views. It's kind of discouraging. Is not voting a polite way to the story is garbage?
Click to expand...

As a rule, 100 views per vote is a "good" ratio. Most of mine sit between 100 and 250 views per vote. A few have as little as 1000 views per vote.

Unfortunately, a lot of people tune out if they don't like a story (for a myriad of reasons) OR cum, so it's a tough ratio to read into.
 
TANSTAAFL58 said:
Is this a typically expected number of votes; "at least 100"? My story was posted ten days after this and it's only got 14 votes on just under 1000 views. It's kind of discouraging. Is not voting a polite way to the story is garbage?
Click to expand...
Agree with MD. My rule of thumb across nearly 60 stories is one vote per hundred views, one comment per thousand. My recent Sci-fi and Fantasy is currently running one vote per 50, and ten comments, but that's on the back of the Geek Pride Anthology promotion.

Don't assume no-vote = garbage. If it's garbage, people will down-vote, not no-vote. Silence usually means "okay" - folk will let you know if a story is really good or really bad, same with comments.

Note also, that the most popular categories (Incest and Non-con) can get stupid high numbers of views and votes, but you need to make your own mind up as to what that actually means...
 
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