Feedback on new story

This is the first story I've submitted to Literotica. I would appreciate any feedback.
http://www.literotica.com/s/a-taste-for-asian-pussy

- You need an editor. Without going into specifcs you tend to overuse commas and there is some tense confusion.

- You have potential; Your natural writing voice is easy to read.

- instead of using adverbs I recommend you expand your descriptions with more details.

- In parts you have too many short sentences together when you shouldn't. Short sentences make the action feel fast when I don't think you intend that. Eg:

She began grinding her crotch against mine. I felt my errection grow even harder. I reached up and grabbed her ass. It felt firm and tight, not like my wife's saggy bottom. Her perfume was light and floral, I inhaled it deeply.

Click to expand...

IMO This should fused into two sentences. The perfume sentence would go in the next paragraph or preempted with a sentence saying something like how their bodies were so close he could smell her.

How tall and fat is a big client? How short and skinny is a little client? (I don't think you mean big and little, find other words.)
I find this style of writing very annoying. Let your words, your characters, their voices, their actions their smells, tastes, feelings tell the story. The first 'don't' in Strunk and White is: keep yourself out of your writing. Never address your reader directly, even if you are writing in the first person. The first person narrator in the story should never be the same person as the writer.

Research the proper use of 'and' this tiny powerful word should never be used as an invisible word but only used to join to very similar or equal ideas. "I reached up and grabbed her ass." 'reached up' and 'grabbed' are not equal, one is necessary to accomplish the other. One of the actions should be in a subordinate clause or a prepositional phrase. e.g. I reached up to grab her ass. or, reaching up, I grabbed her ass. Or how about not reaching at all, but merely, "I grabbed her ass." If we already know the relative positions of the persons, then we know he reached (up). This usage is similar to saying: I sat down, stood up, bent over, etc, all superfluous, unless we need them to establish relative positions.

I agree with most of the above.

Remember that even though you may be able to see, tastes, and feel whats happening we can't. Unless you share it with us.

It is all in the details.

Lit_Zombie said:

Remember that even though you may be able to see, tastes, and feel whats happening we can't. Unless you share it with us.

It is all in the details.

Click to expand...

It is all in how the experience is expressed*


Please don't write a "this happened and that happened" story.

litmlove said:

It is all in how the experience is expressed*


Please don't write a "this happened and that happened" story.

Click to expand...

Much better way to say what I said.

'This happened' to him/her and s/he reacted and 'that happened' to be short.

This is (usually) fiction. so any writing style can work. When you use short choppy sentences. It is read that way. Fast paced. Boom Boom Boom. Done.

If i remember this one it was about a man out on a business trip with a bitchy wife. Don't know what he does or sells. Wasn't in the beginning. Its written from his perspective. here is one of those Boom Boom Boom moments:


"Yeah, whatever, have they paid you anything yet?"

"Well no, they just signed, but this was a very import..."

"I don't fucking care, just bring home more money, you little shit."

I understand that most people think that adding in a little detail here may turn this into a tl;dr. (too long; didn't read) I also know that in that situation, an argument or ass reaming, my adrenalin is pumping and human thought is WAY faster than speech:

She interrupted...

(add in with the narrative that you started with.) It was important because...?

Like you did after she called him a 'little shit'

Doing things like this don't really add a lot of length to a story just depth.

litmlove said:

It is all in how the experience is expressed*


Please don't write a "this happened and that happened" story.

Click to expand...

In other words "Show don't tell"

Really????

lovecraft68 said:

In other words "Show don't tell"

Click to expand...

does that really help anyone?

These people are adults and all. But, If I asked everyone under the age of 25 to state a thesis. Most of them couldn't do it. Half of you reading this later will google it. And still get it wrong. It isn't an intelligence thing. And that isn't meant as an insult.

It's literally the understanding of an idea. And solidifying it with substantiating evidence.

That is all a story is. An idea. What makes it feel real are all of the little details that go along with it.

In other words "Show don't tell"

Click to expand...

All I can do is shake my head.

Overall, I thought it was a good short story. Your writing style is easy to follow and flows well. I liked your descriptions of the characters and of the setting. There were some typos and little things here and there, but nothing a copy editor wouldn't catch. (You can get a decent one for around $10 for that length of story.) Write up about a dozen or so of those and bundle them on Amazon. Good for you for sharing your work--I know it's not easy!

I think robertreams' comments cut to the chase. A major distraction is that you have two 'I's in the story, the writer and the protagonist. Stick to the protag and don't talk to the readers.

For me, your story is not erotic. Man buys hooker but constantly thinks about the wife he claims to detest. Uh! She may be a harpy but he comes across as a shit.

You need to proof your text. I've never met a sole in Nevada apart from in a restaurant.

I was bigger than average - has it shrunk? Think you mean, 'am'.

Please, I am an amazon on this, skip the breast measurements. It's not sexy, you have no idea and she probably changes from shop to shop. Describe her 'girls' rather than treating them as vegetables.

Lit_Zombie said:

does that really help anyone?

These people are adults and all. But, If I asked everyone under the age of 25 to state a thesis. Most of them couldn't do it. Half of you reading this later will google it. And still get it wrong. It isn't an intelligence thing. And that isn't meant as an insult.

It's literally the understanding of an idea. And solidifying it with substantiating evidence.

That is all a story is. An idea. What makes it feel real are all of the little details that go along with it.



All I can do is shake my head.

Click to expand...

Show....let the story and the characters carry the story, their words, actions, their surroundings.....show me.

Tell.....every single detail about the appearance, history and personality of the characters and how they got where they are explained in paragraph after paragraph of narrative.

Example....paragraphs of the main character "thinking" and then I said this and she said that and we both did this, then she went here and I stayed here....

as opposed to the actual exchange between the characters done "live" in dialogue.

When the author is showing you the story you're going along with it and picking it up on your own

When the author is telling you are getting bombarded by a big info dump and it turns into Blah blah blah.

What's so hard to understand?

LC, I agree with you, but last week I was reading an early Harlan Coben on a plane and he broke every rule.

The protag talked to the readers (not the writer, I accept). He told lots, backstory and all, but left much detail about the other characters floating.

Show, don't tell has to accommodate mystery.

Well, gonna throw in a few comments here.

For one, I can tell you are from LA. Nobody else would say "the 15", it is Interstate 15 or I-15. Be careful in falling to much onto your natural dialect, just saying "the 15" or "the 405" might make sense to you, but might completely confuse somebody not familiar with the phrases.

Research is always good. As somebody else had mentioned, all legal prostitution in Nevada requires condoms. So having him bareback instantly throws it into serious suspension of belief. Also the price was way high, normal prices are in the $500-700 range per hour in the legal brothels.

Like all girls in the adult industry, an Asian girl is going to use a stage name. Generally something exotic and memorable, that reflects their ethnicity. Jade, Kim, China, Asia, Lily, Tiger, Kat, Aki, Yasmin. I even knew one Korean dancer who's stage name was "Risa" (her own joke at the inability of some to say "Lisa").

So for say an Asian girl, have her try to "sound" the role. I found her dialect coming and going, one moment cutting to immigrant "She white girl, your wife?", then the next line using contractions and correct pleural (something my wife of almost 30 years still has problems with).

I liked the story, and am sure that with practice and more editing you will be giving us some really good stories. I think one thing I kept going back to was how when he meets Si Fah her pubes were poking out the top of her panties, then later on she was almost completely shaved.

But I do look forward to reading what you come out with next.

My 2c on the debate above:

"Show, Don't Tell" is one of the first rules that new writers get drilled on, because it engages your imagination and encourages you to put more of your imagination on the page. There's always something lost in translation, but "Show Don't Tell" helps reduce the amount. Having said that, like any rule, there are times to break it, and it's also one of the first rules a writer typically does break.

Now, as to the actual story.

I've never quite gotten the fetishization of Asian women, but that might be a personal thing. What I find, though, is that you seem to be relying on the fetishization to carry a lot of the story. I don't want to know that Jeff finds this girl hot: I want to know why he does. More concrete details, in other words, as has been said before. What does Jeff like about her boobs? Her hair? Her pussy? Her ass? Her skin color, eye color, voice, facial structure, lips, ears, nose, chin? Make this character sexy, even if I don't buy into the idea that yellow skin is a magic aphrodisiac.

(Also, I don't think "Si Fah" is a real Thai name. Very cursory Google searches brought up lists of actual given names from Thailand, of which you could've had your pick. Instead, we have Si Fah, which frankly sounds more Mandarin than Thai, and threatens to snap The Reader out of the story by encouraging them to say, "Wait: Is that an actual Thai name? Heck, is it an actual name in any language?" The last thing you want to do is give The Reader a chance to see "backstage" into the thought process behind the story, because that's always more distracting than the story itself.)

I found your characters lacking in, well, personality. The Asian hooker has no identity beyond her skin color; it probably makes sense, from a business standpoint, that she'd play up the "fresh off boat" angle, but there's no indication that she's doing so deliberately, and that makes me wonder whether she wouldn't be happier back home, and how many other options she had besides prostitution. A character who was supposed to be sexy is now a terrifying victim. Also, the wife was a shrill, illogical harpy; I can't even call her "one dimensional" because having a dimension requires motivation, and she doesn't seem to have any. At least, besides, "Annoy the narrator, because the author said so."

Your characters are flat, but let's be clear: that's okay. Your intent was to tell a story about a white dude fucking an Asian girl, and you accomplished your goal. "Characters having depth" is a quality that makes the story feel more real, but it isn't a necessary thing, especially not for a story (like yours) where the sex itself is the main intent. (Tolkien got away with lacking it too.) The only problem is--again--breaking the Suspension of Disbelief. When a character is as wildly irrational as Jeff's wife, it yanks The Reader right out of the story. (The fact that Jeff draws attention to her behavior by lampshading it made it even worse for me, though YMMV.) So I guess what I'm trying to say is that while you don't need Oscar-winning character development, you do want them to at least make sense, and I feel like Jeff's Wife in particular falls below that threshold.

Finally, please, for the love of God, do a spell-check, grammar check, punctuation check before you submit. Don't just hit the buttons on your word processor, either: set the story aside for a day or two and then come back with objective, detached eyes. There have definitely been works published on Literotica that have more misspellings and such than does yours--honestly, given the comments above, I was expecting worse. But when you publish a story that has these blatant errors... Well, think of it this way: Your job, as a writer, is to seduce The Reader. You need to lure them into coming on a journey with you--a journey that, in our genre, involves cocks and pussies, tits and asses, racing hearts and heaving chests, muted groans and breathy moans. Your job is to seduce The Reader... And can you imagine a better way to fail at this than to show that you haven't the faintest clue what you're doing? And can you imagine a better way to establish that you don't know what you're doing than to English wrong?

The similarity between reading and fucking is that you put yourself into the act. You are contributing energy and imagination and skill. As such, you want guarantees that you'll get at least equal amounts of pleasure in return. And shoddy technicals are a big red flag that, Nope, you are not going to get yours. Your partner, The Writer, cares about himself but not you, and once he's done, you'll be left high and dry. Shoddy technicals tell The Reader that they shouldn't trust you to satisfy them. And, unlike a genuine sexual encounter, The Reader has a very easy escape route: the [Back] button. Don't give them any reason to use it.

The critiques I've been giving you are pretty advanced ones. There are writers I wouldn't dream of telling this stuff to. I'm telling them to you because... this is your first story. And it's better than some people's last stories. You have potential. You have stories to tell that all of us are looking forward to hearing; the advice we're giving you should, hopefully, help you tell them well. You have the gift. Keep writing.