Turn On The Lights

Joined
Sep 6, 2009
Posts
24
Turn On The Lights Ch. 1

Category: Lesbian Sex

http://www.literotica.com/s/turn-on-the-lights-ch-01

Blurb:

A brief chance encounter with stunning redhead Annie after finishing work at a gig begins to make Scruff - a quiet, anxious lighting technician - re-evaluate herself. But a few months later life's complications catch up with her all at once and test her to her emotional limits.

Torn between her own logic and her aching heart, will her sexual reawakening get the better of her? Will she submit or rise to the occasion? Will it be the right decision? Will history repeat itself?


Author's Notes:

This has been a labour of love on and off over the past year or so, and it shows. My previous stories look like (and probably were) cobbled-together half-assed thoughts thrown onto a keyboard by comparison. This is a slow, aching burn of a story that will bring you increasing rewards the deeper into it you go...although there is an important, fairly abrupt sex scene towards the end of Ch. 1 to keep your nether regions interested until I post the rest. Ch. 2 gets considerably toastier and is already written (waiting for it to mature like a good cheese...)

If anyone would like to edit Ch. 2 for me, please get in touch. A female editor would be very welcome.

Excerpt:

“Follow me,” Mike nodded to us.

We walked down a couple of corridors. Mike stopped outside the men’s staff toilets. “Call of nature,” he grinned “Head along to the end and take the first right. It’s the second door on the left.”

Annie tugged me along. Mike vanished into the toilet.

She suddenly yanked me out of the corridor and into the women’s toilets, which was the next door along. I think I may have squeaked a little in surprise.

I was even more surprised when she pushed me against the bathroom wall and kissed me hard. “Unff…” was all I could get out as her lips mashed into mine. Her lips broke away quickly, her face whipping around to my ear, her copper hair swishing out to the side.

“I’m feeling impatient right now. I want to fuck you. I want to fuck you so hard you’ll remember it for the rest of your life. And I haven’t got much time. Do you want me to fuck you?”
 
I see this one slipped through the cracks and got no response, so I will try to get you something this week.
 
Deleted. I asked a dumb question that means nothing in the long term. Should have feedback for you tonight or tonorrow
 
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Disclaimer - I am just one random person on the internet. What follows are my opinions, and you should only allow those to count for exactly that much: one person's opinion. I am not a professional writer nor am I a professional critic, and I do not own the secret recipe to write perfect stories.

I have three points to make:

Point the first. I want to share a quote that was really influential for me. Nic Pizzolato, the writer for True Detective, was asked what bad writing looks like. His response was

”What it looks like, to me, is people running around delivering information.” “You know, when you’re writing comedy … is this just people standing around telling jokes, or are there actual human beings engaged in action? Then the humor arises out of that. In my line of work, it would be like… is this just people walking around trading information? Or is this people living with each other and against each other?”

If you can find the full interview (utoob), between him and Dan Harmon (another of my writing heroes), it’s worth your time.

When I was reading Turn On The Lights, I was struck by a constant inconsistency of character. You set up Scruff to be introverted, Annie to be distant, or Becky to be confident. That’s all fine, those are great starting points for characters, but then you would break that setup at any point if you needed to get the plot to do something or go someplace specific.

In chapter 2, near the end, Scruff and Becky are getting close. In order to create drama, you had Scruff overhear Becky trying really hard to get Dave to fuck her. Ouch. We haven’t really seen enough of Becky for this to feel like a logical desperate act by a woman who is clinging to her heterosexuality. It feels forced, because this is the action of someone who is intensely insecure.

Okay. So now they're not talking to each other, but you need them to get back together because that's the story so Becky asks Scruff to go get a drink, and Scruff resists. She doesn’t say no, which is good. It’s perfect for her character to avoid conflict because Scruff is an introvert. But she’s also delaying because she doesn’t know what she wants. Becky is an unknown quantity, and Annie is a sure thing albeit fleeting.

In order to make this decision clearer, you had Becky call Scruff a dyke. Ouch. You manufactured conflict between Scruff and Becky that felt inauthentic and forced. If this is how Becky talks and thinks, Scruff should know enough to just cut her losses, but Becky doesn't read like a homophobe. The action doesn't line up with the setup.

Scruff stays behind and talks to Annie, but she’s conflicted. To get around this conflict and deliver the sex you think this chapter needs, you made Annie give an impassioned confession of her pain. Yes, this wins over Scruff, but that is a weird thing for someone allergic to feelings and emotions to do. It feels inauthentic and forced for Annie to open up.

Becky was upset that Scruff didn’t come, so she insisted she would keep a seat for Scruff at the bar. That’s what a friend would do, but instead of staying at the bar you made Becky comes back to the club just in time to see Scruff and Annie. Becky’s actions here are more in line with someone in love.

You have this cascade of people not acting like themselves in order to deliver the gut punch you think this chapter needs, but it doesn’t deliver. Not like you want it to. And this isn’t the only example of this, it’s just the best microcosm of the largest problem:

Your characters don’t feel like people. They feel like sock puppets acting out the story in your head.

Story comes alive through characters. They’re what readers connect with and empathize with. Every time you forced conflict between these characters, you broke your characters’ backstories and personalities to do it.
Without spending a lot of time thinking about it I’m not in a position to suggest better options, but I promise that there are more organic ways to tell the story you want to tell.

Point the second. The first four paragraphs of Chapter 1 read like a technical manual on how to park a car and enter a building. We all know how to do that. I’m not telling you that so that you can go back and cut out four paragraphs because the real problem is that you have a preponderance of technical writing that needs to be edited with a heavy hand. In addition to a treatise on how to go from outside to inside, we’re also given more information than we needed on how to climb ladders, how to walk down hallways, how heads turn from side to side, and many more.

I can hazard a guess that a lot of this is getting caught up in an effort, by you, to clearly explain some of the technical elements of what Scruff does for her job, and that’s good. You do an admirable job of explaining that Scruff is proficient at the jobs she performs, but you take that urge to explain too far.

This ties into my first point. Readers connect with characters. We want to be there when Scruff feels pain and we want to be there when Scruff feels joy, and the real power of writing as a storytelling medium is the ability to assume mountains of information. You don’t need to tell us that Scruff contracts her thigh muscle which lifts her left leg from the ground, leans forward and shifts her weight, and then quickly moves her left foot back down to the ground to prevent herself from falling while using her forward momentum to slowly propel herself across the room, repeating this motion with her left and right legs, to where Becky is tilted at an acute angle against a piece of wood where glass containers are holding liquids specially prepared for after-hours consumption. You can just tell us that Scruff walks toward Becky, who is leaning against the bar. Our imagination fills in the rest.

There are limits to how little you can explain without leaving the reader confused, but I would encourage you to experiment with finding that line. Less really can be more.

Point the third. I knew, near the bottom of the first page on chapter 1, that I was reading lesbian fantasy written by a man. I hadn’t looked at your profile before starting, but within one page I knew, and if I had to point to something it would be Scruff’s very obvious male gaze. Scruff sees women like a man does. Tits, ass, legs. The whole package gets observed, usually within a single paragraph, with a clear conclusion at the end.

mmmmmmm-daddy-likes-what-he-sees.jpg


Before anyone jumps down my throat, let me be clear. Women like sex. Women want sex. I get thirsty all the time, but there’s a very clear, linear progression of “See-Want-Fuck” between Scruff and Annie, and between Annie and Scruff.

Women do not have the same visual focus coupled with a drive to insert seed into everything with a vaj. As a default rule we want to connect more than we want fingers jammed in places we haven’t had fingers jammed in a while.

Since there are ALWAYS exceptions to rules, I would be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt with Scruff and Annie… except that Scruff exhibits the exact same behavior within one paragraph of Chapter 2. She instantly wants to fuck Becky, and is damp at the drop of a hat. She’s less interested in Becky’s obvious confidence than she is in the way Becky’s shirt outlines the size and general pertness of Becky’s breasts.

One point of data means nothing. It’s impossible to draw conclusions on one data point because you can’t tell what is an outlier and what is a pattern. Two points of data represents a trend.

Scruff exhibits male gaze with Annie. Annie exhibits male gaze with Scruff. Scruff exhibits male gaze with Becky, and Becky is reeeeeeally close to the same thing. For someone who isn’t sure how they feel about women, Becky is really interested in defining exactly how pretty/beautiful/fit/feminine Scruff is or could be. Given this pattern, we can assume that it is not that this story contains a lot of very masculine women but that you write women like men.

Not all lesbian stories need to be romances. I’m down for a good girl-girl hookup story, but it alwaysalwaysALWAYS comes back to characters. As soon as you figure out how not to be your own biggest enemy, you’re going to be pretty great.
 
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...aaaand this is why I want a female editor.

I knew there was gonna be something in there that didn't add up for the characters, and this is the first bit of constructive criticism I've had that really addressed that.

Duly noted.

Ch 03 is gonna need some serious rewriting :p

Thanks, much appreciated.
 
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