Writing women

Joined
Apr 3, 2017
Posts
951
Hi folks,

I have a new story up in Group this time (vs GM where I usually post).

https://www.literotica.com/s/valentines-for-adam.

It was going to be a Valentine's Day comp entry, but I struggled to finish it to where I was happy with it, and missed the deadline.

It contains mm and mf, and I'd be keen to get feedback from women on how I've written Corinne. I wanted to write a woman who was in control, without fetishising that control and turning it into a cuck story or a femdom story. Let me know how I did.

The basic outline of the story is that Jesse (bisexual man) is picked up by a woman (Corinne) at a concert, and he takes her back to what he thinks is an empty apartment belonging to Adam, an older man he's friends with, and who he's slept with before (character borrowed from electricblue66). From there, Corinne decides to seduce Adam, and Jesse joins in. And, as it turns out, Corinne rather likes watching Jesse and Adam together.

There's a lot of 'intro' that might be a touch boring, as I warmed myself into writing the characters. It's four pages, and the sex starts half-way down on page two, so I wouldn't call it stroke. But for the reader who has time on his or her hands, any feedback appreciated. :)
 
Forget about Corinne. All of your characters are able to guess everything about each other. I think you're doing some kind of technique where the characters are trying to put each other off their game by having things they want to hide brought out into the open, but what that does in the end is just 'tell' us a lot from different mouths.

You're telling us about these characters rather than showing us. Something needs to happen for there to be character-driven action. We can't tell you who Corinne is because you didn't show us who Corinne is. Who she really is.

Three people stood in a room, talked a lot, smoked some, and banged. No barometer in the world will give you a good measure of a character from that.
 
Make something happen. Throw roadblocks between your characters, their goals, and their needs. That's where you find out who a human being is, and the same goes for characters.
 
Make something happen. Throw roadblocks between your characters, their goals, and their needs. That's where you find out who a human being is, and the same goes for characters.

Thanks Awkward, Appreciate the feedback. Could be why i struggled with this one. Perhaps I've approached it from the wrong angle.
 
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Show don't tell, show don't tell, I'm AwarkardMD, I'm a zombie, show don't tell. Fuck that advice. Blood Meridian is over half tell, and it's told in a great voice.

If you tell something, tell it well, if you show it, show it well, if you want to mix your show/tell, mix it well.

I'm not into reading stories on Lit, or GM (Giant Men?), but I did skim. I found the wording lacks a flow. I don't know if this is how other people see words, but words either string together for me in a rhythm I can follow, or they appear one at a time like speed bumps made of letters.

I'd say choose better wordings for your sentences. That's a big difference between a bad professional and other bad writers, bad professional have boring stories (to me) but their words flow together for a smoother read, making it easier to move through their pieces.

Thanks for that. Appreciate the feedback and I dont disagree. My key thing here is not style though, but the depiction of the woman. Any comment on that? Or am I worrying about it unnecessarily?
 
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I'll add to the dialogue didn't work for me, seemed stilted, rocky, not a natural conversation.

But I can tell just by your post you seemed to be worried and over thinking from the start and that's why there did not seem to be a natural flow, like you were focusing on each sentence more than a big picture.

Show don't tell, tell don't show, unreliable narrator...all these writing terms mean nothing to me. I'm a high school drop out that likes to write and tell stories. I've improved grammar wise over the years and gotten better in general, but in a practice kind of way not going and taking courses.

I'm a natural story teller and if someone says you did great with exposition or this or that, I guess it was instinctual because I still don't know what they mean.

My strength is easily my dialogue -at least after my first year or two of writing-I don't use a lot of narration. I won't spend 1000 words telling you what the room or house they are in looks like or what the damn sky looked like.

My stories are told through my characters thoughts, but also a lot of dialogue, they tell you the story by talking to other people and revealing their actions and personas that way.

I let the talking do the talking.

I only say this because I think people get too caught up in the technicals in both writing and critiquing. Just let it rip and let the story tell itself.

No one here is an award winning author. A blue W here is not award winning, these contests are meaningless and just in case anyone here isn't familiar with me I have 7 contest wins so that comment isn't 'jealousy' its fact.

This is an amateur porn writing site, Doesn't mean you can't want to put out good stories and improve, but it does mean you should be having fun and people shouldn't be acting like English teachers and pro writers.

Keep the anal in the anal category people.
 
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Read between the lines. Lovecraft and Kindofhere are saying the same thing I am: flawed dialogue that is trying to carry a story where the plot isn't moving. The only difference is that they think it's more acceptable to attack a person or toot their own horns instead of constructively criticising the story.

There are no writing police. No one is going to arrest you for telling and not showing or refusing to shoot Chekhov's gun before the third chapter, but you knew there was something wrong. Your instincts were right, and there are lessons to be learned by listening to those instincts.

It's too late to fix this story, but use it make the next one better.
 
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Read between the lines. Lovecraft and Kindofhere are saying the same thing I am: flawed dialogue that is trying to carry a story where the plot isn't moving. The only difference is that they think it's more acceptable to attack a person or toot their own horns instead of constructively criticising the story.

There are no writing police. No one is going to arrest you for telling and not showing or refusing to shoot Chekhov's gun before the third chapter, but you knew there was something wrong. Your instincts were right, and there are lessons to be learned by listening to those instincts.

It's too late to fix this story, but use it make the next one better.

This is all good feedback, and I very much appreciate that you've taken the time to read it and comment back.

Thing is, rightly or wrongly, I don't apply the general rules of good writing to writing erotica. Reason being, erotic stories on (this site at least) are a truncated, short form of writing, where building characters and 'showing' and not telling is an investment that only a very small handful of readers seems to appreciate.

So, I aim to write something relatable enough and interesting enough to satisfy readers who enjoy my particular brand of sexual weirdness - and I'm still figuring out the right mix of elements to make something work in this context.

A lot of what I write is well outside my comfort zone as a writer and it probably shows. Just fucking - all good. Bring in relationships and intimacy, and I struggle to craft that in a way that's anything close to realistic.

Someone described this story as feeling like music 'out of time', and I agree, it does feel stilted and awkward. The cadence and the flow just doesn't work, and no matter how I reworked it, I couldn't force it to feel natural. But I'd set myself a challenge, and I had to try. And now I know. This is not my forte!

Thanks all. Back to the drawing board!

- J.
 
Read between the lines. Lovecraft and Kindofhere are saying the same thing I am: flawed dialogue that is trying to carry a story where the plot isn't moving. The only difference is that they think it's more acceptable to attack a person or toot their own horns instead of constructively criticising the story.

There are no writing police. No one is going to arrest you for telling and not showing or refusing to shoot Chekhov's gun before the third chapter, but you knew there was something wrong. Your instincts were right, and there are lessons to be learned by listening to those instincts.

It's too late to fix this story, but use it make the next one better.

I am un-apologetically dickish. I really think spending years reading SRplt71 rail away about vigilante criticism has driven his point home. I get tired of pretentious advice about writing style etc coming from people who are all writing on the same free platform-including me-and it makes me roll my eyes.

This is a porn site. Yes, there are longer more in depth stories here and there are very talented writers here. But its still predominantly a stroke site and people take it way too seriously.

In the case of the OP, this is someone who is a mainstream writer and is having fun with this and in a sense dumbing down a bit because fact is, porn readers have lower standards then mainstream readers. get them hard or wet and they're happy.

But this has been an insightful thread in the sense that this forum really isn't for me anymore.

Not sure if I should blame Pilot or thank him....think I'll thank him. Takes a lot of me to change my perceptions on things.
 
Big Butthurt does not pay me commissions. I have never given advice that I wouldn't have wanted to hear, even if it's tough. Especially if it's tough.

Whether or not anyone takes my advice does not affect my desire to help.
 
Big Butthurt does not pay me commissions. I have never given advice that I wouldn't have wanted to hear, even if it's tough. Especially if it's tough.

Whether or not anyone takes my advice does not affect my desire to help.

"Big Butthurt does not pay me commissions." :D
 
Big Butthurt does not pay me commissions. I have never given advice that I wouldn't have wanted to hear, even if it's tough. Especially if it's tough.

Whether or not anyone takes my advice does not affect my desire to help.

Even when MD doesn't necessarily go "click" with what a writer is trying to do, her commentary is deep, intelligent, heartfelt, and absolutely worth having.

I placed a long commentary of hers into my Comments for Floating World Part 1, where she reminded me of the importance of plot and story flow. I pointed out that the whole esesence of that story was the opposite thing, that it was all dreamlike and mood; plot didn't matter. My characters, Adam and Amanda, did, I think, seduce her in a way, as they seduced each other; which pleased me immensely. Despite herself, she went 'click' with my characters, even if she wanted them to do more. Too much walking about :).

And apposite to this thread, as it is the same Adam that Jason has now written, with his gift of two Valentines. Those close to our joint world will see that this story is written off the back of our collaborative effort, Floating World Part 4, where Jesse first meets Adam. That was an 'equal writing' collaboration, where we each wrote, pretty much, equal share; whereas Valentines is mostly Jason (my contribution here is limited to, "no Adam wouldn't do/say that" and some sentences. And his music - I take credit for that).

Perhaps the whole joint weave of these worlds (especially Jesse's world, which is spread over a dozen or more Clearwater stories prior to this) has burdened this piece with too much baggage, too much sub-text, too many layers, and perhaps it should have stayed behind the scenes (I don't know).

But the agony of the writer, "to get the woman right", is a story of its own.
 
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