Short story "The Great Collaboration"

Limnophile

99 story Noob
Joined
Jun 22, 2021
Posts
89
The admin who rejected the story below said it should be a forum discussion instead, so here you go.
-----
This is why few sex stories have everything you want and there are only a handful of great collaborations:

My laptop made a ‘ding’ as I received a message from ‘Authorwench’. She was my favorite writer, other than myself. “Hi again, Limnophile. I enjoyed your latest story quite a bit. We should collaborate. I think we could do something truly great together!”

I smiled and excitedly replied, “I’d love to write something with you! What kind of story should it be?”

I went to get a snack and returned to see, “Mind control, incest, and BDSM are very popular these days; and many readers have other fetishes. There are a lot of LGBTQ+ people too. I think we should include everything we can, so lots of readers will enjoy it.”

I responded, “That makes sense. To include most of the common fetishes we’ll need at least 18 or 20 characters. What format and point of view do you think we should we use?”

“Multiple POV is getting more popular these days. I think we should tell at least five chapters from each character’s viewpoint. A lot of readers complain if chapters are short, too. I think we should do at least 20 pages per chapter.”

“Hmmm ... if we do a hundred chapters with twenty pages each, that’s two thousand pages. With my family and job, I only have time to write or edit two or three pages a day. If you include editing time, that will take us over five years. Do you want to publish chapters once we finish them, or write three or five chapters in advance so we have time to catch continuity errors and plot holes?”

Authorwench answered, “It’s better to be safe than sorry. How about we publish once the whole story is complete and we’ve gone over it several times to make sure there are no mistakes?”

I sighed and replied, “That makes sense, but I must admit I’m a bit of a ‘score whore’. I like getting feedback on my writing. Waiting five years for a ‘good story’ or ‘more please’ would be difficult for me. Another concern is having a backstory and family for each character. Assuming an average family size of five people, we’ll need to create about a hundred characters instead of just the 20 or so main ones.”

“Well, there are other problems with including families too. All the characters need to be plausible with some depth, not one-dimensional. We should write at least five pages about each of them. I know you really enjoy incest and smoking fetish, but I’m not into that. I hope you don’t mind if I include some pee and scat scenes?”

I shrugged and wrote, “You like potty play a lot, but it kind of grosses me out. How about we avoid bathroom play, smoking, and incest, so we’ll both enjoy writing it?”

“I guess. There’s also the big worry about law enforcement and website editors. They’re very alert and suspicious if there’s even a tiny chance something might be underage content. We better be very careful about ages. I don’t want to risk including any characters under 21.”

I typed back, “Absolutely! I had a story rejected for ‘underage content’ just because a 30-year-old character mentioned playing football back when he was in high school! Another one was kicked back because a character saw a size 16 dress! They’re ridiculously touchy these days, so we need to be very careful.”

“I want to be sure our story will be published and without us getting in trouble. The problem is, if the youngest offspring are 21 the main character parents need to be at least 43, since we can’t imply they had sex before they were 21 either. I don’t know how we’re going to write exciting scenes if everyone involved is mid-forties and older.”

“There’s also the issue with fetish-shaming and some readers being overly ‘squicky’. Some homophobic men leave nasty comments if they see a bisexual male or gay scene. Many others quit reading if there’s toilet play, smoking, pain, drugs, bondage, or anything non-consensual. Half of them don’t look at the story tags and get upset when they’re surprised by something they don’t like. Some don’t read cautions at the beginning of stories, even if you type them in ALL CAPS!”

I let out a big sigh and responded, “So we need to figure out how to include as many fetishes as possible without offending anybody; keep track of about a hundred characters; write an extra thousand pages to make them believable; make the story hot and exciting with characters in their forties and fifties; and nobody will see it and thank us for over five years? I ... I don’t know if I want to do all that.”

Her reply surprised me a little. “You’re right. That’s way too much work if we’re not getting paid for it. I guess I’ll just have a glass of wine and watch some porn before bed.”

“Excellent plan. I think I'll do the same. Good night.”
 
That's the kind of planning that kills a story, and you didn't have one to begin with. For a collaboration to work, the collaborators must all be inspired and have the time to work on it. Plus, as soon as you go down the "We only write stuff that we all like" route, you're wasting the major benefit of the collaboration...
 
That's the kind of planning that kills a story, and you didn't have one to begin with. For a collaboration to work, the collaborators must all be inspired and have the time to work on it. Plus, as soon as you go down the "We only write stuff that we all like" route, you're wasting the major benefit of the collaboration...
I strongly agree, Alinax! I was mostly trying to point out the difficulties involved in writing a long story, or worse yet a collaboration.

Things have been quite frustrating for me lately. I had a collab lined up with another author I liked. We brainstormed up a dozen characters and at least 20 plot ideas. The day we finally agreed on which main plot and subplots to use and which characters, I had a family emergency and had to stop writing for a while. The other writer got angry, sent me a nasty message, and started the project without me.

When I returned, I got a month of my work deleted and my hand metaphorically slapped because I tried to publish something that might have been slightly over the line. According to a certain admin on another site, it's illegal kiddie porn if a 17-year-old tells a friend the same age an older woman is pretty.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant.
 
I've been on the other end of that, impatiently writing a story while my collaborator tried to keep up. I could tell it was frustrating for them, but I couldn't leave the story alone.

Ultimately, though, you need to understand that these things happen. Sending nasty messages is just a sure way to end the collaboration for good.
 
I've done story collaborations, and it's kind of fun, but I don't think great literature ever comes of it. I think the quality of the overall work is dragged down to the level of the weakest collaborators. Fundamentally, IMHO, writing is best done as a solitary activity.
 
Back
Top