The seed from which your story grew

[Emilymcplugger]

So, I have told this story MANY MANY times (to be said like Commandant Lesard) but I will do again anyway.

As a long- time reader I never expected to write anything on this website. That was for erotic authors to do, and knowing how good some of my favourites were the chances of me writing something decent was between slim and none.

Anyway I started reading Spector_Dugan’s LIKE THE DEVIL WITH A DEAL, and I just felt this odd connection to the characters, I couldn’t explain why? As the story progressed I became increasingly concerned for them, and by the time the inevitable bad ending came round I was gutted… so gutted I couldn’t leave it like that.

In 48 hours I had crafted the idea for a sequel to the story that took every straggly end and question from the first story and attempted to weave it into a satisfying conclusion. I got in touch with the original author who, not having any future plans for these characters was happy to let me do my thing with them, which I did.

2 months and 100,00 words later and I’d finished it, the five-parter ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE. It was arguably the only light-bulb above the head moment but I’m glad I took the plunge in getting it down as I added this experience to my list of firsts that year.

 

[Duleigh]

I’m glad I took the plunge in getting it down as I added this experience to my list of firsts that year.

Been there, done that. And when I sat down and totaled up the words I threw at our readers in this past 11 months I never thought I would be able to do something like that.

I'm tempted to write an essay on the Attack of the Plot Bunnies I've been fending off for the past year but I probably won't. That's bragging and I'm too good for that. (yes, that was a joke) But it's also Troll Food, and I ain't goin' there.

 

[ThatNewGuy]

I've really enjoyed reading all these descriptions of how stories were born. The only downside is that I now have a bunch of new stories that I want to read and no idea how I'm going to make the time.

Hey, the Godzilla explanation

Off topic, but I've been a big Godzilla fan since I was a wee lad (Shōwa era Godzilla, of course). I still have some old Godzilla movies that my Dad recorded on VHS (look it up, kids) right from the TV.

- Thinking about how we carry around little simulacra of our loved ones in our heads - the thing that tells me "Jane would love this book, I should tell her about it" - and about how those simulacra can diverge from the people they're modelled on, and about how part of grief is the conversations that one has with those simulacra after their originals are gone. (Loss Function, also influenced by one of the earlier AI-writing threads here.)

I love this concept. It's very much in line with my own experience with grief. I definitely carry simulacra of loved ones in my head and converse with them, sometimes at truly random and bizarre times. I agree also that often it's not just one seed from which a story grows. I can think of a few examples from my own stories in which some external catalyst caused two or more ideas that had been floating around in my head to coalesce into something new.

Cafes. Those ephemeral relationships one has with the counter staff of the city or suburban cafe one goes to regularly each morning in the city for a year, four seasons; or every third day on the way back home from somewhere down the hill. Or the people you see on the regular commute, or waiting in line for their coffee,

Makes perfect sense. Those fleeting glimpses into others' lives are fertile ground for imagining what someone is really like or what might be going on in their lives.

”Mel’s Universe” (2/3 of my posted stories) grew out of a passing and resolutely non-sexual encounter in Guadalajara, Mexico, a long time ago, with a tall brunette and her shorter blonde friend. Her name wasn’t Mel (Melanie) and only the appearances of Mel and Shelly came from that seed. That merged with a long-ago dream that involved radio-controlled planes. No, really.

This made me chuckle. I love the combination of a chance encounter in Mexico with a dream about radio-controlled planes. I'll have to check out this story, too. If I recall correctly, Longhorn__07's story "Flyover Country" kicks off with an interesting scene involving a radio-controlled plane.

titled A Serendipitous Liaison, which received very low page views but good scores. I learned one very important lesson from that story - don't use fancy words in the title. Readers trip over each other to get away from stories with a fancy word in the title.

Ha! Sorry to hear it scared them off. I think it's a fun title! But it makes me think maybe I should scrap my upcoming story set in Wales: "A Liaison in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll".

I was reading a non-fiction account of a shipping accident with vivid first-person descriptions of the horror of that incident. As I was reading it, I felt a strong urge to write a shipwreck into a story.

Sometimes a real-life story like that pulls you in and really gets your mind going. The seed for my story "Art of Deception" was planted when I was driving home from work and heard an NPR story about a forgery saga that brought down the Knoedler Gallery. I've always been fascinated by forgery. I'm also a sucker for Holmes and Moriarty-style confrontations, where two geniuses match wits in a dramatic final showdown. So what would a showdown between the world's greatest art forger and the world's most brilliant forensic art detective look like? I had a lot of fun finding out.

Excellent topic. I call it "Anatomy of a Story".

That's kind of how I think about it too. In fact, I almost titled this thread "Anatomy of a Story."

Thanks to all who have shared a bit about the story behind their story.

 

[Duleigh]

"A Liaison in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll".

I want to use that so much now!!!

 

[Phantom300]

Most of mine are just random thoughts and "What ifs" that run through my perverted mind.

One is based on an accidental encounter late at night, which led me to "What if" and a story nugget was born.

 

[YDB95]

Very few of my stories were inspired by a single real-life moment. One of the few that were is A Hairy Ride Down. The first several paragraphs are just about exactly what really happened: I was at an aqua-aerobics class, and there was a woman there with a giant bush who spent the whole class fighting a losing battle to hide it. What happens next in the story is, of course, what I wish had happened in real life after class!

 

[RetroFan]

The initial inspiration for my most successful story 'The Lost Hours With Annabelle' came from an unlikely source, a line towards the end of the Cowsills late 1960s hit song 'The Flower Girl' (aka The Rain, the Park and the Other Things) which goes 'Was she reality, or just a dream to me?' While ''it was all just a dream' is a very bad trope in fiction, I got to thinking, what if two people experience lost time with no idea what they did in the hours they cannot account for?

So in this story, 18-year-old narrator Jim takes Annabelle - the tall and attractive 18-year-old daughter of his family's house guests - for a picnic on Melbourne's Yarra River one Saturday in 1962, where they hire a row boat. Mid-morning, with the weather bright and sunny Jim begins to drift off for a few seconds, but when he awakens it is now late in the afternoon, the weather has turned wet, windy and cold, and Annabelle has likewise lost about six hours with no recollection of this lost time. Neither has the slightest clue as to what had happened, and a few days later Annabelle returns to Adelaide with her family. Jim and Annabelle write to each other a few times, but lose contact, and 57 years go by, by which time the now elderly Jim is married and a father and grandfather, and still nothing to account for that strange day years earlier.

Jim then attends an agricultural show with his family, where he goes in a stage hypnosis show and has an odd reaction, seeing and hearing things that remind him of that day in 1962. Later that night, Jim experiences a dream that is like no other dream he has ever had before, very detailed which fills in the intimate details of how he and Annabelle spent the lost hours. Feeling odd after awakening, Jim by chance the next day finds a South Australian newspaper, and sees an obituary for the long lost Annabelle, who died from Parkinson's Disease the same day he was hypnotized and had the strange dream.

But after attending Annabelle's funeral and speaking to her younger brother, Jim is still none the wiser. Did he and Annabelle simply fall asleep when they were younger and sleep for six hours? Did the hypnosis have a strange reaction on him? Was the intimate and detailed dream of that day just a dream of what they did, and the events of the present day just a series of coincidences? Or was their experience something supernatural, and when Annabelle died what actually happened came to Jim in a dream? So Jim ended up not knowing if Annabelle and he were intimate in reality, or whether the dream was just a dream.

 

[PennameWombat]

This made me chuckle. I love the combination of a chance encounter in Mexico with a dream about radio-controlled planes. I'll have to check out this story, too. If I recall correctly, Longhorn__07's story "Flyover Country" kicks off with an interesting scene involving a radio-controlled plane.

The opening story in the main thread is Mel’s Phone Call. Although, that, technically, isn’t the first one chronologically in the Universe. See my author biography for that. I publish stories outside of the main thread that jump around the timeline in the Universe.

But, despite the dream, there are no actual radio controlled planes in the stories that’ve appeared so far. They haven’t shown up as yet. The dream also included nanobots, and they have appeared in a number of the stories.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

The initial inspiration for my most successful story 'The Lost Hours With Annabelle' came from an unlikely source, a line towards the end of the Cowsills late 1960s hit song 'The Flower Girl' (aka The Rain, the Park and the Other Things) which goes 'Was she reality, or just a dream to me?' While ''it was all just a dream' is a very bad trope in fiction, I got to thinking, what if two people experience lost time with no idea what they did in the hours they cannot account for?

So in this story, 18-year-old narrator Jim takes Annabelle - the tall and attractive 18-year-old daughter of his family's house guests - for a picnic on Melbourne's Yarra River one Saturday in 1962, where they hire a row boat. Mid-morning, with the weather bright and sunny Jim begins to drift off for a few seconds, but when he awakens it is now late in the afternoon, the weather has turned wet, windy and cold, and Annabelle has likewise lost about six hours with no recollection of this lost time. Neither has the slightest clue as to what had happened, and a few days later Annabelle returns to Adelaide with her family. Jim and Annabelle write to each other a few times, but lose contact, and 57 years go by, by which time the now elderly Jim is married and a father and grandfather, and still nothing to account for that strange day years earlier.

Jim then attends an agricultural show with his family, where he goes in a stage hypnosis show and has an odd reaction, seeing and hearing things that remind him of that day in 1962. Later that night, Jim experiences a dream that is like no other dream he has ever had before, very detailed which fills in the intimate details of how he and Annabelle spent the lost hours. Feeling odd after awakening, Jim by chance the next day finds a South Australian newspaper, and sees an obituary for the long lost Annabelle, who died from Parkinson's Disease the same day he was hypnotized and had the strange dream.

But after attending Annabelle's funeral and speaking to her younger brother, Jim is still none the wiser. Did he and Annabelle simply fall asleep when they were younger and sleep for six hours? Did the hypnosis have a strange reaction on him? Was the intimate and detailed dream of that day just a dream of what they did, and the events of the present day just a series of coincidences? Or was their experience something supernatural, and when Annabelle died what actually happened came to Jim in a dream? So Jim ended up not knowing if Annabelle and he were intimate in reality, or whether the dream was just a dream.

Yeah “it was all a dream” is shit.

This does not sound like “shit”, so well done for taking a trope and managing to re-use it successfully. Two of my favourite films do this, HOT FUZZ and GALAXY QUEST, which simultaneously rip into the genres that the films fall into before becoming a homage to all the tropes and brilliantly weaving them into the narrative.

 

[Omenainen]

I’m a pantser, so a lot of my stories have grown out of some small random thing. For example Class Reunion: the seed was the idea of this man sitting alone in an empty lobby bar, and I went huh, who is he, why is he alone, who is he waiting for? So I wrote the story to find out, and 20k words later I know who he is and what happened to him.

 

[Bodington]

For Literotica I write almost exclusively in the novels and novellas category, and each of my novels contain at least 100K words. Two of my longest novels are titled "Mothers and Daughters" consisting of around 430K words and the other titled "Vivian Laaning" has between 350K to 400K words. Despite the length of each of these novels they were both inspired by one simple notion or idea to get me started.

For "Mothers and Daughters" I was intrigued enough to consider writing a story about a teenage girl getting pregnant while only thirteen years of age. Eschewing getting an abortion she decides to give birth and raise the child on her own instead of giving it up for adoption. I would have loved to have described her seduction by a suave senior high school football player, but of course with Literotica's prohibition against describing underage sex I was precluded from doing so. The main focus of my idea is that my character would most likely be heavily pressured by her parents and by her seducer to get an abortion especially considering that she hadn't even started high school when she got pregnant. I resolved the conflict by having her living in a small town in Mississippi and her seducer was wealthy enough to offer her $5,000 to get an abortion plus a bus ticket to Chicago to obtain an abortion there. Of course she has no intention of getting an abortion and luckily she befriends her fellow passenger, an older black lady, who invites our heroine to stay at her place while in Chicago. And my story goes on from there.

In the case of "Vivian Laaning" I was inspired by Thomas Hardy's novel, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles". In that novel there is a scene described where the seducer of the heroine gazes upon her as she was milking a cow. Rather than pressing her forehead against the flank of the cow as was the normal custom of milkers, Tess rested her entire side of her face against the cow and was presumably daydreaming while engaged in her chore. The sight was so enthralling to the seducer that it was the catalyst for him to force her into having sexual intimacies.

Bear in mind that this novel was published in 1891/1892 right in the heart of the Victorian era of modesty and prudery. Consequently, this novel is devoid of the kind of graphic descriptions contained in today's erotic literature. And yet this has been to my mind one of the most erotic thought-provoking scenes I've ever had the pleasure of reading. So this was my idea to replicate the scene aided greatly by the freedom of describing the action in stark graphic terms.

Since Wisconsin is the state in the United States most renowned for its dairy farm industry, I had the setting for my novel. Since nowadays because of its efficiency, cows are generally milked by machines rather than by hand. So, I had to come up with a plausible reason for my heroine to be seen milking a cow the old-fashioned way. I came up with the idea that there were four recalcitrant cows on the farm who refused to be milked by a machine. So my heroine's father ordered her to milk those cows by hand. Having resolved the issue in that manner, I was off to the races in concocting a full-fledged plot.

 

[Reshbod]

For me, my stories tend to start out with a seed such as a scenario, a line of dialog or a real event that happened to me. Occasionally I will start with such an idea and by the end of the story it has been completely abandoned.

 

[stevesthename]

Simple lust in my case

One of our friends has a 20-something daughter who I find seriously attractive. She's that slender but athletic build, long limbs, long hair and a hippy vibe.

Eden Takes Charge is basically my (let's be honest here) male fantasy about this smoking hot girl.

 

[PandemicReader8]

Very few of my stories were inspired by a single real-life moment.

Pretty much this.

Everything I write is a conglomeration of bits and snippets and half- thoughts that marinate in possibility in the back of my head until a chunky bit catches my attention.

I don't know if I've ever had a Eureka moment where an idea sprang fully formed and functional into my consciousness.

The one story I've posted here thus far was - I think - born of stories I read over the years that felt "half done"; good ideas reduced to a sex scene with a half a prologue.

Don't get me wrong, there is a place for spank fuel!

But the output of that initial inspiration came together around de Sade's "Philosiphy of Bedroom " - had to gut much of the linkage because it was deemed advertising- and includes folks I know presented in pastiche and kernels of experiences I've had over the decades.

 

[ColinPiper]

Simple lust in my case

One of our friends has a 20-something daughter who I find seriously attractive. She's that slender but athletic build, long limbs, long hair and a hippy vibe.

Eden Takes Charge is basically my (let's be honest here) male fantasy about this smoking hot girl.

Ah, nice one Steve. Can definitely relate to wish fulfillment fantasy being the inspiration for a lot of characters and content in my stories.

 

[SamScribble]

Many of my stories start with the first sentence or paragraph.

As McGuire climbed through the open window, into the empty house, he suddenly became aware that the house wasn't empty after all. There was a woman. Wearing a bowler hat. But otherwise naked. Sitting in a chair on the other side of the room. Watching him.​

And then, of course, I want to know who McGuire is. And why he is climbing through the window. And who the woman is. And why she is naked. But, mainly, I want to know what happens next. And so I have to keep writing in order to find the answers.

Simple really.

 

[Grendelpuppy]

My story https://literotica.com/s/caribean-beach-encounter

was inspired by a pictorial in PENTHOUSE of Avril Lund. She was the first PENTHOUSE model to go all in with full frontal nudity, thus winning "The Pubic Wars." Google her to see an example of what real women should really look like.

There are a couple of photos of Avril sitting on a beach with legs spread as the surf surges between her thighs. I always thought that these images were extremely suggestive and profoundly provocative. I imagined that the surf was either washing semen from her vagina or that the waves were actually semen inseminating her. It was very reminiscent of that famous scene in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.. I wrote the story as a nonconsent just to evade the BTB Trolls at loving wives.

 

[Trionyx]

Many of my stories start with the first sentence or paragraph.

Funny, all of my stories start with the first sentence or paragraph.

 

[Duleigh]

In the book Equal Rites by Sir Terry Pratchett (Should I call him that? He wasn't a Sir when he wrote Equal Rites, I need a BritRuling on that) the senior witch on the discworld heard that the blacksmith Gordo Smith had a dying wizard visit and the wizard gave his staff to Gordo's newly born daughter which by tradition made her a wizard. The senior witch Granny Weatherwax arrived and tried to convince Gordo to get rid of the staff. They were discussing what was going to happen with his daughter:

“Now you listen to me, Gordo Smith!” she said. “Female wizards aren't right either! It's the wrong kind of magic for women, is wizard magic, it's all books and stars and jommetry. She'd never grasp it. Whoever heard of a female wizard?”

“There's witches,” said the smith uncertainly. “And enchantresses too, I've heard.”

“Witches is a different thing altogether,” snapped Granny Weatherwax. “It's magic out of the ground, not out of the sky, and men never could get the hang of it. As for enchantresses,” she added. “They're no better than they should be. You take it from me, just burn the staff, bury the body and don't let on it ever happened.”

And that was it, pterry never mentioned enchantresses again. I've read everything he published (that I can find) and it doesn't look like he's ever published that word ever again. My 2023 Geek Pride story is going to set that right

 

[SamScribble]

Funny, all of my stories start with the first sentence or paragraph.

There's one in every class, isn't there?

 

[ColinPiper]

There's one in every class, isn't there?

Actually, a lot of stories start in the wrong place. I'm probably as guilty of this as much as anyone. Helps to be aware though.

 

[KeithD]

Actually, a lot of stories start in the wrong place. I'm probably as guilty of this as much as anyone. Helps to be aware though.

What a great idea for a story opening line. "As he left the bar and walked down the cobblestone street toward the inner harbor, he realized that his story had started in the wrong place."

 

[PandemicReader8]

Actually, a lot of stories start in the wrong place. I'm probably as guilty of this as much as anyone. Helps to be aware though.

"Start where the story starts" is harder than it sounds. I've deleted a lot of good scenes because they weren't where they belonged over the years.

 

[AchtungNight]

“The Rendezvous” came about when I was part of an online Celebrity Fantasy community and I wanted to write a unique femslash story. I wanted to go big or go home with four unique yet similar characters, four artists that had little to no attention on the site, and do one of those John Hughes or Coen Bros intense dramas where people become very good friends in one day. I set it during the making of the film “The Upside of Anger”, a movie I had recently enjoyed and cast characters based on four young actresses with ongoing potential. Getting a reluctant seducer, a repressed lonely woman, an overeager emotional windstorm, and a proud swinger holding herself back to come together was not easy. I got it done and someone on AO3 recently called it “the best fanfic they’d ever read, bar none”. ;D

Story hasn’t gotten much praise on Lit but it’s here too if anyone is interested.

 

[oneagainst]

My latest one came directly from an article on the news. I read it and then just couldn't let it go. The thing wrote itself.