What I Wrote and Why: Ben's Big Mistake

StillStunned

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This was a story that I never thought I'd write. It came about because of this thread: How annoying is first-person present tense? My first reply in that thread was this:
It annoys me. Not the first person, that's fine. Present tense is what puts me off, but I'm struggling to say why.

Maybe it's as simple as not being what I'm used to. Maybe it's more subtle: first person present tense seems to prioritise the narrator over the reader. As the reader, I don't feel like the narrator is sharing with me, I feel like I'm intruding on the narrator's thoughts.
But a few days later I added this:
This discussion has made me wonder whether I can do a first-person-present story. So far I'm a little over 1000 words into a university professor blackmailing a student for sex.
And this:
I think it works because of the sense of immediacy. Just one scene where you're in the narrator's head, when you can feel their heart pounding in their chest, where you live through the battle between lust and anxiety. And no, the narrator doesn't know [what's going to happen].

And so a story (3.9k words) came about: Ben's Big Mistake. Three months after its publication (in Non-Consent/Reluctance) it's had 18.3k views. It's at 4.15 stars from 98 ratings, with 12 hearts and 6 very positive comments. Not my highest-rated story, but outside I/T it's my most-viewed.

The premise is the one I originally came up with: a university professor decides to blackmail a student. I felt that 1P-PT suited a scenario like this: we're there in the narrator's head as events unfold. He doesn't know, we don't know. It's a shared journey of exploration.

It begins with Ben, the narrator, gearing himself up for meeting with his student:
My name's Ben, and I'm about to make a mistake. A big mistake. Perhaps the worst mistake of my life.
This somewhat formulaic opening is intended to draw the reader in. Well, the title was probably a clue. But still. I wanted the reader to identify with Ben. That feeling when you're about to do something you know you shouldn't - you know it's wrong, but on balance the possible consequences don't outweigh the desire to get what you want. That one last drink that pushes you over the edge into drunkenness. That bit of gossip you swore you wouldn't share. That red light you don't feel like stopping for.
What's worse, I know it's a mistake and I'm going to go ahead anyway. I can't stop. It's like that split second before you bite down on your cheek. You know it's about to happen, you know it's going to hurt, but there's nothing you can do to stop it.

In the version I originally wrote the student was Jenny Jones:
Blonde curls falling to her shoulders. Pouty lips. Far too much exposed skin for our quiet campus.
This poor girl was going to be blackmailed into having sex with her professor. As I was writing, however, I realised that the story needed more. If I was going to the extreme of using 1P-PT, it couldn't be simply to convey Ben's excitement at crossing a boundary.

I decided that the blackmailee had to turn the tables. Ben needed to be faced with a surprise. We needed to be there in his head as he realised that he was caught in his own trap, that there was no way out.

And so Jenny Jones became Gan Jones:
Gan Jones. She clearly gets her looks from her Thai mother. Straight black hair in a ponytail, pouty lips and boyish figure. Far too much exposed skin for our quiet campus.
There's some foreshadowing going on here. "Gan", according to the infinite wisdom of the Internet, means "forceful". And then there's her "boyish" figure...

Yes, I decided to make Gan a trans woman. Our Ben is looking forward to having his way with a hot chick, only to discover she has a dick.

I worried about writing this. First, I don't have any experience with trans women. I never crossed paths with one in my younger days, and for the past 25 years I've been in committed relationships. Still, I'm a fairly vanilla bloke, and at the very least I could imagine Ben's reaction. I figured this would be alright as long as I didn't write Gan as outlandish, but simply as someone who sees an opportunity and seizes it. And it's Literotica, so a general willingness to have sex is pretty much a given.

My second concern was category. I didn't want to spoil the twist by putting it in Transgender & Crossdressers. I felt it belonged in NC/R - the reluctance, when it comes to the actual sex, being on Ben's part. Still, I felt that a certain category of readers would be shocked, shocked! to read about anything other than straight man-on-woman sex. The blackmail bit would be perfectly acceptable, of course.

I actually wrote two versions of the story side by side: one with Jenny, one with Gan. I have the version with Jenny on file - it ends just before the point where, in the other version, Gan takes control. That's where I was certain that the Gan version was much more interesting to write, and much hotter to read.

In the end, to hedge my bets, I added a warning before the story:
Author's note: This story contains a twist about halfway in. If it's not your kink, just click away. If you keep reading, don't blame me for what you find.
Overall, I think most readers took this warning to heart. There were the usual 1-bombs, and the story has my second-lowest rating (after my 2P POV adventure), but overall I'm not unhappy with how it's performed.

[Continued in the next post because of character limits.]
 
On to some writerly matters...

Like I've already mentioned, the story was an experiment in putting the reader there in the moment, inside the narrator's head. We get to see what he sees, think and feel what he thinks and feels.

One reviewer of the story raised a criticism that I didn't describe the scenery. There's just Ben's office. His desk. The chair he's positioned so that he can look up Gan's skirt. A window. A bird outside, with a worm in its beak (foreshadowing, get it, get it?). This was deliberate. Or if not deliberate, it was a natural consequence of how I was writing.

Ben's caught up in the moment. He's focused on what's happening right before him. We don't see his office because he doesn't see it. It's familiar to him, so he doesn't give it a second thought. We see things around him as his attention turns to them. The chair isn't mentioned until Ben tells Gan to sit:
I've cleverly positioned the chair opposite my desk just far enough away that I can see her golden thighs above her knee-high white socks, all the way up until they disappear beneath that pleated blue skirt she likes to wear.
The desk is mentioned when Gan turns round and bends over it, tidying it up an an attempt to get out from being blackmailed. The world outside Ben's office doesn't exist until he's about to get what he wants:
And today's the perfect day. Everyone else is away on an offsite. The students have all buggered off. And the cleaners don't come round on Tuesdays.

It's just me and Gan, and my cock and her naked body...
While this might not be to everyone's taste, it serves to keep the narrative, and the reader's attention, focused on what's happening right before Ben's eyes. That was, after all, the whole point of writing 1P PT.

That same reviewer also expressed their concerns about the style: they felt there were too many hard stops, and wanted it to be more fluid.

Again, this was a deliberate choice. Ben's hyper-aware. He's living in split seconds:
My hands are on her sides, sliding up to her small breasts. I take her nipples between thumb and forefinger of each hand. She grunts. "I like your breasts," I tell her reassuringly.
(...)
She kicks off her sandals. Then her hands go round her back and she undoes a button that's holding her skirt together. A wiggle of her hips and it's off, tossed onto the floor. Her socks stay on.
When Ben gets to act, the sentences become more fluid:
In an instant I'm between her legs again, my hands running up and down her back, my lips and tongue exploring those intriguing breasts. She murmurs and rubs one hand through my hair. "Lower."

Well, I meant what I said about us both enjoying this. I've been fantasising about how she tastes, what it would feel like when she bucks her hips against my face, when she comes...

Her panties are nothing sexy. White, cotton, covering the slight curve of her mound. They're the hottest thing I can imagine just now. I take hold of the elastic at her waist and pull it down. She lifts her hips and the material peels away, revealing more brown skin, then the first hint of neatly trimmed black hair.
Then comes the big reveal, and Ben's back to the heart-pounding hyperawareness:
My heart's pounding in my chest again, but for a whole new reason now. This is unfamiliar territory for me. I've always been a staid kind of man. Respectable. Never cheated on my wife, or any of my girlfriends before her. Never done anything that could be described as kinky.

Never sucked a woman's cock.

But I don't seem to have a choice. Gan is staring at me. Waiting. I force my gaze down from her eyes, across her chest to her cock. It's pointing up now, like mine. Smaller though, slenderer.

The sex scene that follows mostly follows this choppy style. Ben's mind is flitting around - reluctance, excitement, enjoyment, worry, self-doubt. There's a lot going on in his mind. I think most people have been there, with our mind racing as we try to take in everything and all its implications. And then the random thoughts that intrude:
Only her head is in my mouth now. I wrap my lips tightly around it and give a few tugs with my hand. Her hairless scrotum -- Isn't there a sexier word? I wonder -- her scrotum is tight. I feel it against my thumb.
(...)
"Not a bad cock," she whispers, and for the first time I feel her tiny hand, cool on my blazing shaft. Then she's reaching down, below my cock, below my scrotum -- that awful word again -- and down to my crack. I feel her fingers, firm and cool, exploring down there. Her eyes are locked on mine.

This second half of the story also has some call-backs to the first half. Gan's "forceful" nature, for a start:
"Suck it!" Leaning close, she whispers into my face, "You wouldn't want anyone to know about this, would you?"
(...)
I reach for her cock again, but she slaps my hand away. "Later. Now take your shorts off."
(...)
"Please," I begin again, but she silences me with a stern look.

"On the desk," she commands. "Like I was."
There's the reference to her "boyish figure":
My hands are on Gan's thighs, clasping them just below her arse. A boyish arse, I always thought. Well, isn't that ironic? Or perhaps not, I suppose.
And comments from Gan about "a little application" and "gagging for it" that mirror lines spoken or thought earlier by Ben. And, of course, now it's Ben saying "Please" instead of Gan.

The story with Gan in control of the situation. Having been worried at the start of the story that the events will change his life ("This could be life-changing, marriage-wrecking, career-ending"), Ben is quite happy:
She sucks as hungrily as I did a moment ago. It's like she's sucking everything out of me, the old me, every last drop of inhibition.

In this instant I love her like I've never loved anyone in my life.
(...)
When she's dressed, pulling down her top tight so her hard nipples are showing through the material again, she bends down and kisses me. I kiss her back. I'm looking right into her eyes. I don't know what to say.

"I'll rewrite my thesis proposal," she murmurs, her lips almost touching mine. "That is, if you still... want me?"

It's another of those instants where time seems to stand still under the weight of the moment. "Yes," I hear myself say. "I still want you."

I think 1P-PT was the best choice for this story, and the deliberate choppiness reinforces the narrative. Reading it again, there are bits where I can sense Ben's breathlessness, I can feel his heart pounding. As a writer, I think I succeeded quite well in marrying style and narrative, and that the final result works in ways that wouldn't be possible if I'd changed either.

Let me know what you think!
 
Let me know what you think!
I think you should put a spoiler alert on this post! By the time I figured out it wanted to read this, you'd already ruined it! While talking about how you didn't want to ruin it via the categorization! Oh irony thy name is still stunned...
 
Present tense works well for these kinds of stories. Over the last few months I've found myself writing shorter stories and more of them and I've started using first person for them. It tends to work well for these one scene stories. Reading BBM (which I enjoyed) I do wonder if foreshadowing and first-person go together. To my mind, there's a bit of a clash if the narrator already knows the end but it's related in real time. Thinking on it, perhaps the reason I've used first person for so many of my stories is that a lot of them turn on a surprise for the narrator in the story. This story kind of does that, but again has both the author's note warning and the opening lines (I understand why you'd want to cover yourself here though given the twist).
 
I did A Doctorā€™s Tale in first person present tense. It wasnā€™t annoying in retrospect, just different. I told one fan I might do it again if I ever write another story from the same characterā€™s perspective. Not sure if Iā€™ll do that. Life is full of challenges and my stories are not always easy to get out of my head.
 
I think you should put a spoiler alert on this post! By the time I figured out it wanted to read this, you'd already ruined it! While talking about how you didn't want to ruin it via the categorization! Oh irony thy name is still stunned...
Oops. I figured the story had been up long enough, and I've talked about it here before. Sorry.
Thanks for starting this up again šŸ˜Š.
It never went away! Seriously, I hope to do one a month until the WIWAW challenge this summer.
Reading BBM (which I enjoyed) I do wonder if foreshadowing and first-person go together. To my mind, there's a bit of a clash if the narrator already knows the end but it's related in real time. Thinking on it, perhaps the reason I've used first person for so many of my stories is that a lot of them turn on a surprise for the narrator in the story. This story kind of does that, but again has both the author's note warning and the opening lines (I understand why you'd want to cover yourself here though given the twist).
I think the foreshadowing is subtle enough that you only notice it on a second read. Boyish figure, birds with a worm. The opening lines only refer to Ben's intention to blackmail his student, he doesn't know that he's going to be blackmailed in turn.

There was no way to do leave out the warning, though.
 
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