How complex are your stories?

[TheRedChamber]

Complexity is something that has often been on my mind as I've developed as a writer, even when I've not outright struggled with it. A beta-reader of mine one descrived a draft of mine as an exquisite Faberge egg of a plot, unfortunatley he also found a massive crack running down one side. Obviously, and according to the AH mantra, every story is different and every story will be best served by an appropriate level of complexity. But I thought it might be interesting to ask the AHs...

a) How complex do you think you stories are? In what ways are they complex?
b) Have you ever consciously tried to move from writing simple stories to more complex ones? Or visa versa?

To show what I mean by complex, I'll give the example of my most recent story.

It starts with the simple premise of a long term couple trying to fulfill their already agreed desire for a MFF threesome. Things get more complicated because...

Different opinions - the male MC does not like the 'unicorn' the female MC has chosen.
Backstory - the male MC knows the unicorn and has an opinion of her shaped by significant events dating back years.
Growth - the unicorn is, from the start, clealy not the same person the male MC used to know.
Options - a second potential unicorn is introduced to the story, who is more to the male MCs liking but less acceptable to the female MC. At the midpoint it is intentionally not clear if the story will end with a foursome, one of two possible threesomes, or with the MC couple going home mad with each other.
Differing Sexualities - The characters are not omnisexual and their desires for the evening don't always line up.
Secrets and Revelations - The female MC knows more about unicorn 1 than she lets on at the start and that information is revealed at several moments during the story.
Tricks - similarly, but crucially different because the reader is in on it, the male MC attmpts to trick others to get what he wants.
Imperfect Sex - the sex scene when it arrives isn't just wall-to-wall orgasms and is a novel but not completely enjoyable experince for the male MC.
Twist Ending - the story ends with a neat little bow.
Optional Kinks - the couple have a whole bunch of BDSM toys in their car that may or may not get used.

I'm happy with how this story turned out but it had a difficult birth with me completely rewriting more than 50% of the text. Beta readers often suggested losing this or that aspect of the story. I've kind.of decided that complexity is a hallmark of that particular series and that I'm going to embrace there. I am thinking carefully about how complex I make other stories.

 

[StillStunned]

I write simple stories because I'm a simple person with simple tastes. Or to put it in writer terms: I'm crap at plotting.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

'Bout as complex as an unsharpened #2 pencil.

 

[THBGato]

I think my recent story Clara and the Solar system is my most complex story. Others have their twists and turns, sure (Eve & Lucy especially, but you'd expect that over 84 thousand words), but I think on a length-complexity axis this ranks highest.

It's a simple enough plot, but it was complex to set up the twist in a believable way. I'm not going to give it away, though names all hint at it. But there's lots of complexity in terms of exploring the themes of inclusion, of identity, plus the work I do here to extend the stories of side characters from other stories I've written. Writing some of the dialogue was also quite complex.

(As an aside, it is an interesting illustration of how you can't always take an audience with you across categories. The lead character was also the pov character in an EV story (Clara and the star) published the day before. That has 11k views. Clara and the Solar system, published the next day, is in transgender and only has 2.8k views.)

Generally, I write simple plots I think, but try to make the characters and themes more complex.

 

[LisaMayTurner]

Isn't that a bit like asking the guy in the shop if his pizzas are the best in town? Why don't you just read a few and work out the answer? And I don't mean that you need to read a few pizzas.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Isn't that a bit like asking the guy in the shop if his pizzas are the best in town? Why don't you just read a few and work out the answer? And I don't mean that you need to read a few pizzas.

In mu view it'd be more like asking the pizza guy how many ingredients he thinks go on the pizza. Some places focus on combining strange and exciting ingredients and some focus on nailing the tomato and cheese experience.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Too complex for lit. I like plot. Everyone hates my plot. The comments tell me so. Even my smut heavy steamy romp story, I'm told that my one little plot twist ruined the story.

 

[Bamagan]

I guess most of my stories are complex, insofar as they tend to be long-ish with multiple POV characters with their own plotlines, many of which resolve rather slowly. But I don't tend to think of them that way. Complexity is perhaps a hard thing to judge in one's own work. It's relatively easy for me to keep everything organized in my head because I made it up and know more about my characters and their worlds than goes into the story. But what seems straightforward to me might not be for those who know only what they read and maybe some things they inferred.

 

[TheRedLantern]

My stories are super simple at this point. My most complex one is 6 scenes with 3-4 prominent characters.

They're intentionally simplified because I'm still trying to learn how to make characters & develop them, and I'm trying to learn how to write outside the speculative fiction genres where I started. My plots were typically too ambitious for what I could pull off as a writer, so I am intentionally dialing that down and restarting from small building blocks.

 

[Bazzle]

I have tried in the past to be clever with plot and arcs and twists and tend to fail!

 

[onehitwanda]

Girl who love girls who like girls who are girls who like girls when they're girl who like girls when they're girls, always will be something I tend to write.

edit: to paraphrase, there is beauty in simplicity.

 

[THBGato]

Girl who love girls who like girls who are girls who like girls when they're girl who like girls when they're girls, always will be something I tend to write.

Simple plots sure, but your characters nearly always have emotionally complex backstories.

Then there's your supernatural ones...

 

[ElectricBlue]

My most complicated story was the first long shaggy dog story I wrote, with a shape-shifting girl manifesting as a different type of bird in each chapter, somehow pursuing the narrator through a primal city. A glimmering of going backwards in time travel emerged around chapter four, and at first that seemed okay, seemed to work. But around half way through the story (although I didn't know it at the time) a complete new plot twist arrived, with two completely new characters, moving forwards in time from the late nineteenth century.

Fuck me, that got confusing. It took me another dozen chapters to figure it all out, who was who, which direction in time they were going, where the whole damn thing would end. At one point my hero meets Thomas Eddison (a deliberate misspelling) who invents the electric chair, but there's a twist - if at the moment of death the person orgasms, they're thrown half a dozen years into the future.

So the MC does it again and again, trying to catch up with his own timeline. Which is going backwards, and he ends up meeting himself. And if anyone knows my Adam Cain persona, this story's got Alexandra Cain, who might or might not be his mother. The few books I published, I chose the pen name A.A.Cain. I wonder why, haha.

Keeping up, so far?

Alexandra has several unnamed cameos in other stories, where she's the very attractive older woman sitting at a nearby table in one of my perpetual cafés, who overhears something that story's characters say, and she nods knowingly, intrigued by the spice that she's hearing.

I published as I wrote it, 23 chapters over six months (do the maths). Unbelievably, I wrote the first half while my mother was dying, shuttling back and forth between two cities, while she too, for her last month, was spiralling backwards into her own childhood, thinking I was her husband, my older sister a three year old child and me not even born yet. I figure that had something to do with it.

Sex and death, you can't beat that for a plot line.

There you go, a complex story. Keep in mind I'm a pantser, through and through, I never plot, never outline. This thing made itself up as I went along, I had no idea where it was going. In the course of it, I was able to recreate nearly every casual sexual encounter I've ever had, and several more that I've never had. Someone thought it was an exercise in erotica from the Iowa Writers Workshop, which I'd never heard of; and someone else thought it was influenced by Frances Ponge, who I'd also not heard of.

Complex? There's your challenge!

 

[onehitwanda]

Sex and death, you can't beat that for a plot line.

as @Bramblethorn loves to point out, the two together are not legal on Literotica.

 

[TheLobster]

My stories have real and imaginary components so, uh, yes, they are complex, I guess.

 

[onehitwanda]

My stories have real and imaginary components so, uh, yes, they are complex, I guess.

Oh i say.

Sigh. I wish @EmilyMiller were here for the incipient maths puns.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I like complexity even in Lit stories. It gives my brain that sorely needed fix.
But there's adjusting complexity to the length and the purpose of the story. Too much complexity can take away from the story. Sanderson's work, for example, is a cautionary tale.

 

[StillStunned]

as @Bramblethorn loves to point out, the two together are not legal on Literotica.

Well, it's taken me until middle age, but I suppose I'm finally a rebel.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Sex and death, you can't beat that for a plot line.

My readers hated it.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

as @Bramblethorn loves to point out, the two together are not legal on Literotica.

It's all in HOW.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

I grew up reading Tom Clancy, and unfortunately I got that style embedded into my DNA. I chose the series format because I wanted to be able to do a longer plot while also still feeling episodic. Kind of like Star Trek the Next Generation in the later seasons.

My big series is set in the same universe, which required some world building as it takes place over a 70 year period, with flashbacks to the 70s, 80s, 2000s and 2010s, although the main setting is the 2030s. Multiple locations, more than 60 unique characters, dozens of characters with sex scenes, and multiple plot lines all going at the same time, with a main plot mystery and a lot of twists and turns. Things that I mention in passing early foreshadow future events and the reveal of the Big Bad Guy character doesn’t even happen until the end of the second series, 600K+ words in.

So, yeah. I’m a bit too complex for my own good. But I hope for the folks who stuck with it they’ve enjoyed it. Only another ten chapters to close it out, if I’m lucky.

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

I like complexity even in Lit stories. It gives my brain that sorely needed fix.
But there's adjusting complexity to the length and the purpose of the story. Too much complexity can take away from the story. Sanderson's work, for example, is a cautionary tale.

A cautionary tale in AWESOME, lol

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Varied. Often I start with a short simple story, some of which stay simple, others get more complex. At one extreme, a 100-word dialogue exercise became a 120k-word novel, with various subplots cut out and the main one now becoming another novella. Or I have a story and then add some material to make it a Valentine's story (worked very well with about 3 extra paragraphs with Wheelchair Bound?, added an extra quarter to the story for Sex Swing Satisfaction, possibly didn't work so well but hard to say because the GM audience barely ever comment).

Currently polishing up the last chapter of Matchmaking for the Shy, where I had a lot of switching back and forth between characters/storylines, but not always enough material to justify it. So simplifying it and reducing the number of switches.

I do have a weakness for creating lots of long strands of story, knitting a few together, then shaving others off to leave a coherent story. Or publishing some of the knitted bits separately: Conference Collaboration, Anal Sex: A Scientific Approach, and Messing About on the River are really one story, published in three parts out of order. Whether I weaved together various threads and plot successfully is an exercise for the reader.

 

[ElectricBlue]

My readers hated it.

Setting aside the policy issue that you can't relate the two intimately together, there could be potential.

 

[alexandra_secret]

As far as I can tell, there are a lot of stories on this site that are merely sex scenes with a short intro and a short conclusion. These stories are not complex at all, but it seems there are people who enjoy them. It is certainly the right place to post such stories, even if it's not what I'm into.

For my own work, I don't really think in term of complexity. I try to give my MC an arc and good motivations to do what they do. I guess that justifying motivations naturally creates complexity, it can also makes the story more interesting.

I have a few stories that are a bit too complex for my skills, and I have been struggling with them for months, so it can also be a source of frustration. But I will not give up, even if it takes me way too long to finish them!