Write a controversial opinion

[M_K_Babalon]

Root beer tastes like cheap and shitty toothpaste.

The "best" soft-drink is Fentimans naturally-fermted ginger beer. The second best is San Pellegrino Limonata.

View attachment 2570232 View attachment 2570233

for our deprived brethren and sistren across the pond - sucks to be you

See... you lost credibility saying lemon anything taste good. Not that you were right on root beer, anyway.

 

[nice90sguy]

Not sure how controversial this is, but...

"Well-written" doesn't imply "worth reading", and vice-versa.

 

[Erozetta]

Alright, I think we can call the thread here. It cannot possibly get any more controversial than that.

Both suck.

 

[nice90sguy]

Female empowerment is a suitable topic for an erotic story.

I'm pissed-off and happy in equal measures that this is still considered controversial: Pissed off because, if it were less controversial, I'd probably have more readers. Happy, because I'm a contrarian.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Men demean themselves more at strip clubs than the women.

Its the men lining up to pay to see naked women. Throwing money at them, paying for them to grind in their lap and in some places paying for more than that. Men acting like drooling dogs with no self respect like they've never seen a pair of tits before and having to pay to do it.

Spacones in their thousand dollar suit bragging that they paid a woman to dance on their lap like its an achievement.

Then of course we get the moralists blaming the women for being there and tempting men.

Because you know, they go outside and drag them in, so let's add typical lack of male accountability to the mix.

But yeah, its like Only Fans, "Those women doing anything for money!" Well, tell me, Mr. Man, who is paying them all that money? Pretty sure its men.

Supply and demand and men are the demand and the losers will pay to go watch a woman strip because they think its makes them men.

I'd say rant over, but I've been man bashing since way the hell before the net and not going to stop.

I've been to a strip club once in my life for my longtime best friend's 40th birthday party because that's what he wanted. I looked around and was appalled at how guys act in there. Have some fucking dignity

I don't really care for strip clubs either. I've only been twice willingly, the other times were because I delivered pizza. One time I did and three of the chicks were just sitting on the stage playing cards.

 

[Robin_Starveling]

Not sure how controversial this is, but...

"Well-written" doesn't imply "worth reading", and vice-versa.

I object to the vice versa. “Worth reading” has to be “well written.”

 

[CuriousJInLA]

I don’t know if it’s controversial, but getting what you desire is rarely as satisfying as the pursuit of getting what you desire

 

[nice90sguy]

I object to the vice versa. “Worth reading” has to be “well written.”

Yay it IS controversial

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Tea is better than coffee

But plain black tea is the worst tea.

Sometimes I brew coffee with a teabag. It'd good.

 

[Robin_Starveling]

This is what sits behind my notion of "socially responsible erotica", and why I have a problem with those who say, "I can write whatever I want to, it's only fiction, it won't hurt anyone." Sure you can do that, but yes it can hurt people, so think about it for at least a second before you publish. Words have power, and some people conveniently forget that.

Here’s that politruk mode again. There are descriptions, tags, and often authors’ notes to warn readers about potentially charged content. If someone chooses to read anyway, that’s on them. If you’re after pure escapism and feel-good tales and shun any bit of realism, there are tags for that too.

As I see it, effective writing should embrace the full spectrum of human experience, and hurt is part of that. If a character happens to be racist or abusive, putting tape over their mouth and hands just so no one gets hurt is nothing short of outrageous.

 

[Omenainen]

I'm pissed-off and happy in equal measures that this is still considered controversial: Pissed off because, if it were less controversial, I'd probably have more readers. Happy, because I'm a contrarian.

You’re welcome to write a Pink Orchid, then.

 

[nice90sguy]

You’re welcome to write a Pink Orchid, then.

Nah, that's for chicks

 

[Omenainen]

Nah, that's for chicks

No, it isn’t. <- I do hope that by now, the fifth year of the event, this is no longer a controversial statement.

The only ones it isn’t for is for people writing exclusively gay male with no prominent female characters at all in their stories.

 

[StillStunned]

prominent female characters

That means women with big tits, doesn't it?

 

[Omenainen]

That means women with big tits, doesn't it?

Why don’t we have this as a reaction

Or this

Or this

 

[Omenainen]

Why don’t we have this as a reaction

Or this

Or this

Haha, the last one didn’t even show

Well, I’ll leave it to your imagination.

 

[StillStunned]

Haha, the last one didn’t even show

Well, I’ll leave it to your imagination.

And here I was thinking I'd rendered you so speechless that you were unable to express yourself even in emojis.

 

[Eisenloewe]

Using "said" as an adjective (as in, like"said [item]") in casual speech and writing drives me nuts. Save it for the lawyers, otherwise it sounds moronic.

Example?

mention something

then call it "said something" later

I'm trying to think of examples of this in casual writing. I agree, though, it's never needed, even among lawyers.

I couldn't give cites, but I feel like most of the time when I've seen this in fiction it's been as part of an intentionally facetious tone. That works for me but it'd probably feel stilted if used unironically.

Ironically, the story that I submitted for Crime & Punishment, which I pulled after it sat in limbo for weeks, used/uses this construction in its second opening paragraph ... setting the scene in a law office with a male MC who's a lawyer:

It wasn’t as if he lacked work to do, even though he had already billed a hundred hours this month and it wasn’t even the fifteenth of said month yet.

Not completely facetious. Maybe a little. But it set the foundation that the POV character is a lawyer. That said, I can't even completely say myself if I'd have written it differently ("the month" instead of "said month") had said MC been some other profession than a lawyer, consultant, MBA, or other profession where the use of "said" is common.

 

[Omenainen]

And here I was thinking I'd rendered you so speechless that you were unable to express yourself even in emojis.

You could say I'm still... stunned...

 

[StillStunned]

You could say I'm still... stunned...

 

[Eisenloewe]

Okay, I have a controversial opinion that I'll share... When people here -- including people that I respect and like very much -- say things like "you don't owe readers anything," I think they're wrong.

I think that by choosing to publish stories to a public channel, I'm entering into a sort of mutually beneficial relationship.

I'm creating something with the intention of eliciting a reaction from an audience. If that wasn't my intention, I'd just write in a locked diary or a private text file. I gain a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from knowing that a story of mine generated titillation, or emotional catharsis, or even just a pleasant little squirt of dopamine from a reader.

But that also means that I'm accepting ownership for what I write, and for what reactions it creates. In the same way that it feels good to make someone happy, it feels bad to make someone unhappy.

That doesn't mean that I or anyone else should only write pandering stories that the largest majority of readers want, or that I should avoid topics or tones for fear of upsetting someone. But it does mean that I take on responsibility for what happens, for good or bad.

Writing to provoke a reaction without accepting responsibility is literally the definition of a troll.

"Death of the author" is a one-way street. It means that we can't control how an audience perceives our work, it doesn't absolve us of what we create.

You've made the biggest and most important controversial point anybody in this thread has made, considering this is a writing forum. There are a million things one could say about this.

I don't exactly agree that I "owe" readers anything. But I respect that my readers don't owe me anything more than what I owe them. For instance, I don't think it's wrong of me if I write something that happens to offend some readers. But if it does, they're just as entitled to tell me how much I suck as I am to write the story in the first place. I'm not entitled to expect anything.

This is why I believe it makes sense for writers to make some effort to master basic conventions of grammar and spelling and punctuation: show respect for the people you're trying to communicate with. Publication of a story is an act of communication with others. It's not just sounding off to the world.

And if you're going to publish stories with controversial or painful content, OK, there may be a good reason for it, but brace yourself for the response and don't be surprised at it.

There's also the aspect that dark words can sometimes help as much as they can hurt. Sometimes it's comforting to feel like your not alone in the world while in a dark headspace.

I've had comments from people thanking me for understanding how to bring a little light into the dark to help them see another way to continue forward, that's fucking powerful and something I won't give up because such stories have helped me before as well.

I write nice things and I write dark things. It all depends on how I'm doing at the time and I've had people respond to pretty light stories with both admiration of the sweetness and bitterness about how unrealistic such love would be.

How a reader feels when reading our work isn't something we can control and isn't something we are responsible for, unless the response is intended. If I want someone to walk away from a story ugly crying, they will. But happiness is a double edged sword because some people are incapable of accepting it since they either haven't felt it or simply don't want to feel it. We can't help it when someone like that comes across our words.

I should probably also clarify that (and I can only speak for myself here) when I say I can be purposeful, and I can be intentional, and I can control reader reactions, I believe that this is true for somewhere between 90 and 99% of my readers. Obviously, not every story is as successful as every other story because I'm always trying something new, but I don't feel that "3% of my audience walking away with the wrong impression" is my responsibility. At those kind of numbers, they are the exception that proves the rule. 10% is, to my mind, the upper limit for being able to claim the same.

I don't have specific numbers to back this up, just a general sense of how my stories perform over time (views and scores) plus the general vibe of comments and how they align with my intentions (which are usually fixed before I start writing).

Obviously, there's a ton of bias there. Potentially load bearing bias. However, I think that what I write is different enough from the average Lit story that my success must at least partially stem from how I do what I do.

I make it a point to have keywords in my short descriptions, and I have also never published a story with fewer than ten tags, in part to give as much warning to the audience as possible as to what they're in for. I consider this particularly important because I frequently write stories that would fit in multiple categories, so for example when I posted a story with heavy BDSM and sci-fi/fantasy elements, I put it in the BDSM category and led the short description with "Sci-fi" in part just to warn away readers who aren't into SF&F before they wasted any precious time reading a story posted outside the SF&F category that was going to hit them with a lot of elements from that genre. I have an unpublished story with strong religious and patriarchal elements--I would tag those. I've never done a story with character death, but I would immediately tag that.

And any story I encounter with zero tags will generally make me immediately close the tab, story unread.

But there are some people who will ignore every warning label on a product and then still sue the manufacturer. I can't help it if I manufacture a screwdriver and other people decide it needs to double as a rectal thermometer.

 

[Erozetta]

I make it a point to have keywords in my short descriptions, and I have also never published a story with fewer than ten tags, in part to give as much warning to the audience as possible as to what they're in for. I consider this particularly important because I frequently write stories that would fit in multiple categories, so for example when I posted a story with heavy BDSM and sci-fi/fantasy elements, I put it in the BDSM category and led the short description with "Sci-fi" in part just to warn away readers who aren't into SF&F before they wasted any precious time reading a story posted outside the SF&F category that was going to hit them with a lot of elements from that genre. I have an unpublished story with strong religious and patriarchal elements--I would tag those. I've never done a story with character death, but I would immediately tag that.

And any story I encounter with zero tags will generally make me immediately close the tab, story unread.

But there are some people who will ignore every warning label on a product and then still sue the manufacturer. I can't help it if I manufacture a screwdriver and other people decide it needs to double as a rectal thermometer.

That's what happens when you call something a screwdriver and give it a flared base.

But, yeah, I agree with you. Although sometimes I simply make up tags to hit the 10 limit, lol.

 

[SimonDoom]

The best power tool is the chain saw.

The stuff you can do with chain saws is just awesome.

Wait, that came out a little weird.

 

[Actingup]

Well, a whole bunch of assumed males got their knickers in a knot the first year of the event, so to save their delicate feelings I’ve omitted “female empowerment” from the event announcement in later years. Things have been more peaceful since.

Well, they can fuck off. It’s a suitable topic, particularly noting that so many stories (and porn storylines, or so I’ve heard) are about female disempowerment.

 

[TheLobster]

That means women with big tits, doesn't it?

Come on, let's not be so crass and reductive. You of all people should know it's not just about the boobs because butts matter, too!