Request for feedback - The Girl or the Group?

[gorson]

Hi everyone

A first time forum poster here, writing again on this great site after a bit of a break.

If anyone's able to give any feedback on my most recent effort I'd really appreciate it - "The Girl or the Group? Ch 01", by Gorson, in Group Sex - before I put the second chapter up.

https://www.literotica.com/s/the-girl-or-the-group-ch-01

All criticism gratefully received, and will be taken in the spirit intended! One thing I'm particularly interested in hearing from experienced authors here is views on adverbs, and generally lengthy descriptions. For non-erotica, at least in my neck of the woods, there's a very strong presumption that the correct adverb count is 0, and the plaudits go to the deft, minimalist pen portrait. But for erotica, personally I like adverbs, adjectives and longer descriptions, of people and scenes. But what do you all and readers think?

Thank you and best wishes
Gorson

 

[yowser]

Overall a well-crafted tale that draws in the reader and is far better technically written than 95% of Lit entries. You are an author in command of the narrative, and the reader is never left in doubt that good things, more satisfying parts of the story, are in the offing.

But of course you asked for criticism, and most of it will be of the nit-picking variety, except for the standard iron-clad advice that can be applied to most fiction, all the way around:

It's too long. You could cut this down by a third and not only still achieve your tension and interest, but heighten those elements. Descriptions get a bit repetitive, and you are in danger when applying the adjective 'beautiful' more than once to a character.

I am perhaps in the camp of minimal use of adjectives and adverbs (a complete prohibition is excessive) but some of yours are a bit overdone and get repetitive.

The erection the 'size of Kansas' was great once, but suffered with the replays, probably one more round of it would have been sufficient.

On the other hand, your descriptions are vivid, and use metaphor perfectly, your character's sense of humor clear and deft.

A couple typos or mis-spellings (I can point them out in a separate message if you like) but again, far better than the norm.

One piece that stuck out for me was the use of British terminology and writing conventions. It is not until half way through the first part that you reveal the character's 'mixed' parentage, UK and US. If you had let on earlier, I wouldn't have been so annoyed at hearing a US military vet use Brit spellings "realised' and 'grey' earlier in the story. (I am probably over-sensitive to this, since my own stories vacillate between US and UK, and people have made the same comments to me - hard to keep the dialects separate and consistent.)

Given all this, a rousing and most promising story. I suspect the challenge in the next sections is not going overboard with the sex. If you can maintain control, resist the overblown descriptions and minimise the exaggerated gymnastics of your orgy-to-be, concentrating on your character's feelings and enjoyments without doing the whole fourth of July fireworks bit, you will have a winner.

Good luck.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

You’re probably hoping for comments on the entire story, and I’m afraid I don’t have time to read all of it now. If it helps, I’ve read as far as the end of the gym scene, and I can at least say something about your concern over adverbs.

I think you had an okay idea in trying to describe the blonde in four dimensions, both static 3D and the fourth as she exercises through time, and her body moves. Clearly your first-person narrator is smitten. My reading didn’t start to bog down until her breasts rose and fell ‘wonderfully,’ and then soon after you gave us ‘hypnotically.’ After that, you have her do hand movements that I don’t quite understand; they lead to more descriptions of her, but unless she’s shedding sweat or something, the movements seem unmotivated.

The overuse of adverbs, and modifiers generally, doesn’t necessarily happen in one place. It can build up over time. If you’ve already described a specific thing about her, and its effect on him, you don’t need to reach (or worse, exceed) that level of detail when the specific thing is described again. You should say less, or nothing, unless you think this next observation adds something new about the situation.

One way to find unnecessary verbiage is to read the text aloud. That can be difficult to arrange with any text, if you live with or near people who would rather not hear thousands of spoken words that don’t concern them. It can be much worse than that, with salacious material that could offend those people and give them a bad opinion of you. If you can’t get total privacy, you may have to read as if you were speaking, maybe by moving your lips silently.

I don’t know anything else about the story, so please take what’s next as the opinion of a single reader which, from what I’ve seen, isn’t in line with that of many Literotica readers. During their time in the gym, they never speak, and she (according to the narrator) never acknowledges his presence. He goes bonkers wondering if she wants nothing to do with him, or is putting on a show for him. To the narrator, she just shows up as she is, in workout wear more revealing than functional. To the author, she should be a person with a backstory, someone who made a decision to dress that way, thinking either that she wants to knock the socks off of some male stranger in the workout room, or that this outfit works for her and she doesn’t care what anyone else thinks about it. The backstory doesn’t have to be spelled out to the reader, but what the reader sees must be consistent with the backstory.

The way you’ve written the scene will succeed as a POV fantasy for many readers, but I’m too aware of the way that the fantasy allows readers to decide that a woman who does this is a tease, and that “not interested” may not mean “no.” Again, this is a statement by one reader with a certain worldview, which you may consider or not, as you choose.

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5116173&page=submissions

 

[gorson]

@ yowser and JuanSeiszFitzHall

Thank you both very much for taking the time to look at the story, and respond so quickly and constructively. I think that because honest feedback is so incredibly valuable - one of the most generous gifts one can receive on the net - those who take the trouble to give it deserve a lot of respect. I found your comments really helpful - so again: thank you.

The need to cut more and avoid repetition, which you both mention, is a familiar 'development opportunity' for me! I will be trying to rein in the adverbs etc a bit.

@ yowser - you nailed it on the US/UK issue! I find it quite the technical challenge, and was interested to hear it's similar for you.

@ JuanSeiszFitzHall - thank you especially for the observation about how overused modifiers can build up over time. Some very useful food for thought there.

Thank you and best wishes
Gorson

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yes, what the others said - over-written and, for me, far too self-aware. It's first person narration, but it's far too chatty, you're engaging the reader with too many asides, too much commentary. With a first person story I want to become immersed in the narrator's pov, I want to become that person in the story. But here, I'm not. I'm being reminded in nearly every sentence that your authorial presence is all over this. But I don't want to be you, the author, I want to be the character. Your style is exhausting, I'm being bombarded from all sides and she's still walking in the door...

Then this:

It was like a dream walked in.

It's a tiny word and I'm sure you didn't mean the take I gave it, but the first word of any new paragraph is important. You've just introduced a beautiful young woman, a stunner from this account, and under those circumstances I'd expect to read:

She was like a dream, walking in.

Your use of the pronoun "it" threw me out, right there. This young woman is a person, not a thing. I suspect you meant the whole scene was like a dream, But dreams unwind, they play out like a movie; they don't "walk in." The person you're writing about is a woman who walks in. She's a she, not an it.

That's where I bailed out. As I say, it's maybe just me, and over such a tiny, some might say trivial, thing. But how you address a person is important. It's ironic, you provide such elaborate descriptions (and hey, I'm one for lengthy descriptions, they're my house style) but came unstuck early on with almost the shortest possible word.

My suggestion would be to relax, trust your writing, trust a simpler style of description; and pay attention to the tiny things, not the thesaurus. And I also suggests taking the blatant author's voice out. You're constantly skating close to the fourth wall, and to do that well requires more subtlety. This is too self-conscious.

You're a good, competent writer, but I reckon you need to trust yourself more, don't try so hard. And that's a rare thing to say on Lit. Usually, the sum of feedback is to try harder, to get the technical stuff nailed, learn how to get the basics right. You're fine with those elements - just take a few layers off so the story and characters can show through. You're hiding them under a thousand veils. Seven will do .

 

[gorson]

@electricblue66

Thank you for looking at the story, and I genuinely appreciate the feedback. It's very interesting to see your take on writing style. The fourth wall stuff is intentional, obviously, and the fact it didn't work for you is very helpful feedback, which I will reflect on. Of course I may just conclude it means I need to do it better! Thanks again for taking the time to help a Literotica newbie

Thank you and best wishes
Gorson

 

[NotWise]

I read the beginning to see what people were getting on about. I read a little past where EB stopped.

The first thing I noticed was that a lot of your sentences aren't sentences. For instance, from very early:

The deal was done. Ink on the contracts, funds in escrow.

The part before the first full stop is a sentence. The rest isn't. That was common in what I read, though perhaps it was more common near the beginning. I know you're doing that intentionally, and for effect. I think you got the effect, but I found it distracting. The phrasing was jerky in places, and incomplete sentences made it worse.

I didn't read on to confirm that it was too wordy, but in the example above, the part that isn't a sentence could be deleted, and no meaning would be lost. I think that was true in other instances I saw.

The fourth wall was not a problem for me. "The Fourth Wall" is a term from drama, and I don't think the prohibition against breaking the fourth wall applies very well to writing. Storytellers usually speak directly to their audience, and if you want to write like a storyteller, than you also need to speak directly to your reader.

I'd break the fourth wall carefully, though. It might be something your readers aren't ready for. Two of my stories are told by a storyteller, and she speaks directly to an imaginary audience, and to the reader, to slip into the story and back out again. In at least one of those cases, it worked well.

Parentheses seem to be unpopular punctuation these days, and your use of parentheses caught my attention. I'm reminded of a friend/editor of mine who quoted from Strunk and White something to the effect of "There's nothing you want to put in parentheses that I want to read."

Parenthetic statements can, alternatively, be offset by commas or em dashes.

Edit: despite my comments above, I found your style engaging even though it was a little clunky.

 

[gorson]

@NotWise

Thank you very much for taking the time to read the piece and give feedback. Much appreciated.

It's interesting to hear you found the clipped phrasing to be distracting, even though you know it's intentional. It's how I wanted the character to sound, though more so at the beginning of his arc - it does evolve. But your response is very useful food for thought, and I'm grateful for your help.

Thank you and best wishes
Gorson

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

You’ve asked specifically for feedback regarding long descriptions, adverbs and adjectives. But first, I have comments on what, imho, is the real issue, which is the many, repeat grammatical and semantical mistakes in your narrative. I think those mistakes muddle the desired effect of your stylistic choices.

An example (numbers added):

(1)Most of the team (2) had been heading home Friday anyway, (3) and my assistant had a family problem come up, so I got him out on an early flight, (4) leaving me to tie up a last couple of things. My (5) plane wasn't till (6) tomorrow afternoon.

1. This is a run-on sentence, and should be broken into two (or, possibly, three) complete sentences. In each preceding paragraph, your narrative has been littered with incomplete sentences. This is one of the first complete, and complex, sentence structures you’ve presented and it’s bungled. The desired effect of your short choppy writing is, therefore, muddled because it seems part of your conflicting grammatical issues, rather than a purposefully chosen narrative style.

2. This is incorrect use of past perfect continuous tense. Past perfect continuous is used for a condition that is ongoing in the past, usually relative to a specific event, e.g., “He had been living in China when he got the promotion.” This observation is simply past tense; Most of the team went home on Friday.

3. If the reader doesn’t have contextual information, then overly detailed explanations are superfluous. Here you’ve presented (i) an assistant (who, moreover, doesn’t return in the chapter), (ii) a family problem for said assistant and (iii) getting the assistant “out on an early flight” (btw, this should be earlier flight). Semantically, you left off the underlying facts the reader actually needed to know: that Pete’s assistant usually flies back with him after a deal. That information is what’s relevant to moving this part of the story forward, because it’s the underlying reason that Pete was alone on Saturday. Writing that focuses on minutiae of superfluous details and descriptions while leaving off critical information can come across as unedited at best, and lazy at its worst.

4. “Last” is a definitive adjective—if something’s the last, then there can’t be anything left— so the article should be definitive too: “the last couple of things.” This correction demonstrates that this is a weak dependent clause; it would be more effective to simply describe what Pete had to finish.

5. My flight, not my plane. Mark Twain is credited with saying, “The difference between the right word and wrong word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

6. The following afternoon, not tomorrow afternoon.

These kinds of problems are present throughout your narrative, as well as dangling and misplaced modifiers, incorrect tenses, mixed tenses, comma splices, confused demonstrative pronouns, run-on sentences, etc. My general advice to writers I work with is that if you want to break rules, you should aim to master rules; I think it could strengthen your writing to keep that in mind.

To your request for feedback about adjectives, adverbs and lengthy descriptions:

Descriptive words tend to tell the action, emotion, scenery, etc. instead of allowing the readers to experience it for themselves. Without experience, it’s difficult to create depth or dimension. It’s also easy for a story to get overlong and overburdened with unnecessary detail.

To me, as it did for others in the review thread, this particularly stood out in your mellifluous descriptions of the women Pete encountered. There was little meaningful interaction between him and Jenna, or Erika, or Caroline, and thus, the repeat physical descriptions of them flattened the women to little more than interchangeable stock characters.

I think the difficulty in group sex stories isn’t the logistics of sex, or finding interesting ways of describing the characters, but rather figuring out how to create characters unique enough that the reader cares enough to keep track of who’s who. While there’s more than one way to skin a cat, I think that successful group sex stories lead the reader to experience the multiple characters’ autonomy so they’re not just reading about what the main characters feel but also, to some degree, experiencing it for themselves. A couple of excellent examples of group sex stories that you might want to read for inspiration are SolarRay’s She’s a Wild One and Megamuffin’s A Week on the Lake.

I hope this is helpful! Best of luck with chapter two!

 

[gorson]

@Vix Giovanni

Thank you for taking the time to give such detailed feedback, and particularly for reading the whole chapter. I think there's a lot I can learn from what you write. I shall reflect on it and I am genuinely grateful to you, thank you.

The sentence you dissected is certainly clunky, and I should have done a better job of it. It's a good learning experience for me to work through that. My intention there was to show that, even though at this stage in his arc he should appear callow, Peter cares about people (his assistant). But that is not what came over to you, so that's helpful to know.

Thank you and best wishes
Gorson

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

@Vix Giovanni

Thank you for taking the time to give such detailed feedback, and particularly for reading the whole chapter. I think there's a lot I can learn from what you write. I shall reflect on it and I am genuinely grateful to you, thank you.

The sentence you dissected is certainly clunky, and I should have done a better job of it. It's a good learning experience for me to work through that. My intention there was to show that, even though at this stage in his arc he should appear callow, Peter cares about people (his assistant). But that is not what came over to you, so that's helpful to know.

Thank you and best wishes
Gorson

It helps to know that your intention was to show that Peter cares about people. No, the sentence in question does nothing to develop that character trait.

I didn’t find Peter to be a callow (i.e., immature) character at all. You mentioned he’s 31, and I thought he had believably commensurate business experience. While he was awkward with the ladies in a few scenes, he didn’t seem virginal.

I think, however, that your actual concern is you didn’t want Peter to come off as callous, which means cold and unfeeling....


Setting aside the grammar mistakes of both your reply and of the sentence at issue:

Most of the team had been heading home Friday anyway, and my assistant had a family problem come up, so I got him out on an early flight, leaving me to tie up a last couple of things.

The assistant is not the subject of this sentence—the subject is the logistics of getting employees home after concluding a business deal. The assistant is barely an afterthought; the focus is not on who he is, but rather getting him on an earlier flight.

The assistant doesn’t even have a name. Peter doesn’t even bother to tell us what the family emergency is; it’s just an aside to that breakdown of employees’ flight schedules. The assistant and Peter have no interaction or dialogue. There’s no indication that, in any part of the business transaction, Peter considered him a valuable player, or, more directly to your intended takeaway, that Peter himself was at all concerned about the assistant and his family emergency!

These omissions are far more impactful to any perception that Peter is callous than his rainmaking ability in an arm’s length transaction.

Peter’s not, for example, coordinating flight schedules to get orphans out of a war zone and using nothing but his own life savings to fund it; he’s closing a deal, and sending employees home on the company’s dollar.

Mentioning in passing that Peter’s assistant flew home before Peter due to a family emergency speaks only to his professionalism, and not to any personality trait, positive or negative. There’s nothing implied in this sentence, or any preceding, to indicate that Peter operates in a business world atypical to the real one. Therefore, this sentence merely shows that Peter’s done the bare minimum an employer is required to do for an employee in a business setting—responding to said employee's need to leave for family emergency. Without further details and context, there’s no information for any reader to glean about Peter’s personality, character, integrity or empathy.