Please trash my submission

[NoNewNames]

Hey all,

Now that the Halloween contest has ended, I'd appreciate some brutal criticism of my submission, Mom's Halloween Party.

The premise of the story is that a young woman realizes while masturbating that she is sexually attracted to her mother. The story then follows her as she works out her unsure feelings about trying to trick her mother into bed while she develops the skills to let her do that, a scene at a halloween party her mother hosted, they having sex, and then a wrap up that I'm going to talk about in a moment.

I read erotica and was inspired to write this story mostly because of a paranoia I imagine most artists feel: I'm a shit writer, and my friends are sparing my feelings when they compliment it. I decided to post on this lovely community where people who don't know me can read my work and give me their thoughts. After doing some digging through the popular categories and tags I found a combination I thought would be popular enough to get some useful comments for me, but I still might find, and a story is born.

Seeing the stats for my submission makes me feel better about my writing overall, but I also noticed something: my ending was not understood how I intended it. The original ending had Julie essentially admitting to the trickery when her mom orgasms, but I felt weird about it and heavily rewrote it. In retrospect I see that the issue is that I forgot to mention anything about Julie making it so her mom couldn't call her! So, the ending comes off as ambiguous about the direction of their relationship and possible sequels I don't have ideas for. There are 8 comments at time of writing, and all of them are about wanting a sequel.

As a consequence, I will say my take away number 1: sleep on rewrites for more than one day.

The real question: what else should I take away? Because of the nature of the writing, if the sex is passable, I will be happy. What I would really like comments about is, well, everything else. Do the characters have realistic dialogue and relationships, do Julie and her mom have believable arcs and dynamics, does Julie have a believable internal monologue? That last question is pretty important to me because I'm a dude, and Julie's inner world is pretty damn far from anything I've experienced.

Thanks much all!

 

[Jada59]

I see a few tense changes, missing or incorrect punctuation, a misspelled word or two...

Sorry. I had to drop out on page two. The conversation seemed forced. And I just couldn't get into the story. I do talk during sex. But not that much. Didn't seem plausible.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Wow, you did amazingly well for your first time out: a 4.51 and a red H. You must be giving the audience what it wants. Personally, I don't get incest (unless it's non-blood relatives) but then some people don't get my fetishes either.

 

[NotWise]

The real question: what else should I take away? Because of the nature of the writing, if the sex is passable, I will be happy. What I would really like comments about is, well, everything else. Do the characters have realistic dialogue and relationships, do Julie and her mom have believable arcs and dynamics, does Julie have a believable internal monologue? That last question is pretty important to me because I'm a dude, and Julie's inner world is pretty damn far from anything I've experienced.

I'm not sure where to begin, partly because I'm not sure what you wanted out of the story. The most important take away is that you aren't a shit writer. I actually thought you were doing pretty well at first. The story has the right parts, and your story-telling was OK. The biggest problem I see is that, like I did as a first-time writer, you may have underestimated how much work it takes to dot the i's and cross the t's.

You challenged yourself with a story that has inherently awkward pacing. The buildup takes about half the text and covers years to get to the climax. The other half of the text is a one night stand. If you're going to proportion the story that way, then there needs to be some tension in that buildup, but I didn't get that. I never once thought the story would go anywhere except where it went, and in a pretty straight line.

And then there's the climax. Maybe the description of the sex was OK, but I found it completely unbelievable. As far as I could tell, Julie was a virgin. I don't think there's even an allusion to her previous experience other than masturbation, yet she instigated sex with her mother. Ellen had never had sex with a woman before, but she seemed to know exactly what she was doing and she was fairly aggressive about getting there.

I don't think your characters were very well-developed. There were a few places where your dialogue lost me, and that was partly because of your inconsistent use of dialogue tags: she said, she answered, and so on. I never understood Kae at all. I never understood Ellen at all. I had only a little better understanding of Julie.

It's a fairly short story and it should be. It would be possible to develop your characters a little better without extending the length a lot, but that would require some very careful writing. More meaningful dialogue, especially, would have given better insight to the characters.

On the whole, I found the story unbelievable. Most I/T stories are unbelievable. Some of mine are outright fantasies. That shouldn't be important. You're writing for a crowd that wants to believe your story, and you just need to let them get their heads into it.

The biggest problem for me was that repeated punctuation errors, omitted words and other technical details kept knocking me out of the story. Eliminating those things are what I meant by dotting the i's and crossing the t's. You needed an editor to help you catch the mechanical problems and to fix some of the awkward sentence structures. Then there were the very uneven pacing, and the rabbit holes down into details of makeup and clothing.

And yes, you probably shot yourself in the foot with that ending.

Keep writing. You have ability, but you need to write more to get better. It's the only way.

 

[ChasPHX]

I'll bite! What a generous invitation ; )

I'll read and provide notes here in the next day or so.

 

[ChasPHX]

Let’s start with the score and what it means (or doesn’t mean).

At the time I checked, your story was at a 4.51 with a red H. That means, in all likelihood, you could continue to write exactly like this with the same type of content and you would score well with more stories. There are many writers who do just that. The writing is ok, sometimes not even all that ok, but they continue to score well because quality writing is not the primary concern of Lit readers. It may not even be a secondary or tertiary concern, all the way down to “Who gives a fuck if there's no periods?”

So you would have to understand that embarking on a journey of improving your writing might improve your scores, but it might not. There are tons of well-written stories on this site that are not as well-rated because, well, lots of reasons—but I would say the number one reason is, they are not delivering on reader expectations for the specific kink or category that’s been advertised (intentionally or otherwise).

Now I haven’t been around here very long. Not even a year. But I think you’ll find many variations on my assessment from lots of more experienced writers too.

On to the story…

I would agree with other posters that your writing isn’t “shite.” It could use a lot of work, sure, but you’re well aware of that, which is always a good start, right?

I think your title does what it needs to do for the category, and your short summary is actually quite good: “Mom’s Halloween Party: Julie has a plan, and it’s going to involve some acting.” It could be improved slightly because we don’t know if Julie is the mom, or if this is a mom/son or mom/daughter story. Inquiring I/T readers will want to know. A simple fix (not factoring in character count) would be: “Mom’s Halloween Party: Daughter has a plan, and it’s going to involve some acting.”

Honestly, if we were not in a feedback scenario, this is not a story I would have read to completion for two reasons. One, as soon as I saw that it was mom/daughter, I would have immediately lost interest. Unless the writing was extra special, in which case I would have pressed on to see whether the writing would keep me hooked. Alas, and this is the second reason I bailed, the writing was simply not strong enough for me to get past the first few paragraphs (there’s only so much time in the day).

But we are in a feedback scenario, so yes, I did finish it—though I skimmed most of page 2.

I did see some glimmers of humour poking through, and some half-decent sentence structure. Your paragraph breaks were good. That feels like a strange thing to comment on, but I’ve been surprised at how many stories are made up of giant blocks of text that are obnoxious on the eyes—especially on mobile. You’re not doing that, so points.

Others have commented on poor punctuation, typos, verb tense, lack of dialogue tags... No sense going into detail.

I have one high-level substantive comment. From what I’ve seen in this category, and it’s probably the case in other categories as well (maybe all of them), there are two kinds of stories. One kind is very focused on the kink and the central erotic act or acts. There is little character development, no “backstory,” not much context to the relationship at all. (And by the way, this has nothing to do with the quality of the writing.)

The other kind of story gives more attention to the characters and their relationship(s) outside the central erotic act. For some readers, this helps them invest in the story and heightens the eroticism. For others, it’s just a bunch of extra words getting in the way of a good wank.

Both approaches can yield high-quality results. And they both appeal to different kinds of readers. I like a little from column A and a little from column B myself.

The point is, I think you’re in a mushy middle with this story. The relationship is half-baked at best, yet there’s too much inconsequential blah-bitty-blah ahead of the central erotic act for it to be a high-quality wank piece.

So I would start my next piece by first deciding where on that scale you want to be.

This story could easily be of the first type, as it employs an age-old gimmick: Family member unknowingly fucks other family member because other family member is in disguise. There you go. Take your dick out, right? Put your fingers in it. What are you waiting for?

If that was your approach, you would start the story at the party, or immediately before, maybe in the makeup chair. Why not start with Lucinda’s bold speech when she walks in the door? Her declaration would make a great opening! Backfill here and there as the evening goes on, but don’t overdo it. Keep it focused on the present action and don’t lose your momentum. This is harder than it sounds.

But—this story could also have been more about the relationship. You would have needed to work harder on relevant character details for Julie and her mom. It doesn’t necessarily mean higher word count, but to do it economically definitely takes work and practice. Now, an important point is that if you’d taken this route, it would have been very hard to pull off the “trick disguise” aspect of the story. If you’re trying to portray a more serious and realistic relationship, having one of the characters trick the other into an incestuous encounter would be tough to pull off ; ) – but of course, never impossible.

The proposed timeline of this story is insane. If I recall, Julie had a four year plan to seduce her mother? Without seeing her once over the period? During which time she’d shed a bunch of weight and learn how to do makeup? And then her time got unexpectedly shortened because Thanksgiving? Then because Christmas? But then Halloween? Hunh? If I was a cynical SOB, I’d say you were trying to ensure this story could be slotted into any number of holiday-themed contests ; )

And that’s what I mean about going the simple route where the central conceit/gimmick/erotic setup is the entire point of the story. Get rid of all that other stuff. Not important. Even if this was a relationship story, still get rid of all that stuff! It just doesn’t make sense.

The party/seduction scene was jarring and contrarian character behaviour was rampant. The first thing out of Ellen’s mouth is that she’s not gay, then five minutes later she’s basically begging Lucinda to go to bed with her. Lucinda admits to Ellen that she's a “friend” of Julie’s, and Ellen still goes through with the deed! Why would Lucinda admit to a connection with Ellen’s daughter at all, instead of a simple “Who’s Julie?” She’d already said the reason she was at the party was because of “Mark” anyway.

Certainly the ending wasn’t really an ending at all, and your readers called that out in the comments.

One more time: Even if you don’t heed any so-called writerly advice you’re getting on this thread, judging from the reader response to your story you’d still do fine by keeping on keeping on. Also, I’m not necessarily one to listen to; most of my stories are rated lower than yours, as I've not made a habit of playing to category "type," and that's come with the expected (weaker) results.

Keep writing! Your readers want it, you seem to genuinely want to improve, and anyway, what else are you gonna do?

 

[8letters]

ChasPHX did an excellent job of providing feedback. I just want to add a couple of points.

Rating IMHO is driven the most by how appealing the premise is. For the people who saw that it was a mom-daughter story and kept reading, most of them liked the premise.