SimonBrooke
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2005
- Posts
- 1,139
This comes out of some correspondence I've been having with a person I edit for. She is trying to develop the confidence to write her own erotica; personally I think she has very interesting ideas and writes well about some aspects of sexuality which are very fresh and uncliched. I'm trying to give her the confidence to develop those stories with her own voice. She counters to me that the stories that she's published so far on Literotica which are directly about the things which interest her have few readers and poor vote scores, whereas the stories she's written based on other people's plots have had many more readers and have scored better.
I wrote back to her:
/-----
I'm inclined not to be swayed by that statistic. Firstly, I don't believe the Literotica audience as a whole is discerning (although it contains some very discerning people). Also, that statistic increments, as I understand it, when people click on the title of your story, before they've read it.
...this is a question about why we write. And as (in my opinion) the process of writing is actually secondary, of why we tell stories. We tell stories to please an audience. We tell stories to express some truth we experience about the world. We tell stories in order to develop our own skills as story tellers. We tell stories in order to experience mastery of the art of story-telling.
If you look at my stories on Literotica, you'll see there's quite a lot of 'H' marks:
http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/memberpage.php?uid=486920&page=submissions
The two that /don't/ have 'H' marks (apart from the new chapter of Pornstar which is new on today and hasn't had time) are the two that are, in my opinion, the good ones, the important ones. Catriona you know about. Workshop is something I worked very hard at, and which I care about intensely - and I think it's good. It hasn't had many readers. It only has one comment. And it doesn't have a great score. But - although I'd like it to be better - in my mind it is much closer to what I want to achieve than Pornstar, which is playing to the Literotica gallery and is essentially nothing more than a bit of fun.
Yes, we need an audience. Writing without an audience is in the worst sense masturbatory. It is empty, hollow, unsatisfying. But that doesn't mean we need to pander to just any audience. I'd love to build an audience which is appreciative to the sorts of stories I want to tell, and I'm thinking about how I would go about that. But in the meantime, provided I get some intelligent feedback from some readers, and that the balance of the intelligent feedback is approving, that's good enough for me. I don't feel the need to play to the groundlings of the Literotica audience.
Rehashing trivial sex cliches is the easiest way to high scores on Literotica, or so at least it seems to me. The easiest way to get a quantitatively large audience. But it isn't going to express your personal truth, and it isn't going to hone your skills, and it isn't going to help you experience mastery. Personally, so long as I have an audience, I'd rather have a smaller, more discerning audience than a larger, less discerning one.
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So... am I right? Or am I an intellectual snob? Or both?
I wrote back to her:
/-----
I'm inclined not to be swayed by that statistic. Firstly, I don't believe the Literotica audience as a whole is discerning (although it contains some very discerning people). Also, that statistic increments, as I understand it, when people click on the title of your story, before they've read it.
...this is a question about why we write. And as (in my opinion) the process of writing is actually secondary, of why we tell stories. We tell stories to please an audience. We tell stories to express some truth we experience about the world. We tell stories in order to develop our own skills as story tellers. We tell stories in order to experience mastery of the art of story-telling.
If you look at my stories on Literotica, you'll see there's quite a lot of 'H' marks:
http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/memberpage.php?uid=486920&page=submissions
The two that /don't/ have 'H' marks (apart from the new chapter of Pornstar which is new on today and hasn't had time) are the two that are, in my opinion, the good ones, the important ones. Catriona you know about. Workshop is something I worked very hard at, and which I care about intensely - and I think it's good. It hasn't had many readers. It only has one comment. And it doesn't have a great score. But - although I'd like it to be better - in my mind it is much closer to what I want to achieve than Pornstar, which is playing to the Literotica gallery and is essentially nothing more than a bit of fun.
Yes, we need an audience. Writing without an audience is in the worst sense masturbatory. It is empty, hollow, unsatisfying. But that doesn't mean we need to pander to just any audience. I'd love to build an audience which is appreciative to the sorts of stories I want to tell, and I'm thinking about how I would go about that. But in the meantime, provided I get some intelligent feedback from some readers, and that the balance of the intelligent feedback is approving, that's good enough for me. I don't feel the need to play to the groundlings of the Literotica audience.
Rehashing trivial sex cliches is the easiest way to high scores on Literotica, or so at least it seems to me. The easiest way to get a quantitatively large audience. But it isn't going to express your personal truth, and it isn't going to hone your skills, and it isn't going to help you experience mastery. Personally, so long as I have an audience, I'd rather have a smaller, more discerning audience than a larger, less discerning one.
\-----
So... am I right? Or am I an intellectual snob? Or both?
