Erozetta
Erotically Inclined
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2024
- Posts
- 1,529
*Taps fingers on desk impatiently.* For 11 days now.
*Must not resubmit or touch it*
Also, novella. It topped out at 30k, lol.
AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread
- Thread starter AwkwardMD
- Start date
*Must not resubmit or touch it*
Also, novella. It topped out at 30k, lol.
sinfantasy
Dream Weaver
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2021
- Posts
- 180
Hi @AwkwardMD and @Omenainen
I would appreciate your feedback on Amorous goods: The Collectors Tale. It's one of my earlier submissions and while it's my best-rated story, it has no comments (Maybe because of only 4.5K views). This is approx 14K+ words in size and pure romance with a touch of darkness of Amorous Goods.
I have improved a lot since then, and I have my own ideas on how this could be better. For starters, If I write it again, it would grow almost twice in size or more with.... well that's exactly what I don't want to do.
My goal for asking for feedback is to wear a learning hat again and go back to a few months ago when I was still trying to figure out my way. This story had immense potential and I feel I have not done justice to it. While I don't want to improve or rewrite it, the idea is to learn from what could have been better and use it in the next story. So, you don't have to be polite about what you have to say.
Thank you in advance.
I would appreciate your feedback on Amorous goods: The Collectors Tale. It's one of my earlier submissions and while it's my best-rated story, it has no comments (Maybe because of only 4.5K views). This is approx 14K+ words in size and pure romance with a touch of darkness of Amorous Goods.
I have improved a lot since then, and I have my own ideas on how this could be better. For starters, If I write it again, it would grow almost twice in size or more with.... well that's exactly what I don't want to do.
My goal for asking for feedback is to wear a learning hat again and go back to a few months ago when I was still trying to figure out my way. This story had immense potential and I feel I have not done justice to it. While I don't want to improve or rewrite it, the idea is to learn from what could have been better and use it in the next story. So, you don't have to be polite about what you have to say.
Thank you in advance.
AwkwardMD
The worst Buddhist
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2014
- Posts
- 2,941
@sinfantasy We'll get right on it!
HaralLuhhan
Experienced
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2024
- Posts
- 99
I wouldnt mind a review of my first chapter too if/when you have time.
All chapters would be great but you might consider it too long.
Link in my sig
AwkwardMD
The worst Buddhist
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2014
- Posts
- 2,941
https://www.literotica.com/s/shifting-boundaries-ch-01I wouldnt mind a review of my first chapter too if/when you have time.
All chapters would be great but you might consider it too long.
Link in my sig
This?
HaralLuhhan
Experienced
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2024
- Posts
- 99
That's the one!
AlinaX
Asymmetric Snowflake
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2014
- Posts
- 5,172
(The glitchy grammar I can overlook, but, ugh, not the Harry Potter.)
HaralLuhhan
Experienced
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2024
- Posts
- 99
I'll have to see what other movies were big in 2004 lol.
AwkwardMD
The worst Buddhist
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2014
- Posts
- 2,941
@sinfantasy
link
I see what you mean. I think this story, executed this way, would work best as a much longer novel, somewhere closer to sixty or eighty thousand words. Even doubling this, at twenty-eight thousand words, would be leaving a lot on the cutting room floor. This idea, as is, has a lot of potential, but it is absolutely kneecapped by the scope. You are trying to fit a Ferrari motor onto a Segway.
On the plus side, you have the part that’s unteachable. No amount of feedback, or reading the works of others, can teach the kind of creativity you have. This story, in theory, is fantastic. What’s on the page, though, does not do the premise justice. It doesn’t work as a story this short. This has you at an impasse between story and scope; the story doesn’t work this short, but stories this short are what you can do. For now, given your skillset, the venue, and the fact that you’re not getting paid for this, I think it would be wise to ditch the story and work with the scope. Write short stories.
This does not mean you need to give up on the whole idea. I think if you chucked the first nine thousand words of this story and started at about the time the two shopkeeper cousins caught back up to The Collector, you could still have had an extremely compelling story. A little bit of explanation about the family, a typical morning in suburbia, before Ethan has to go on the run. A knock on the door, and faces he recognizes. He’s desperate, and he knows he only has a little bit of time to explain his situation to his wife. She loves him, and he loves her. She’ll understand if he can get the words right, he knows it.
He also knows he can’t keep going like he was. He’d tried quitting before, but it didn’t work. This time, though… This time they’ve come for him, and it has to end. He just has one more night.
This is, essentially, the same story you told except with an extremely tight scope. Three scenes, maybe four, and that’s it. Very dense. Learning how to be efficient is not a silver bullet to becoming a better writer, but it was maybe the single most impactful thing for me personally. Several of my best works are, essentially, one very long scene structured around the single most important point, that moment of growth where a character lets go of who they were and becomes who they were meant to be. I’m always looking for a way to tell the most amount of story, to get the maximum amount of drama, tears, or release, out of the least amount of storytelling.
Given that you’re writing on Lit, and given what I’m seeing in this story, I think this is the next step for you, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if what you decided to try and master was fleshing out an idea like this all the way to it’s logical (novel-length) conclusion.
Regardless, my advice is to figure out a way to cut down and compress your starting idea, like taking coal down to diamond. Strip away the waste. Find a way to cut the facets just so, to make the underlying elements shine brightest.
***
In order to be able to do this, in order to be able to strip away the dead weight, you have to learn to be ruthless with your work. There is an applicable phrase that says “Kill your darlings.” For example, near the end of the story you sent The Collector on a mission with the cousins who own the shop, and realistically there’s no reason for this. It feels like what you wanted was an opportunity for The Collector to do something noble and meaningful, a last hurrah, and realistically this should have ended up on the cutting room floor.
In my personal opinion, we didn’t need The Collector to do something heroic at the end. It’s okay to have morally gray characters, who make choices for selfish reasons and regret them later. You don’t need to do more than that. Everyone over the age of 40 understands where the Collector starts this story, with loss and regret in his heart. He fell to temptation, and that doesn’t need an 11th hour fix.
***
One other way the length of the story hurt you was the wife. The central conceit of the story is the way the Collector ages and de-ages, over time, and the more we see the wife doing nothing in the face of a medical miracle that should be garnering a reaction for her, the weirder it is. It feels like you knew this, so instead of having her deal with it you kept telling the reader “She just lets it go because she loves him so much.” This is a textbook example of the kind of telling not showing that gets people shouting about Show Don’t Tell.
Were this story shorter, and the scope of the story was just a scene or two as suggested above, all you need to do with the wife is have her say “Yes” when the Collector says “We have to leave now, there’s no time for questions.” Everyone wants, and deserves, a partner who will help you bury the bodies, and you had a prime opportunity to give your main character exactly that. She goes along with it when the stakes are high, and she listens when he tries to explain.
Everyone should be so lucky, but instead, what’s on the page is passive and uninteresting. It’s saying “I love you” without doing the loving, and without the opportunity to do the loving.
Let them have a night in a hotel, at the edge of town. Let there be urgency.
***
The last big piece of advice I have for you is to become more familiar with the concept of scenes. Three characters, in a room, shaped like this, to have this specific conversation. Two pieces of furniture, a big wooden desk and an armchair. Brandy and snifters against the wall. What’s on the page now floats from chapter to chapter, place to place, all montage, and none of it feels grounded. It floats, like balloons drifting in the wind.
Because none of it is grounded, we get a moment in the beginning where the collector is sitting at his desk at home staring at the knife. The knife talks him into killing his dog, and then he goes home, and sits down at his desk. I swear, I read this twice to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke.
You need to anchor scenes. Places and people. Setting. Let each character have a motive that changes as the story progresses. This drives their dialog, and the dialog is where the story comes alive. Ditch the titled chapters. Even if you doubled the length, this story wouldn’t be long enough to warrant chapters. Focus on writing scenes with their own internal arc, their own internal tension and release.
We’re too distant from the characters now. They’re far off. We’re not in their heads, and because time moves so fluidly through the story (floaty balloons) we’re never really stopping for long enough to get their thoughts. We need to be closer to the characters. Closer to their motivations. Closer to their thoughts. Closer to the action.
Granted, there are writers who write very etheric, prosaic works, and they do quite well, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what you’re going for and it doesn’t seem like that would be your style, given what I can see between the lines of your work. It seems like you want grit, and gray areas, and moral ambiguity. Conflicted motivations. Those things are in the DNA of this story, but they aren’t executed in a way that matters.
You can’t have impact without force. You can’t have force without planting your feet on the ground. Astronauts can flail at each other, but it isn’t the same. It doesn’t hit. Two people in the water can slap at each other, but you can’t blow someone over the way you can when you’re grounded. Boxing teachers will tell you that you don’t throw a punch with your arms, you throw it with your hips. It starts in your legs.
The Collectors Tale had the potential to land a terrific gut punch, but it whiffed.
link
I see what you mean. I think this story, executed this way, would work best as a much longer novel, somewhere closer to sixty or eighty thousand words. Even doubling this, at twenty-eight thousand words, would be leaving a lot on the cutting room floor. This idea, as is, has a lot of potential, but it is absolutely kneecapped by the scope. You are trying to fit a Ferrari motor onto a Segway.
On the plus side, you have the part that’s unteachable. No amount of feedback, or reading the works of others, can teach the kind of creativity you have. This story, in theory, is fantastic. What’s on the page, though, does not do the premise justice. It doesn’t work as a story this short. This has you at an impasse between story and scope; the story doesn’t work this short, but stories this short are what you can do. For now, given your skillset, the venue, and the fact that you’re not getting paid for this, I think it would be wise to ditch the story and work with the scope. Write short stories.
This does not mean you need to give up on the whole idea. I think if you chucked the first nine thousand words of this story and started at about the time the two shopkeeper cousins caught back up to The Collector, you could still have had an extremely compelling story. A little bit of explanation about the family, a typical morning in suburbia, before Ethan has to go on the run. A knock on the door, and faces he recognizes. He’s desperate, and he knows he only has a little bit of time to explain his situation to his wife. She loves him, and he loves her. She’ll understand if he can get the words right, he knows it.
He also knows he can’t keep going like he was. He’d tried quitting before, but it didn’t work. This time, though… This time they’ve come for him, and it has to end. He just has one more night.
This is, essentially, the same story you told except with an extremely tight scope. Three scenes, maybe four, and that’s it. Very dense. Learning how to be efficient is not a silver bullet to becoming a better writer, but it was maybe the single most impactful thing for me personally. Several of my best works are, essentially, one very long scene structured around the single most important point, that moment of growth where a character lets go of who they were and becomes who they were meant to be. I’m always looking for a way to tell the most amount of story, to get the maximum amount of drama, tears, or release, out of the least amount of storytelling.
Given that you’re writing on Lit, and given what I’m seeing in this story, I think this is the next step for you, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if what you decided to try and master was fleshing out an idea like this all the way to it’s logical (novel-length) conclusion.
Regardless, my advice is to figure out a way to cut down and compress your starting idea, like taking coal down to diamond. Strip away the waste. Find a way to cut the facets just so, to make the underlying elements shine brightest.
***
In order to be able to do this, in order to be able to strip away the dead weight, you have to learn to be ruthless with your work. There is an applicable phrase that says “Kill your darlings.” For example, near the end of the story you sent The Collector on a mission with the cousins who own the shop, and realistically there’s no reason for this. It feels like what you wanted was an opportunity for The Collector to do something noble and meaningful, a last hurrah, and realistically this should have ended up on the cutting room floor.
In my personal opinion, we didn’t need The Collector to do something heroic at the end. It’s okay to have morally gray characters, who make choices for selfish reasons and regret them later. You don’t need to do more than that. Everyone over the age of 40 understands where the Collector starts this story, with loss and regret in his heart. He fell to temptation, and that doesn’t need an 11th hour fix.
***
One other way the length of the story hurt you was the wife. The central conceit of the story is the way the Collector ages and de-ages, over time, and the more we see the wife doing nothing in the face of a medical miracle that should be garnering a reaction for her, the weirder it is. It feels like you knew this, so instead of having her deal with it you kept telling the reader “She just lets it go because she loves him so much.” This is a textbook example of the kind of telling not showing that gets people shouting about Show Don’t Tell.
Were this story shorter, and the scope of the story was just a scene or two as suggested above, all you need to do with the wife is have her say “Yes” when the Collector says “We have to leave now, there’s no time for questions.” Everyone wants, and deserves, a partner who will help you bury the bodies, and you had a prime opportunity to give your main character exactly that. She goes along with it when the stakes are high, and she listens when he tries to explain.
Everyone should be so lucky, but instead, what’s on the page is passive and uninteresting. It’s saying “I love you” without doing the loving, and without the opportunity to do the loving.
Let them have a night in a hotel, at the edge of town. Let there be urgency.
***
The last big piece of advice I have for you is to become more familiar with the concept of scenes. Three characters, in a room, shaped like this, to have this specific conversation. Two pieces of furniture, a big wooden desk and an armchair. Brandy and snifters against the wall. What’s on the page now floats from chapter to chapter, place to place, all montage, and none of it feels grounded. It floats, like balloons drifting in the wind.
Because none of it is grounded, we get a moment in the beginning where the collector is sitting at his desk at home staring at the knife. The knife talks him into killing his dog, and then he goes home, and sits down at his desk. I swear, I read this twice to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke.
You need to anchor scenes. Places and people. Setting. Let each character have a motive that changes as the story progresses. This drives their dialog, and the dialog is where the story comes alive. Ditch the titled chapters. Even if you doubled the length, this story wouldn’t be long enough to warrant chapters. Focus on writing scenes with their own internal arc, their own internal tension and release.
We’re too distant from the characters now. They’re far off. We’re not in their heads, and because time moves so fluidly through the story (floaty balloons) we’re never really stopping for long enough to get their thoughts. We need to be closer to the characters. Closer to their motivations. Closer to their thoughts. Closer to the action.
Granted, there are writers who write very etheric, prosaic works, and they do quite well, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what you’re going for and it doesn’t seem like that would be your style, given what I can see between the lines of your work. It seems like you want grit, and gray areas, and moral ambiguity. Conflicted motivations. Those things are in the DNA of this story, but they aren’t executed in a way that matters.
You can’t have impact without force. You can’t have force without planting your feet on the ground. Astronauts can flail at each other, but it isn’t the same. It doesn’t hit. Two people in the water can slap at each other, but you can’t blow someone over the way you can when you’re grounded. Boxing teachers will tell you that you don’t throw a punch with your arms, you throw it with your hips. It starts in your legs.
The Collectors Tale had the potential to land a terrific gut punch, but it whiffed.
Last edited:
sinfantasy
Dream Weaver
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2021
- Posts
- 180
@AwkwardMD - Oh boy... I skimmed through your feedback and I am fighting the voice in my head trying to justify everything.
This will take time to read, really ready, digest and even more to so to implement.
I have written 19k, 22k and the latest 47.4k stories after this. While they have been successful, all I can say is Lit readers have been generous (including L/W with their uncompromising mindsets). You just know when your work doesn't stand where it should potentially be.
I knew I had taken shortcuts and it was time to unlearn and go back to basics. This is what I asked for. I am glad and humbled that you have delivered just that.
I have been sitting on a April fools spark for last few days but haven't written a single word. What has been bothering me? What you rightly called out, the scope. It's running for 40k + and I don't have time for that. (Not even counting the challenge of writing teenage drama and college scene with quirks).
Once again thank you for taking time to read my work and give such a detailed feedback. I won't be so bad to write shorter stories and ground the basics afterall.
This will take time to read, really ready, digest and even more to so to implement.
I have written 19k, 22k and the latest 47.4k stories after this. While they have been successful, all I can say is Lit readers have been generous (including L/W with their uncompromising mindsets). You just know when your work doesn't stand where it should potentially be.
I knew I had taken shortcuts and it was time to unlearn and go back to basics. This is what I asked for. I am glad and humbled that you have delivered just that.
I have been sitting on a April fools spark for last few days but haven't written a single word. What has been bothering me? What you rightly called out, the scope. It's running for 40k + and I don't have time for that. (Not even counting the challenge of writing teenage drama and college scene with quirks).
Once again thank you for taking time to read my work and give such a detailed feedback. I won't be so bad to write shorter stories and ground the basics afterall.
AwkwardMD
The worst Buddhist
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2014
- Posts
- 2,941
I have no doubt that you had justifications for the creative choices you made, and you do not need to justify yourself to me. I do not matter and my opinion is only my own.
Keep what feels right to you, after you've had a good think on the matter, and ditch the rest.
sinfantasy
Dream Weaver
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2021
- Posts
- 180
When I started the story, I wanted it to be dark but the collector refused to go dark after meeting Samantha.
While I have no plans to edit this story again, you just gave me the spark for next amorous goods
You have a good thing going on here and I will be back for more feedback on my next work.
Omenainen
Finnishing
- Joined
- May 5, 2020
- Posts
- 1,786
@HaralLuhhan
link
Hi and welcome to Lit! As you’ve noticed, writing smut is an unexpectedly engaging and rewarding hobby. Lit is a good platform for practicing writing, because it provides readers, especially in your chosen category, and other self-publishing platforms don’t necessarily have that.
The one and only way to get better at writing is to write, so that is essentially my advice to you. Write more, experiment, find your muse. Let plot bunnies carry you away. This is a low risk environment: so what if you write something people don't like? It’s not like your livelihood is dependent on this.
On a practical level I have some tips. First is to always use all ten tags. This is the way readers will find your story once it’s off the new lists. Include every applicable tag for sex acts that happen in the story, and if you end up with more than ten stick with the most enticing ones. Explore tag search to see what are most used tags in a category. Read forum threads to learn what are the “secret weapon” tags for a given category. (Like Lesbian Sex and “first time lesbian” – they love that shit.)
Second, I don’t know what 8letters helped you with, but looks like it wasn’t editing. Your story has sloppy dialogue punctuation and the way you switch between first person and third person is both unnecessary and irritating. Learn to punctuate dialogue. Learn to read your text so that you can focus on different aspects (punctuation, sentence length, paragraph structure etc) instead of the content; in other words, learn to self edit. Learn to kill your darlings: so you started a story in first person, but find out you actually want to introduce points of view other than the narrator? Switch to third person and rewrite.
I won’t go into the actual contents of the story for a few reasons. It’s your first story and nitpicking it closely would be unfair. It’s also not a complete story. There is no real way to evaluate plot, pacing, flow, characterization for a story that is not complete. Last but not least, it’s not your story. You’ve lifted the premise and plot from someone else, so what would I be reviewing? The work of someone who hasn’t asked for it nor is he around to benefit from it.
I am aware that we all derive inspiration from everything we read, see, experience, and that there is only so many storylines (or premises for an incest story) in the world. I’m taking your word that you have used someone else’s intellectual property in a manner that is on the side of “being inspired by” and not “blatantly stealing”. I am not going to read both series and compare, it’s not like my opinion would change the situation in any meaningful way no matter how it is. I do hope that in the future you will find inspiration to write your own stories.
Go forth, learn, write, find your muse. When you have more stories under your belt, if you still want feedback and we’re still in business on giving it, come back for more.
link
Hi and welcome to Lit! As you’ve noticed, writing smut is an unexpectedly engaging and rewarding hobby. Lit is a good platform for practicing writing, because it provides readers, especially in your chosen category, and other self-publishing platforms don’t necessarily have that.
The one and only way to get better at writing is to write, so that is essentially my advice to you. Write more, experiment, find your muse. Let plot bunnies carry you away. This is a low risk environment: so what if you write something people don't like? It’s not like your livelihood is dependent on this.
On a practical level I have some tips. First is to always use all ten tags. This is the way readers will find your story once it’s off the new lists. Include every applicable tag for sex acts that happen in the story, and if you end up with more than ten stick with the most enticing ones. Explore tag search to see what are most used tags in a category. Read forum threads to learn what are the “secret weapon” tags for a given category. (Like Lesbian Sex and “first time lesbian” – they love that shit.)
Second, I don’t know what 8letters helped you with, but looks like it wasn’t editing. Your story has sloppy dialogue punctuation and the way you switch between first person and third person is both unnecessary and irritating. Learn to punctuate dialogue. Learn to read your text so that you can focus on different aspects (punctuation, sentence length, paragraph structure etc) instead of the content; in other words, learn to self edit. Learn to kill your darlings: so you started a story in first person, but find out you actually want to introduce points of view other than the narrator? Switch to third person and rewrite.
I won’t go into the actual contents of the story for a few reasons. It’s your first story and nitpicking it closely would be unfair. It’s also not a complete story. There is no real way to evaluate plot, pacing, flow, characterization for a story that is not complete. Last but not least, it’s not your story. You’ve lifted the premise and plot from someone else, so what would I be reviewing? The work of someone who hasn’t asked for it nor is he around to benefit from it.
I am aware that we all derive inspiration from everything we read, see, experience, and that there is only so many storylines (or premises for an incest story) in the world. I’m taking your word that you have used someone else’s intellectual property in a manner that is on the side of “being inspired by” and not “blatantly stealing”. I am not going to read both series and compare, it’s not like my opinion would change the situation in any meaningful way no matter how it is. I do hope that in the future you will find inspiration to write your own stories.
Go forth, learn, write, find your muse. When you have more stories under your belt, if you still want feedback and we’re still in business on giving it, come back for more.
HaralLuhhan
Experienced
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2024
- Posts
- 99
Thanks for the review. Yeah I got a lot of comments about pov switching, including from 8Letters, after publishing. So I made the next chapters 3rd person only. I was intending to rewrite the story, combining all 3 chapters (a suggestion by 8Letters)
The story has a similar premise to the original, thats pretty much it. Characters, motivations, most scenes, plot (for the most part), etc are different. Another comment I got claimed the story was too similar to a story I've never even heard of and couldnt find on the site. so... shrug.
And yeah I do struggle with dialog punctuation. Hopefully I improved in later chapters but I suspect not as much as you'd like. I'll keep working on improving that. Oh, come to think of it, I have Grammarly telling me to change punctuation too. I only used it for error correction, but now I wonder if it led me astray in a few cases.
The story has a similar premise to the original, thats pretty much it. Characters, motivations, most scenes, plot (for the most part), etc are different. Another comment I got claimed the story was too similar to a story I've never even heard of and couldnt find on the site. so... shrug.
And yeah I do struggle with dialog punctuation. Hopefully I improved in later chapters but I suspect not as much as you'd like.
I'll keep working on improving that. Oh, come to think of it, I have Grammarly telling me to change punctuation too. I only used it for error correction, but now I wonder if it led me astray in a few cases.HaralLuhhan
Experienced
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2024
- Posts
- 99
Oh, and by the way, 8Letters was very helpful with plot and story flow suggestions. he also gave me an abandoned story of his for reference that has a very similar plot (father daughter dates, mother encouraging it. That was helpful too.
sinfantasy
Dream Weaver
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2021
- Posts
- 180
Hi @AwkwardMD and @Omenainen
I would appreciate your feedback on Hold Your Nerves, Boy. This is my on the job submission. Its about 13.4 K / 4 pages long in Mature category with theme of older woman younger man.
I would like your perspective on if I have got your last feedback right or not. Also, I ended the story on sort of cliffhanger and assumed the readers would understand that its just a cheeky ending. Unfortunately, some annons did not like it. What do you think?
After our last feedback, I wrote a April Fools: The Karaoke Caper Duet. However, I could only spend about 4 hours on it. This is another one which had high potential but I could not give it enough time so lets skip it.
Thank you in advance.
I would appreciate your feedback on Hold Your Nerves, Boy. This is my on the job submission. Its about 13.4 K / 4 pages long in Mature category with theme of older woman younger man.
I would like your perspective on if I have got your last feedback right or not. Also, I ended the story on sort of cliffhanger and assumed the readers would understand that its just a cheeky ending. Unfortunately, some annons did not like it. What do you think?
After our last feedback, I wrote a April Fools: The Karaoke Caper Duet. However, I could only spend about 4 hours on it. This is another one which had high potential but I could not give it enough time so lets skip it.
Thank you in advance.
AwkwardMD
The worst Buddhist
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2014
- Posts
- 2,941
@sinfantasy
Link
The positives: You have done an excellent job grasping scenes. This story felt much more grounded, even as it moved back and forth in time, which is difficult to pull off. You kept us close to your characters, and their headspace and motivations were easy to follow. This, as you well know, is much harder than it sounds, and this made the whole thing flow much easier.
The negatives: You have gone too far following our advice on scope. This is a 5k word story stretched to fill 14k words. Using the metaphor from our prior review, this is putting a Segway motor inside a Ferrari.
If we strip away everything else, this story is about having sex with the office MILF. That’s the point. Your setup, an employee on his last day, is excellent for this. These two parts, the setup and the point, fit together like perfect puzzle pieces. This one moment in time is the best, and potentially only, chance that these two characters will have to act on their feelings and mutual attraction. That’s excellent.
The stuff with his dad? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff with their team? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff where his other job is a sham? Doesn’t matter or make sense. What exactly would be the point of this scam?
The stuff with the over-boss? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff where the over-boss admits he was wrong? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff where, again, your protagonist is a hero who fixes everything noble-y? Doesn’t matter.
All fluff. Jettison it all.
If you had written this story where, say, your protagonist and the office MILF had a 30 minute meeting on his last day, and you wrote 15 minutes of dialog where they start professional and work their way toward cutesy flirting, followed by overt flirting, followed by sex? That would have been amazing. This is the only part of the story that mattered, and what you wrote was potentially 1 minute of dialog followed by approximately 5 minutes of narrated sex that you told us took 2 hours. Thumbs down.
Now, 15 minutes of actual dialog is daunting. I get it. The average sentence takes, like, 4 seconds to speak out loud. I understand the impulse to avoid that and do what you did, but that 15 minutes was the most important step in transcending a boundary. It should have been hard, and it wasn’t.
Good justification, in this situation, should have required good organic conversation, and I think you’re capable of that. I think you easily have the creativity for that if not, yet, the ear for organic conversation. How to have two characters sit in one room, start talking about one thing, and end up talking about several other things with smooth transitions along the way. That is a skill, and it’s not an easy one to master.
What you did instead was to try to stack the deck on both sides, making your protagonist too hot to not be attracted to, too determined to be denied, too well schooled by his past to be deflected. Your love interest, too lonely to maintain her professional status. These are “Nice to haves”, but they’re not load bearing. They can’t and don’t carry the weight of the story. Instead you handwave past them and distract the reader with a lot of come uppance on the part of the asshole overboss who, again, doesn’t matter.
***
A lot of what you have in this story, the stuff with his past, the circumstances between two jobs, these are elements that could work in a different story if the point was something like “Setting up a series of conflicts that causes the protagonist to grow” but the protagonist doesn’t change here. He was a good guy at the beginning and he’s a good guy at the end. He didn’t lose faith in himself; he always believed he was good enough to do the work.
Lots of stories feature character growth, and they have elements, problems, like this. It feels like you’re borrowing from stories you like, but you haven’t quite grasped why it’s important to put hurdles in the path of a character. What it means for there to be conflict, and to overcome. These aren’t shortcuts to gaining reader empathy, they’re opportunities for growth. I’m sure a lot of us had a father who, when we complained about a problem, said something along the lines of “Builds character,” and that advice is extremely true here.
Problems build character, but your protagonist didn’t need building. He was already perfect at the beginning, which makes the opportunities for growth unnecessary. You’re just wasting our time.
There’s two ways you can fix a story like this. One is to do like I suggested above, to shrink the story down to fit the real scope of the idea at the core of this story. The meeting, beginning when the protagonist walks in the door and ending when the time is up and these two walk out of the room. Then, working at different jobs, they’re free to remain in contact. A brief epilogue where they meet up at a coffee shop for a real first date. Done. 6k words.
The other way to fix this is to have your character be much less determined. Much less willing to stand up for themselves. You can’t keep this title, or the background with his dad, but you could keep the hurdles. The hurdles knock the protagonist down, then he builds himself up, and he ends the story on a stronger footing than he started, having wooed the office MILF along the way. I think this is the lesser of the two options, but it keeps more of what you wrote intact.
***
There’s one more thing I really, really want to expose you to. I want you to imagine a version of this story where you keep the title but you never flashback to the protagonist’s past. You never tell the reader “My dad used to say.” You could have him “chuckle as he hears his father’s voice in his head”, but that’s it.
How many readers do you think would put together that the thing he hears his father saying is the title of the story?
I suspect that, at the time you wrote this story if not right now when I’m asking you, your answer would be zero, because this story does not trust the reader to put together anything that you don’t explicitly point out.
Readers love to put things together on their own, to solve little mysteries. To arrive at conclusions before the character does. This is what makes foreshadowing such a useful and common tool; it’s you demonstrating that you know where a story is going, and giving the reader the opportunity to be in on it.
Stop spelling everything out, and embrace some subtlety. Subtlety allows you to keep that cool title you came up with, without writing 2k words of otherwise-unimportant backstory to justify it.
***
This story is a definite improvement in every way over the previous story you had us look at, but it fails in some ways that are similar and some ways that are new. I hope that you’ll continue to write and grow!
Link
The positives: You have done an excellent job grasping scenes. This story felt much more grounded, even as it moved back and forth in time, which is difficult to pull off. You kept us close to your characters, and their headspace and motivations were easy to follow. This, as you well know, is much harder than it sounds, and this made the whole thing flow much easier.
The negatives: You have gone too far following our advice on scope. This is a 5k word story stretched to fill 14k words. Using the metaphor from our prior review, this is putting a Segway motor inside a Ferrari.
If we strip away everything else, this story is about having sex with the office MILF. That’s the point. Your setup, an employee on his last day, is excellent for this. These two parts, the setup and the point, fit together like perfect puzzle pieces. This one moment in time is the best, and potentially only, chance that these two characters will have to act on their feelings and mutual attraction. That’s excellent.
The stuff with his dad? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff with their team? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff where his other job is a sham? Doesn’t matter or make sense. What exactly would be the point of this scam?
The stuff with the over-boss? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff where the over-boss admits he was wrong? Doesn’t matter.
The stuff where, again, your protagonist is a hero who fixes everything noble-y? Doesn’t matter.
All fluff. Jettison it all.
If you had written this story where, say, your protagonist and the office MILF had a 30 minute meeting on his last day, and you wrote 15 minutes of dialog where they start professional and work their way toward cutesy flirting, followed by overt flirting, followed by sex? That would have been amazing. This is the only part of the story that mattered, and what you wrote was potentially 1 minute of dialog followed by approximately 5 minutes of narrated sex that you told us took 2 hours. Thumbs down.
Now, 15 minutes of actual dialog is daunting. I get it. The average sentence takes, like, 4 seconds to speak out loud. I understand the impulse to avoid that and do what you did, but that 15 minutes was the most important step in transcending a boundary. It should have been hard, and it wasn’t.
Good justification, in this situation, should have required good organic conversation, and I think you’re capable of that. I think you easily have the creativity for that if not, yet, the ear for organic conversation. How to have two characters sit in one room, start talking about one thing, and end up talking about several other things with smooth transitions along the way. That is a skill, and it’s not an easy one to master.
What you did instead was to try to stack the deck on both sides, making your protagonist too hot to not be attracted to, too determined to be denied, too well schooled by his past to be deflected. Your love interest, too lonely to maintain her professional status. These are “Nice to haves”, but they’re not load bearing. They can’t and don’t carry the weight of the story. Instead you handwave past them and distract the reader with a lot of come uppance on the part of the asshole overboss who, again, doesn’t matter.
***
A lot of what you have in this story, the stuff with his past, the circumstances between two jobs, these are elements that could work in a different story if the point was something like “Setting up a series of conflicts that causes the protagonist to grow” but the protagonist doesn’t change here. He was a good guy at the beginning and he’s a good guy at the end. He didn’t lose faith in himself; he always believed he was good enough to do the work.
Lots of stories feature character growth, and they have elements, problems, like this. It feels like you’re borrowing from stories you like, but you haven’t quite grasped why it’s important to put hurdles in the path of a character. What it means for there to be conflict, and to overcome. These aren’t shortcuts to gaining reader empathy, they’re opportunities for growth. I’m sure a lot of us had a father who, when we complained about a problem, said something along the lines of “Builds character,” and that advice is extremely true here.
Problems build character, but your protagonist didn’t need building. He was already perfect at the beginning, which makes the opportunities for growth unnecessary. You’re just wasting our time.
There’s two ways you can fix a story like this. One is to do like I suggested above, to shrink the story down to fit the real scope of the idea at the core of this story. The meeting, beginning when the protagonist walks in the door and ending when the time is up and these two walk out of the room. Then, working at different jobs, they’re free to remain in contact. A brief epilogue where they meet up at a coffee shop for a real first date. Done. 6k words.
The other way to fix this is to have your character be much less determined. Much less willing to stand up for themselves. You can’t keep this title, or the background with his dad, but you could keep the hurdles. The hurdles knock the protagonist down, then he builds himself up, and he ends the story on a stronger footing than he started, having wooed the office MILF along the way. I think this is the lesser of the two options, but it keeps more of what you wrote intact.
***
There’s one more thing I really, really want to expose you to. I want you to imagine a version of this story where you keep the title but you never flashback to the protagonist’s past. You never tell the reader “My dad used to say.” You could have him “chuckle as he hears his father’s voice in his head”, but that’s it.
How many readers do you think would put together that the thing he hears his father saying is the title of the story?
I suspect that, at the time you wrote this story if not right now when I’m asking you, your answer would be zero, because this story does not trust the reader to put together anything that you don’t explicitly point out.
Readers love to put things together on their own, to solve little mysteries. To arrive at conclusions before the character does. This is what makes foreshadowing such a useful and common tool; it’s you demonstrating that you know where a story is going, and giving the reader the opportunity to be in on it.
Stop spelling everything out, and embrace some subtlety. Subtlety allows you to keep that cool title you came up with, without writing 2k words of otherwise-unimportant backstory to justify it.
***
This story is a definite improvement in every way over the previous story you had us look at, but it fails in some ways that are similar and some ways that are new. I hope that you’ll continue to write and grow!
Last edited:
sinfantasy
Dream Weaver
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2021
- Posts
- 180
@AwkwardMD - Thank you for taking time to review my work and your detailed feedback.
I had a tough time to digest what you said, until I reminded myself the feedback in for whats being published and not how I see the story in my head. One of the first comments on this story was its too sweet and I did not understand it till I read your feedback.
Employees last working day and his chance to bang his milf boss, that's the story you said. I understand from Erotica standards, you are correct. However, that's not the kind story I was willing to write. "On the Job" event only says sex at workplace, but I wanted to add realism of Office environment and politics.
Now does this works? The way I understand it now is I carried a variety of Ammo to the mission but did not use it, it just ended up being the dead weight. Or I served a meal with too many side dishes that did not really enhance the experience. I loved the part about character growth. Yah, that would have worked great. May be Jeremy should have started unsure and fiddled around to figure out his way.
Organic conversation and readers engagement as the story progress? Now, those are some interesting ideas to work on.
One again, thank you. I will be back once I have something satisfactory published.
I had a tough time to digest what you said, until I reminded myself the feedback in for whats being published and not how I see the story in my head. One of the first comments on this story was its too sweet and I did not understand it till I read your feedback.
Employees last working day and his chance to bang his milf boss, that's the story you said. I understand from Erotica standards, you are correct. However, that's not the kind story I was willing to write. "On the Job" event only says sex at workplace, but I wanted to add realism of Office environment and politics.
Now does this works? The way I understand it now is I carried a variety of Ammo to the mission but did not use it, it just ended up being the dead weight. Or I served a meal with too many side dishes that did not really enhance the experience. I loved the part about character growth. Yah, that would have worked great. May be Jeremy should have started unsure and fiddled around to figure out his way.
Organic conversation and readers engagement as the story progress? Now, those are some interesting ideas to work on.
One again, thank you. I will be back once I have something satisfactory published.
AwkwardMD
The worst Buddhist
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2014
- Posts
- 2,941
Again that's an issue of scope. If you wanted to delve into office politics, that's more complex than a single 'day in the life' time frame. You could do that with 20k words, but you'd need a different structure to the story. Protagonist's Last Day is ideal for a get-in/get-out setup, not an in-depth portrayal of interpersonal relationships among people that protagonist is pretty sure he will never see again (because that's the reality of office work in a city).
I have tackled a more complex, office politics-type story (here). It's pretty dark so it may not be your cup of tea, but I think it merges the concepts in a complex and original way. It'll give you an idea of what kinds of results my advice can lead to.
I have tackled a more complex, office politics-type story (here). It's pretty dark so it may not be your cup of tea, but I think it merges the concepts in a complex and original way. It'll give you an idea of what kinds of results my advice can lead to.
Omenainen
Finnishing
- Joined
- May 5, 2020
- Posts
- 1,786
One thing that helps with seeing the story as it exists on the page, and self-editing in general, is letting it sit after “final edit” so that you can take a look with fresh eyes. How long that is depends on a person, I myself have a blessedly bad memory and 1-2 weeks is usually enough
It’s sometimes difficult to remember what you’ve kept and what edited out and what you thought but never said. Having that bit of a pause before re-reading helps you see how the story looks to someone facing it the first time. You’ve been very productive over the past months, which is great, but spacing yourself out a little might work in your favor.
(Another great help is to have additional eyes on your story, but that’s tricky because volunteer editors are hard to come by and with them, as with reader/fellow author beta readers, finding people whose word you trust and agree with can be difficult. I’m more of a self-reliant sort so knowing how to do it all myself was my go-to when I was starting out.)
Greetings @AwkwardMD and @Omenainen!
I'm new as a posting and contributing member here. Finding active folks willing to provide reviews and commentary, especially with the kind of thoughtfulness and depth I see in this thread, is amazing to see.
If you are able to provide your insights into my first Literotica story, "The Professor: An Awakening", I'd be grateful.
This work was complete pantsing on my part. I started with a guy at a desk and just developed from there. By the time I got to the end of it, it felt like Chapter 1 of a longer work, maybe a novel or novella, but for the very first thing I put up here I didn't want to commit to that amount of work! It hasn't been through beta readers or anything... just my own revisions and reviews.
This might be my first smut, but it's not my first writing, so I will encourage you to be as direct and succinct as you care to be in your comments! You ain't gonna hurt my feelings. I don't normally write 3P omniscient/etc. so this was a bit of an experiment on my part. I was very much trying to get into the heads of both MCs and give the reader the back-and-forth between them. Did it work? I guess that's part of what I'm asking.
Cheers
Cally420
I'm new as a posting and contributing member here. Finding active folks willing to provide reviews and commentary, especially with the kind of thoughtfulness and depth I see in this thread, is amazing to see.
If you are able to provide your insights into my first Literotica story, "The Professor: An Awakening", I'd be grateful.
This work was complete pantsing on my part. I started with a guy at a desk and just developed from there. By the time I got to the end of it, it felt like Chapter 1 of a longer work, maybe a novel or novella, but for the very first thing I put up here I didn't want to commit to that amount of work! It hasn't been through beta readers or anything... just my own revisions and reviews.
This might be my first smut, but it's not my first writing, so I will encourage you to be as direct and succinct as you care to be in your comments! You ain't gonna hurt my feelings.
I don't normally write 3P omniscient/etc. so this was a bit of an experiment on my part. I was very much trying to get into the heads of both MCs and give the reader the back-and-forth between them. Did it work? I guess that's part of what I'm asking.Cheers
Cally420
Last edited:
AlinaX
Asymmetric Snowflake
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2014
- Posts
- 5,172
Just a quick note on the opening paragraph. Two sentences:
The second sentence is very blunt and might work as an opening sentence, but feels very uneven as a final sentence.
The first sentence is quite nice, except for 'under his hands', which refers to a him not yet introduced.
Far better to have something like:
Although the 'Professor' feels awkward too and could be indicated later.
ETA: I missed the POV switch at Para. 12 and got confused.
Last edited:
AwkwardMD
The worst Buddhist
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2014
- Posts
- 2,941
We will get to this promptly!Greetings @AwkwardMD and @Omenainen!
I'm new as a posting and contributing member here. Finding active folks willing to provide reviews and commentary, especially with the kind of thoughtfulness and depth I see in this thread, is amazing to see.
If you are able to provide your insights into my first Literotica story, "The Professor: An Awakening", I'd be grateful.
This work was complete pantsing on my part. I started with a guy at a desk and just developed from there. By the time I got to the end of it, it felt like Chapter 1 of a longer work, maybe a novel or novella, but for the very first thing I put up here I didn't want to commit to that amount of work! It hasn't been through beta readers or anything... just my own revisions and reviews.
This might be my first smut, but it's not my first writing, so I will encourage you to be as direct and succinct as you care to be in your comments! You ain't gonna hurt my feelings.
Cheers
Cally420
Thank you! But also, oh my goodness!
I went back to reread this myself after not having looked at it since posting. So much that I want to fix on it already. I definitely rushed to post instead of giving it time to sit for a while and doing a structure and wording pass. With a refreshed set of eyes, I'm seeing echoes/repeats, flabby phrasing, and a lot of needless over-description of position, etc. I'm sure there's more that needs work, but that's what first jumped out. I think I was focusing too much on inhabiting each POV and wound up sort of repeating things more than I shoulda from each POV.
So much to learn!
