Do you record or do you craft?

[AG31]

It seems to me that the writing of erotica (or any fiction, I suppose) can be categorized as either recording or crafting.

Recording: A story comes to you pretty well fleshed out, and you spend your time finding words to communicate it.

Crafting: You get an idea, create a plot, devise and flesh out characters, come up with a setting, and write it all down.

Obviously actual writing is usually a blend, but where are you on the spectrum?

Can recording in its purer form work with longer stories?

EDIT: And then there's "pantsing." See some posts down thread.

 

[GlennJenko]

I lean more towards Crafting. I usually get a "nugget" that I find interesting and then flesh it out from there into an outline. Characters then fall into place once that outline is sorted out in my head (or on a page).

 

[WittyUserName]

It seems to me that the writing of erotica (or any fiction, I suppose) can be categorized as either recording or crafting.

Recording: A story comes to you pretty well fleshed out, and you spend your time finding words to communicate it.

Crafting: You get an idea, create a plot, devise and flesh out characters, come up with a setting, and write it all down.

Obviously actual writing is usually a blend, but where are you on the spectrum?

Can recording in its purer form work with longer stories?

Not really either. My first series was started because of a dream I had. Then I just started making things up as I went along. Kind of regret that now! My current series is more toward the crafting method.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Depends on the story, but I do both. Some stories are more complete that others. Those I transcribe. Others are just nuggets that have to be nurtured to grow. Regardless of how they start, they all take crafting to be complete.

 

[NuclearFairy]

For short stories I'm always a recorder, for the longer ones it's a combination of the two. The big pivotal scenes all just sorta come to me and I figure out how to get them down. But the smaller how do we get from point a to point d scenes I have to carefully craft most of those.

 

[AG31]

I'm a total pantser. I usually start with a scene in my head, or a line of dialogue, or some other tiny element of the story, and I start writing. I'll take a break and think about where I want the story to go from where I am at that point, and then go back and rewrite the start to fit it. It's like I'm writing forwards and backwards from the middle.

That moment when it all clicks in my head, and I see the story laid out behind me and before me, that's one of my favourite moments in the writing experience.

I don't even start with that.

Typically when I write, I sit down to a blank document and just start putting words on the page. Whatever comes to mind works.

Ooops! I guess there's a third category. The "pantser." A few months ago I had to ask what that was. Pretty common, it seems, since everyone else seemed to know what it was.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

70 craft/30 record

An idea will come, then live in my head until it sprouts a handful of scenes. Then I’ll start rough outlining to try and connect the dots.

The 30% record for me more comes from a specific type of scene that I want to feature, then finding ways to build around it.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Can recording in its purer form work with longer stories?

Not for me. I'll record an observation (my grace notes), but my stories are stream of consciousness writing; pure pantser, me.

"Crafting" implies doing something very deliberately, so I'm not that either. What you read is pretty much (98% - 99%) the raw first draft. During edit I fiddle with words, phrases, the occasional sentence gets moved around, but I like to keep the rawness I get in that first rush of words to the page. It's very possibly, "You can't polish a turd," but it might also be, as a beloved beta reader once said, "Finding a gem in the mud."

 

[HordHolm]

First draft, pantser; editing process, craft.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

More of a sculptor or a cook instead of a craftswoman. I'm not a recorder because even if I do that, the result is completely different from what I had in my head, even during the first step.

 

[Erozetta]

Gatherer - crafter - recorder. In that order.

I sit down to nothing and slowly discover what I have available to me on hand as I write. Once I have all of the options for the story in front of me written down, I begin experimenting to see what works and what doesn't, slowly whittling it down to the core ingredients that work best together. Then I refine the recipe and record the results.

Rough draft - first draft - final draft.

Or, how I see this question:

Shopping list of potentially needed ingredients - experimentation with ingredients to find the right flavor profile - final recipe for others to utilize.

Nothing I originally wrote is wasted. I sometimes use it to anchor my knowledge of the characters and situation then remove it when deciding the reader doesn't need that information, but I did. It's the bouquet garni of writing. Great for developing flavor, but removed before serving.

(I'm a better cook/baker than I am a writer.)

 

[StillStunned]

I've compared my process before to a potter. I start with a rough lump, and shape it up and down in a continuous process. As noted above, mostly once I have the core sorted out I can work backwards and forwards until it's a satisfying and cohesive unit.

So in that sense I suppose it's crafting.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Stop creating false binaries within a spectrum (or in this case, a cloud).

 

[M_K_Babalon]

So... pantsing and plotting?

 

[iwatchus]

I am still getting started on writing fiction. My very first story was purely crafted. I knew the climactic scene and then built a world around it.

That turned into a series as I became curious and attached to the characters. I feel like I am recording, but I have no idea where the story is going. I just write down what the characters do. They have all the agency, I just write down what they do. It is a very weird feeling.

If I try to plan things out, the writing becomes very stilted. I still need a lot of editing and some re-writing.

Is this recording or crafting?

 

[AG31]

Stop creating false binaries within a spectrum (or in this case, a cloud).

I added a third category up thread, so it's not binary. Trinary??? Anyway, did you miss this?

Obviously actual writing is usually a blend, but where are you on the spectrum?

Is a spectrum a binary????

ANYWAY... So far the thread has generated some pretty interesting responses, so I don't think I'll stop, thank you.

 

[XerXesXu]

I have a theme, and points of interest within that theme, and a story arc - that is a beginning and ending in mind - before I'll sit down to write. I construct this nucleus of a story in my mind while I'm running.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Put recording and crafting in a blender with a big old dollop of 'wingin' it', blend until smooth and serve over ice.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I've said this before but, for me, planning out a story is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle - except instead of one picture, there are infinite pieces and infinite pictures it could end up as. Not all the pieces fit together and sometimes you're left shaking the box with nothing usable falling out, but sometime you find one or two pieces which suddenly fit together and you go - 'oh, it's a horse!' - and suddenly the rest of the pieces are really easy and you can start writing.
And sometimes when the story is ninety percent done, you stop and can't find the missing piece and you have to leave it for six months before your brain suddenly goes 'It was a unicorn all along!'

Most of my stories start with a central idea - the one I'm working on at the moment started with 'A guy is offered a MFF by his girlfriend but what if he really dislikes the second F?' From there you try and find the pieces that not only make it work, but also try to keep it somewhat unique. I've tried to avoid 'Oh, halfway through he realizes he likes F2 after all' but it has meant I've struggled to find something interesting that actually works.

I don't feel that I'm able to write prose unless I have a clear map in my mind, not necessarily of the whole story, but at least of a single scene. I'm a computer programmer by trade and I tend to take that into my writing. I wouldn't write a function in C++ without knowing what the entry parameters and return value were supposed to be, nor what side-effects it was supposed to have. Similarly, in any scene I write, I need to know where the characters are starting from and where I want them to be at the end of the scene. I also want to have a clear idea of what the 'gradual progress' is made on any of the characters arcs (over dinner she comes to like him more, he becomes aware of her troubled past etc.) and I want to know roughly what to Checkov into any scene that I'll need later.

Once I've got that I can sit down and actually start to write at a paragraph level. I can say - right, lets spend one paragraph describing the restaurant - lets spend one paragraph describing what she's wearing - now dialogue about ordering followed by the actual meat of the conversation where he reveals he's the modern day Count of Monte Cristo. I can't really do any of that low-level stuff unless I know what the overall effect of the scene is supposed to be.

As you write, characters can surprise you, but that's often an indication that your higher-level planning has gone wrong somewhere. If she's telling me she doesn't want to sleep with him, then there must have been a mistake in my 'calculations' for why someone with her basic personality traits in her basic situation would want to sleep with the guy I've created.

All this means I tend to be fairly painstaking in the way I construct stories. And I tend to have multiple ones I'm thinking about or waiting to think about at any one time. It used to be that I didn't start writing until I was pretty sure I could write the whole story. These days I'm a bit more relaxed and if I think a scene is neat and interesting in its own right, I'm happy to write say up to 3k words of prose based on a complete plan of a scene but not the whole story.

(More to come...)

 

[TheRedChamber]

Sometimes, the whole process of crafting the bones of a story happens fast. The absolute fastest it's ever happened to me was last year when I wrote the story Re-Opening. I'd been thinking about writing something for the Ogg Heroism event but come up with a blank. I was working on something else and needed to confirm when Old Compton Street became 'the gay street' in London. When I googled, the first result I got was a picture of the Admiral Duncan pub in London and I found I immediately had the whole story in literally less than a second.

In fact, the story had been written about two and a half decades ago, before I even knew I was interested in writing, when I was walking past the Admiral Duncana pub in the year 2000. For those who don't know, in 1999 the pub was subject to a vicious nailbomb attack which killed three people and injured more, many horrifically. When I passed it, I was new in London and, while I'd heard about the bombing, I hadn't heard that it had been rebuilt in less than three months. My thought process went "Good for them...but, man, if I were gay, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable or safe drinking in there...but, I guess if I were gay, I'd feel that I damn well had to drink in there whether I felt safe or not."

Fast-foward to the present and my mind took those two contrasting thoughts and gave them to two characters, gay lovers, and had them act follow it through to its natural conclusion - they had to go to the opening night. I was able to write the whole story in less than an hour. I could have started typing immediately but I stopped to confirm some exact dates, and facts. I sent it to @Kumquatqueen who I knew had probably the best background of anyone of on the forum to read such a story and she turned it around pretty damn fast as well.

This sort of lightning in a bottle does happen sometimes, but it's relatively rare and I can usually only go straight from flash of inspiration to full text for very short stories (Re-Opening is only 1.5k words). It's far more common even for 'easy' stories, for me to get a flash of inspiration that tells me the basic direction of the plot and why its 'interesting' and worth writing, but I spend a week working on the skeleton before I'm ready to put meat on the bones.

 

[OddLove]

I freestyle it based of a general idea. For example, it could be as little of an idea as 'Police officer guy is into femdom, and wants to be a pet pig to a powerful and mean woman' then I just figure out where it should start.

So then I'd think 'Well, where would the story get interesting', then maybe I think, he has to go to a sex club to arrest a powerful ladies stalker Ex for breaking a restraining order.

Then I just freestyle from there.

Every time I finish one or two scenes, I got back to review and craft them more.

I'd say I spend more time 'recording' it, but in reality, I should be spending more time 'crafting' it, because I end up finding a mountain of small errors, like saying 'feeling' instead of 'filling' or using the wrong To, Too, Then, Than, and over using certain words like Amazing, Nervously, Surprisingly, etc. I do about 80% recording/freestyling, and 20% crafting. But now I'm trying really hard to do So Much More Crafting that I reverse those numbers. Even if it takes me weeks to finish a medium length 10k word story, cause it takes a long time for Lit people to approve my Edits, and I shouldn't be depending on Edits to fix my stories anyways.

I should just be crafting better.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Some stories simply need recording (not just the ones that actually happened - they can appear in my head, be carefully imagined, and then just written down), but others appear only as a single image or plot point, and then that needs a story to be carefully crafted around it - or at least some semi-plausible scaffolding masquerading as a plot, that justifies characters getting it on.

One reason why I like writing porn - you can get away with little plot. The other main reason is people actually want to read it.

 

[lovecraft68]

Muse-Hey, check this out!
Me-Not much there, it's a scene.
Muse-But its a hot scene!
Me-It is, but who are they, how did they get there?
Muse-Not sure.
Me-Shouldn't you know?
Muse-Listen fuckwit, its been years of this, you know how this works. You want the story, put your fingers to the keys and I'll tell it to you.
Me-But why can you never just tell me?
Muse-Because I don't know until you start. You going to start or talk to yourself?
Me-Fuck you.
Sits down at the desk while bitching about the diva muse, puts on some hard and heavy playlist, puts the fingers to the keys.
Me-Okay, Jules, tell me a story.
Muse-Oh, okay, so we...
Me-taps keys impatiently. "Do you even have a story for this?"
Muse-Fuck you
Mind opens words sound in my mind, images appear, characters pop up and name themselves.
Fingers move.

Recording? Crafting? Just making shit up line by line? Mental instability? Not sure, its how it works

 

[madelinemasoch]

There’s a happy medium here. Ideas come. They come with their own energy to be recorded into the form of prose. Sometimes while you’re writing, ideas and energy come with intuition. In other words sometimes while you’re recording an idea, more of the idea spills out and you find yourself crafting it.

 

[designatedvictim]

I'm not sure about the use of 'record' or 'craft' in this context, but I can see why you used the terms.

I would never apply craft to my own material, though. That sounds way, way, way too artsy, for my tastes.

Like many, I'm sort of a hybrid.

'Record'

An idea pops into my head for the basic scenario and, ahem, players. To whit, The Long Weekend and A Week of Sunrises (the sum total of my published material).

I have a distinct tendency to do a bit of a slow burn, a build up to the main action. That requires words. Often, many words. I have several comments complaining about my preponderance of words.

I've also had a comment or two (I haven't received many comments) that my characters tend to be a bit talky (meaning more words).

I'll be honest and say (as I've said in other threads) that I don't know when to shut up.

Some people don't want to wade through 11K words before getting to the steamy parts.

As Bugs Bunny has been wont to say:

Okay, okay, I'm shuttin' up. Why should I continue to keep yappin' when I'm told to shut up. I'm not the kind of dope that don't know when to stop...

Many of my individual scenes do pretty much boil down to 'recording' what's noodling about in my head.

It also turns out that I like writing dialog between two characters, something that I never expected - something I never expected I could even do, actually.

'Craft', though I have reservations using the term.

My initial story idea is usually a high-level outline that has no flesh on its details. A rough scenario with a rough list of scenes that should follow.

As I set down to work, I suppose that's where 'craft' works. Arranging the pieces so that the 'record' feature takes over at the detailed line-level. During that arranging phase, I often build a more scene-oriented list of points that ought to happen in a scene - a 'shopping list' of things to apply while I put a scene to the page.

I'm not certain if 'pantsing' should more properly be applied to my scene- and dialog-level material, but I could see the argument for applying it in my case.