First Story Feedback - Past or Present Tense (Femdom/Incest)

[Usually_Lurking]

I just recently published my first story: Breaking In Her Naive Nephew (https://www.literotica.com/s/breaking-in-her-naive-nephew), and the good news is that it seems well-received so far! Better than I could have expected, in all fairness.

However, one of the first comments mentioned that the present tense construction was perhaps a source of difficulty. Now, I recognize one comment is nothing to change your whole writing style for, but this one resonated with me because I had previously found managing the tense during writing to be one of my most challenging areas. The story was originally in some weird mix of past and present tense, and I had rehashed the whole thing several times before settling on this one.

I am a scientific writer and editor by trade, so while I have a pretty firm grip of English, I don't get much practice with things like scene narration.

Can any experienced writers weigh in? It seems like maybe the past tense is preferred, but is it worth re-working the story before proceeding with future chapters? I think my specific area of struggle is balancing the different past tenses in a way that keeps the action/progression of events cohesive, so if anyone could provide insight I would appreciate it.

 

[Wriggle]

I tend to use past tense in prose storytelling and present tense in screenwriting.

This said, and maybe it's due to my experience in screenwriting, I did not find the flow of your style off-putting.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Can any experienced writers weigh in? It seems like maybe the past tense is preferred, but is it worth re-working the story before proceeding with future chapters? I think my specific area of struggle is balancing the different past tenses in a way that keeps the action/progression of events cohesive, so if anyone could provide insight I would appreciate it.

I've not read the story, but my suggestion would be to leave the first chapter as it is, and proceed to the next chapter, and write it in past tense.

It can be tedious to "tense shift" a whole chapter and probably not worth the effort. Put the time into the next chapter - I always say you progress faster as a writer by writing the next story, not futzing with the last one.

Past tense gives you more control over the flow of your writing - present tense can be too much "in your face", and can be exhausting to read. You need to give readers a chance to breath.

 

[HectorBidon]

Here is a thread about tense that you might find of interest.

 

[MediocreAuthor]

I don't know if I'd consider myself "experienced" but I'll do my best to explain my thought process on tenses.

Okay, so I write in 2 styles:
3rd person past tense, and 1st person present tense.

Why? First off, if I'm planning on telling a story that includes more than one character's POV during a single scene, then I do 3rd person past. It just sounds more natural to how anyone might tell a story.

"So he went to the store, saw a movie, fucked an alien, and then the two of them got some ice cream. The alien didn't like rum raisin much, but he did, so they got rum raisin anyway."

That works perfectly in past tense...

HOWEVER... I also write semi-dark, noncon and mind control stories where bad things happen to the main characters. In those stories, there is something about reading:

"I, the narrator, am experiencing this dark, sexual scenario RIGHT NOW, and you the reader are learning about it at the same time I am! I'm describing to you my experience, in the moment, but you can't help me!"

that comes out as so erotic that it makes me sick to my stomach sometimes.

This is not a narrator telling you about an event that happened long ago to someone else... this is a character experiencing the events at the same time as the reader... and it comes across and super hot to me.
But if it were in 3rd person, then it's a dispassionate narrator telling the story anyway. There's no reason to tell it in present tense, because the narrator isn't the one experiencing the action.

Basically,

"It happened to them... let the narrator tell you how it happened back then."
or
"It's happening to me... let me tell you what's happening, right now!"

Does that make any sense?

 

[Usually_Lurking]

That makes perfect sense! Thank you all very much for your thoughtful replies. I think that I will leave the first chapter as-is, and work on incorporating this advice as I move forward.

It sounds like I could "get away with" present tense if it's well-written, but that past tense will be easier and give me quite a bit more flexibility. I do love your idea, MediocreAuthor, of working in first person, present tense glimpses of the action. That will work very well for some scenes I have planned.

Thank you for your input, everyone!

 

[Mr_Blackr0se]

I just recently published my first story: Breaking In Her Naive Nephew (https://www.literotica.com/s/breaking-in-her-naive-nephew), and the good news is that it seems well-received so far! Better than I could have expected, in all fairness.

However, one of the first comments mentioned that the present tense construction was perhaps a source of difficulty. Now, I recognize one comment is nothing to change your whole writing style for, but this one resonated with me because I had previously found managing the tense during writing to be one of my most challenging areas. The story was originally in some weird mix of past and present tense, and I had rehashed the whole thing several times before settling on this one.

I am a scientific writer and editor by trade, so while I have a pretty firm grip of English, I don't get much practice with things like scene narration.

Can any experienced writers weigh in? It seems like maybe the past tense is preferred, but is it worth re-working the story before proceeding with future chapters? I think my specific area of struggle is balancing the different past tenses in a way that keeps the action/progression of events cohesive, so if anyone could provide insight I would appreciate it.

Excellent question. I almost always write in past tense. There are a couple of reasons. 1. You get a bigger sandbox to play in as far as your ability to use verb tenses go, and 2, when you write in present tense, you lose between 10 and 20% of your audience, especially with adults. I know YA does a ton of present tense, but if you look at most other genres, past tense is way more popular. When I read erotica I prefer past tense as well because the action has already happened. The stories I am working on for here are all 1st person past tense. When I write regular fiction it's usually 3rd person past tense.

 

[ElectricBlue]

That makes perfect sense! Thank you all very much for your thoughtful replies. I think that I will leave the first chapter as-is, and work on incorporating this advice as I move forward.

It sounds like I could "get away with" present tense if it's well-written, but that past tense will be easier and give me quite a bit more flexibility. I do love your idea, MediocreAuthor, of working in first person, present tense glimpses of the action. That will work very well for some scenes I have planned.

Thank you for your input, everyone!

I'm not sure MediocreAuthor is suggesting you use mixed tenses and shifting points of view in the same story. That can be disconcerting for the reader, and gets confusing. Best to stay in one tense throughout, and use close third person to manage the points of view.

 

[MediocreAuthor]

I'm not sure MediocreAuthor is suggesting you use mixed tenses and shifting points of view in the same story. That can be disconcerting for the reader, and gets confusing. Best to stay in one tense throughout, and use close third person to manage the points of view.

Correct!

Maintain one view point type/tense in each story.

I am merely listing my favorite two options... But I never mix them within a single story

 

[Pureotica]

Present tense doesn't bother me, and you don't write it badly. If you enjoy it, keep it.

I didn't read the whole story. Just a quick pass of the beginning. If I fine-tooth-combed the piece, I'd suggest some edits, but nothing egregious. Your base-line technical skills are nothing to worry about. You have a grasp of "show-don't-tell." You violate POV a few times, but not in immersion breaking ways. You'll be fine. If you like what you've written, keep it. If you want to change it, that's fine also. You can't serve every single Lit commenter's personal presences. That path is the road to madness. You have to serve your story. Pick the perspective you like and stick to it.

 

[lustychimera]

I find present tense much easier to write in first person. All the little turns of phrase flow better, I think the scenes read easier, and to me, it makes the moment much more engaging. It's definitely become my favorite to write in.

But when it comes to fiction writing, stories are almost entirely past tense. Readers tend to consider present tense a quirk, almost. It does stick out to me for the first few pages when the story is written in third person present, and especially in the omniscient POV. Limited POV isn't quite as weird to read since you can get a really tight viewpoint, nearly first person with free indirect.

Reading through the first part of your story, I didn't find the tense shifts jarring, but you did have a really liberal use of punctuation. That was the biggest flaw with the beginning, I think.

Lexi swirls her drink, sitting alone on the edge of a patio in the heart of suburbia. Watching the family reunion with intensely mixed feelings.

Faced with her pick of the litter: bragging uncles by the grill, screaming cousins in the yard, and old women sharing church gossip in the shade... It was a pretty easy choice to just move a chair into the corner to suntan and wait it out.

Don't get me wrong. I love creative and flexible punctuation. Sometimes you just gotta get that cadence right or highlight a moment, but the thing is, it needs to have a purpose if you're going to stretch the rules or else it just reads like a grammatical error rather than an artistic expression.

In the first paragraph, you have a fragmented gerund phrase, and it doesn't really seem to be serving any kind of purpose. "Watching the family..." To me, it wouldn't read any differently if you just put a comma in there, or even just putting a dash in there or something if you want to separate it out.

And just to add in there, as a personal preference, I try to avoid -ing verbs as much as possible. It makes the prose read like a chainsaw in my mind: -ing, -ing, -ing. Also, it forces me to phrase my sentences more creatively, which helps to cut down on repetition.

The other big thing I noticed was you used a ton of ellipses, even when they don't make much sense, which tend to get annoying to read over.

But overall, you did an amazing job at the beginning of not only setting the drama but making it relatable and even making it feel like the exposition is happening in the story rather than just a big dump at the beginning. Conflict and characterization right off the bat, and you showed it to me. I do hate the cliche "show; don't tell" advice, but when you show a scene at the right moments, you can really pile on a lot of complex characterizations; you can have a lot of emotions happening at once. I think that's the right way to use it, and that's definitely what you did with the sibling pleasantries.

And normally I'm not a fan of a pause for heavy physical character description, but the way you put it in the story really made it part of the narrative rather than feeling like a break. Like, you weren't just pausing to let me know how she looked, but you used it in such a way that it gave me insight into how the character sees herself in relation to the conflict with her sister, and what really made it read well was the heap of voice you added in.

So you clearly know how to weave a story, just the grammar and prose could use some work. You definitely hooked me with the early conflict of the story. Like, I'm actually rooting for Lexi to get one over on her sister by seducing her nephew. That's the whole plot laid out, and it was done really well. To be clear, it wasn't the premise that intrigued me; it was how you structured and presented it.

Edit: I was only thinking about reading the beginning but ended up reading to the end, and I'm glad I did. Your writing got so much better as the story went on. It was just the right pacing and description for a easy read, and the prose was pretty much invisible for the most part.

Most of all--and I know it's the kink--but I enjoyed how you vilified Lexi as the story went on. At the beginning, I thought she was the unfortunate black sheep, but toward the end, she was flat out abusing the poor boy, and what's even more ironic was, to me, she was doing it for all the same reasons she complained about men. Like, she was exactly the kind of person she herself didn't want to be with.

I did think Clifton's characterization was lacking. Pure lust isn't much to go on (which is weird to say for an erotica, but I like what I like), but there were hints that he was rebelling against Mother, like there was some resentment there. I would have liked it if you leaned into that more and used it as the connection between them, but again, that's getting prescriptive, and it's your story, and it really was a well written one, just the beginning was oddly bumpy to read compared to the rest of it.

 

[Usually_Lurking]

Thank you for the very in-depth feedback, @lustychimera! That's all extremely helpful. Commas and ellipses are definitely my guilty pleasure, and you aren't the first to tell me to settle down (probably not the last either, though I do intend to work on it).

You mentioned that the end seemed to improve on the beginning, and I think I know why: I actually wrote this story in two halves split very far apart. The beginning was written 2+ years ago, and reworked (probably overworked) several times in different tenses, while the latter half was finished up over just a week or so when I returned to it.

You're also a very attentive reader! The question I asked myself for this story, at its core, was "what would it look like if we gender-swapped every expectation of toxic age-gap relationships?" So we have a naive but beautiful young man taken advantage of by a lecherous, manipulative older woman. She uses every trick in the book, things that would be obvious red flags to anyone more experienced, to twist him around her finger and then get him into her bed. And once he's there, his pleasure is really an afterthought. She uses and abuses him like a toy to get what she wants, while using his own needs as another tool to control him. We see her laying hooks into him all throughout the story, and she shows no signs of letting him go at the end. This is something I plan to explore further as we go, and I'm in the process of sketching out some ungodly number of future chapters to explore additional layers of the same concept. Basically, it's supposed to be about a predatory relationship.

It's a fair take that Clifton's character is not deeply explored. In a way, he's a bit of a prop, as I certainly want the focus on Lexi as the star (and villain) of the show. However, I can do more with him and probably should, to keep things spicy. He's certainly going to have many conflicting feelings to work through in future chapters, and his perspective is going to be needed to keep it believable as Lexi domineers his life to her own ends.

 

[lustychimera]

Thank you for the very in-depth feedback, @lustychimera! That's all extremely helpful. Commas and ellipses are definitely my guilty pleasure, and you aren't the first to tell me to settle down (probably not the last either, though I do intend to work on it).

You mentioned that the end seemed to improve on the beginning, and I think I know why: I actually wrote this story in two halves split very far apart. The beginning was written 2+ years ago, and reworked (probably overworked) several times in different tenses, while the latter half was finished up over just a week or so when I returned to it.

You're also a very attentive reader! The question I asked myself for this story, at its core, was "what would it look like if we gender-swapped every expectation of toxic age-gap relationships?" So we have a naive but beautiful young man taken advantage of by a lecherous, manipulative older woman. She uses every trick in the book, things that would be obvious red flags to anyone more experienced, to twist him around her finger and then get him into her bed. And once he's there, his pleasure is really an afterthought. She uses and abuses him like a toy to get what she wants, while using his own needs as another tool to control him. We see her laying hooks into him all throughout the story, and she shows no signs of letting him go at the end. This is something I plan to explore further as we go, and I'm in the process of sketching out some ungodly number of future chapters to explore additional layers of the same concept. Basically, it's supposed to be about a predatory relationship.

It's a fair take that Clifton's character is not deeply explored. In a way, he's a bit of a prop, as I certainly want the focus on Lexi as the star (and villain) of the show. However, I can do more with him and probably should, to keep things spicy. He's certainly going to have many conflicting feelings to work through in future chapters, and his perspective is going to be needed to keep it believable as Lexi domineers his life to her own ends.

I just want to say, it makes me very happy how much attention to characterization that you are putting into your story. To me, without all that, it's just a kink described through an action beat script, which makes it more akin to XHamster for blind people than a story with emotion.

 

[Usually_Lurking]

I just want to say, it makes me very happy how much attention to characterization that you are putting into your story. To me, without all that, it's just a kink described through an action beat script, which makes it more akin to XHamster for blind people than a story with emotion.

I know it's been a minute since this thread was active, but I just wanted to let you know that Chapter 2 has been posted, and (in no small part due to your feedback) it does give Clif more of a fair shake in terms of screen-time and characterization. It is also written in the past tense: that seemed to be the group consensus. Once I committed to that adjustment, I actually found it easier to stick to.

The second chapter is available here (https://literotica.com/s/breaking-in-her-naive-nephew-ch-02) if you're curious. Thanks again for the very helpful advice!

 

[darkride]

Whichever you choose - just make sure you stick to it. 100%.

Because there's nothing worse than when you change tense part way through.

 

[BgDaddy33]

I've not read the story, but my suggestion would be to leave the first chapter as it is, and proceed to the next chapter, and write it in past tense.

It can be tedious to "tense shift" a whole chapter and probably not worth the effort. Put the time into the next chapter - I always say you progress faster as a writer by writing the next story, not futzing with the last one.

Past tense gives you more control over the flow of your writing - present tense can be too much "in your face", and can be exhausting to read. You need to give readers a chance to breath.

This. Well said.

It is going to drive you mad(crazy) wanting to go go back and edit, but if you can help it, leave it as is and move the future chapters to past tense. This way you don't get stuck at the beginning of your story. Tell your story and then go back and fix it if you feel you absolutely need to.

 

[darkride]

I always say you progress faster as a writer by writing the next story, not futzing with the last one.

Early in my life I went to a weekend course in story writing, and one of the key things I took from it was -

Get it writ, then get it right.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Early in my life I went to a weekend course in story writing, and one of the key things I took from it was -

Get it writ, then get it right.

Yes, when you're editing before publication.

But so many people here don't do that. They rush, they don't pay attention to the basics, they get a story published. Then they start fixing things.

Get it right before you publish, is my point. Don't put stuff out that's half baked.