First story on Lit

[Willpkirk]

So I've taken the plunge and posted my first story on Lit. Aware that the sex is a bit rushed, it was designed as a short so something that I would look at expanding in future stories but any other feedback is welcome https://www.literotica.com/s/the-boss-39

 

[countdowntolov3]

Congrats on posting your first story! I like the dialogue between the characters. It's porny - but fun and fresh. I particularly enjoyed the main character's sarcastic adoption of the put apon office worker. It dovetailed nicely with the action and painted their relationship well.

Sadly though, there are some significant and pervasive grammatical errors that make this a hard read. The good news is that this is straightforward to correct.

This is your first paragraph. It is one single sentence. It's way too long. The first sentence should end after "waiting on me."

I walked back into my office, and my boss, Diana, was standing waiting on me, Diana and I get on great, well usually, and while she was technically my boss, we have a very relaxed manner with each other, and very little she ever said to me was taken seriously, it was just the relationship we had with each other, I had been at the job long enough to know what to do and how to do it, and she generally left me to it, anything she needed to be done, she knew I would get done for her, and the very odd occasion she needed to be serious... well I knew when she was being serious.

Three possible strategies for correcting this issue in your future writing.

1. Do some googling about the rules of sentence and paragraph construction. Learn the rules. Apply them.
2. Read the paragraph out loud. When you naturally pause, add a period.
3. Grab a book by an established author and find a paragraph with a similar logical construction. See how they structured their writing. Just avoid intense scenes in their book, established authors break rules all the time at moments of high import. But we want to learn the basics before we start doing that.

For me. Option #3 works best.

The good news is that I think your writing flows okay when read with punctuation. Is think this is just a technical issue.

Another issue, even more easily addressed is that you sometimes jump between past and present tense. The fix is easy: don't do that!

"Gee, sorry Di, I was taking a break why don't you just chain me to the chair sure," I say as I sit down and start to pull up the sheet she's talking about, to see what is wrong with the formula.

"Oh don't you go giving me ideas mister, you wouldn't want to know what I'd do if you were all chained up to that chair," she quipped back, just the normal banter that we seem to be having more and more frequently recently.

I want to tell you that the sex is missing reactions from both characters. Especially the main character. When Di puts him inside her for the first time he just tells us it's happening, no feeling conveyed at all. But, you seem to know this already. Since you mentioned it was rushed. So I guess my feedback here has to be... maybe put it down and come back to it later, so it's not so rushed?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yes, for your readers' sake, please learn what a sentence is. This becomes unreadable, very quickly. I think you'll have more people give up, than go on. You need to slow down, punctuate, use sentences properly. Take a big breath and try reading it out loud - you'll faint, from oxygen deprivation!

 

[TheRedChamber]

I was writing this last night but got interrupted. As a result, it looks like I'm repeating a few of the points that countdowntolov already made. Sorry, don't mean it to feel like a pile on, but I'll leave it as is.

Congratulations on your first story. It makes sense to keep things short and sweet for the first one. I'd make the following comments.

First some language based ones.
1)

I walked back into my office, and my boss, Diana, was standing waiting on me, Diana and I get on great, well usually, and while she was technically my boss, we have a very relaxed manner with each other, and very little she ever said to me was taken seriously, it was just the relationship we had with each other, I had been at the job long enough to know what to do and how to do it, and she generally left me to it, anything she needed to be done, she knew I would get done for her, and the very odd occasion she needed to be serious... well I knew when she was being serious.

You have to habit of using a commas all the time rather than full stops and as a result, your whole first paragraph is technically one sentence.

2)
There's a lot of minor mistakes around speach including missing capital letters and whether the quoted speech needs to end with a full stop or a comma. It's not only that is wrong according to normal style guides, but you're also quite inconsistant.

3)
You need a little more variety in your writing in the sense that you start a lot of your paragraphs with 'I' and you have five in a row with 'She'. You also reuse a lot of vocabulary - your characters 'smile' at each other 16 times in one page and do things 'gently' 6 times.

These issues detract a bit from the story which I think is a good fantasy - simple but no worse for that. In terms of the plot and characters:

4) I found the relationship between the two characters a bit unclear. For example, it starts off by saying that they have a good working relationship (though she's hands off - at least until tonight) but then starts with 'What the hell' which sounds like he's in trouble for not being where he's supposed to be, but then it all gets sorted out within two lines and they're quipping at each other. He's fifteen years her senior but she's sending him to get coffee and later food. This is in the BDSM category and so the kind of power relationship is often at the heart of the story, but here its kind of hard for the reader to get their head around.

5) There's a bit too much vagueness in some of the descriptions. We learn that the MC is 15 years older than the boss, but I didn't get the sense of if she's a 25 yo over-achiever (probably not) or if she's 50 and the MC is one year away from retirement. Similarly, we know that the characters work in an office but apart from the fact that it uses Excel spreadsheets, we don't know much about it. This extends to even things like 'she was playing my favourite song as I came in', but you don't tell us what the MC's favourite song is. As a result everything feels a little generic. A story like this doesn't need long information dump paragraphs telling us the full history of the company, but little asides can fill in some of the gaps. 'She had (/hadn't) invited me to her 30th birthday party the previous month'. 'There was no natural light ain my dingy basement office'/'The views of Manhatten from my executive office on the 112th floor were stunning.'