For Fun - What's the worst corner you've ever written yourself into?

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

Apart from the charming thread on alien names, there have been some pretty heavy (but important) threads lately, as well as some very practical ones. I thought it might be fun to share stories about the worst or funniest corner authors have written themselves into, and they've gotten out of them.

So, if you feel inclined to rat yourself out for writing yourself into a plot corner you had trouble getting out of, or writing a character who was too disinclined to do whatever it was you wanted the character to do, please share!

 

[oggbashan]

My obvious one was Christmas Fairy. I had written parts one and two but seemed to have put myself in an impossible situation to get beyond the end of part two without deus ex machina or 'with one bound he was free'.

It took me from 2004 to 2017 before I worked out a solution.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

My obvious one was Christmas Fairy. I had written parts one and two but seemed to have put myself in an impossible situation to get beyond the end of part two without deus ex machina or 'with one bound he was free'.

It took me from 2004 to 2017 before I worked out a solution.

Thirteen years? That must have been one hell of a corner. What exactly was the impossible situation?

 

[Brutal_One]

I guess mine in the current story arc where trying to write about a fledgling BDSM relationship between two characters but having the first encounter being as a result of an MC device you would have thought would negate the whole relationship (and there were many that think it did) but story writing is like life so nothing should be out with the bounds of correcting it. So the relationship continues and is continuing as I would like it to. Why forgive the reason for an encounter in the first place if it still develops as you would have imagined.

I guess it’s true to say the rewrite has made the story (to my mind anyway) better than the original. The three main threads of the story remain but the role of the players has shifted for some.

So yes a corner but not one that I could not write myself out of. Of course it would not have worked if it had been a single standalone novella but where one objective was just trying to achieve a start that was acceptable to Lit so Laurel in effect.

I am aware of its potential which makes me more mindful of the writing.

Brutal One

 

[oggbashan]

Thirteen years? That must have been one hell of a corner. What exactly was the impossible situation?

I had started with a twelve-inch high Christmas Fairy that was an alien artefact. She needed sperm to survive and then to grow. But then she grew too large and had to use sperm to shrink again with the help of her human partner sucking milk from her breasts.

That milk changed him. He was now dependent on her, and she on him but that was only a temporary fix. Unless a solution was found to their mutual dependence both would die - soon...

But I couldn't think of that solution.

 

[NotWise]

"Wolves of Winter" (in my sig line) is one case. I wrote to the point where a small group of ranchers in a remote area would have to fight off a Mexican drug cartel. I couldn't figure out how they'd do that. Now I think I have the solution (there are two cartels, and the ranchers manage to pit them against each other), but I haven't gotten back to the story.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as a corner, really, but when writing "Working for Mom" I got to the point that I couldn't write one more sex scene. There was just too much, and it stuck me there for a few weeks.

I deleted two scenes from early in the story that I found not very inspiring and moved a scenes from later in the story to nearer the beginning. I ended up with no sex at all in the last third of the story, and the readers didn't care for that.

It's not uncommon for me to write to the point where I get blocked. The general solution is to back up at least a few paragraphs and figure out what went wrong, then rewrite it.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

Two corners, I guess, both in the Alexaverse..


1) The story was originally meant to be five, maybe six chapters, and has morphed into thirty-nine, and nowhere near done. This has led to drastic character expansions, and a LOT of retcons as I play catch up.

2) I started the series in 2015, and because it has mushroomed, I now need important details I never discussed before, like birthdays. I may have been writing this damn thing for five years, but only eight months has passed in the story.

So now I'm pulling a Simpsons thing where everyone is the age they're meant to be, and actual age-to-date ratios are ignored, like Maggie Simpson being a toddler for the past thirty years. So that's been requiring some fancy footwork to overcome.

I think I've done the opposite of 'paint myself into a corner', I've painted past the size and scope of my original canvas and have to keep adding on, hoping nobody will notice the seams...

I'm reasonably sure it's only the Alexaverse I've done that with. Time will tell.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

I haven't written enough erotica yet to run into that kind of problem, but in my non-erotic writing, oh boy. I'm currently struggling with the idea that an alien species can create wormholes, but can't travel through time, when science suggests that if wormholes can exist then they must traverse both space and time. If the aliens can time travel they'd be an invincible antagonist, and if they can't travel through wormholes, they'd be a toothless one.

But there's a limit to how much hand-waving I can stomach in my own writing, so yeah, trying to figure that one out. Even if they can only use wormholes to travel through space, that's such an enormous advantage over humans that they still might be invincible, which I need them to ... not be.

I think of that as the Superman problem. They made Superman the comic book character so invincible with so many powers that they had a hard time coming up with conflicts that were realistically threatening for him. There was a lot of inconsistency as a result.

Maybe the solution is not in the rules of the wormhole, but in something about their biology or their technology that doesn't allow them to take advantage of the time-traveling capacity of the wormhole. It can be easier to add new rules than tweak the old ones.

If you're stuck, as a kid. No matter what problem you have, they'll have an answer. Sometimes it will even make sense. Other times, it will be something like they couldn't use wormholes more than once a day or their moms would ground them. You'll at least get entertainment out of it! Sometimes there's a seed of something even in the silly ideas.

Do you publish your non-erotic work?

 

[Nouh_Bdee]

Standard weights and measures

This doesn't truly fit the topic, but I'm new to this so it's the best I can do.

I'm writing a Sci-Fi story set in the future, and I decided that between now and my fictional future, every human nation would use the metric system. The only problem is, I'm an American who was stupidly raised on the imperial system so I have to look up conversion rates every time I include a reference to size or weight. It's tedious and frustrating.

Nouh

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

I did with my 'Goodbye to the Past' series and went a bit all-in and left it with nowhere to go.

I regret it for a few reasons - firstly, I skipped from genre to genre. First it was Mature, then it was Les then it was Group Sex. As the views dropped, I lost the will to go on, so left poor Caitlin high and not quite so dry.

Secondly, I had a great 'epilogue' ending with a newspaper article sometime in the future exposing Cait and her (by then) famous actress girlfriend for their previous exploits. It never got used and I still regret it.

Taught me to hold back, keep the genres the same and allow for a proper conclusion.

At least it did until I got onto my current lockdown story, which again features les, group, mild bdsm and a bit of mature.

Not a clue where to publish it.

Is this my fault or Lit's strange genre classification?

Answers on a postcard please.

Or maybe somewhere below...

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

Thanks Nada - been slithering towards Group for it, but Bi would be much more appropriate.

Shame it don't exist...

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm not sure if it's quite working myself into a corner, but I would say with my series Hotel Exhibitionist, after chapter 3 I found myself hitting a barrier and I have not yet quite figured out how to get past it, and that's why I haven't continued it for over three years.

My personal philosophy of a series in a category like Exhibitionist and Voyeur is that I want each chapter to push the erotic/titillation envelope a little further than the previous one. Chapter three carried things to a pretty extreme level and after I published it I wasn't sure how to a) continue pushing the envelope with each chapter and b) continue the story's narrative arc in a satisfying way. I still intend to finish that story at some point but am still trying to figure out how to do so.

A bigger problem for me than working myself into a corner is that I come up with story ideas faster than I can write them and then have a hard time focusing on the current story rather than spending time musing about the next one. That's where I am now.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I haven't written enough erotica yet to run into that kind of problem, but in my non-erotic writing, oh boy. I'm currently struggling with the idea that an alien species can create wormholes, but can't travel through time, when science suggests that if wormholes can exist then they must traverse both space and time. If the aliens can time travel they'd be an invincible antagonist, and if they can't travel through wormholes, they'd be a toothless one.

But there's a limit to how much hand-waving I can stomach in my own writing, so yeah, trying to figure that one out. Even if they can only use wormholes to travel through space, that's such an enormous advantage over humans that they still might be invincible, which I need them to ... not be.

Depending on just how hard SF you're aiming for and how you need wormholes to work, the concept of a light cone may be helpful.

The gist of it is: under relativity, time depends on the inertial frame of the observer combined with position in space. One observer will see event X happen before Y, whereas another will see Y happen before X. It follows that if you can teleport instantaneously, there will be inertial frames where that teleportation is travelling backwards in time.

But there are limits on that. If light from event X has time to travel to the location of Y before Y happens, then X will always happen before Y, in any frame of reference. The part of space-time that definitively happens after X is known as X's "light cone" (because it's shaped like a four-dimensional cone, limited by the speed of light).

If you restrict teleportation to within the light cone, then although it's still time travel from certain perspectives, it's not causality-violating time travel: you can never witness an event and then react to it in a way that prevents that event from happening.

This only really works for unidirectional travel, though; if I can zip over to Alpha Centauri through a wormhole and then return instantaneously, that's not going to be obeying the light cone restriction. So it depends on what you want from your wormholes.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I'd love to tell you, but even winding up for the story would be a novel in itself. The ultra-short version: I've managed to put about five days of action and personal interactions into a 24-hour period. It fits perfectly together, except for the "not eating, sleeping or visiting the loo for five days" bit. Untangling that whole mess plus stretching it out into more manageable bits was the reason people are still waiting for "Rembrandt Legacy II - Marooned on Gorgon IX." They didn't even leave the star system they had one hell of a party in.

Hm. Wasn't that long after all.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I had started with a twelve-inch high Christmas Fairy that was an alien artefact. She needed sperm to survive and then to grow. But then she grew too large and had to use sperm to shrink again with the help of her human partner sucking milk from her breasts.

That milk changed him. He was now dependent on her, and she on him but that was only a temporary fix. Unless a solution was found to their mutual dependence both would die - soon...

But I couldn't think of that solution.

I thought of one as soon as I read the scenario.

https://us.123rf.com/450wm/alekseyvanin/alekseyvanin1905/alekseyvanin190501613/123099273-stock-vector-tomb-stone-vector-icon-filled-flat-sign-for-mobile-concept-and-web-design-two-graves-with-cross-glyp.jpg?ver=6

 

[Bramblethorn]

I thought of one as soon as I read the scenario.

https://us.123rf.com/450wm/alekseyvanin/alekseyvanin1905/alekseyvanin190501613/123099273-stock-vector-tomb-stone-vector-icon-filled-flat-sign-for-mobile-concept-and-web-design-two-graves-with-cross-glyp.jpg?ver=6

I don't see how getting crosses tattooed on her boobs is going to help here.

 

[Nouh_Bdee]

I don't see how getting crosses tattooed on her boobs is going to help here.

It's obviously to protect from curses.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This is fantastic, thank you! I've got some reading up to do! I appreciate the info and a solid explanation, too.

Does that mean that for the traveler, their journey would be instantaneous, but for observers it would take as long as light itself would take (so many hundreds of thousands of years, on a galactic scale)?

I think it would need to take at least as long as light takes, yes. If you can get there faster than light does, then from certain frames of reference you're travelling back in time and causality violations are possible. But I'm not an expert in this.

Charles Stross' "Eschaton" series (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise) deals with this stuff a bit, though fair warning, trying to keep up with the story gave me a headache near the end. It was meant to be a trilogy but, aptly enough for this thread, he abandoned it after realising he'd painted himself into a corner and couldn't figure out an escape.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

I think it would need to take at least as long as light takes, yes. If you can get there faster than light does, then from certain frames of reference you're travelling back in time and causality violations are possible. But I'm not an expert in this....

This is probably a dumb question, but would the person doing the time traveling experience their own personal passage of time? And if so, what would their personal time be set to? If you could travel back in time, it's not like you'd cease to exist because you weren't born yet, so it stands to reason (I think) that whatever time passes for the time traveler can't correlate to the interval between their former place in the timeline and their current place in the timeline. But the more I think about it, the less sense it all makes.

 

[ElectricBlue]

But the more I think about it, the less sense it all makes.

And this from the woman who has cats with portals in pockets. You need to listen to your cat. This stuff is a doddle for a cat.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

A non-fantasy one - I had a bit of plot involving a guy having then-under-age-sex when the age of consent was 21, but misremembered the year it changed locally (and it had been a minor comment to start, but then the characters ran with it). Eventually decided the only way out was to move the whole story from around 2015-16 to 2010.

Cue research on whether fingerprint-lock phones were available them, changing references to buildings as being built not existing, and having to make one character the type of guy who would own a much fancier phone than I'd originally had him as. And having to go back to Wikipedia to re-write another character's military career to fit the timeline.

I think it all hangs together now - it made the housing choices of them all more plausible at least. Course I then had one of them dissing civil partnership and claiming he'd never marry again unless he could go down City Hall and do it properly. Roll on same-sex marriage legislation, but turns out City Hall (London) is one of the few buildings in the area not licensed for weddings even now... (which took ages to confirm, given London Ontario has a City Hall and would love you to marry there...)

 

[oggbashan]

My second worst corner - I can't beat the large gap in years between Christmas Fairy 1,2 and part 3 - was in the story Earth to Earth.

A major plot premise was that the grandparents had married underage (i.e. under 21 at the date of the story) and had been ostracised by their community for it.

But the plot as written required events to occur in a particular order and with dates that related to historical events. When I was near to the final draft the timeline was impossible unless the grandparents married at about age 12 when the bride was already pregnant.

I had to draw up a timeline on paper with the fixed historical dates on one part and the marriages and birthdates on another. It took me days to make a plausible timeline.

 

[lovecraft68]

I don't think I've cornered myself in any stories here. Seeing most are stand alone stories they are pretty straight forward.

Off lit is another story, my series is stalled because I put myself in the sort of box where I just kept adding characters and story lines and its too much. The only answer is to let out the reaper and let him harvest some souls out of the story...but that leads to who and how?

I guess that's the point where writing becomes work.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Not so much a corner, painted into, but 13 chapters into a shaggy dog yarn, a plot twist arrived in the space of one paragraph, which took another thirteen chapters to resolve. I won't be doing that again.

 

[AlinaX]

I haven't written enough erotica yet to run into that kind of problem, but in my non-erotic writing, oh boy. I'm currently struggling with the idea that an alien species can create wormholes, but can't travel through time, when science suggests that if wormholes can exist then they must traverse both space and time. If the aliens can time travel they'd be an invincible antagonist, and if they can't travel through wormholes, they'd be a toothless one.

But there's a limit to how much hand-waving I can stomach in my own writing, so yeah, trying to figure that one out. Even if they can only use wormholes to travel through space, that's such an enormous advantage over humans that they still might be invincible, which I need them to ... not be.

An entropy argument, perhaps. Technically it's possible to travel backwards through time, but systems degrade in the process to maintain causality. Thus I travel back in time to meet & seduce my grandparents, but my memories are confused and my genetic structure corrupted.

Or travel backwards in time only to places at extreme distances.

Any attempts at FTL inevitably bump up against causality in some framework.