BeautyInTheStruggle
Virgin
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2025
- Posts
- 17
I began writing because before we married, my husband was a seafarer. We were apart for months at a time, and ships are usually without internet or telephone connections for weeks at a time, so letter writing remained a major part of our lives. Over time, the letters became longer and more explicit until I began writing lengthy stories with detailed descriptions of places, feelings and of course, the sex acts we were both focused on.
I joined an online writers forum because I wanted to improve my writing, and got hooked on trying to win best story of the week, month, etc. I thought that I was a good writer, but I made several friends on that forum who persuaded me that there was more to writing than plots that you could fit on the back of a bus ticket, and finding ever more obscure synonyms to describe fucking and sucking.
One evening, I chatted with an American guy who told me that he was a retired newspaper editor, and from the few details I told him that night, plus some things he discovered from my stories, he wrote a short story about meeting me in a London park and buying me a coffee on a cold morning. It was just a simple description written in the third person of two strangers meeting in a public place, but it was so good that it unnerved me. Perhaps I gave away more than I intended to, or he was just good at psychology, but he captured the feeling of the place and the emotions of the couple perfectly.
I've been trying to write like this for the last decade and never got anywhere near equalling his description of meeting me in a park. These days, I usually write stories about wayward middle-class Filipinas set in our rather complicated culture. In our society, no one cares if you're a lesbian or in a poly relationship, but a degree of subtlety is required if you want to keep your friends. It's not Lit material unless I put in a lot more physical sex than I want to, so I don't post it on here.
Comparison is the thief of joy - something I try to remind myself often! But no matter what you do with them, as long as you enjoy writing them or rereading them than that's enough surely?