Info-dump

[thomas1965]

Many stories on LitErotica start with a detailed description of one, usually female character.
I don't like it and I think that's a sign of an amateur writer.
What are your thoughts about it?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Many stories on LitErotica start with a detailed description of one, usually female character.
I don't like it and I think that's a sign of an amateur writer.
What are your thoughts about it?

It's a back click for me, too. Too many stories seem to start, "I was on a term break and went back home to blah blah blah..." Still, it saves me reading the first three or four hundred words, which is usually enough to say no.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Nah, I'd give it a miss. I slowly feed a character's description into a story. If I feel it's necessary.

 

[SimonDoom]

I agree. It's better to jump right into the story with action or dialogue, only tell as much backstory as is necessary, and weave it into the story rather than dump it on the reader at the start.

I think it's OK to introduce a main character who is about to do something, or beginning to do something, and explain briefly why that person is about to do so. But you want to catch up to the present as soon as possible.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Agree its much better to start a story with a sentence which has a verb showing the character doing something interesting right now (and leave the explaining why for a bit later) - or at least try to get to that verb as quickly as possible.

That said, you could potentially start an erotic story with a unique description of a particularly unique character - "The first thing I noticed about Megan wasn't her beautiful blue eyes or her round firm breasts - it was her trunk. Gene splicing with cats or rabbits was all the rage with the fashionable young girls on Beetlegeuse these days. I'd just never heard of anyone doing it with elephant DNA before. Still, the trunk did open up a whole new range of possiblities..." (Although even here, there's 'noticing' going on in the first sentence)

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I don't see it as a hard-and-fast rule, but rather something which would need very careful handling to succeed.

 

[gunhilltrain]

"Call Me Ishmael" Well, you've got to start somewhere. It's a novel, not a short story, but the first pages are about Ishmael's temporary return to New York City and his problems adjusting to to the place again. It's rather vivid, anyway, and he's obviously not going to last very long there. "It requires a strong moral principle in me to avoid stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hat's off." After 170 years or so, I know exactly how he's feeling about the place.

Anyway, I've never read the whole thing. Too many info-dumps about whaling, perhaps, but at least he knew his stuff.

"Bartleby, The Scrivener;" that is a short story, and I have read the whole thing. It begins with a rather long first-person description by Bartleby's unnamed employer, an attorney, who launches into a lot of info about himself, the three men he employs, and even what his own office looks like. He brags about how John Jacob Astor (who the hell is that? ) thought highly of him and apparently sent some business his way.

So we're not going to be writing in a 19th Century style (unless we deliberately want to approximate it), but that is how one of the pros handled it.

 

[TadOverdon]

There are no real rules, are there?

The longer I'm here, the more I discover that I like a lot of stories that I would never want to write. And erotica is as rife with cliches as any genre. More than most, in fact.

Just don't have the woman admire herself in a mirror, okay? No one swells with confidence at what they see in the mirror. We check ourselves out to make sure that we're not complete messes and that our clothes aren't inside out.

 

[Lovecraft_Lore]

You need a hook to grab the readers attention. "I watched the top of my teachers head as she bobbed up and down my cock." Then some back story of the events leading to that momemt.

Starting with a full page of how rich and powerful the billionaire ex navy SEAL male character is, how huge his dick is, then the rest of the story is him trying to blackmail the cashier at Kmart into a quickly behind a dumpster.

After the second or third such story, I have learned just click back as soon as I see it.

 

[Thefireflies]

Depends, maybe a description of a person sometimes works as the hook? After all, who can really tell what any individual will read, and even professional writers had to get lucky with enough people reading their work to get their big break and continue publishing. I even once read a story that starts with an explicit description of a hole in the ground, and goes on to describe the inhabitant of said hole, a critter called a Hobbit, in very boring detail, but I loved that book!

 

[stickygirl]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. This particular dude was packing too, with jodhpurs wagging 'Stay Left' like a traffic sign and balls slapping free against his muscled thigh. His chiseled jaw as proud as an anvil and striking deep set blue eyes under a powerful brow, and his hands! Hands with such elegant fingers that now cradled the open pages of his Bible as he would any young ladies bottom as she vigorously rode his monstrous tool at the canter.

The young ladies in the village were all a gossip and dripped love juice in chapel, leaving their cloven stains of shame on the oaken pews. The chaplain's hooked nose was assailed by the honeyed nectar, pausing his sermon on Lot's wife to glare at the blushing young ladies for whom the evils of the flesh were all too evidently expressed.

Fuck, I'm onto something

 

[gunhilltrain]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. This particular dude was packing too, with jodhpurs wagging 'Stay Left' like a traffic sign and balls slapping free against his muscled thigh. His chiseled jaw as proud as an anvil and striking deep set blue eyes under a powerful brow, and his hands! Hands with such elegant fingers that now cradled the open pages of his Bible as he would any young ladies bottom as she vigorously rode his monstrous tool at the canter.

The young ladies in the village were all a gossip and dripped love juice in chapel, leaving their cloven stains of shame on the oaken pews. The chaplain's hooked nose was assailed by the honeyed nectar, pausing his sermon on Lot's wife to glare at the blushing young ladies for whom the evils of the flesh were all too evidently expressed.

Fuck, I'm onto something

Well, you wrote this. Maybe you're only half-joking - what would would you do if some modern approximation of this guy actually showed up?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Stickygirl has raced past D.H. Lawrence, and is up to the Austen Augmented Edition, the Lost Diaries (Soho Publishing Pty Ltd).

 

[Trionyx]

It has been written here, more than once, about the importance of the first few lines to hook the reader’s attention. A simple description of an individual, no matter how attractive, seldom does the job. For my last few stories I have spent more time on those few lines than I have on any others. Only time will tell if I have been successful.

 

[stickygirl]

Well, you wrote this. Maybe you're only half-joking - what would would you do if some modern approximation of this guy actually showed up?

 

[NotWise]

Stickygirl has raced past D.H. Lawrence, and is up to the Austen Augmented Edition, the Lost Diaries (Soho Publishing Pty Ltd).

Brings to mind "The Diary of a Flea" -- the old John Holmes flick.

 

[NotWise]

There are no real rules, are there?

Right. My most successful story on Lit starts with the closest I've come to an opening info dump. A lot can be gained or lost in how it's done.

 

[LegoHead]

Many stories on LitErotica start with a detailed description of one, usually female character.
I don't like it and I think that's a sign of an amateur writer.
What are your thoughts about it?

From Apprentice Adept, Chapter 1, by Piers Anthony

He walked with the assurance of stature, and most others deferred to him subtly. When he moved in a given direction, the way before him conveniently opened, by seeming coincidence; when he made eye contact, the other head nodded in a token bow. He was a serf, like all of them, naked and with no physical badge of status; indeed, it would have been the depth of bad taste to accord him any overt recognition. Yet he was a giant, here. His name was Stile.

Stile stood one point five meters tall and weighed fifty kilograms. In prior parlance he would have stood four feet, eleven inches tall and weighed a scant hundredweight or eight stone; or stood a scant fifteen hands and weighed a hundred and ten pounds. His male associates towered above him by up to half a meter and outweighed him by twenty-five kilos.

He was fit, but not extraordinarily muscled. Person-able without being handsome. He did not hail his friends heartily, for there were few he called friend, and he was diffident about approaches. Yet there was enormous drive in him that manifested in lieu of personal warmth.

Egregiously amateurish.

 

[yowser]

There is nothing wrong with this per se, it all depends on how it is done and how it fits the story. If a long description tells you something about the narrator (first person POV) and creates some interest in either the narrator or the female of interest, I think it a fine beginning.

Completely agree with TO about the mirror business, and if the description gets into information only a dressmaker would know (actually any measurements at all) then bye, bye.

 

[gunhilltrain]

There are no real rules, are there?

The longer I'm here, the more I discover that I like a lot of stories that I would never want to write. And erotica is as rife with cliches as any genre. More than most, in fact.

Just don't have the woman admire herself in a mirror, okay? No one swells with confidence at what they see in the mirror. We check ourselves out to make sure that we're not complete messes and that our clothes aren't inside out.

Only the rules that the site's owners impose. Except for the age restrictions, which are pretty clear, the other rules can be a bit ambiguous at times.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Brings to mind "The Diary of a Flea" -- the old John Holmes flick.

Isn't it actually "The Autobiography of a Flea?" An odd conceit, perhaps, but - shrug. I've heard of that Jane Austen adaptation. I suppose it's supposed to be everything that is happening behind the scenes, or maybe just what everybody is thinking but don't about actually do. Wait a minutes, is stickygirl quoting directly from it? I've never read it myself.

If I may do a bit of self-promotion, I have a series on another site about a wayward priest who is involved with a nineteen-year-old woman (in 1957). She is definitely running the show, however. I decided not to put on Lit because of possible controversies over religious themes.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Is that woman sneezing? Maybe I've interpreted incorrectly. (Spelling corrected from previous version.)

 

[NotWise]

Is that woman squeezing? Maybe I've interpreted incorrectly.

She's gagging and getting the little bit vomit in the back of her throat.

 

[NotWise]

Isn't it actually "The Autobiography of a Flea?" An odd conceit, perhaps, but - shrug. I've heard of that Jane Austen adaptation. I suppose it's supposed to be everything that is happening behind the scenes, or maybe just what everybody is thinking but don't about actually do. Wait a minutes, is stickygirl quoting directly from it? I've never read it myself.

If I may do a bit of self-promotion, I have a series on another site about a wayward priest who is involved with a nineteen-year-old woman (in 1957). She is definitely running the show, however. I decided not to put on Lit because of possible controversies over religious themes.

Yep. It is "The Autobiography of a Flea." My bad. I was busy thinking of Annette Haven's pounding the bed near the end of the film and sending a monk away, saying (something like) "Not you! I want the other monk. The one with the big cock!"

 

[KeithD]

It's better to jump right into the story with action or dialogue, only tell as much backstory as is necessary, and weave it into the story rather than dump it on the reader at the start.

This is what I do. There probably are readers who like to be spoon-fed from the beginning, though. Different strokes for different folks (and I leave them to it).