Is it just me?

[justathought555]

But the hardest part of writing erotic stories (still working on my 2nd for public consumption) is not the sex scenes - it's that annoying stuff in between the sex scenes, like plot and character development.

Anybody else notice that this is true for them?

Thanks for letting me vent, but it is time to go back to the salt mines (aka - writing dialogue).

 

[English Lady]

It varies from story to story with me. Sometimes I have problems getting into the sex and other times I have trouble getting into the narrative and I can't say I have more trouble with one over the other!

Oh and hello and welcome if I've not had oportunity to say it before

 

[yui]

Hi just,

Welcome to AH (if I haven't said it already)! I agree with you - plot and all that stuff is the hardest part. That's why I leave it out and just write the sex.

Luck,

Yui

 

[neonlyte]

Hi just,

Welcome to AH (if I haven't said it already)! I agree with you - plot and all that stuff is the hardest part. That's why I leave it out and just write the sex.

Luck,

Yui

I've noticed that - just left you some PC

It varies for me, most of the time I have trouble getting to the sex, I enjoy the build up, creating the tension, the confusion of thought and action. When stories of mine head away from the act of sex, they evolve into longer works, I push the sex aside or relieve the tension by writing a more explicit work, some of which are published here.

 

[scheherazade_79]

I agree. When I write a story, the entire plot usually comes to me really quickly. I write it all down in note form, and have to stop myself from writing the sex scenes first, because when I reach that 'climax' getting the rest written down is doubly hard. I find openings the hardest, because for some reason I always turn into a perfectionist over the first bit of the story. I want to set the scene, create the mood, introduce some of the motifs, and more than anything else get the reader hooked after just a few lines.

It's always worth it in the end, but sometimes I feel so frustrated that I get really tempted to go back to writing stories just about sex.

 

[ElizabethWest]

I've only got one story under my belt to date, but the hardest for me was the sex scenes. I had no problem with the plot and characters for the most part. (My editor may say differently.) But since it is an anal sex story and I've never had anal sex, it was quite a "challenge". *snicker*

Truth be told, I wrote the general flow of things in the sex scenes and my editor embellished greatly on the details. As I said in my dedication, I couldn't have done it without him.

 

[oggbashan]

But the hardest part of writing erotic stories (still working on my 2nd for public consumption) is not the sex scenes - it's that annoying stuff in between the sex scenes, like plot and character development.

With me (100+ stories on Lit) the difficult part is making the sex meaningful and essential to the story. Several of my stories have what I call 'semi-detached' sex scenes. The story would work without the sex. That is a fatal flaw when writing erotica. I proved how detachable the sex was by removing it from one of my stories (Bastille Day) and submitting the result into a local short-story competition. You could enter 3 stories and I was one short. The sex-deleted story came 3rd. The two written specifically for the competition were unplaced.

I have tried two ways to improve the sexual content of my stories. The first which seems to work is to leave all the sex off-stage, in the mind of the reader. Some readers enjoy those stories because their imagination supplies whatever turns them on. The general response is What the F***? - Shouldn't I have submitted this as non-erotic?

The second is to make the story dependent on the sex. 'Tripletit' would have no meaning without the sex. Some other stories that I think have non-detachable sex are less successful because in my opinion I am not particularly good at writing full-on sex scenes.

Literotica has many stories that have little plot or development. I think of them in a musical metaphor as 'Tone Poems'. They are about the experience of sex, not a story that includes sex. Multi-chapter versions I think of as 'Theme and Variations'. The stories that include sex I consider to be like 'Symphonies' which have a beginning, development and a satisfactory conclusion. Is a Symphony better than a Tone Poem? I don't think I should or could judge. A good tone poem might be better than a bad symphony. Or the other way round. The ultimate test is whether either works for a particular reader. Some of my stories work for many people. Some work only for a few. Some don't work at all, for anyone, not even for me.

If you are writing a tone poem you are exploring the immediate impact of sex on the individuals involved. You don't need to specify how they got into the sexual encounter or what happens next. All you have to do is portray mind-blowing sex in intimate detail so that the encounter can be visualised in technicolor and stereophonic sound by the reader or best of all so that the reader is an intimate participant in the action. If you can do that - who needs plot or development? You do need a plot in the sense that the encounter should follow a coherent pattern that the reader can follow. Otherwise? Anything goes.

Og

 

[elfin_odalisque]

I agree. When I write a story, the entire plot usually comes to me really quickly. I write it all down in note form, and have to stop myself from writing the sex scenes first, because when I reach that 'climax' getting the rest written down is doubly hard. I find openings the hardest, because for some reason I always turn into a perfectionist over the first bit of the story. I want to set the scene, create the mood, introduce some of the motifs, and more than anything else get the reader hooked after just a few lines.

It's always worth it in the end, but sometimes I feel so frustrated that I get really tempted to go back to writing stories just about sex.

As always, I think Ogg makes a good point but is too verbose to quote!

Surely, in erotic fantasy (that is what we write isn't it?) the sex is the pivotal part that shoots the story along. The plot, characterization, raison d'être must be controlled by the sex scenes.

My problem is how to find any new ways of saying suck, squeeze, tickle, dribble and gush. (Sounds like a bunch of lawyers)

I have a tendency to write the plot leaving a comment 'sex scene here', then going back and filling in later.

Also, I don't do beginnings until the very end - you don't know what you want to say.

 

[cantdog]

More truth than poetry to the "save the beginning to the end of the work." I generally come up with a good wedge paragraph to start off with, but in my mind it is tentative until the second polishing. The first few paragraphs must draw in the reader and they need special husbandry.

 

[Boota]

I found the whole process in writing my only erotic story to be fairly difficult. In my usual fare I fly through it effortlessly, but when I wrote The Man In The Woods I really had to sweat over nearly every sentence in it. And since my story is pretty much one wall-to-wall sexual encounter I didn't have much plot to deal with. I found myself thinking, "Is that the right word to use?" quite often, and I almost never do that in my other writing. I think a lot of that was because I realized that in a story where mood and atmosphere are so important, one wrong word and it could blow the entire feeling.

I normally gloss over the sex scenes in my other writing, so I don't feel like I have a problem in writing the non-sex situations. Like ogg, I tend to let the sex take place offstage. Unless it's going to be really, really funny.

 

[TxRad]

But the hardest part of writing erotic stories (still working on my 2nd for public consumption) is not the sex scenes - it's that annoying stuff in between the sex scenes, like plot and character development.

Anybody else notice that this is true for them?

Thanks for letting me vent, but it is time to go back to the salt mines (aka - writing dialogue).

I'm working on a novel that i've glossed over the sex and left it to the readers imagination. A friend of mine read it and suggested that i go back and fill in the sex scenes... I did and found out that that was the easiest part to write.... It also double the size of the book.....