marys-new-life

[The_Assman]

Hi all, been posting "Mary's new life" for a couple weeks now. Seems to be getting decent ratings but not much feedback. Would like some comments on the story. I'm by no means a writer and am trying to learn as I go about the structuring of the story. I wrote this story a few years ago for a friend who had fantasies of being forced to be submissive. The originall story is 6 chapters and I would like feedback to see if I should keep it going. thanks all
http://www.literotica.com/s/marys-new-life

 

[polynices]

I have to admit I didn't get very far with this story - I read the first few paragraphs, then started skipping, then skipped massively. That was mainly because I thought the set-up situation was trite. When I read this:

"Please Mr. Anderson don't fire me. I really need this job, isn't there something I can do? ... ,

I decided the story wasn't for me. It reminded me of a thousand hackneyed porn films, I'm afraid. I didn't see much scope for character or plot development there. So I started losing interest.

However, I also realise that this is a non-consent story and I have to admit I don't like the category very much, so I'm probably not a reliable reviewer. (So why did I bother to start a review in the first place? Well, just because I was actually looking for something to review this afternoon, and there don't seem to be many fresh requests up at the moment.) Judging by the number of views you've had so far, though, you do have an audience. So you might do well to take my reaction with a pinch or two of salt.

I also reacted against this physical description:

At 21, Mary had thought she had all. 5 ft. 2 in. tall and 116 pounds, her breasts were perky 36 Cs that turned upward. Her nipples look like erasers trying to break through her usual tight tops. Her waist was only 22 inches that flared to rounded 34 inch hips. Her ass was a heart shaped beauty that she enhanced by wearing tight fitting slacks or skirts. With skin that was pale and blemish free, Mary appeared to never have sunbathed, giving her virtually no tan lines. Green eyes the color of emeralds looked out from a head full of curly fire red hair that fell just below the shoulders.

People on this board often warn against this kind of thing, especially 'description by bra size' (her breasts were perky 36 Cs). I have to agree with them. The point is, I didn't get a mental picture of Mary from all this detail. I just registered it as standard male idealisation - a sort of shopping list of features for the construction of a generic Barbie doll.

The standard advice for writing physical description is that 'less is more'. That is, instead of listing a whole series of attributes, just choose one or two to give the reader a swift impression - what birdwatchers call 'jizz' (with no dirty pun intended). A written paragraph isn't a photograph or a picture and it can't be - so it's best not to try to make it one. It will always fail. It's better to suggest what someone looks like through just one or two quick details and to let the reader form his/her own impression instead. (Readers actually do most of the work in these circumstances. Writers just get them started.)

I have one more point to make before I finish. You do some odd things with tense at the start of the story:

"It's 1:15 you're late again" he said. "What part of having a lunch hour between 12 and 1 don't you understand?"

Mary was near tears; nothing had gone right today, now she was being berated for getting back late.

"I'm so sorry Mr. Anderson" she said, "I got confused downtown again and missed my turn."

"Don't give me your excuses" he says, "I've had about all of them I can take." He waves a file in her face. "These reports are all wrong again, someone is going to have to stay late tonight and fix them. Tell me, who do think that will be?"

Oh no not tonight Mary thought, Mark was coming into town and she hadn't seen him in almost a month.

You begin by using past tenses in the first three paragraphs - no problem there. Then, suddenly and unaccountably, you switch to present tense - to what's known as the dramatic present, in fact. There's nothing wrong with using dramatic present either, but it's wrong to mix your tenses like this. It's disconcerting - it makes the reader (well, me anyway) blink and come out of the story.

You do something similar shortly afterwards:

"Why should someone else have to fix your mistakes?" he asked. "Maybe this job is just too much for you and I should find somebody more competent."

"Please Mr. Anderson don't fire me. I really need this job, isn't there something I can do? I will work tonight and fix the reports" she says. "I won't be late anymore and I'll be much more careful with my work."

I don't know if there are any more examples of this - I stopped reading with attention around there, I'm afraid - but the moral is simple. Choose a narrative approach - either past tenses or dramatic present - and stick with it. Don't mix them up.

Finally, I know this is a heavy review, and I apologise for it. But, despite my criticisms, many Literotica readers probably don't care too much (or at all) about the points I've raised and they may well enjoy the story a lot. So what I've said really isn't a reason to stop writing. Good luck with the next installment.

- polynices

 

[The_Assman]

Thank you polynices for you comments. Your points are very helpful and appreciated. Without having any experience in writing I really have no idea as to how to structure a story.

 

[PennLady]

At the risk of being bold, I thought I'd offer some suggestions for creating stories. I'm still learning, myself, so let's toss some things out there.

First, I'd say make yourself your rules and then don't break them. If a rule doesn't work for you, then go back and change everything related to that. Don't just break it because it's convenient, or inconvenient. If you want everyone to dress in red for mourning and only mourning, then you find out that you need your warriors in red, then go back and make the mourning color something else.

Make sure your characters are true to themselves and to their actions. This is very hard. I think you can approach it two ways. You can either decide you want character A to embody certain traits, or perhaps you have a situation involved and you want the character to act/react in a certain way. Either of these is fine, it's a matter of going forward or backwards.

But if Character A is someone who (to use a broad example) is shy, then let them be shy. It's jarring, for example, when a shy character is suddenly very coy and teasing. If you want them to be coy and able to banter with a partner, then set it up that way from the start.

If you want character A to have a fight with, say, a sibling, and in that fight you want A to say something hurtful, then give A that kind of character. Let A be someone who has trouble controlling their temper or something like that.

Once you have your characters established, much of the plot will fall into line.

I'm sure there's more but I'll start there.

 

[polynices]

Just a couple of reactions to PennLady's post:

1. I agree completely that consistency is important - whether it's at the grammatical level, like the tense examples I gave earlier, or at higher levels of the story.

2. I'm less certain about her points about character creation, though I don't want to be dogmatic about it. PennLady says, for example:

But if Character A is someone who (to use a broad example) is shy, then let them be shy. It's jarring, for example, when a shy character is suddenly very coy and teasing. If you want them to be coy and able to banter with a partner, then set it up that way from the start.

The problem with that, I think, is that people often do display contradictory traits. Almost everyone is shy at some times and bold at others. This is a question of psychology. Our behaviour often depends on setting - on how comfortable we feel, for example, in a particular situation. Of course, a character may be generally shy in most situations - that makes sense - but s/he may still react differently at times. The trick here, perhaps, is to make the behaviour grow out of the story - out of the plot and the person's relationships with other characters.

3. She says:

Make sure your characters are true to themselves and to their actions. This is very hard.

I agree with that, of course - though it's difficult to define exactly what it means - in the abstract, at least.

4. PennLady also says:

I think you can approach it two ways. You can either decide you want character A to embody certain traits, or perhaps you have a situation involved and you want the character to act/react in a certain way. Either of these is fine, it's a matter of going forward or backwards.

To some extent, I think the way one plans a story depends on the kind of story one wants to write. I'd call the idea of deciding in advance that you want character A to embody certain traits an 'engineering' approach. I'm sure it suits some writers but to me it suggests something overly schematic. It would certainly suit certain genres, though - e.g. comic-book style writing in which action predominates over character, or a fable, perhaps. At the extreme, allegory works like that (think of Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress', perhaps), where character is completely subordinated to plot (or moral message), and the figures in the story merely embody the traits the writer wants to illustrate. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that kind of writing, of course, but I think it does restrict the story to a particular range of genres.

I'd call the alternative an 'organic' approach, in which characters behave in response to the situations they encounter. It's difficult to give hard-and-fast 'rules' for this kind of writing, because there's always a complex interplay between character and plot. To a large extent, they grow out of each other.

Practically, I'd say this kind of 'organic' writing can be achieved simply by the author imagining himself/herself in a given situation and describing the way s/he would react. For me, that kind of writing is close to improvised acting, or roleplay. And if one describes one's own probable reactions faithfully, one's likely to make the character consistent.

That said, different writers have different ways of going about things, and none of them are necessarily invalid. I realise, too, that what I've written here is rather high-fallutin', and may seem a long way away from the central interest of writing sexy porn/erotica. In fact, I'd say there's a danger of over-thinking the whole issue of character. It's probably best to just have some kind of person in mind (a sexy person, since we're talking about porn), put them in an exciting situation, and see what happens to them. In the end, the author has to be excited by the story. Without that, it has no life.

- polynices

 

[estragon]

"In fact, I'd say there's a danger of over-thinking the whole issue of character. " Poly, agreed as to danger, but I think that the author must do a lot of thinking so as to save the reader from doing anything but following the story.

 

[PennLady]

Well, I was speaking in very general terms of course. Yes, people are contradictory in many ways and they will even act of character at times. Yet even so, there's often a consistency there, or an explanation, if you look for it.

In my shy person example, I don't mean to say a shy person can't ever flirt or banter. But when you have a shy person who's always blushing or stuttering, and then when they're finally in a romantic situation know exactly what to say and how to tease -- that's not right. But you could explain this by building up the relationship between Shy and Not Shy to the point where Shy has the confidence to try something new.

And I disagree that deciding you want a character to be a certain way means subordinating them to anything. In my story Young Blood, I wanted the main female character to be kind of headstrong, and full of nervous energy. That dictated how she reacted to various situations, but that was okay, that helped write the story. She would act differently than a character who was more pensive, or thought more before acting.

What I was getting at is that there are different ways to get started with characters, and here were two basic, and maybe even crude ones.

polynices said:

I'd call the alternative an 'organic' approach, in which characters behave in response to the situations they encounter. It's difficult to give hard-and-fast 'rules' for this kind of writing, because there's always a complex interplay between character and plot. To a large extent, they grow out of each other.

Yes, but still, the characters have to respond in the way you've built them until that point.

I don't mean to suggest that one should concentrate on character to the extent of everything else. That'd be boring. I do know, though, that when I posted a stroke story, I got more than a few reactions wanting to know more about the characters. Now whether that was something they wanted in stroke story to make it more enjoyable, or whether it was something they expected from me, I don't know.

 

[sr71plt]

A whole point of a story might be that a character changes (something is supposed to change--or very pointedly not change--if it is to be considered a story at all)--or, when the author is really clever, if the character turns out to be entirely different from what the reader is led to presuppose.

I do agree that the arc of the change must be logical in hindsight--that even if the character changes seemingly illogically to the reader that a trace back would find clues that the reader her/himself took the assuming off the rails.

My own overriding criterium in sitting down to write is a erotic story is "what is fresh, surprising, different, hot, unusual, unexpected (to/for me)" to do with this idea? This can be obtained in characterization, plot, setting, mood, theme or some or all of the above.

 

[polynices]

A whole point of a story might be that a character changes (something is supposed to change--or very pointedly not change--if it is to be considered a story at all)--or, when the author is really clever, if the character turns out to be entirely different from what the reader is led to presuppose.

I do agree that the arc of the change must be logical in hindsight--that even if the character changes seemingly illogically to the reader that a trace back would find clues that the reader her/himself took the assuming off the rails.

My own overriding criterium in sitting down to write is a erotic story is "what is fresh, surprising, different, hot, unusual, unexpected (to/for me)" to do with this idea? This can be obtained in characterization, plot, setting, mood, theme or some or all of the above.

Yes. Exactly. I agree with all of that.

- polynices

 

[polynices]

... Without having any experience in writing I really have no idea as to how to structure a story.

I suspect we (I, at least) have got a bit abstract on this thread. I'd like to try to answer Assman's implied question directly - though, if I do, there's the inevitable danger of setting myself up as a complete expert, of course. And I'm not that by any means, but I do have some ideas.

I also think there's a problem of perspective when one's discussing the act of writing fiction. We can describe it from the 'outside' or the 'inside', if that makes sense. I'm not sure that describing writing from the 'outside' is very useful to somebody looking for advice on how to write. For what it's worth, I'll try to describe my own approach from the 'inside' here. That is, I'm going to try to describe how I go about producing stories.

Assuming Assman's question is 'How do you go about structuring a story?', and assuming that 'structuring' has a very wide application, including plot, character, setting and all the other things we've touched on here, I have to admit that I don't structure stories at all in a conscious way. But that doesn't, I hope, mean that my stories have no structure. What I do instead is fantasize - and I do that whether I'm writing porn/erotica or non-sexual fiction. That is, I don't focus on different aspects of the story (character and so on) in isolation. The stories emerge complete from my fantasy - and it's when my fantasy fails that the story fails too.

I suspect that a lot of people begin like that. However, having a fantasy and writing it down as a coherent - and hopefully enjoyable - story are different things. So Assman's question probably boils down to 'How does one translate one's fantasy to the page?'

That's the million dollar question and I can't present any 'rules'. However, I can suggest a strategy. My own fantasies usually come with a 'voice' nowadays. (I don't think that was always true, but it's been happening since I started to take writing seriously. Every fantasy is a potential story and they mostly come with a voice.)

The voice may be the voice of the main protagonist if the story is first person, or it may be the narrative tone the story seems to require if it's a third person piece. Deciding on voice or tone isn't a conscious decision at all - it just emerges from my fantasy if the fantasy has matured enough to turn itself into a story.

However, some, at least, of my fantasies are suggested by the voice and tone of stories or novels I've read recently. I don't mean to suggest that I plagiarize. When I read something that gets to me, the narrative voice sinks in and stays with me after I've finished reading. If it's powerful enough, it sparks a fantasy and then, if that's powerful too, it prompts me to sit down and start writing. At these times (not always but often) I write in the voice of the original - the story I read -, even though my story (plot and setting, etc) is completely different. The result is rarely close to the original - I'm not a mimic and the voice develops as I write; it doesn't stay the same. However, the original story's voice or tone (or style, perhaps) is the platform I begin from. It gets me started and - I think - it suggests more than style alone. It determines the overall 'shape' of the story I eventually write.

OK, that was all a bit abstract, despite my criticising abstraction at the start of this post. But I think it does suggest a practical strategy for beginning to write - for developing a way of structuring a story. I suggest reading is the answer - reading and acting on any impulse to write that the reading prompts. I stress, I'm not advocating plagiarism, but I am recommending putting the voices you 'hear' in your head down on paper, without worrying too much about preliminary note-making or character-sketching, or whatever. I'm sure there's a place for that - especially with longer pieces - but I think too much planning in advance can kill a nascent story. I suggest you write first, whatever the initial impulse is, then refine and edit later. I think stories have to grow to be successful; they can't be constructed like bridges.

I don't know how useful that was - maybe not very, if at all - but now here's my caveat. I'm not an expert (all this is only personal opinion) and, as I said earlier in the thread, I know different writers have very different ways of working. I also know there are 'How to Write ' books about that do recommend careful planning before embarking on any part of the actual story. I'm not saying they're wrong - I'm merely describing how I operate, and what seems to work for me.

Perhaps there's an overall message here: if you want to know how to structure a story - how to make stories, in fact - then observe and refine your own process - which takes lots of practice, of course, and therefore lots of writing.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people will disagree with what I've said here and, if that's the case, I hope they'll describe their own processes. Ultimately, I think you learn how to 'structure a story' by writing stories and, therefore, structuring them. And by being self-critical about the results of your efforts, of course.

I hope that helps, but I'm not sure it will. I think it's very difficult to describe how stories happen. For me, the ones I like best just grow. And the trick, for me, lies in learning how to facilitate the growth.

- polynices