My kingdom for a title.

[WMDean]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a story for the "romance" category after a long hiatus and have what I think is a decent draft. I'm really quite stuck for a title though.

I read through Whispersecret's article on titles and that helped me rule out some that I was bouncing around but "the perfect title" eludes me. I'm really trying to avoid cliches and cheesiness with this one.

In short my story is about an executive named Pepper who's super stressed at work because her company is going through tough times. A personal friend in another department who is also a former co-worker visits her office. She reveals her feelings for him over a couple days and they develop a romantic relationship. There is a certain office sex fetishism to the story but it isn't super emphasized. The story is told from the point of view of the friend.

That probably doesn't help TOO much unfortuantely... if anyone wants to skim the story I can send them the draft (not sure how people do that around here). Could use any advice with the story itself but the thing I am truly stumped on is a title so a few suggestions would do wonders, or get my mind going on it!

edit: link! http://stashbox.org/618016/Pepper's Story.rtf

 

[Bianca_Sommerland]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a story for the "romance" category after a long hiatus and have what I think is a decent draft. I'm really quite stuck for a title though.

I read through Whispersecret's article on titles and that helped me rule out some that I was bouncing around but "the perfect title" eludes me. I'm really trying to avoid cliches and cheesiness with this one.

In short my story is about an executive named Pepper who's super stressed at work because her company is going through tough times. A personal friend in another department who is also a former co-worker visits her office. She reveals her feelings for him over a couple days and they develop a romantic relationship. There is a certain office sex fetishism to the story but it isn't super emphasized. The story is told from the point of view of the friend.

That probably doesn't help TOO much unfortuantely... if anyone wants to skim the story I can send them the draft (not sure how people do that around here). Could use any advice with the story itself but the thing I am truly stumped on is a title so a few suggestions would do wonders, or get my mind going on it!

Completely random but what about something like 'Strange Tension' ? First thing off the top of my head without reading the story. I'm not sure how to send stuff either but if you figure it out, or I figure it out, I wouldn't mind taking a look. Good luck!

 

[mia_erotica]

Titles

How about the following:

Pleasing Pepper

I'll have More Pepper

Lovin' Pepper

Pepper Flavors the Office

Peppered Romance

 

[WMDean]

Let's see if this works...

OK, I have the draft uploaded here:

http://stashbox.org/618016/Pepper's Story.rtf

Any comments welcome although I'm particularly looking for help with descriptions, sentence structures, pacing, etc rather than content per se. Thanks to anyone who's willing to have a look.

 

[Guest]

As for a title: May I suggest "The Pepper-Upper"?

As for your writing: Overall, quite good. I do have two major kvetches with your story, though (just my opinion--YMMV).

The first is breaking tense--in the opening paragraphs, you're telling a story that occured in the past but you keep breaking in to tell how things are at the company in the present. Sometimes you do it several times in the same paragraph:

I heard my door open.

“Nice of you to knock,” I said without looking up. She laughed.

“I always do.”

She doesn’t—and I don’t mind, really. Daphne Carter, director of operations for our group. Nice lady. Vaguely reminds me of a sterner version of Tina Fey. She’s 40 going on 41 but man she looks at least 7 years younger. Her hair was brushed into a feathery bell, and she was wearing her “battle dress,” the one she uses for media appearances—a severe black pants suit with a white blouse. And those beady brown eyes, with a twinkle in them for me but not for everyone. She can really scare the shit out of people when she wants to. Day and night, the two sides of her.

I realize that may have a been an artistic choice on your part, but I found it off-putting. It broke the flow of the story for me. Others may be fine with the tense shifts.

That's mechanical, and easily fixed if you want to. The other is harder.

Your narrator, as depicted, has virtually no emotional life and for that reason--plus the fact that he doesn't appear to have a name or a physical description--I don't care about him. He has thoughts, he has reactions, but no genuine emotions. Take this (admittedly long) excerpt:

I stopped and stared at her for a few seconds. I saw her shirt sticking to her body, her beautiful straight hair all wet and a bit matted like she’d just gotten out of the shower, and her eyes moist. She smelled of rainwater but just as strongly of her rosy perfume and her conditioner. A tear trickled down from her left eye, meeting the droplets of rainwater that clung to both of our faces. I had never seen her looking so disjointed and lost.

Somehow, though, in spite of all that, she was strong. It was in the lines of her face and in the gleam of her crying eyes, which burned not with grief but with life. Beneath the sundered exterior was the same Pepper I’d always knew—the one who loved life and loved her friends and family deeply.

She gently took my hand and placed it on her chest, clasping it with both her hands. Everything was wet and cold, and yet somehow I felt the warmth of her body far more than the rain. I could feel her heart beating.

“Do you want this?”

She wanted to share herself with me. And as I looked at those thin, anxiously pursed lips and those resolute, almost defiant gray eyes staring back at me, I knew that I could never say no.

“Yeah, I do,” I said finally. It seemed almost anticlimactic after the unspoken exchange that had passed between us. Not for her though. She let go of me and seemed to swoon, and I caught her with a hand on her back, leaning over her to make sure she was all right. Her eyes refocused and looked up at me. She was smiling now. I could see the little wrinkles around her eyes as she realized that it was all coming together for her.

Lots and lots of description of Pepper, a few thoughts, but not a single emotion from ol' what's-his-name. Even the sex is like that:

She grabbed one of my hands and put my fingers between her legs. Her pussy was shaved clean and the lips felt smooth and slightly moist as I ran my fingers along them. I gently rubbed her clit. She let out a little moan and smiled with pleasure, reaching behind her back to unclasp her bra. As I massaged her slit, she pulled down the straps and let the bra slide off her arms onto the floor.

Her breasts were high, firm and round, with little pink nipples. I had only had a little while to gaze at them when she straddled me, bending down to meet me in a kiss as her right hand reached down and grabbed my dick.

I put my hands on her back and ran them across, my fingers caressing every undulation in her wiry, sensual back. The moisture seemed to make everything stick a little. She shivered.

He's reporting, not experiencing, not describing his internal life. It falls flat. It robs the story of intensity. It makes the story not work well, in my opinion.

There are a few minor things--paragraphing in some instances, a few relatively slight grammatical issues that a good editor or proofreader would catch. But like I said, your writing is quite good overall. What the story needs (from my perspective) is a narrator I can identify with or, failing that, at least feel something for. Others will likely feel differently.

Keep writing--you're already a great deal better than many, many others who post to this site, and you'll only get better with experience.

 

[WMDean]

Hey thanks for the feedback, I'm going to do some more revising tonight.

My protagonists are all nameless (the other two were like that) but I have definitely struggled with giving them life in general... I guess I want my narrator to be a sort of "everyman". Sort of like Nick who is a minor character in the Great Gatsby but who sees everything.

I do want to sneak in something for the female readers to give an idea of what he looks like. How would I do that without going into a medical "i'm X tall, with such and such eyes and hair" etc? I've rarely seen a first person story do a good job of describing the "I" character so I'm not sure what to emulate.

Thanks for pointing out the tense changes, I guess it was sort of a natural flow--characters being described in present tense as they are whereas events and temporary things like posture and clothing are in past. Is there a way to untangle that particular knot without losing content?

Do you think it would be more interesting for the reader to have the narrator's emotional reactions to what he sees come out? What's the best way to do that?

Pardon the abundance of questions--I have a lot of experience writing but outside of lit it's ALL been non-fiction, so naturally my weak points will often be genre specific

Other thing I was going to do was try to reduce the front-loading of the background info... I read somewhere on the forums (top fiction mistakes or something like that) about not starting off with too much description. I didn't want to strip the story to the bone though even if it takes a while to get to the sex. Still searching for that balance...

 

[Guest]

Didn't like the title. huh? (sigh) Oh, well.

Let's take it in order, then:

1. Protagonist description is easier and less obtrusive if you break it into naturally occurring segments based on the story flow. Take height and build, for instance; you described Pepper as tall without being specific. Well, give her a height and then her interaction with your protagonist defines him: When they hug for the first time in the story, where is the top of her head in relationship to his chin? When she looks at him, does she look up or across? When she hugs him, will her arms span his back? When their hands touch, how much larger is his than hers? (For that matter, what's the contrast in their skin tones?)

Eye color is a quick mention: Her blue eyes met my (brown, gray, whatever) ones unflinchingly. Same with hair, a throwaway line--She'd always nagged me to keep my unruly brown hair trimmed.

2. Tense confusion--see "Avoiding Front-Loading of Background," below.

3. Fiction is supposed to take the reader inside at least one of the characters; otherwise, it's a newspaper account. Sexual description is actually boring (to me, at least) unless somebody's showing me how it feels or what it means.

4. Avoiding Front Loading of Background: We know considerably more about this company than we need to for purposes of the story and most of it is really irrelevant to the romance. That level of detail (and the pacing it requires) is more appropriate for a novella or novel than for a short story. If you're not considering making this a series or a longer work (and if you're not, why are you spending so much time on Daphne, who's a bit player?), I'd suggest eliminating or condensing at least half of it. One way to do that is to search for the points where the background flows from the dialogue and break it into smaller pieces.

 

[WMDean]

I'll have to see where I can slip those things in--makes sense though, I just wasn't taking care of my narrator!

I do have a decent idea relating to the hair now though, should be interesting to see how this works out...

Just a few explanations--thinking aloud, trying to see why I'm doing some of the things that are in the story...

As far as length and depth go I was thinking of writing more chapters, detailing in a "snapshot" way how their relationship evolves and then stopping at a good happy ending. I almost kicked the second scene into a "morning after" chapter (which is why the sex scene takes place on a Friday night) but I liked being able to show a different side of my female character right away.

Daphne is there because she's intentionally setting the narrator up with Pepper, which is a minor thing I guess but one that's hovering in the backstory. Initially she was just a red herring, because I don't like it when stories start out "here's the protagonist, here is the chick he is going to bang in about 10 pages, hold on to your hats" but her role has grown in my concept of the story so I wrote another scene for her. Some of her description though is just me plinking away at a mental image in my head, so I see your point.

In most office fetishes you have 2 people driving the action autonomously and I found it less of a trope to introduce a third person who knows everything and nudges them into it without them really being aware of her influence.

The idea was to get the characters beyond just a generic fetish office setting to suggest this is the kind of place where such an involved relationship a. is realistically more likely to happen and b. wouldn't get our two friends fired.

I was leaning towards hacking away much of the other bits though, maybe pushing a few of the better bits into the dialogue to make that part seem less like "I feel like crap, let's have sex!" which is its own pitfall (hence there not being any sex in the first encounter between the two characters). It does seem like dialogue was quite useful where I did write it.

The first sex scene is intentionally done with only a couple lines of dialogue as I think it lends a different atmosphere than one with a lot of dirty talking (which is a staple of both my other stories, wanted to try something different). Does it work, you think?

Thanks again for the feedback, it's definitely giving me a lot to work with.

As for titles, well, I'm not sure what I want to do really. A serious title or a somewhat more light hearted one...