StillStunned
Mr Sticky
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2023
- Posts
- 11,310
In your thread on the Editors' Forum, you wrote:
And:
In fact, the "most content in the smallest space" would be, "I woke up, my sister wanked me off, then she left." Arguably, everything else you've written is already fluff.
Take a look at this story: Too Cold Not to Fuck. It's my shortest submission on Lit, at about 1.5k words. But it's had more than 100k views, and it's rated 4.54 from over 2k votes. It's spawned three sequels that together have 180k views and nearly 2.6k votes.
The entire second half of the story (nearly 800 words) is sex. Even so, most of the comments describe the story as (essentially) "sweet for its length, more please". And that's mostly because I spent 300 words giving the bare minimum of background (the narrator and his sister are freezing inside their tent so they decide to zip their sleeping bags together) followed by a short section of internal and external dialogue to set up the sex.
The point I'm trying to make is that the "fluff" is what makes a story. It's what draws the reader in and makes them come back for more. In my story, the "fluff" is the introduction and the build-up. But it's not there as padding. It's there to make the scene and the characters come to life. When the sex happens, the reader is there in the narrator's mind.
In your snippet, you could add some whispered dialogue. "We can't keep doing this." "Why not? Who are we hurting?" "It just seems wrong!" "Shh, you'll wake Kenny. Just lie back and enjoy." You can extend the orgasm scene, because it's so short that I missed it the first two times. I think my story devotes more words to the orgasms than your entire snippet has.
Small things like this can turn a snippet into a story. Begin with what you have, then look at it carefully and try and place yourself in the scene. How would you react? Why? Think about what details would engage the reader: including sound ("my sister's breath was raw and throaty as she stared at my cock"), scent ("this close, I could smell yesterday's perfume on her skin and beneath it the warm scent of her arousal"), touch ("her tiny fingers felt cool on my hot shaft").
Do this little by little until you get to the 750-word minimum. Then look at what you've written and ask yourself if it feels bloated, or whether the "fluff" adds to the story.
If you still feel that it's unnecessarily long, then you'll just have to face the fact that Lit isn't the sight for you. Otherwise: welcome on board!
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