Now these are true critics

[gunhilltrain]

This is about film-making, not writing, but it does give some idea of how audiences perceive all fictional endeavors. True, these people are part of a very special audience. Yet, as consumers of a mass medium, everybody brings their own views to what others have created and hoped to have appreciated. On AH, I've seen many complaints that readers either don't appreciate the efforts that went into making submissions or that they expect "realism" of some kind that isn't appropriate. Note @SimonDoom's recent thread on "suspension of disbelief" and how authors should try to handle that.

 

[Euphony]

On the author's end of the spectrum, there's always the troublesome "authenticity to the lived experience" issue.

Even far afield stories have some basis in realty and it gets even more troublesome the closer to autobiographic the author gets.

Our lived experiences are wildly different so, while I can appreciate your HS sweetheart actually was spitroasted by you and your best friend and you all still get along swimmingly, I can't imagine similar scenarios playing out in my own real life, even having a ton more maturity and, ostensibly, getting it on with full adults with their grander experience to fall back on.

Readers want what they want and, in the day and age of on demand every-fucking-thing, stories are now very much under that same pressure.

Feels like it works counterintuitively to me. Good writing needs an author enamored with their own idea and working through the concepts/ideas/thoughts that inspired them to spend significant time creating the thing.

Many Lit readers want Valley porn but also need some veneer of something grander. You hit their expected buttons (usual category specific) or the voting reflects you "failed."

When a loud (minorty?) subset of the readers exist in a world akin to everyone being a 5 year old getting to set the household menu 24/7/365, how many are going to pick much outside of mac and cheese or chicken nuggets?

And shouldn't some authors throw at least try to expose readers to some vegetables, roughage, and pro-biotics just to see if something might stick?

Alls I know is, by and large, the stories that really have me in awe and jealous of other's writing abilities and creativity tend to exist OUTSIDE the popular top lists. Somewhere around that 4.4ish to 4.6ish band is where I personally find the story magicians lie. (and you then mine their profiles for even bigger swings that didn't connect with readers b/c "this isn't standard" and fall in awe all over again.

 

[SimonDoom]

I would say in response to this that I write for a generalist reader, not a specialist. I don't write to satisfy the standards of a specialist in a field, or someone with detailed personal knowledge of a particular event, like the sinking of the Titanic. If I wrote an erotic story set on the Titanic, I would be satisfied if its accuracy standards were sufficient to satisfy a "reasonably well-informed" reader, not somebody who was on the ship.

But, on the other hand, I typically dodge the problem by not delving too deeply into specialties I don't know about. I'm not a car aficionado, so you won't find references in my stories to the detailed workings of car engines and drive trains. I just skip those things.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I would say in response to this that I write for a generalist reader, not a specialist. I don't write to satisfy the standards of a specialist in a field, or someone with detailed personal knowledge of a particular event, like the sinking of the Titanic. If I wrote an erotic story set on the Titanic, I would be satisfied if its accuracy standards were sufficient to satisfy a "reasonably well-informed" reader, not somebody who was on the ship.

But, on the other hand, I typically dodge the problem by not delving too deeply into specialties I don't know about. I'm not a car aficionado, so you won't find references in my stories to the detailed workings of car engines and drive trains. I just skip those things.

I think in this case, the people watching the movies were mostly concerned not with the specifics of the ship itself but rather with the experience of living through the event. It seems the ones with the most difficulties were the ones who had survived while other family members did not. It seems rare in disasters that one gets so much time (up to two hours) to ponder their fates - particular in the case of loading the lifeboats. Notable that the crew failed to load the boats fully. There were only abut 705 people picked up from the boats when there was room for nearly 500 more. For one thing, many of the passengers were initially reluctant to get in them.

 

[SimonDoom]

I think in this case, the people watching the movies were mostly concerned not with the specifics of the ship itself but rather with the experience of living through the event. It seems the ones with the most difficulties were the ones who had survived while other family members did not. It seems rare in disasters that one gets so much time (up to two hours) to ponder their fates - particular in the case of loading the lifeboats. Notable that the crew failed to load the boats fully. There were only abut 705 people picked up from the boats when there was room for nearly 500 more. For one thing, many of the passengers were initially reluctant to get in them.

One of the things that's fascinating about the Titanic sinking and the narrative about it is that, despite eyewitness accounts, it wasn't widely accepted that it split in two until the wreckage was found on the bottom of the ocean in the 1980s. In the '58 film, it sinks without breaking. In the 1970s potboiler novel Raise the Titanic, which I read as a teen, the ship was raised intact from the bottom of the sea, so people still believed that was possible, which it wasn't. It wasn't until the 1980s discovery and James Cameron's film that the public understanding was completely revised to accept that it broke in two before sinking.

It raises the interesting question: when you write a story, which version of the "truth" do you accept?

 

[MyBareTorso]

This is very interesting...on the whole though, I don't see the same rules of criticism applying here on Literotica as they do in other mediums. It's a free site, it's niche, personal kinks play so heavily in story responses, authors are not necessarily here to create "great art" etc etc....

 

[gunhilltrain]

This is very interesting...on the whole though, I don't see the same rules of criticism applying here on Literotica as they do in other mediums. It's a free site, it's niche, personal kinks play so heavily in story responses, authors are not necessarily here to create "great art" etc etc....

I think a major difference is that, although the site makes money (I'm not sure of their complete business model), we don't. Thus we can't truly fail; we can't be "fired," no matter how low "unpopular" we are.

 

[Euphony]

This is very interesting...on the whole though, I don't see the same rules of criticism applying here on Literotica as they do in other mediums. It's a free site, it's niche, personal kinks play so heavily in story responses, authors are not necessarily here to create "great art" etc etc....

I suppose numbers wise, yeah, but there are plenty of authors here that take the craft work seriously and their work reads like it.

The best Lit experiences I've ever had are some talented author dragging me kicking and screaming into a genre/scenario that isn't my cup o' tea whatsoever and making me a believer in their craft even when I'm fighting off my own internal/morality icks.

Got damn that's a freaking artist.

 

[RetroFan]

I would say in response to this that I write for a generalist reader, not a specialist. I don't write to satisfy the standards of a specialist in a field, or someone with detailed personal knowledge of a particular event, like the sinking of the Titanic. If I wrote an erotic story set on the Titanic, I would be satisfied if its accuracy standards were sufficient to satisfy a "reasonably well-informed" reader, not somebody who was on the ship.

But, on the other hand, I typically dodge the problem by not delving too deeply into specialties I don't know about. I'm not a car aficionado, so you won't find references in my stories to the detailed workings of car engines and drive trains. I just skip those things.

I actually wrote and posted a Loving Wives story about the Titanic recently, 'Bad Things Happen On April 15th'. I obviously did my research to write it and tried to make things as authentic as possible, and while it did get some negative feedback the overall response was positive.

However, as anyone who ever set foot on the Titanic is long dead and very few people still alive today who were living in 1912, so long as I don't make any glaring errors or anachronisms I'm pretty much right in this regard. There are of course people living today who were alive and remember World War II, but while I have set quite a number of 1940s stories set long before I was born I can wing it provided I do my research and don't go into too much details on things I don't know about. I've never been to Canada, but the narrator of my story 'Virginity Lost On Vacation' is Abbey from Toronto, and she takes a vacation to South Africa, another place I have never been, but avoiding giving too much details of scenery no-one can tell.

I find that what will trip people up more is writing not so much extraordinary things but mundane things they haven't experienced. For example, I went to high school, and I am guessing that most of the people writing and reading stories also went to high school. I'm Australian, so my experience of high school would differ from those who went to high school in another country. My high school experience would be different from someone who graduated 20 years before me or 20 years after me regardless of location, but regardless, all of us experienced high school at one point in our lives.

But let's say an author came aboard who's greatest regret in life was that his parents home-schooled him, and that he never got to be in the 'Class of 2006' and feels he missed out on much in his teen years. So much so that he writes a story with Tolkien-like levels of details that takes place at a high school in the early-mid 2000s (erotic action between teachers, and if students seniors/Year 12 aged over 18) and posts it on the site. Because most people reading it would have gone to high school, they would pick up anachronisms and unrealistic plots far more readily than they would in a story featuring things they never experienced (such as living in the 1920s) and would comment accordingly.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I suppose numbers wise, yeah, but there are plenty of authors here that take the craft work seriously and their work reads like it.

The best Lit experiences I've ever had are some talented author dragging me kicking and screaming into a genre/scenario that isn't my cup o' tea whatsoever and making me a believer in their craft even when I'm fighting off my own internal/morality icks.

Got damn that's a freaking artist.

I suppose I need at least a bit of interest in whatever scenario in order to deal with it at all. There are a some interests that I probably can't do. By the way, how can you know for sure that a particular author doesn't have that "smidgen" (only word I can think of) of interest even if you don't have it? The rules here are tight enough to forbid a number of activities which I don't need to elaborate on here. However, I have seen them depicted in print and in some movies/videos.

 

[Voboy]

It raises the interesting question: when you write a story, which version of the "truth" do you accept?

Historians have been grappling with that since Day One.

Things happen, but the moment they're described? The events are distorted. So everyone needs to sort through the different versions of the truth and select which ones they feel best about.

 

[Euphony]

I suppose I need at least a bit of interest in whatever scenario in order to deal with it at all. There are a some interests that I probably can't do. By the way, how can you know for sure that a particular author doesn't have that "smidgen" (only word I can think of) of interest even if you don't have it? The rules here are tight enough to forbid a number of activities which I don't need to elaborate on here. However, I have seen them depicted in print and in some movies/videos.

I'm not sure I follow.

My assumption is rare is the Lit Nabokov who is compelled by the concept/idea to work it through (if only for their own mental health) with no baseline interest in the topic.

To me, many writers here use the medium as an extension of testing their own interests/bounds/proclivities/fantasy etc. I try real hard to keep in mind all that I write is not indicative of who I am and, especially the more creatively inclined, sometime need a steam release valve without the real world social and financial consequences of actually living the experience. I try to give others the same understanding I give myself (within my limits)

I've read a lot on fantasy research (what little has been funded and done) and a through line is always there's a grand divide between what someone conjures in their mind and what they'd actual partake in even given perfect, near consequence less scenarios.

Human ape brains are weird, boundary testing machines. If you've never murdered a co-worker in your mind for a slight offense, I worry more about your mental health than if you have.

 

[Euphony]

Historians have been grappling with that since Day One.

Things happen, but the moment they're described? The events are distorted. So everyone needs to sort through the different versions of the truth and select which ones they feel best about.

Usually it's what's most congruent with the narrative someone likes to apply themselves.

Rare is the bad guy who sees themselves as the bad guy.

 

[MyBareTorso]

I suppose numbers wise, yeah, but there are plenty of authors here that take the craft work seriously and their work reads like it.

The best Lit experiences I've ever had are some talented author dragging me kicking and screaming into a genre/scenario that isn't my cup o' tea whatsoever and making me a believer in their craft even when I'm fighting off my own internal/morality icks.

Got damn that's a freaking artist.

There are some really great writers here, without question...

 

[gunhilltrain]

I'm not sure I follow.

My assumption is rare is the Lit Nabokov who is compelled by the concept/idea to work it through (if only for their own mental health) with no baseline interest in the topic.

To me, many writers here use the medium as an extension of testing their own interests/bounds/proclivities/fantasy etc. I try real hard to keep in mind all that I write is not indicative of who I am and, especially the more creatively inclined, sometime need a steam release valve without the real world social and financial consequences of actually living the experience. I try to give others the same understanding I give myself (within my limits)

I've read a lot on fantasy research (what little has been funded and done) and a through line is always there's a grand divide between what someone conjures in their mind and what they'd actual partake in even given perfect, near consequence less scenarios.

Human ape brains are weird, boundary testing machines. If you've never murdered a co-worker in your mind for a slight offense, I worry more about your mental health than if you have.

It's a bit early in he morning by my standards, so I can't deal with all this in one sitting. I doubt that there are very many people on Lit who write as well as Nabokov did. Even if we wished to push some limits like he did, Lit and most other sites wouldn't accept it. In the case of the movie version of Lolita (1962!), Sue Lyon was fourteen when filming began and she was playing a fourteen-year-old character. Even by 1997, filmmakers still wouldn't go below fourteen regardless of what Nabokov had intended.

Killing co-workers may be a bit much, but a couple of them needed a good spanking. Does that fit within the mental health guidelines?

 

[gunhilltrain]

I actually wrote and posted a Loving Wives story about the Titanic recently, 'Bad Things Happen On April 15th'. I obviously did my research to write it and tried to make things as authentic as possible, and while it did get some negative feedback the overall response was positive.

However, as anyone who ever set foot on the Titanic is long dead and very few people still alive today who were living in 1912, so long as I don't make any glaring errors or anachronisms I'm pretty much right in this regard. There are of course people living today who were alive and remember World War II, but while I have set quite a number of 1940s stories set long before I was born I can wing it provided I do my research and don't go into too much details on things I don't know about. I've never been to Canada, but the narrator of my story 'Virginity Lost On Vacation' is Abbey from Toronto, and she takes a vacation to South Africa, another place I have never been, but avoiding giving too much details of scenery no-one can tell.

I find that what will trip people up more is writing not so much extraordinary things but mundane things they haven't experienced. For example, I went to high school, and I am guessing that most of the people writing and reading stories also went to high school. I'm Australian, so my experience of high school would differ from those who went to high school in another country. My high school experience would be different from someone who graduated 20 years before me or 20 years after me regardless of location, but regardless, all of us experienced high school at one point in our lives.

But let's say an author came aboard who's greatest regret in life was that his parents home-schooled him, and that he never got to be in the 'Class of 2006' and feels he missed out on much in his teen years. So much so that he writes a story with Tolkien-like levels of details that takes place at a high school in the early-mid 2000s (erotic action between teachers, and if students seniors/Year 12 aged over 18) and posts it on the site. Because most people reading it would have gone to high school, they would pick up anachronisms and unrealistic plots far more readily than they would in a story featuring things they never experienced (such as living in the 1920s) and would comment accordingly.

Did you read A Night to Remember or see the movie version of it before or during writing the story?

I mentioned elsewhere that high school - the idea of stratifying people by age cohorts and putting them all in one big building - is both a recent and a very artificial environment. It was developed in the 19th Century as a way to prepare people for the workforce (not that they do a very good job of that) and also to keep them out of the workforce until needed.

 

[Euphony]

It's a bit early in he morning by my standards, so I can't deal with all this in one sitting. I doubt that there are very many people on Lit who write as well as Nabokov did. Even if we wished to push some limits like he did, Lit and most other sites wouldn't accept it. In the case of the movie version of Lolita (1962!), Sue Lyon was fourteen when filming began and she was playing a fourteen-year-old character. Even by 1997, filmmakers still wouldn't go below fourteen regardless of what Nabokov had intended.

Killing co-workers may be a bit much, but a couple of them needed a good spanking. Does that fit within the mental health guidelines?

Nobody writes like Nabokov. Lolita only works b/c he dresses human awfulness in luscious prose rivaled only by siren's calls.

That English wasn't his core language and he still redefined it only further humbles those of us with our scribbles.

The invocation was not Lit standards related but to say that authors, with an metric ton of skill, set the awful in a palatable frame even when we recognize the awful.

I'm under no illusion fledgling Nabokovs (or even 1/10th Nabs) are plentiful here but more restating my core belief that too many Lit readers (and even some authors) rush to take everything at face value, classify it (usually negatively) then bin it.

It boggles that anyone who spends serious time writing doesn't regularly have the conflict of needing to get, maybe undesirable or problematic, stuff down on paper if only as an act of release/therapy. That they also read their fellow authors work as pinpoint representative of their core values/who they are seems so unintentionally hypocritical to me.

Testing dark thoughts is the human mind's stock in trade. Those who swear they never have them, fear them, otherwise banish them, often end up being those that perpetrate the worst of human nature, likely b/c they (or their societies) allow them no release.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Usually it's what's most congruent with the narrative someone likes to apply themselves.

Rare is the bad guy who sees themselves as the bad guy.

View attachment 2350342

"History is written by the victors," has been attributed to a number of people. In The Battle of the Crater, Amanda witnesses this taking place at the 150th Anniversary Gettysburg reenactment. She says of it:

Then they got into playing "Dixie," and some of the guys in Confederate uniforms took their caps off and placed them over their hearts. But there were also a lot of people in there wearing their faux old-timey civilian clothes. Many of them were women, and some of those ladies were my age. And it struck me that they all weren't just having a good time, they were taking that Confederate stuff very seriously too.

I moved as far to the side as I could so that no one would notice my lack of enthusiasm. I, a native of North Carolina and with deep roots in that region, was finding that show and everyone participating in it very creepy.

. . . . It was as if I had seen the Shadow Selves of all those people in the tent. Would they try succession again if they had the chance? Yet Southerners have joined the American military in large numbers for many decades. We can be a difficult people to understand, perhaps.

 

[Euphony]

"History is written by the victors," has been attributed to a number of people. In The Battle of the Crater, Amanda witnesses this taking place at the 150th Anniversary Gettysburg reenactment. She says of it:

Then they got into playing "Dixie," and some of the guys in Confederate uniforms took their caps off and placed them over their hearts. But there were also a lot of people in there wearing their faux old-timey civilian clothes. Many of them were women, and some of those ladies were my age. And it struck me that they all weren't just having a good time, they were taking that Confederate stuff very seriously too.

I moved as far to the side as I could so that no one would notice my lack of enthusiasm. I, a native of North Carolina and with deep roots in that region, was finding that show and everyone participating in it very creepy.

. . . . It was as if I had seen the Shadow Selves of all those people in the tent. Would they try succession again if they had the chance? Yet Southerners have joined the American military in large numbers for many decades. We can be a difficult people to understand, perhaps.

Grew up in the south. My school mascots were blatantly racist so I'm familiar with that vibe.

Not to give anyone a past but a lot of this "backwards looking nationalism" is attributed to having the economic rug pulled out from under them since the 80s (which, they hastened by poor representative choices)

Basic existence is wildly for profit. (health care, food (see meat conglomerates) housing) and people's personal power to affect change has eroded. And education is an utter mess (making it harder to decern why we are here, what went wrong, who hastened negative change to your situation, etc.)

Many are running the teenager script of " I gotta live here but I ain't gotta like it" and rebel in any disruptive way possible, not really concerned or even understanding their position.

I don't have to like their anti-social behavior but I do see where it can be a warped reaction to legitimate concerns and fears over the way things have gone. (that they keep championing people who keep coring what little value in government remains for them is what boggles)

"Succession again" is just an attention grab. Most are no more committed to the cause than the teenager who " is gonna move out and never talk to you" again. They are frustrated, rightfully so, but channel that frustration in highly unproductive, anti-social, ways (those ways also being of great benefit to those profiteering from continuing coring out of the middle class)

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I recently installed Hemingway Editor for the sole purpose of learning the readability level for some middle-grade stories I am writing. I know that my readability level for the majority of my stories is too high for the intended audience and see Hemingway as a tool to assist with adjusting that simply by increasing my awareness of word selection, etc.

For crap and laughter's sake, I ran the OP's post through Hemingway and it scored a readability level of 11th grade. I think a lot of reader comments we receive can be attributed to the readability level of our stories. I've considered this in the past and consciously chose to not "dumb down" the story for the sake of those readers who may not fully comprehend select nuances or plot elements.

Since readers on Lit are supposed to be past the age of maturity, and thus should have completed high school, writing to an 11th grade readability level should not present a problem. But...

 

[nice90sguy]

so you won't find references in my stories to the detailed workings of car engines and drive trains

(removes SimonDoom from favourite authors list)

 

[SimonDoom]

(removes SimonDoom from favourite authors list)

Can't win 'em all I guess.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Can't win 'em all I guess.

With EVs, you won't have to worry about that so much.

"She'll have fun, fun, fun until her Daddy takes the Baker Electric away."

Baker Electric 1910

 

[ElectricBlue]

(removes SimonDoom from favourite authors list)

It's okay. He won't have finished those stories yet .

 

[ElectricBlue]

Since readers on Lit are supposed to be past the age of maturity, and thus should have completed high school, writing to an 11th grade readability level should not present a problem. But...

View attachment 2350541

Gotta love the way the advice is, aim lower. Patronising little prick, too!

If you dumb down to the lowest common denominator, you get smut for simpletons or twelve year olds.