Setting

[dr_mabeuse]

I'm sad to see how little attention setting gets in our porn stories. By 'setting' I mean the locale, the weather, all those externals that bring mood and depth to a scene. A sex scene that happens on a muggy, sweat-soaked summer night is totally different from one that happens at noon with snow falling outside, even if the same people are in the same room. Personally, when I'm writing a sex scene, almost the first thing I think about is setting: time of day, location, whether the room is messy or neat, weather outside, the lighting, things like that.

I wonder, is it just that fact that everyone's inside in the air-conditioning all the time now that precludes descriptions of setting? Is it the fact that so many of us live in California and Florida? Or is it something we just don't care about?

---dr.M.

 

[oggbashan]

It matters for the Earth Day competition.

My characters get wet and muddy for Earth Day.

If it is too hot and humid I can't think of sex without air conditioning, nor can my characters.

Og

 

[Liar]

I'll answer this as a reader, since I'm still struggling with my first erotic story.

Setting is very important. After the Who anf the Why people have sex, Where is what I look for in a story. Because Where tells you much more of How than merely describing the act.

IMO, it can never be too hot and humid for a good sex scene (can you say sauna?). In fact, more extreme settings both in location and climate are often a catalyst to inctreased eroticism.

But in a way, a perfectly controlled, air conditioned, neat and tidy bed is kind of an extreme condition too. All settings where the setting can be made an issue of is a plus in my book. A victorian ballroom, a bus stop in the pouring rain, on top of the Seattle Space Needle, Santa's sleigh, a honeymoon suite... it adds value to the story to know these places and the location's effect on the characters.

#L

 

[herecomestherain]

Decor...

I've just written and posted a story set in the studio home of the female character who is an artist and while there are not many descriptions of the interior setting I still found it useful to draw a quick plan of the imagined studio so I could "see" where things were. She sees herself in a mirror whist standing near the bed, where is the mirror located? She sees the model in a certain way, where is she sitting or standing?
The plan helps me visualise the way the characters may move around and what sort of furniture they may encounter in the room. I looked through some interiors books off my shelves to get a feel for what the space may be like. The location becomes more important in the next chapter so I'm glad I've thought this through now. I think that paying attention to small details like crumpled bedsheets are intriguing clues that help paint vivid pictures.

From An Artist and Her Muse

...This last evening session was the most difficult for me, technically and emotionally. I had asked him to lay face down, much as he had been in the photograph, on the big bed that had become the centrepiece of my studio a year ago when I had started my Men in Love Series painting series. I loved that bed. The antique headboard was a decadent, ornate piece, a weathered nickel plate affair that provided a beautifully decorative background for my model. It had been an irresistible junk shop find that had taken two men to carry up to my studio. Occasionally when I couldn't sleep, I'd grasp the cool metal of that headboard; my arms outstretched above my head and let my imagination take me all sorts of wild places. I'd think up delicious scenes that only served to keep me awake...

At this moment, Nick was the only person I could think about. He lay with the delicious firm curve of his buttocks central to the pose, the low light casting deep shadows, creating sharp contrasts against the warmth of his skin. The bedding was delightfully rumpled into a thousand complex creases adding texture and contrast around his beautiful smooth body. Oh those suggestively rumpled sheets had me hot every time I looked at them, even if they were going to be hell to paint when the time came. They spoke in no uncertain terms of sex; vital, vigorous, physical sex.

Ironically I had created a clever illusion for the only sex those sheets had seen recently was of the solo kind.

******
Try drawing a plan to help make an interior more concrete.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I worry a great deal about setting. So much of the beauty of sex is in the details and details like what the room looks like helps to paint the scene for the reader. That said the external things tend to get lost in the internal things, I think possibly because of the way things are now a days with most of us having ventral air & heat.

-Colly

 

[KarenAM]

Setting is tricky; too much and you lose the story in it, too little and you have nothing but rubbing body parts. In science fiction there is a particular joy to world-building which causes some authors to overdescribe their worlds, their technology, etc., because a lot of science fiction fans care less about the story than the neat gadgets, and so erring on the side of description is often encouraged.

I prefer to put the reader in a world and let them supply many of the details with their own imaginations. For example,

It was later, and she knelt. Outside the door, the nebula that marked the night skies of Vandhaqa shone down on the little village. The Usahar had not been gentle with her, had given her no quarter. She was Taiyiha, slave. Even now, as she held the Usahar's cock and licked at it, Susan knew that what respite would come would come only at their leisure.


From "Need & Redemption"

The nebula exists, but to count its stars would distract us from the more important point of the girl kneeling and pleasuring the alien. That this is an alien world is shown by its name; that the girl is having sex with aliens of some sort is shown by the use of unfamiliar terms, which by the end of the story will have become more familiar. The goal, of course, is to keep the reader's eye on the action and supply the setting as natural to that action, the way we note details in a room we enter without being quite conscious of them; if they become particularly important, they get examined in more detail.

 

[Sabledrake]

I like to play around some with different settings, because they can pose interesting challenges for writing the 'action.'

I've used the back seat of a car (A Knife at Lover's Lane), a stagecoach (Emma), a ship (various chapters of The Ravishing of Constance), a steamy and humid apartment (Swallowed), a graveyard (The Witch of Dark Hollow) and even Hell itself (Infernal).

When I read or write a story, I like to have a good picture in my mind of the characters and the surroundings. Details that affect the various other senses, not just sight, help add depth to the scene.

Sabledrake

 

[CharleyH]

I think it completely depends - setting in my opinion is a reflection of character, plot, or theme. So what motivates the symbols . . . motivates the detail or lack in the mise-en-scene.

Yes, whether it is hot or cold, day, night, fall, spring, summer etc. are all important. I rarely use the weather unless it is significant in some way, or my characters are outside of a closed environment. Humid: well it could mean passionately hot, or it could also mean overbearingly claustrophobic, or whatever else I decide it to mean - my point is that it should mean if it is there.

A longer fiction gives time to detail, but shorter fiction doesn't allow for the time to detail a room. Like a film: one selects the most important details . . . the reader has an impression, and fills in the rest.

 

[Guest]

what motivates the symbols? Charlie, you're going off the postmod chart again. (But I 'get' you, honest.) P.

 

[CharleyH]

what motivates the symbols? Charlie, you're going off the postmod chart again. (But I 'get' you, honest.) P.

Jesus anti-christ - I've been reading Barthes and Glamorama - give me a break here!!!!

Edit - also listening to Marilyn Manson. Enough post-mod for one day?

 

[pop_54]

I've tried including detailed descriptions of settings, locations, reactions, weather, etc, etc. I find the story begins to get bogged down with too much detail, this is fine for semi-erotic or non-erotic novells, but I found few friends among the porn readers who basically just want to read about 'Slot A' being poked by 'Tool B'.

They don't really give a toss if it's raining, sunny, snowing, on the bloody Moon, or whatever, they just want to read about some broad and guy enjoying a spine bending, mind blowing fuck.

When I write stories for my own consumption, or for friends, with little intention of posting them here, you wouldn't believe the number of pages they run to with fine detail and mood setting.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Look what Mary Shelly did by having Frankenstein create his monster in the middle of a thunderstorm. Can you imagine how weak that scene would be on a sunny day in June? Or look at the movie Body Heat with Kathleen Turner. Without the setting, it’s an okay mystery. With the South Florida heat wave, the whole movie sizzles. There’s no rule that says you have to use it, but it’s such an easy way to give real resonance to a run-of-the-mill scen, I don’t know why it’s so neglected by so many writers here.

---dr.M.

 

[CharleyH]

Look what Mary Shelly did by having Frankenstein create his monster in the middle of a thunderstorm. Can you imagine how weak that scene would be on a sunny day in June? Or look at the movie Body Heat with Kathleen Turner. Without the setting, it’s an okay mystery. With the South Florida heat wave, the whole movie sizzles. There’s no rule that says you have to use it, but it’s such an easy way to give real resonance to a run-of-the-mill scen, I don’t know why it’s so neglected by so many writers here.

---dr.M.

True - important symbols that fit in the context of theme: Frankenstien is alchemic and so the lightening has its place in the context of that, and Body Heat, passion - femme fatale the hot feminine humidity of Turners character (been a while) - as said, but also you have chosen lenthier pieces?

Short stories: If the weather is taken out of some, then it ruins a story, if from others, well does it matter if the whether (for example of course) has no symbolic value to the story?

 

[gauchecritic]

Are you talking about pathetic fallacy here Mab or just asking for mundane detail to complement/contrast the spiritual/physical?

Both have their place but a conscious decision to put them there usually (for my reading pleasure) has a detrimental effect (or is it affect?).

I use settings (places) to accompany physical acts, I use weather to accompany emotional happenings. In general, the first in stroke the second in 'serious' writing.

But I think I can honestly say that for the mass of the readership, such 'writerly' skills are misplaced.
For your own writing pleasure (and an absence of feedback) then their use has to be judicious and so easily read as to be dismissed in terms of story.

Then again, that's true of every little 'trick' used by us "authors".

Gauche

 

[Guest]

Mab., I understand your plaint, but I too think that for the majority it matters not on Lit. Real settings (climate, geography, styles, etc.) are for the literary minded; at best 'settings' are inextricable from the story (DH Laurence and Th. Hardy come to mind).

Perdita

 

[The_Fool]

*pondering*

I think in most of my stories, the setting is critical to the story. Maybe not. I can't see writing them any other way.

 

[CharleyH]

Mab., I understand your plaint, but I too think that for the majority it matters not on Lit. Real settings (climate, geography, styles, etc.) are for the literary minded; at best 'settings' are inextricable from the story (DH Laurence and Th. Hardy come to mind).

Perdita

Well I'm with Gauche on this one, but P, you too are talking novels, where there's TONS of time to develop not only setting. I find that, most of my stories are lost - because I write semiotically. Will anyone get the nuances? The small little pop culture details? The point of the weather? Well - I have a faith, and many of those fans who have written privately - get it, and others get off . . . hmm. Anyhow . . . the challenge is this:

IS THERE a short erotic story that ANYONE can think of where these details can't be taken away? EROTIC - I can think of many short non-erotic fiction stories . . . but lets limit here to LIT? What is most important here?

 

[angela146]

...IS THERE a short erotic story that ANYONE can think of where these details can't be taken away? EROTIC - I can think of many short non-erotic fiction stories . . . but lets limit here to LIT? What is most important here?

I'm in the final editing stages of a story where the setting is effectively a third character in the story.

The story takes place on a 640 acre (i.e. square mile) farm in central Wisconsin in the middle of summer. The farm is surrounded by a line of trees and a fence, giving it an isolated feel.

Aside from having the couple run around naked in the prairie grass, I'm also including the history of the farm in the story.

In this case, the setting is essential to the story and provides some of the eroticism. It even matters that it's in Wisconsin as opposed to Illinois or Iowa.

I will hopefully be posting it this weekend so you should see it mid week. I'll update here when it goes up.

Edited to add the link:

Here is a link to the story: http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=135600

 

[Dirt Man]

Detail is important only in that it put the reader into the story with the characters. Other wise it just becomes extrainious verbosity. The first word in Short Story means exactly that; Short. So the discription of the setting becomes only as important as the characters actions in that setting. And each is vying always for position, and room within the limitations granted to them. Where as in a book one might go into great detail say about the slovenly housekeeping skills of a character, for more than a full page, in a short story you might only get:

The over filled ashtrays, half filled cups of coffee with floating debris, and empty candy wrappers, and old smelly socks, and torn panties lying round the room spoke volumes for Libby's churning stomach as she followed Alex to his spotless room in the back of the apartment house.

Sometimes a paragraph is the most you can afford in a short story, so it has to be filled with much more information that two pages worth of discription in a novel, or book of fiction.

As Always
I Am the
Dirt Man

 

[Green_Gem]

The importance of setting

In my opinion setting and detail are very important to stories even here at Lit. I accept the comment that a 'short story' is meant to be exactly that - short. However, even within a two pager, setting and detail will make the difference to a story in terms of creating atmosphere and mood. In movies, great amounts of money, time and skill is spent on getting the visual affects, here we have to use words to create theatre in the mind. I know, that I could never have pulled off a story I wrote recently without the detail and mood created by the setting which was Amsterdam. Probably the best comments I got on the story were those where a reader said it was better than any movie he had watched, and others wrote about the authenticity of the place. I was thrilled, given that I've never visited Amsterdam!

To add to Dr Mab's comment's on the use of setting and stifling heat in 'Body Heat,' I have a similar feeling about the setting and detail in the Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange movie 'The Postman always rings twice.'

Who can ever erase the memory of their first frenzied and crude coupling on the old wooden kitchen table where she was baking bread? And a later scene, where after murdering her husband, the lovers have to stage an auto accident. In order that they also look 'injured' they are forced to rough each other up, and then, while still at the scene of the crime with the wrecked car nearby and the dead body of her husband in sight, Jack pulls off her panties and they fuck. I still remember the emotions I felt when I saw that for the first time, and shivers still run up my spine when I think of that terribly base level of passion.

I recently saw an interview with Adrienne Lyne. ( Spelling?) He's the guy who directed the movie "Fatal Attraction" ( Michael Douglas, Glen Close and the boiled bunny). More recently he did "Unfaithful' with Richard Gere, Dianne Lane and Oliver Martinez. Well he said, his movies are most often remembered for the 'graphic sex scenes' and he referred specifically to the scene with Michael and Glen in their kitchen scene fuck. Who could forget it? - The dirty plates stacked up in the sink, her ass resting on the side of the sink- the water dripping from the tap. But here's the thing: According to him, that scene was less than 60 seconds long in a two hour movie, and yet people remember it. Why? I think it was just so powerful and the setting had everything to do with it...

BTW 'Unfaithful" did not disappoint either.

I've rambled, but that's my two cents worth.

Green_Gem

 

[shereads]

I'm sad to see how little attention setting gets in our porn stories.

It was a dark and story night.

Jane hated storms.

Moreover, her nipples were so erect they ached. And she had this naughty, moist feeling inside her panties that made her squirm around in her chair as she typed.

 

[Dirt Man]

Re: The importance of setting

In my opinion setting and detail are very important to stories even here at Lit. I accept the comment that a 'short story' is meant to be exactly that - short. However, even within a two pager, setting and detail will make the difference to a story in terms of creating atmosphere and mood. In movies, great amounts of money, time and skill is spent on getting the visual affects, here we have to use words to create theatre in the mind. I know, that I could never have pulled off a story I wrote recently without the detail and mood created by the setting which was Amsterdam. Probably the best comments I got on the story were those where a reader said it was better than any movie he had watched, and others wrote about the authenticity of the place. I was thrilled, given that I've never visited Amsterdam!

To add to Dr Mab's comment's on the use of setting and stifling heat in 'Body Heat,' I have a similar feeling about the setting and detail in the Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange movie 'The Postman always rings twice.'

Who can ever erase the memory of their first frenzied and crude coupling on the old wooden kitchen table where she was baking bread? And a later scene, where after murdering her husband, the lovers have to stage an auto accident. In order that they also look 'injured' they are forced to rough each other up, and then, while still at the scene of the crime with the wrecked car nearby and the dead body of her husband in sight, Jack pulls off her panties and they fuck. I still remember the emotions I felt when I saw that for the first time, and shivers still run up my spine when I think of that terribly base level of passion.

I recently saw an interview with Adrienne Lyne. ( Spelling?) He's the guy who directed the movie "Fatal Attraction" ( Michael Douglas, Glen Close and the boiled bunny). More recently he did "Unfaithful' with Richard Gere, Dianne Lane and Oliver Martinez. Well he said, his movies are most often remembered for the 'graphic sex scenes' and he referred specifically to the scene with Michael and Glen in their kitchen scene fuck. Who could forget it? - The dirty plates stacked up in the sink, her ass resting on the side of the sink- the water dripping from the tap. But here's the thing: According to him, that scene was less than 60 seconds long in a two hour movie, and yet people remember it. Why? I think it was just so powerful and the setting had everything to do with it...

BTW 'Unfaithful" did not disappoint either.

I've rambled, but that's my two cents worth.

Green_Gem

Comparing a two hour movie based on a book, or novel is hardly making your point about lengthy wordy settings. As they say a picture speaks a thousand words, but if you try that in a thousand word short story contest there's no room left to tell the story. Picking a choosing your words carefully to lay out a setting that puts the reader right into the story is what short stories is all about. When I'm writing a book I may do the same, but I have more room for much more detail if I choose to do so for that scene. And I don't just write short stories, and novels, I also write poetry, and have a Hot to book under my belt. The point is, be as articulate, and detailed as the space, and mind frame of your readers will allow.

As Always
I Am the
Dirt Man

 

[Green_Gem]

Actually, Dirt Man, I wasn't comparing a two hour movie based on a book or a novel to make my point about lengthy wordy settings. I merely stated, that I believe that even within a two page short story at Lit, setting and mood can be included, and that I prefer to write with emphasis on setting.

As a separate point, I added to Dr Mab's observation of how setting and mood can make the difference between a so/so movie and an exceptional one. I then went on to tell of my personal experience with a particular movie, and share observations from a director who uses setting and mood very effectively.

You say "The point is, be as articulate, and detailed as the space, and mind frame of your readers will allow." and I say -

Do whatever works for you. I have my style, and you have yours, just as I am entitled to my view and you are to yours. Neither is better than the other, it's simply a matter of personal preferance and style..

Green_Gem

 

[angela146]

How short is short? Is a twenty-page story a short story? I think so.

In a twenty-page story, can we spare a page for the setting? Probably. If we spread that page of words across the first five pages of the story, we can make it integral to the plot.

The amount of word-space that is used for the setting obscures the larger issue. Setting is a tool of the craft. A well chosen setting can actually reduce the number of words needed to tell the story by creating symbolism, allowing for the removal of adjectives and adverbs and making the descriptions more parsimonious.

If the characters are having sex in the observatory elevator at the Sears Tower, they have about ninety seconds to do their thing. (This particular elevator goes from the lobby to the 103rd floor without stopping).

The "clock" (the floors going by) is ticking; their bodies are heavy from the additional G forces. They are being taken to new heights. There are all sorts of phallic metaphors to be had about rising elevator shafts.

Then, as the bell "dings" and they stand there naked about to climax. She presses the "L" button, preventing the doors from opening... and down they go.

If you think that's fun, try the CN tower in Toronto. Its elevator has an exterior window...

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Regarding Dirt Man’s love of concision, I’m not suggesting that anyone devote pages and to setting a scene. Setting is just another tool the writer has in his box, and I think it’s shame more people don’t use it.

I’ve been reading a bunch of stories on Lit lately, and one of the things that struck me is their flatness and lack of any sort of tone or richness. “We met, she was a babe, we fucked,” is basically it. I guess that’s sufficient as far as it goes, but paying some attention to setting is such a simple and easy was of giving some depth to a bland story.

At the other end are Green Gem’s examples of the way a setting can establish a mood and even tell you a hell of a lot about a character. Honest to God, if I read one more scene of a woman checking herself in a mirror so the author can tell us what she looks like, I’ll heave. Imagine how a brief description of someone’s apartment or even kitchen can tell the reader so much about a person without stopping the story for a tiresome period of telling us. In the example of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” what does the fact of their making love in a kitchen while her bread was baking say about this relationship? I’ve never seen the movie or read the play, but right away you know that she’s married and very domestic, and this cheating threatens her very home. It’s just a brilliant scene, and it’s all due to the setting.

---dr.M.