Trying to write erotica
- Thread starter Beco
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Colleen Thomas
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Beco said:
My only suggestion to such a general question woul dbe to just write it. Once it's all down, you can pare, edit and revise. As long as you're puzzling over something not completed, you will find it hard to make decisions on what is good and what needs cutting.
Good Luck
RebeccaMorton
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Beco said:
I find I'm the same. All my life I've had a hundred idea's buzzing around my head and I feel that I can never quite fit it into a start/middle/end story format. I find that writing dow the bit you have in your head generally leads onto more.
Perhaps you could just write a few chapters and post them. No one says it has to be a complete story with a final resolve at the end. People on here will give you feedback and perhaps point you in directions and fill you with inspirartion... it's worth a go.
cantdog
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Plainly, most of us here have overcome that Just putting the inspirations to paper is a damn good start. But generally, the inspirations are a scene, a dialogue, a situation. What you need, though, is a story. Stories contain those elements, but have organization, thrust, structure. If that's the place you are stuck, it's certainly not an uncommon place.
We have had discussions of story development here, from time to time. Everyone seemed to handle that part differently. There are whole books about it, and some of us used tips from those, I think. It might be a good way to start, a book. There's one entitled How To Write Erotica, even. There are dozens of books explaining possible methods of structuring and disciplining a congeries of notions into a story.
Some here said they proceeded from an outline. There are many different forms such a thing can take. One fellow described something that sounded like the dramatis personae listing at the head of a play-- notes and backstory on the characters, relations to others, goals of each. Keeps the names straight. Some people had more of a flow-chart-like structure, scene by scene and parallel branches for subplots. There was one guy who described a sort of mandala, on a big sheet of paper; I couldn't follow how it was used, exactly, but he got it from a book and seemed to find it extremely useful.
Others never used outlines, although some confessed to a sheet of paper with characters listed, all the same. Those people generally picked a plot point early on, chronologically, and wrote what happened straight ahead from there, following the chains of cause and effect. So they began the editing-down process with a long screed of blather, with most everything in there. They then cut out the parts that were extraneous, streamlining. A subtractive process.
One women described a process rather like stringing beads. She started, as you do, with these scenes or vignettes or encounters, and wrote her first draft by stringing those together on a thread, if you follow.
cantdog
Just putting the inspirations to paper is a damn good start. But generally, the inspirations are a scene, a dialogue, a situation. What you need, though, is a story. Stories contain those elements, but have organization, thrust, structure. If that's the place you are stuck, it's certainly not an uncommon place.We have had discussions of story development here, from time to time. Everyone seemed to handle that part differently. There are whole books about it, and some of us used tips from those, I think. It might be a good way to start, a book. There's one entitled How To Write Erotica, even. There are dozens of books explaining possible methods of structuring and disciplining a congeries of notions into a story.
Some here said they proceeded from an outline. There are many different forms such a thing can take. One fellow described something that sounded like the dramatis personae listing at the head of a play-- notes and backstory on the characters, relations to others, goals of each. Keeps the names straight. Some people had more of a flow-chart-like structure, scene by scene and parallel branches for subplots. There was one guy who described a sort of mandala, on a big sheet of paper; I couldn't follow how it was used, exactly, but he got it from a book and seemed to find it extremely useful.
Others never used outlines, although some confessed to a sheet of paper with characters listed, all the same. Those people generally picked a plot point early on, chronologically, and wrote what happened straight ahead from there, following the chains of cause and effect. So they began the editing-down process with a long screed of blather, with most everything in there. They then cut out the parts that were extraneous, streamlining. A subtractive process.
One women described a process rather like stringing beads. She started, as you do, with these scenes or vignettes or encounters, and wrote her first draft by stringing those together on a thread, if you follow.
cantdog
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FallingToFly
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I'd love to know that myself. :/ I tend towards romance of the Mary Sue genre or really horrific love-gone-bad stories.Beco said:
Have you tried an outline, or writing it down like you were telling a story to a friend? Sometimes that helps me.
cantdog
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There are stories and stories, too. Some are plot-driven, deriving their impact from suspense or from solving a mystery, deriving their meaning from the way events as a whole in the story have shaped themselves and the people in them. But a whole pile of books don't do that at all. They are character-driven, following one person through a series of experiences and deriving their meaning and impact from the changes the character goes through, how she comes out the other side a different person.
The vignettes alone will sell, too. Short-short fiction still appears in magazines, and short stroke pieces of the one-scene variety are posted here by the myriad.
The vignettes alone will sell, too. Short-short fiction still appears in magazines, and short stroke pieces of the one-scene variety are posted here by the myriad.
cantdog
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One author in here told us he doesn't really know where he's going when he writes. He gives that some thought only after he's already written about half or two-thirds of it. During that half or two-thirds, the difficulties multiply and Our Hero gets deeper in the shit. Then he sits and ponders how the hell Our Hero will ever get loose, and finishes the story. He had to do a lot of subtractive streamlining with the result, too.
The less structure in the first draft, the longer the edit and polish phase. But you really don't even have to know where you want to end up to start writing a story.
The less structure in the first draft, the longer the edit and polish phase. But you really don't even have to know where you want to end up to start writing a story.
SEVERUSMAX
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Unless it's Humor & Satire, Sci-fi/Fantasy, or Erotic Horror, you should probably try to keep it somewhat realistic. Of course, that's somewhat subjective. Some people refuse to recognize Murphy's Law. I, for one, take it as one of the few certainties in life.
Other advice: write what YOU like, not what most people like. Believe me, if you make interesting and believable enough (not to mention HOT), your story will find plenty of readers who like that. Though, of course, no genre is liked by all. Once your get more experience, however, you will probably want to branch into a more challenging genre, which isn't your personal fetish. That's cool. However, for most stories, your own fetishes and fantasies are better than some vain pursuit of popularity. Passion beats trying to gratify all of the critics.
And try to listen to the characters. If an action feels like it doesn't fit the character's specific persona, don't try to force them to do it anyway.
Other advice: write what YOU like, not what most people like. Believe me, if you make interesting and believable enough (not to mention HOT), your story will find plenty of readers who like that. Though, of course, no genre is liked by all. Once your get more experience, however, you will probably want to branch into a more challenging genre, which isn't your personal fetish. That's cool. However, for most stories, your own fetishes and fantasies are better than some vain pursuit of popularity. Passion beats trying to gratify all of the critics.
And try to listen to the characters. If an action feels like it doesn't fit the character's specific persona, don't try to force them to do it anyway.
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Stella_Omega
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Heh, you will make some people unhappy- Women, speaking generally, love dialogue. I have one story with no dialogue at all- no quoted dialogue, anyway- and I've gotten one-bombed for it. On the other hand I've also gotten high praise.Beco said:
One idea that I'm toying with- I started writing down the sexual situations as I think of them, and I'm thinking of simply stringing them into one long line. No plot much, no names, descriptions, explanations. It's kind of surreal, and very hot in a greasy sort of way...
