'Twin' Stories

[RetroFan]

By this I don't mean stories about twins, although I have written a lot of stories involving twins, but rather an idea I had about writing twin stories about the same series of events that are in different categories, one in Lesbian Sex, the other in Erotic Couplings. The lesbian part involves two 18-year-old girls, one a bratty, smart-ass, bitchy blonde whose middle-aged single father has gotten together with a single mother, whose own daughter (a brunette) is hopelessly naive, sweet-natured and unworldly. Both parents think their polar opposite daughters won't get along, but to their surprise the girls hit it off, but neither parent has any clue to what extent. The Erotic Couplings part involves the blonde girl's redhead BFF and the brunette's own BFF - a very camp and effeminate gay young man. Upon meeting him, the redhead sees through the gay young man's persona as all an act and calls him out on it, to which he confesses to her his reasons for doing so, before she seduces him and they have sex together.

I've had lesbian material in Erotic Couplings, Fetish and Loving Wives before, as well as some male/female sex in Lesbian Sex stories. Does anyone think writing two different stories about the same events across two different categories would be a good idea, or would just one story in Erotic Couplings or Lesbian Sex be a better idea? Or has anyone ever tried this story approach before, and how did it go? Please let me know.

 

[KeithD]

I've done that. One example, in my sr71plt, was a five-parter done in four categories (GM, Lesbian, Erotic Couplings, Group), and received four Green Es from Laurel.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Could be interesting. One of my favourite Leverage episodes, "The Rashomon Job", describes the same heist from five different perspectives, with each person seeing things differently. (Obviously inspired by "Rashomon", a more serious version of the same device.)

 

[lovecraft68]

I'm wondering how many people would read both? There are readers here who tend to stick to categories that provide their specific fix. Your Lesbian version will get that crowd, but how many who come here for Sapphic fun, drift over to EC? Some readers avoid certain material, so the Lesbian story might not appeal to them....

Even your own followers-as I discovered a long time ago-won't follow you to a category they don't care for.

I'd do them both though because I'd be curious as to how many check both out and you get comments of "aren't these the same girls..."

 

[SimonDoom]

I think it's an idea worth trying. It could be challenging, and I have no idea how well received it would be. But it's not difficult for me to imagine that you could change the story considerably by telling it from two different perspectives and justify putting each story into a different category. It would be an interesting experiment to see what happened.

An analogous example would be Clint Eastwood's twin movies, Flag of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, which told the story of the invasion of Iwo Jima from the American and Japanese perspectives, respectively. It worked surprisingly well, and the Japanese-perspective film ended up being more critically acclaimed than its American-perspective twin. Perhaps because it's sadder and more poignant.

I like Bramblethorn's idea, too: write one story in a Rashomon style, where it's told from multiple conflicting perspectives and the reader can't be sure which one is correct. Sex/erotica would be a great subject for a story like that because sexual encounters so often involve mixed signals and conflicting motivations.

A suggestion: If you do this, then include a preface for each story that lets readers know that the story has a twin in a different category.

 

[KeithD]

I think the classic example of this is Carol Shields's Happenstance, which has separate accounts by a husband and wife on a disintegrating marriage, with the wife's story on the same events running in one direction. Turn the book over and you get the husband's vision of events reading in the other direction.

You don't have to have separate stories to do this. You can section off the separate perspectives of the same event in one Literotica story. You can use section subtitles to make clear whose perspective you are in. This is the basic technique Sabb and I use here under the coauthor name Shabbu. We each take a separate character's view of the same events and section it off, going from one to the other. It works OK here. We won first place in the Valentine's Day contest here a few years ago with such a story approach.

 

[jehoram]

My stories "Bigfoot and the Wood Nymph" are essentially the same story but written from two different viewpoints as narrated by the main characters. You can see for yourself whether the idea worked. I was pretty happy with them. (One thing that gave it some realism was that the two memories of the event didn't exactly match up. My editor caught it and asked me if it was deliberate, and I replied that you almost never have two people remembering an event in exactly the same way.)

 

[KeithD]

I would think the whole point of writing multiple perspectives on the same event is that they would either be different or focus on different aspects of the event.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Interesting concept.

I had an idea once which was based on a plot idea mentioned by another writer here. My idea was a writers’ contest, but not like most, with only the basic theme given. Instead, I thought of one in which the basic plot was spelled out in advance; the fun part would be seeing how well, how differently each author wove a tale around it. Sadly, the gentleman in question decided against that, which was entirely his call.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

Didn't Stephen King do something like this with "From a Buick 8" and "The Regulators?"

 

[ElectricBlue]

I like Bramblethorn's idea, too: write one story in a Rashomon style, where it's told from multiple conflicting perspectives and the reader can't be sure which one is correct. Sex/erotica would be a great subject for a story like that because sexual encounters so often involve mixed signals and conflicting motivations.

A suggestion: If you do this, then include a preface for each story that lets readers know that the story has a twin in a different category.

This would be right up my alley, since I have several stories now that are either self-referential or inter-related, with secondary characters in one story taking centre stage in the next.

My curse is, this idea will embed itself in my brain until one day I'll write the first protagonist's version, and then I'm committed to the other protags'. I'd have to limit it to no more than three characters or I'd be stuffed - I'd never get it finished.

 

[GrushaVashnadze]

I did something like this in the first two chapters of my Metamorphoses. The first chapter (categorised under Fantasy and Sci-Fi) is written from the point of view of the artistically minded theatrical/mystical main character, the second (categorised under Group Sex, for want of a better place to put it) by her sceptical cynical scientifically minded lover, trying to make sense of what her beloved has been going through. Because there is time travel involved, the same events are visited twice, but each time from a different mindset, and with a different purpose.

I am pleased with how it worked.

 

[Athalia]

I don't know if this counts, but my story "Jessie, Michael, and Claire" narrates the story from the viewpoint of each of the three protagonists. Jessie tells the first two chapters, Claire the third, and Michael the fourth one.

 

[PennameWombat]

All of my “Mel’s Universe” stories have elements of cross-referencing events. Differest sets of characters take ‘lead’ in their own stories, but characters make cameos regularly in other series. Most of these are told in third person with rotating POVs.

But in one case I tightly interleaved three stories through overlapping events. They’re all in this shared universe. In You Promised Me Geeks: Asha and Tracy (in NonHuman, Asha is, uh, an alien-human hybrid) the leads found themselves in a robbery/kidnapping at a restaurant, told from Asha’s and Tracy’s POVs. That brings in my policewoman, Joyce Shaw, as she looks for her disappeared lover then investigates this crime in Chasing Robes and Shadows (in Novels and Novellas) and she discovers a key clue to his disappearance while investigating this new crime, told from Shaw’s POV. They all come together in Chronicle: Mel and Chris, ch. 04 (in SF&F), told via rotating POVS, mainly Chris and Samantha (The Angel to Mel’s Devil Girl). These latter two stories directly overlap and both reveal what happened to Shaw’s lover, Peter, from different POVs.

The three stories are stand-alone so if you read them alone they all make sense on their own (well, the one is a chapter 4, so YMMV...)

I have no idea if anyone has read all of them, no one has ever commented on the crossover aspect. I have had a couple of other comments and direct feedback on other stories in the universe that indicate some people have noticed the shared universe of the stories.