This was written by my friend, John McMullen.
Rather than join in the usual arguments about God or some argument about the imminent death of the net (film at 11.0.0.0), I thought I'd talk about writing, and writing stories for alt.sex.stories specifically. The rest of this article talks about:
I believe these are reasonable guidelines, but your mileage may vary.
I'll use the word "erotica" to describe the stories here, since the connotation of quality is not as objectionable as some of the connotations of "pornography" or "smut." The point is not to write something besides stroke fiction; the point is to write better stroke fiction.
I assume that you understand some of the basics about fiction: that a story has plot (events that have effects) and character (individuals who are working towards a goal).
Let me make my biases perfectly clear:
I believe in the fictional illusion. I think most fiction should strive to create an illusory world in which the reader exists. Practices that destroy that world or make it impossible to establish it are bad. (Yes, deconstruction and other metafictions exist to point out the mechanisms we use to create the illusion. On the other hand, Derrida doesn't write erotica.)
If the writer is good enough or talented enough, there are no rules. You can find successful exceptions to everything I say, but that's because talent trumps analysis. (A useful rule of thumb is this: if you can explain, cogently and concisely, why you're using a technique that's generally considered "bad" - what you gain and what you lose by using the technique - then you probably know enough to break that rule.)
In case you're not clear on the difference, this is bad:
"Hi," I said. My cock was already stiff from looking at her.
"Hi yourself," she said. Something in her voice said, "Fuck me," so I asked her up to my room. She complied readily, her melons bouncing as she ran up the stairs two a time. By the time I got to my room, she was already naked on the bed, her cooze dripping lust lubricant, her nipples stiff and hard.
Her dripping twat was filled by my ramrod eight incher. God she was tight. She moaned while my cock sank into her and I sawed it back and forth pumping us to orgasm. I really wanted her to enjoy our sex so I grabbed her nipples and squeezed. She moaned again while I was inserting my cock into her lovepudding. God I was good! Her cunt was smooth and warm as transmission fluid in a Formula One racer, and I was ready to drive the distance. We must have fucked like that for half an hour, her gigantic breasts cushioning my weight as I drove my cock into her.
Just then my roommate Travis and his girlfriend walk in. I'd always wanted to fuck Gina, and now I had my chance as she tore her clothes off and asked Travis to pass her around like a box of chocolates.
My girl came again, drenching the sheets in a flood of honey juice and my own cock spurted a gallon of slime into her.
"Fuck my ass," gasped Gina. God she was kinky! Travis pushed his steel-hard nine-incher balls-deep into her puckered pink sphincter.
My cock was still hard, so I fucked my girl in the face for a while. Her throat opened right up so I could fill her mouth to my balls, my bloated testes banging against her chin. I came again, another quart, and she swalloed it all. Travis yelled, "Switch!" so I pulled my hard cock from her mouth and planted it in Gina's juicy cunt while Travis put planted his lovegun in my girl's shitring.
(If you don't think that's bad writing, you should go on to another article now.)
Two different classes of errors here:
Errors of mechanics are problems in presentation - the confused sequence of events in the third paragraph, the change of tense in the second-last paragraph, the clumsiness of some of the metaphors and sentence structures, the spelling mistakes.
Errors of conception (pun intended, of course) are problems in the actual story:
Even though I'm a fan of technical skill in writing, I recognize that some fiction is written for a very narrow audience. I think of this as 'fetish fiction' - fiction that strongly emphasizes one particular sexual act or attribute. Incest and teen fiction are excellent examples of this: for the 'fetish reader' the story loses its oomph if you don't keep re-emphasizing the parent-child relationship, or the youth of the participants. I've also seen fiction that concentrated on sweat, urine, and bodily hair. The continual emphasis on the fetish distracts or bores the casual reader, but makes it exciting for the intended audience.
An example of fetish fiction in its purest form is the bondage story, "Linda's Epic Adventures in Life." The prose is clunky, the characters one-dimensional, and the author's real zest is reserved for describing restraining devices. (Reminds me of Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C+: "As you know, Ralph, we must use a succession of inserts to accommodate her vagina to the thickness of the rusty iron spike." )
How much you emphasize the fetish aspects of your story depends on the audience you're writing for. If you're writing (say) a mother-son incest story, the nature of the relationship has to be the centerpiece. (If you're writing classical tragedy, the incest has to be followed by the destruction of the incestuous parties - but I digress.)
I can't help you much with mechanical details, other than to emphasize that they really are important. You can look them up in any good English text. Your goal here is clarity: If the reader has to re-read the sentence, or if it's not clear who's doing what to whom, then that disturbs the illusion.
Most of these are covered by Tim Pierce in the rec.arts.erotica introduction (stolen without permission):
Spelling in particular is bothersome, because it's so easy to check and correct. Try to check that you're using its and it's correctly (and their and they're, your and you're, and so on). Personally, I loathe the word "cum" and use "come" instead, but I have no argument with those who like the word.
Narrative voice is who's telling the story. The choice of narrative voice affects the narrative distance, the immediacy of the events of the story. In terms of voice, you've got four basic choices (from which you can wring a lot of changes).
First person is most common. It's the format of almost every letter to Penthouse Forum. "I did this and then that happened." While you'd think it's the most immediate, it's actually quite limiting.In a first person story, you must always answer the implied question, "Why are you telling me this?" This has implications for the character transformation in the story. In shorter forms (like letters to Penthouse Forum ), the answer to the question is almost always, "This was the hottest sex I'd ever had." If you're going to write a series of stories from the first person, you may need a better reason than that.
For example, take "Family Fun," a rather long incest story that changed authors several times. In the first five chapters, the narrator is seduced by his mother, seduces his sister, and watches his sister seduce his father. So far, we've got a plausible case that this is in fact the most important event in the character's life. There's no ending to the story at this point, and (really), it's tough to imagine one, although once the entire family sleeps together, there aren't many choices: (a) we stop the story because it's reached its natural conclusion; (b) the family suffers because of their incest (unlikely in this genre of fiction); (c) the family moves on to their extended family, seducing aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and so on; (d) we don't actually end the story. (In fact, the anonymous second and third authors chose something like (d), moving the narrator to a swing party, ignoring the fact that "open marriage" is not the same as the swinger subculture.)
Another problem with first person is that it is always distant in time. It's difficult to preserve the sense of immediacy, of seeing things as the characters see them. Even when you're using the device of a journal or diary, the character is always describing the events afterward.
Second person is coercive, and difficult to pull off. There are a few successful second-person stories in literature, but not many. Second person tends to be an experiment. Try this: take a second-person story and convert it into first person. Then convert it into third person. Read all three. You'll probably find that the first and third person versions take less effort to read.
Third person can be limited or omniscient. In many ways, third person is much more immediate than first person, and you can restrict yourself to the impressions of your viewpoint character. Third person is more flexible and powerful than first person, but isn't used as often. (Probably because everyone starts by writing a letter to Penthouse Forum....)
It seems to be a tradition to use ugly convoluted similes and metaphors ("Her cunt was smooth and warm as transmission fluid in a Formula One racer, and I was ready to drive the distance"). I suggest we break tradition.
An inappropriate or strained image brings laughter, not interest. It's jarring. Really, is anyone turned on by phrases like "bloated testes"? In the same line, I've always felt uncomfortable with references to semen as "slime."
You can see how these metaphors begin - "bloated testes" is meant to convey a feeling of fullness, to convey that image of virility that's so important to many authors. But: "bloated" has negative connotations that are bothersome. You ought to be sensitive to these other connotations.
"A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator." - John Steinbeck
A lot of writers get so carried away by the images in their minds that they don't structure them into sentences. There's no variety in the sentence length or rhythm. Usually this shows up as run-on sentences.
I'm not knocking long and complex sentences. A long and complex sentence may be necessary; but some writers use long sentences because they can't be bothered to insert punctuation. (This is related to runon paragraphs, which I describe in the next section.) Consider this long sentence:
Troy looked around and noticed that Emily was watching him with some interest, staring at his stiff prick and licking her lips as her cousin Beth licked her husband's come from Emily's wet slit...Troy wanted to fuck Emily and went to her, rubbing his stiff prick against her full warm lips and Emily opened her mouth and took his come slick cock into her throat as she slipped a sperm coated finger into his asshole, fingering his butt as she swallowed his stiff prick...Emily sucked his cock deep for about 5 minutes until he pushed Beth aside to fill Emily's spermy cunt with his cock and eventually his goo.
Among other things, the writer here believes that an ellipsis is a substitute for a conjunction. Usually you're better off trying to vary the lengths and rhythms of the sentences. Here's an attempt to rewrite the previous sentence using shorter sentences:
Troy watched Beth eagerly suck her husband's come from Emily's cunt. When he glanced up at Emily's face, she was looking at him, looking at his stiff prick. She licked her lips and he took that as a sign to come forward and fuck her mouth. He rubbed the head of his cock over her full warm lips; Emily took his cock into her mouth and her throat. She slipped a sperm-coated finger into his asshole. He had never felt so full. For five minutes she sucked his cock and probed his ass until finally, he had to have her cunt. He pushed Beth aside and fucked Emily frantically until he came.
Sentences tend to be longer and more florid at the climactic moment (you should pardon the expression) of a story or chapter. There are other reasons for using a long sentence - perhaps to convey a mood or an emotion, as this example tries to do:
Although her cousin Beth was still kneeling between her legs, cleaning her of Garry's come, Emily still felt unsatisfied and hungry, almost empty, and she told herself that the problem had been Garry's - he wasn't big enough - so she beckoned to Troy, whose soft cock was almost as big as Garry's hard one; she felt a vague tremor of desire as the young man walked over to her and proudly presented his cock to her but it wasn't hard yet, watching her hadn't made it hard so she took it in her mouth in a perfunctory manner - but as she tongued it she copied what Beth was doing between her legs, swirling her tongue over his cockhead when Beth caressed her clit, licking his shaft when Beth licked the length of Emily's pussy, until Emily began to feel that she wasn't sucking Troy at all, merely acting as an extension of Beth's tongue, and the illusion destroyed any desire she had felt.
On the other hand, many people have read too much Hemingway and write paragraphs like this:
Troy looked around. Emily was watching him. She licked her lips. Her cousin Beth was sucking her husband's come from her slit. It excited Troy. It excited him a lot. He went to her. He rubbed his cockhead against her full warm mouth. She took it in. She took it all in. She put a finger up his asshole as she swallowed all of him. Emily sucked the good suck, and he came.
Even worse, some people have Zelazny disease:
His cock. Was in her mouth. Her warm wet mouth. She sucked. Him. Until. He. Came.
These special effects have their place, and they can be very effective - that's why people copy them. They lose their effectiveness if overused.
Here's an actual paragraph from Family Fun (I've corrected the spelling):
We drove for about 20 minutes and pulled up in front of a nice suburban house which looked for all intents very conservative. The only indication of a party was the six or seven cars parked in the driveway and in the street. Dad and I got out on the street side and went around to help the ladies out getting a great show as Mom and Ger made sure to hike up their skirts. We went to the door and rang the bell after a short wait a tall blond woman wearing a terry cloth robe answered the door and let us in. Dad spoke briefly to her then introduced Geriann and I to her telling us that her name was Donna. Dad told Donna that this was our first swing party and that we were their kids. Donna looked at Ger and I and licked her lips then reached out and rubbed Ger's tit then my cock. I liked Donna right away and told her I was going to make sure she enjoyed tonight. Donna smiled and opened her robe placing it on the chair next to the door and allowing us see her hot body as she led us into the living room. My eyes almost fell out of their sockets as we entered the room. There were four couples and three young girls going at it on large mats layed down on the floor. Donna led us thru the fucking mass of bodies to a bedroom and told us to strip and join in where ever we wanted. Mom told me to close my open mouth and began to strip me quickly. Dad was doing the same for Geriann and soon my sister and I were standing there naked. I helped Mom out of her clothes as Geriann stripped Dad exposing his stiff cock and stroking his prick in her hot little hand. Mom told us that we needed to be introduced to everyone and that we would have to let the others get to know us a bit before we really got wild. After her words of wisdom Mom led me by my cock as Dad guided Ger by placing his hand on her ass moving us to the living room to meet their swinging friends.
In one paragraph (29 lines of text in the original, 381 words), the author is conveying at least five separate events:
There should probably be three paragraphs here, maybe five.
Dialogue is one of the easiest ways to make your characters seem like actual people. Here's a typical bit of narrative exposition. Your male character has finally been allowed into the Dionysius Club and is being shown around the orgy room:
Leo was introduced to Benito, a stocky man with dark hair and gleaming teeth, who was fucking a woman named Clarice; Benito stopped as they approached and complimented Anna on her shaved pussy.
Compare that with the following (admittedly non-brilliant) dialogue:
"Annie!" A stocky man with dark hair and gleaming teeth stopped in mid-stroke to look at Anna and Leo. "You've shaved! I love my hair pie without the hair."
Anna laughed. "I'll save you a piece, Benito. Hello, Clarice."
The woman under the man grunted. "Don't talk, Benito - fuck!"
This dialogue at least tells you that everyone has met, and that they have some kind of relationship. We also get a hint of their personalities.
Look, we'll cut some slack because it's fiction, but the average erection is around six inches, not six inches around. Not every woman has firm breasts, and if her nipples are stiff it may just mean she's cold. The second half of "Family Fun" contains many references like this: "I really wanted her to enjoy sex, so I pinched her stiff nipples." (And I was wasting my wife's time with foreplay....)
Women always have these gushing orgasms. (Florence King talks about this in her essay, "Confessions of a Lady Pornographer" - at a Christmas party, one of the staff complained that she didn't gush like the women in the books; to which Florence replied (I'm paraphrasing), "Honey, if I lubricated like the women in the books, I'd see a doctor.")
No one kisses in these stories, either.
Part of the problem is that the characters are interchangeable - they're just tab A and slot B. As David Gerrold once wrote, all sex is friction. It's the differences in partners that make it interesting.
And that leads us to...
Characterization is a broad, broad topic and not one that I'm going to be able to treat fairly here. There are lots of approaches to characterization, but here's one that works for me.
What we call characterization is the ability of the writer to convey personality and motivation. Personality is the set of choices a person makes - from diction (whether he says "Yeah" or "Affirmative") and clothing (a hot pink miniskirt says something different than jean cutoffs) to choice of careers, lovers, and hobbies. Not all of these are conscious choices, but we'll leave that aside for the moment. Motivation is the reason why a character makes specific choices. Generally characters are striving to achieve or avoid something. (Note that internal roadblocks count as motivation.)
In most stories we see here on the net, the characters are motivated by simple lust or by a particularly treacly kind of love. Yet people have sex for many different reasons (even Glamour magazine ran an article called "7 Reasons To Have Sex Tonight").
The quickest list of motivations I know is the Seven Deadly Sins; lust is one. In case you're not up on your theology, the other six were:
Imagine a story where they have sex because she's angry (at someone) and he's proud (of his ability). This immediately suggests how each character's story will be resolved - she will discover something about her anger or the object of her anger, he will discover something about his pride.
One more thing: most people are not simple. They don't proceed in straight lines towards their goals, with single motivations.
Incidentally, don't believe that because your character is based on a real person, he or she will be believable. 'Tain't so. In fact, I think a writer describing a real person tends to get lazy and doesn't justify the character enough - so the "real" character gets short shrift.
How many stories have you read with this plot:
I'm not saying a good story can't be built out of this structure (it can), but these stories are frequently boring.
Plot is a series of events that have repercussions for the characters involved. Bob has a shower. That's not important to the plot. But if Bob has a shower and he jerks off, which means that he can't get it up for Julie later, so she invites in Dana from next door: that's an important event in the plot.
Plot is structured in scenes. Scenes are a lot more interesting if each character has something to accomplish and a reason (or reasons) why it can't be done. For example, you have a scene between Chris and Frances:
Obviously, this is a trivial example. If the motivations and obstacles are great enough, they form the basis for the whole story:
Here's that extended chunk of Family Fun rewritten. This version is longer, but it's vastly more readable:
We drove out into the suburbs and pulled up in front of a nice conservative house. Only the six or seven cars parked in the street and driveway betrayed the party inside. Dad and I went around to help our ladies out of the car; Mom and Ger made sure to hike up their skirts, so we got a great show.
A few moments after we rang the bell, a tall blond woman wearing a terry cloth robe let us in. The house smelled of sex.
Dad spoke briefly to her; then said, "This is Donna. Donna, these are our kids, Geriann and Bill. This is their first party."
Donna looked at us and licked her lips. "It's good to meet you, Geriann," she said, and rubbed Ger's tit. Ger surprised me by leaning forward and kissing her. Donna turned the kiss into something wicked, running her hands over Ger's hips, ass, back, and cupping her breasts. After breaking the kiss, she turned to me and said, "Nice to meet you too, Bill," as she traced her fingers along my cock.
I liked her right away. "I'll make sure you enjoy tonight," I told her.
Donna smiled. "I'm sure you will." I tried not to stare when she placed her robe on the chair next to the door. She had a long lean body, like a runner, and almost no tits at all but her nipples were big and brown. She also had the most abundant brown bush I'd ever seen. I watched her muscular asscheeks flex as she led us into the living room, and then I had plenty more to stare at: All the furniture had been pushed to the wall, and there were four couples and three young girls going at it on large mats.
I easily spotted the people I already knew: Bob was fucking one of the teenage girls; Carol was on her hands and knees in a threesome with a man I didn't know and another of the teenagers; Jim was fucking a tiny redhead by the fireplace; and Lisa and Jenny were straddling one of the other men I didn't know. Lisa had his cock, and Jenny was sitting on his face and rubbing her exposed clit. Jenny looked just as sexy naked as I had known she would: her tits were full, firm and bouncing gently as he fucked her with his tongue; her bush was trimmed back nicely and her pussy lips were exposed.
Donna led us through the fucking mass of bodies to a bedroom and told us to strip and join in wherever we wanted. Mom told me to close my open mouth, then quickly stripped me. Dad did the same for Geriann and soon my sister and I were standing there naked. I helped Mom out of her clothes as Geriann stripped Dad. She stroked Dad's stiff prick a couple of times.
"You can't really get wild until you've met everyone and they've gotten to know you a bit," Mom told us. She waited until both Ger and I agreed, and then she said, "So let's get started." She took me by the cock and Dad placed his hand on Ger's ass, and they guided us into the living room to meet somenew friends - and some old friends in a new way.
Okay, enough talking; here are half a dozen scenarios which are not hackneyed or cliched. These are plucked from the air; use if you wish. I've written these as hetero, but change genders and sexual orientations if you'd like. The nice thing about motivations rather than sex acts is that they span sexual preferences.
After the white heat of inspiration has cooled, set the story aside. The next day, read it out loud. (It's even better if you can get someone else to read it to you.) When you're reading something familiar, there's a tendency to skip over the boring or overly-familiar parts. Reading out loud forces you to slow down and look at every word in your story.
A second suggestion: read every book on writing you can find. Even the bad ones will contain one new item or one new interpretation you can use. Although you must take his insistence on a university education with a grain of salt, John Gardner's The Art Of Fiction is excellent. Crawford Killian posted a set of articles on the basics of commercial fiction; they're archived in various places around the Web.
A third suggestion: read voraciously, read analytically. Don't just read Penthouse Forum or the latest Bee-Line book; read Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Pat Califa. Read erotica from the sixties, when they were forced to put in more characterization because they couldn't have as much sex. (Writers like Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block and -- I believe -- Donald Westlake wrote erotica during the fifties and sixties.) Look for the good authors on the net, and read them. But you should also read outside the field. Read romance novels: they're formulaic, but they also show you how you can distinguish one character from a billion other similar characters. Read Faulkner to see how long a sentence can be, and read Hemingway to get that out of your system. Read Sherwood Anderson. Read Edgar Allen Poe to see how all the supposed elements of fiction can be compressed and dropped. (The Cask Of Amontillado is all denouement.) Read classic novels and plays: Shakespeare and Dickens could create a wonderful character in two lines.
And as soon as you think you have the rules of fiction sussed out, find someone who breaks those rules and figure out how they get away with it.