Alright, so I got this anonymous question in my inbox the other day:
“I love your work, but recently it feels like your stories have been too short to have much story, but have too much story to have porn. It’s not that the two are mutually exclusive, but that it feels like you’re taking an interesting scenario, doing some setup for a longer story, but then just cutting it off with ‘And then they all became pigs and lots of gay sex, the end’ rather than fleshing it out.”
And because I’m a tacky bastard my instinctive response was something like,
“Well fuck you too.”
but that was only because I suck at taking criticism. So I thought for a bit, and realized,
“Hey, didn’t I write a metawriting essay on this very topic?”
and sure enough, I had, and I’d failed to take my own advice. Or rather, I felt like the advice I’d given in that entry was good, but it had oversimplified the problem of narrative and the erotic to an either-or, when that doesn’t really capture the actual scope of possible stories. It also failed to grapple with the actual problem. The issue isn’t whether or not you want any given story to be more or less focused on story of sex, rather, the issue is that any given scene, regardless of whether it is focused on sex or story, can either cheat the reader, or overload them. This is a related, but different issue.
Readers are, in general, pretty forgiving in this genre. If you can manage to help them get off, they’ll give you a pass. However, the quickest way to make sure someone doesn’t get off, is to either cheat or overload them. To cheat is to do what the asker above describes, to reach a section of the story, slip in a quick summary of what happened, and then jet off into the next scene. If the reader really wanted more of a description of what had just happened, (say a super-duper hot ass sex scene of one thousand potential orgasms), then they are going to feel cheated. On the other hand, if you go so in depth into a scene that the reader loses interest entirely in what you might have to say, you have just overloaded them, which can be just as bad. So how, exactly, does one strike a good balance?
I tend to err on the side of cheating, especially on tumblr. These captions and vignettes, to me, aren’t really meant to be taken as finalized “stories”. This is more like an artist showing you pages from their sketch book, and like a sketch, I tend to focus on the aspects of any given story that attract my attention. In the same way that a sketch might draw one aspect of a scene in intricate detail, while only implying or omitting other parts, I use these captions to elaborate one or two aspects that I find intriguing–a MacGuffin, a sex act, a particular transformation–and I generally minimize and leave vague everything else around it.
I fully understand that this can be frustrating for readers of my tumblr. The aspects of a vignette I choose to focus on may or may not be the aspect of the story you are most interested in. I’m sympathetic, but not really that much, sorry not sorry. I don’t spend a lot of time editing these captions, and they are largely springboards to other ideas and projects that I would spend more time on (provided “more time” was a thing that existed in my life at the moment). If I were extending these sketches into longer stories, one of the first things I’d do is sketch out how these scenes are structured, but the only way to learn to gauge length is to read other people’s stories, see how they construct their scenes, sexy and otherwise. Find authors you like, and mimic their pace and description. That said, there are a couple signs that you can watch out for in your stories, to make sure you aren’t cheating or overloading the reader.
Keep an eye on your level of detail. There is a sweet spot, where you provide enough detail to prompt a scene in the reader’s mind, while leaving enough mystery to allow them to fill in some of the erotic details with their own imagination. Detail is crucial; I’m not trying to undersell them. Details are erotic triggers, the only aspect of stories that have the power to directly arouse the reader. However, the more details you put in, the more readers you risk leaving disappointed and overloaded. All it takes is one erotic trigger that the reader has no interest in for the entire scene to disappoint. MacGuffins are another choke point. If they become so complicated that you have to spend paragraph after paragraph describing how and why they work, you are wasting so much time on exposition that the vast majority of readers have no interest in (Although I’m certain there are people turned on my elaborate exposition and unnecessary exposition. After all, Tolkien is still a popular author.)
Also be aware of your own boredom. Do you feel yourself, as you’re working on a scene, wishing you were writing something else? If so, there’s a very good chance that your reader is going to be thinking about reading something else when you deliver it to them. If you’re bored, the person making it, then what chance does a reader have? Just be careful that you don’t overcompensate, and go from overloading a scene to cheating it. It’s just as bad to skip over something with a few sentences of rushed exposition as it is to slog through it with too much detail. Better is to reformulate the scene entirely, and start from scratch. Find some way to inject more action into it, to generate excitement, rather than just ignoring the problem. When in doubt, rewrite it.
Of course, the best way to check for cheating or overloading is to give a draft to a reader you trust, and ask them what they wanted more of, and what they felt dragged on too long. Believe them, don’t challenge them, and be willing to rewrite sections and murder your darlings. And in response to your question, Anonymous, I’ll keep a better lid on my tendency to summarize–thanks for pointing it out.
Bracken's Corner 