Writer's Advice

A thread for you to share some tidbits of what you've learned about the art and craft of writing, porn or otherwise. I'm starting this thread after having read a bunch of stories by new authors and finding the same basic defects in all of them.

MMy tip concerns concrete sensual detail. I leanred about this a long time ago in a writing class, and it's still one of the cornerstones of fiction for me, right down there along with plot, character, and conflict...

--Concrete Sensual Detail. It's what brings a scene to life and makes us feel like we're there.

Concrete: Real things. Not ideas and feelings and thoughts. Not your opinions on things. Stuff that's out there in the real world. Ashtrays and streelamps and shoes and rainstorms. Frowns and smiles and shrugs. Not "she had the nicest set of legs I'd ever seen." More like, "She had legs that looked like they could have been made of chrome."

Sensual: Appealing to the senses. Things that we can see and hear and feel and taste. The sound of tires on a wet street; the slant of late afternmoon light; the feel of wind on sweat; the softly yielding feel of lips against yours

Detail: The little things you see in a scene that mean more than what they are. The frayed bathrobe that shows how she feels. The set of his jaw that shows his anger. The half-empty bottle of booze on the kitchen table. The empty fridge.

CSD's are the props that set a scene, and without them your characters are working on an empty set. You can tell me your heroine is in the cabin of a ship on a stormy sea, but unless I see the stuff moving around and the pull chain from the overhead light swinging back and forth, I won't really believe it. When we talk about showing and not telling, very often it's the concrete sensual detail we want to see.

They do something else, too. When you're writing a story, you're trying to get your reader involved. One of the ways you do this is by showing him a scene that demands he try to understand it. Why is there a half-empty booze bottle on the table? What does that say about the person who lives there? The reader has to process that information, and now he's in the story. If you tell us "He's lonely", then we're sitting outside the scene listening to you. If you show us the half-empty bottle of scotch, we're in the room with him.

I've read a lot of sex scenes. but I still remember the first one I saw where the woman clawed the sheets. Among all those throbbing manhoods and aching femininities, that one concrete detail jumped out at me and showed me more of what she was feeling than any yards of prose telling me how good everything felt.

So that's my first piece of advice. Concrete Sensual Detail.

Your turn.

--Zoot

Respect grammar, spelling, and punctuation. They are your friends.

Write dialogue the way people actually talk. Even if everything else is strong, weak dialogue can kill a story quickly.

dr_mabeuse said:

Concrete: Real things. Not ideas and feelings and thoughts. Not your opinions on things. Stuff that's out there in the real world. Ashtrays and streelamps and shoes and rainstorms. Frowns and smiles and shrugs. Not "she had the nicest set of legs I'd ever seen." More like, "She had legs that looked like they could have been made of chrome."

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Actually, they were made of chrome. That is the last time I ever date a robot!

My advice

Whatever you do, don't use every sentence to describe action and motion. A bad story to me is 99% "He did, she did, then they did it together." Intersperse action sentences with feeling sentences, whether that be describing thoughts or sensations.

Also, don't forget (as DrM said), that we have 5 senses. I like to get a see, hear, smell, taste and touch into every sex scene in my stories. If you can, then you stand more of a chance of enveloping the reader in your environment.

The Earl

Passive voice is bad. Strong, active verbs good.

Boota said:

Write dialogue the way people actually talk. Even if everything else is strong, weak dialogue can kill a story quickly.

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is this realistic?

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhhhhh, fuck me with your huge pulsing rod of love!!!!!!!!"

p.s. don't anyone think about stealing that, I'm going to use it.

Avoid repetition.

I’m guiltier of this than most. I tend to get into ruts on how I describe peoples reactions. I must have used “After a moment she realized…” about 40 times in the story I’m currently writing.

If you know you're weak on spelling or grammar, get a proofreader. I have caught several grammatical or spelling errors in others' stories on here. Anyone can make a typo. I've even been caught out a few times, and I'm an excellent typist and linguist. So check, double-check, and then ask someone else to check.

Be very concious of internal continuity. If you describe her as wearing red undies out for her night on the town, don't have her in black when she gets home with her date. Internal continuity failures are easy to make and to the author, they may seem very trivial, but if the reader goes "hey, didn't she have a clit ring?" and scans back up to find out, you've lost them.

Minor Characters are important. Very important, as they fill out the tapestry that is life. You can breathe life into a minor character with a few well placed words and avoid a universe of cardboard cutouts. Surrounding your main characters with real, interesting people, adds great depth to the story. Who knows, you might even find next weeks protagonist in this weeks supporting cast.

There are more than two senses. They all come into play in sex. If you just write the visual and tactile, while ignoring the others, you are cheating the reader and yourself.

Emotional depth is more important than you think. No matter how important you think it is. If your reader connects with a character, they are going to enjoy the story more.

I have a file on my computer titled "The Rules." They are the ones I have learned because I have broken them to my own detriment, or in one or two cases have joyously discovered when they suddenly made my writing much better. Here are my rules:

• Take the backward glance. Asimov has a story called "The Backward Glance" which I read a very long time ago. At the time I thought he was a fool (I was about 13). He's entirely right. Nothing shapes a story like knowing how it ends and writing the story with that backward glance from the ending. It's not just about getting a good ending; it shapes and paces the entire thing. Otherwise personally I end up with amusing characters meandering aimlessly in search of a plot.
  
• Establish narrator sympathy and scrutinize it regularly. I have broken this rule in every way you can imagine. Narrator too arrogant. Too wimpy. Too perfect. Too indecisive. Too profane. Too prissy. Too undeveloped. With any luck, some time in the near future I will finish discovering every possible way to make the audience hate my narrator. In the mean time, I ask myself regularly: "Why will/should the audience love this narrator? Why will they want to listen to this person, and how can I establish that desire in the first paragraph?" Narrative connection is the Holy Grail of reader hooks.
  
• Start with action, not backstory or philosophy. Unless you've got a really great narrative voice or are willing to drop the "general" audience and write only for people with a strong interest in your specific topic (i.e., history text or whatever), the story needs to hit the ground running. [Edited after seeing Dr. M's post below: I break this rule all of the time, actually. Hmmm. Maybe it needs to be something more like "start with something genuinely interesting"? I think Dr. M. is right that the "instant action" start can get cliched and over-used. Possibly we need to expand to "start with a really good hook."]
  
• Connect setting descriptions to theme and mood. Descriptions and locations should not be random; they should fit with the emotional and thematic feel of the story.
  
• Build plot and conflict to reveal character. Brainstorm character goals, fears, and natures to generate plots that challenge the characters in essential ways and bring out who they really are. Then the work will feel like everything has a good reason for happening.
  
• Use brief, powerful symbols, and identify key objects and images. Don't try to describe everything in minute detail, or the reader will get lost and the power of the important elements will be diluted.
  
• Cut enumeration. Decribe actions, feelings, or objects once in the best, most precise way, not as a series of overlapping impressions that each approximate part of the impact.
  
• Cut inverted diction and eschew passive voice. Otherwise your brilliant editor will write "Yoda!" in the margins. God bless him.

Of course, that list tells you a fair bit about my writing goals as well. I want leaner, terser, trimmer work (oh, do have a good laugh; I know it's ridiculous considering how I write). I know that florid writing is my natural tendency and great enemy. But then I go with Yeats on this - we progress best as writers, artists, and people by embracing that which is most different to what we naturally are. I am florid by nature; it would be pointless and destructive for me to attempt a florid writing style deliberately, as it would only become a caricature of itself. By attempting a more spare, lean style, I now and then strike near to something that works.

Shanglan

Beginnings:

Start your story where the story starts. That gimmick about starting a story with action and then writing twelve paragraphs of flashback in order to tell us what's going on is old and overused. (Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Four shots ripped into my gut and I was off on the adventure of my life!)

Don't start out telling us how fantastic or true or amazing the story you're about to tell us is. Don't tell us it was a night you'll never forget. We'll judge all that for ourselves.

Don't give us more background than we need to make sense of the story. We really don't care how you did in seventh grade civics unless it appiies to the current story.

Don't buddy-up to the reader. Assume he/she's as smart as you are. It's a risky assumption, but no one likes to be talked down to.

If you just can't get started on a story because you're stuck on the first paragraph, don't worry about it. Write your shitty paragraph, then go back and delete it and start the story with the second paragraph. It's amazing how often this works.

Ooooh, lots of good advice here for someone like me, still learning and prolly always will be.

I will share something I am still learning, no matter how many times I edit, and I have other people look and make editing suggestions, usually less of this and that and more sex is the suggestions, or more hard-core sex, and then edit and edit some more. I still go back and look at a posted story and think, how the hell did I miss that?

All of this other advice I am going to add to my advice to myself:

Edit, edit, and edit some more, stop, drop it, come back and edit some more later, stop, drop it, and come back and edit some more later. Edit, edit, edit.

Lisa Denton said:

:

Edit, edit, and edit some more, stop, drop it, come back and edit some more later, stop, drop it, and come back and edit some more later. Edit, edit, edit.

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Oh, but first, the very best advice:


Write it!


(then do the above )

carsonshepherd said:

Oh, but first, the very best advice:


Write it!


(then do the above )

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that might be the toughest advice yet.

but it works....

Ask yourself: Would I read this?

Like others have said, make sure you use all 5 senses.

Insert something about the weather, everyday life, trivial things to make the story real.

Keep your verbs in one tense.

Don't switch POV every other sentence.
I think that's my own worst affliction.

The most important of all, for me, is to have your personae behave in character.
Make their reactions believable and in synch with the psychological profile you have established.

Black Tulip said:

The most important of all, for me, is to have your personae behave in character.
Make their reactions believable and in synch with the psychological profile you have established.

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Use a profiling tool to guide your characters so that they always act/react consistently. For example: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

impressive said:

Use a profiling tool to guide your characters so that they always act/react consistently. For example: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

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Fascinating. Evidently I'm a seer. Impressive that they got that, but didn't get "horse."

Shanglan

impressive said:

Use a profiling tool to guide your characters so that they always act/react consistently. For example: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

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That's an interesting little tool. Not so much for the end result, but in actually forcing you to think about what your character's answers would be for those questions.

The Earl

This is something which dawned on me only yesterday, although I had occasionally been close to it - after my failed attempt at re-reading Harry Potter (I) or after the first half page of the prelude to Da Vinci's Code, for example.

Yesterday, on the sequence of the story-theft thread that Bel started recently, I decided to run a Google search on a story to which I had been pointed. It was a particularly bad story, with a very generic, unsearchable title, so the only way to do it was to search for an expression withdrawn from its body of text. As I was scanning the story for an appropriate expression or phrase, it hit me: there weren't any. The main reason why the story was so particularly bad, so extraordinarily boring to read, was that there wasn't a single unexpected word, a memorable phrase or phrasal construction, there wasn't a single original image in it. There was nothing that could ever be quoted or even remembered two minutes after being read. It was, quite simply put, the blandest story I ever read, and it was bad.

So, my advice - or life philosophy - would be, in the words of a dear friend, "rather be dead than bland".

Great thread, Doc. IMHO, you should add your posts, especially the first one, to the How-To Forum. Colly's and BlackShanglan's were, among others, also keepers.

Having nothing original myself, I'd like to add the thoughts of two pretty good writers.

"All first drafts are shit." Ernest Hemingway.

No matter how fabulous you think your first draft is, let it cool for a few days before inflicting it on unsuspecting readers.

There are no hard and fast, unbreakable rules in commerical fiction except, "Thou shalt not bore thy reader." All rules should be seen as guidelines on how to achieve that goal. Here, IMHO, a ten very good ones from one of my favorite authors.

--

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing
Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle

from the New York Times, Writers on Writing Series.

Being a good author is a disappearing act.

By ELMORE LEONARD

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Rumple Foreskin

TheEarl said:

That's an interesting little tool. Not so much for the end result, but in actually forcing you to think about what your character's answers would be for those questions.

The Earl

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The type descriptors at www.TypeLogic.com give more in depth profiles. I find it VERY useful.

impressive said:

The type descriptors at www.TypeLogic.com give more in depth profiles. I find it VERY useful.

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Hmm. That test told me that my main character was an extrovert and a risk-taker. This much I know already and actually used that iformation to answer the qs. It was having to think in charater that was so useful - the process rather than the results.

I have to say, I remain very suspicious of any program or tool that claims to help with writing; I see it as too inorganic for my tastes.

The Earl