Bad Hobbit's Erotic Writing 101

Then there's context and continuity. Where are your fuckers -- that's essentially what they are -- when you're describing them, how did they get there, and in what state? If the woman has pulled the top of her dress down to her waist so the guy can suck her nipples, does the dress come off over her legs or does it have to get pulled over her head? If the latter, the tit action will have to stop for a moment or two. Is she wearing heels? Do these come off before she gets onto the bed? If not, is there a risk that she'll injure him with them? (This has happened to me). If he's taken his pants off, where are his shoes? If she's not wearing a bra, make sure that he doesn't take one off her later in the scene. Or have her wearing a dress at the start of the scene and a blouse and skirt later on. Or have clothes scattered around, or put on afterward, that they weren't wearing at the start. (I've seen several instances of this type of continuity error). If they're drinking, please ensure they put the glasses down before they start having sex, or all that broken glass could cause a nasty injury. And if they're going for anal, at least try to make this credible; spitting on his cock and shoving it in only happens in porn movies where the girl has already filled her cavity with lube before they start shooting.

And think about how people generally react around sex. If I read a story where, on the first page, a girl starts quoting her measurements and those of her friends to me, I tend to switch off. In general, a woman may describe herself as 'skinny', or 'curvy', or 'busty', or maybe 'plump' or 'generously proportioned', but I've never met or corresponded with a woman who will say "Hi, I'm Pandora, and I'm 48-24-38". OK, most guys will have measured their dick at some stage, but generally girls don't ask "So how long is your dick?" They take a look, and it's either too big, too small or just right. Girls can refuse anal -- and even vaginal sex -- because a dick is just too big, or enjoy it specifically because the guy has a smaller one. Some women with small mouths can struggle to give a full blowjob to even an average-sized cock. And these aren't all disadvantages; you can use all of these elements in your story to give it some 'texture' and a sense of realism. In "Mr. Big", my hero has a cock the size of a baseball bat. Young, inexperienced women look at it and are terrified, but he eventually finds several willing partners from among older ladies who've experienced the dubious pleasures of childbirth. It also gives several opportunities for humor, which is something I like to do.

I try to populate my stories with plausibly-real people in believable situations doing things that are physically possible. Not all of the sex has to be good; in 'Uncle Bob', Stacey has a painful experience when she tries anal and isn't properly prepared. Many women can't come just from being fucked, and some can be hurt by a guy's clumsiness or over-enthusiasm. Guys lose erections or have trouble controlling their orgasms. Not all your characters have to be young or even good-looking; many of mine are the wrong side of 40, and some are substantially older. I'm currently working on a novel which involves a 'brothel for ladies', staffed with attractive young men. Some of the clients are in their sixties, and are of all shapes and sizes. If they weren't, the story would lose credibility and, as I said earlier, I like to write about things that could happen, people you could theoretically meet, and actions that are practically possible and realistic. So mix it up a little; a bit of realism may make your story more interesting. Most Literotica stories are sexual fantasy. Some are quite literally incredible -- as in 'impossible to believe'. Give yours a little texture and people might enjoy it more.

Storyboarding, timelines and preparing to write

OK, so I'm something of a 'pantser'. That doesn't mean that I think my work is total pants, as we say in the UK, meaning crap -- others may disagree -- but that I often write 'by the seat of my pants'; ie I often start with an idea and then let the narrative take me where it will. When you've written as much as I have, this can work for short stories, especially if you have a clear 'narrative arc' in your mind, as I usually do. However, for longer pieces, it can be a problem. My 'Uncle Bob' saga, that I started nine years ago, keeps bouncing around without ever really approaching the ending that's in my head, as I keep cramming in new ideas. I also discovered that, in my desire to explain Bob and Stacey's developing relationship, I'd forgotten that Stacey, a high-school senior, would have had a senior prom and a graduation ceremony somewhere in the period I describe. These are huge events in a teenager's life, but I never even mention them, so I now have to review my timelines (see below) and update a couple of earlier chapters already on Literotica if the story is to be believable.

The best way around this is to storyboard. This is standard practice with movies. All good novelists use the technique (see some of Graham Swift's work to observe a master of this technique at work), and the better professional speakers do it with presentations and lectures. It maps out the narrative arc and helps with the timeline. It's useful in keeping the content to a manageable level and preventing the temptation to cram in too much. It also helps avoid inconsistencies, manage different plot threads and to get to the end without wandering off into unhelpful literary side-alleys.

There are many IT-based tools that you can use that will help, but you can also storyboard on good old paper. Here's the basis of the technique. You can adapt it as you see fit.

• Note down on Post-Its all the key events/action points in your story (forget any background detail -- just the action & salient plot points) & lay them out in chronological order. Make sure that there's some indication of the (relative) dates of all of the key events.
• Now look at the storyboard. Does the first bit look like it will grab the reader? If not, you probably need to tell your story in a slightly different order. It's often better if it isn't chronological. Start with some action that makes them want to read more. (For two great examples see James Clavell's 'Shogun' as an action thriller, and Judith Krantz's 'Scruples' as an erotic novel. Both open really well. Later on, Shogun gets a bit bogged down in period detail, but by then you're hooked and keep on reading anyway).
• Now think about how you fill in the background to ensure your reader can follow it by WRITING AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. Put the key facts, without which the story won't work, onto more Post-Its (maybe in a different color) & see where you might be able to 'dribble them out' between or (preferably) during key scenes. A few lines of good dialogue can often help to fill in a lot of background, especially when you're referring to historical events or places that are well-known. (But please avoid 'Dynasty-style' dialog like "Hello, Horace, my long-lost one-legged cousin from Tasmania who was accused of murdering his father but was the victim of mistaken identity." OK, so that was a bit extreme, but you get the idea).
• It's a good idea to also rough-out character descriptions. I sometimes look for pictures on the Web that resemble my characters. I then have a clear idea of what they look like, so I don't start by describing Ethel as having short, brown hair, and then (maybe months later), write something in a later chapter about her long, blonde hair blowing in the wind. (It's very easy to forget the appearance of some of your minor characters). Also, think about what they're like as people, and sketch that in with a few important bullet points in your notes. If we meet Ronald at a BLM rally, and later see him wearing a red MAGA cap, unless this is intended as a real and deliberate change of mind for him, such personality inconsistencies will stick out to readers like the proverbial pump-action shotgun.
• Also, try to give your characters distinctive names, not just in one story but across different stories. A lot of people from India have asked me to edit for them, which I find tricky; although I've visited that amazing country many times, the value systems are very different from those of the UK and the USA, so it's sometimes hard for me to make helpful suggestions. One author had three characters called Anupriya, Anulekha and Aaditya. See the problem? By three pages in, I was struggling to work out who was who. Another (very good) writer had a Latina called Connie in 2 different stories, and I wanted to know whether these were the same person and whether the stories were going to be linked; they weren't. So give your characters distinct names. I have a spreadsheet of as many male and female names as I can think of. Every time I need a character name, I check the spreadsheet and record which story the name was used in, and I then try not to use it anywhere else unless I'm trying to link stories. And I avoid having similar-sounding names, or even two names beginning with the same letter, in any story.
• Once you have established a clear narrative flow that gets you believably from the beginning of your story to the end, without too many diversions, consider your timeline. Over what period does your story happen? Are there any annual events, or even major national or world events, that take place during this time-span? If you're setting your story in (say) 1940s India, there are a few minor intrusions -- World War 2, Gandhi's campaign, religious strife and slaughter, Partition, etc -- that you'll at least have to refer to. If it's set around the Millennium, failing to mention your characters' reactions to 9/11 might be seen as a rather glaring hole in the narrative. I didn't initially do a timeline for Uncle Bob. Then Bob was remembering something that happened three weeks earlier -- or was it four, or two? And, as I said, I forgot Stacey's senior prom and graduation. I now use a spreadsheet that lists the major plot events, chronologically, so I can refer back to them. When Stacey goes to college, I need to have left sufficient time between her graduation and this next event to make reasonable sense.
• Once you have all of the above, think about chapters. Are you going to tell your tale as a straightforward linear narrative -- ie in chronological order -- or are you going to have flashbacks? (I sometimes have flashbacks when I'm reading some stories, to the time I did martial arts, and how I could use techniques I learned then to punish particularly lazy authors. But these aren't the flashbacks I mean). As I implied earlier, a good way to start a story is to throw the reader into some particularly tense or exciting scene, then go back and fill in a little of the back-story they need to make sense of the story. Chopping the timeline around can give you a more dynamic, interesting story -- but don't over-use it (as the author of "A Skylark Sing's" did) or it can make the story fragmented and hard to follow. Mostly this is a matter of feel.
• It's also a really good idea to create an overall structural template you'll use for this and future work, setting up the default formatting styles you'll want to use. Start by creating or selecting your body text and heading styles -- fonts, sizes, indents, etc -- if you're not happy with the WP's defaults, and your proofing language. (If your story is set in the UK, Australia or India, say, 'English (USA)' is not appropriate, unless the main protagonist is American). Make sure your chapter heading style has an automatic page break before it and is recognized as a 'level 1 heading' style, so you can create a table of contents with it. (See below). You may want to save this as a named template (eg 'story.dotx') to re-use for future work.
• Now create the skeleton of your new piece. Using the appropriate style, create chapter headings -- Chapter 1, 2, 3 will do for now -- and then add key plot points (maybe as bullet-points) under each one, together with the detail that needs to be explained at this point; essentially you're transferring your storyboard onto the computer. (If you're changing PoV to tell the story from different perspectives, note this as well so you know who needs to be talking). Now might also be a good time to create that table of contents. I find this really helpful in trying to maintain even-length chapters; otherwise, some chapters will finish after 5 pages and others drag on for 30, and I won't notice until it's harder to change. But don't try submitting a document with a TOC to Literotica, as it doesn't work for online content due to page-length variations.
• Now you're ready to write your text. When you do, fill in each chapter (and obviously delete your initial notes once you've written those sections). Keep an eye on chapter length. Spell-check what you've written, read it through & correct, put it away for a week, read it through & correct again. But if you're serious about making it better, read the next section FIRST.

Keep it punchy -- 'Show, don't tell' and self-editing

A common error I come across is too much exposition. It's an easy trap to fall into, when you get grabbed by an idea or a theme, to go on and on describing what happens and fail to realize that you've lost your reader. Hopefully, on a critical read through, you'll spot where you simply ramble on, talking about things that are happening and using description rather than hints in dialog.

Try, whenever you can, to avoid long passages of "this happened, then this, and after that, this happened again, and then that other thing, and then some more of that." Sketching a few crucial experiences and some interactions in dialogue between characters can save pages of text.

I'd counted nineteen floors. The numbers on the landing walls were lost in the thick, black smoke. We stopped, panting, sweat dripping down our faces under our masks.

"Half gone." It was hard to hear Julie over the roar of the flames, just yards away. She tapped the gauge on her BA -- her Breathing Apparatus. My BA registered the same.

Two figures emerged from the smoke, towels wrapped around their faces, coughing. They looked on the brink of collapse.

So -- should we still try to climb four more floors with half our air left, looking for survivors, or help these people? Anyone we found would have to be carried, so could we help others down while also rescuing these two?

A fireman's training doesn't give you a moral yardstick to help you decide who to save and who to abandon. You want to save everyone. Sometimes you just can't.

This is based on something I read on the Web -- the first-hand story of a fireman and his (female) firefighting partner in Grenfell Tower in London in 2017, trying to rescue people from that appalling disaster. The original text was a verbatim, sequential description of events. I felt I didn't have to describe them getting the emergency call, seeing the fire and the chaos, putting on their breathing apparatus, carrying all of their heavy kit up 19 floors in thick smoke. Within 4 paragraphs I wanted to show the moral dilemma they had to face; whether they should follow their orders and go to the 23^rd floor to look for survivors and thereby risk losing others and not getting out themselves. One carefully-chosen scene with a small selection of observations saves a page and a half of exposition and drops the reader straight into the action. Later, I slipped in tiny bits about the back-story, but the crucial part is to focus on what happened in the Tower and the impact it had on him, rather than a lot of preamble.

Most of us write too much. Stephen King says that, when you have what you consider to be a final draft, you should then seek to take out around 10%. Many of the stories I've read could usefully lose 25% -- including some of my own. One of my first short stories was a 6-page piece about a drug addict who imagines he sees a small child scratch herself on a dirty needle, rushes to take her to a hospital -- and in the process, saves himself. When I took it to a writers' group, one person said "that's lovely. Now make it half as long and take out the Hollywood ending." After editing, the piece was 'flash' fiction -- 1 page long. I'd lost over 80% of the unnecessary text, and the story was much better for it.

So BE RUTHLESS; leave out or take out stuff that doesn't add to the story -- it's just bulk. Use asides, brief observations, or small bits of dialog between characters, to tell the reader something they need to know without pages of 'this happened, then this, then that, and then this...' This is what writers call 'show, don't tell'. Long screeds of description or explanation -- 'exposition', as it's known -- slow the flow and can be tedious. Keep it tight and punchy, and use dialogue to fill in the background as briefly as possible.

I've written pieces for competitions where there is a strict word-count. This is great discipline -- on my 'final' edit, I go through, looking for flabby sentences and redundant detail and chopping it out. In most instances, you can cut down a sentence so that it uses fewer words to say the same thing. Or: most sentences can be shorter without losing meaning. Get what I'm saying? And I find it quite fun to go through, tightening up the work in this way, trying to meet the challenge of a word count. So try setting yourself a target -- 10% to 25% less than you currently have -- and then go for it; not with everything, as Literotica doesn't care how long your story is, but at least occasionally. It's great discipline and will improve your writing.

Conclusion

Writing isn't about 'the idea'; it's about how you develop that idea into a compelling story that someone wants to read. I've had literally hundreds of ideas for stories. A little over 50 pieces -- complete short stories and chapters of longer works -- are on Literotica. Maybe a hundred more are in development or have been published elsewhere. Some have remained 'in development' for 15 years. A story is no more about the idea than a painting is. You may have a great idea for a picture, but if you can't paint like Leonardo, Van Gogh or Picasso, it's not going to turn from that idea into a masterpiece. If you can't paint at all, it isn't going to turn into anything.

It's the same with writing. An idea, however great, is still just an idea until you can take that germ of a story and develop it into something interesting, fun, intriguing -- whatever. Above all, it has to be readable or no one will read it.

I've written this article to try to help people write better, and hopefully to save me hours of anguish in future editing tasks. It's a lot longer than I planned when I set out, so I should maybe have taken my own advice and edited it down. But I won't (at least not right now), because I want to get it out there so that people can start to learn from it and maybe give me some constructive feedback.

So good luck with your writing. The advice in here is really just the absolute basics. If you want to be a good writer, follow Stephen King's advice -- 'read a lot, write a lot'. Just make sure that when you're writing, you don't slip back into any of the many problem areas I've covered here.

And if you need an editor, I make a point of responding to every request, so you only need to ask.