All Comments on 'Guide for Amateur Writers of Erotica'

I wonder if there is a best grammar checker for suggesting sentences. I've tried Grammarly, and loved it... until I saw the price. Changed to ProWritingAid but it is terrible on the sentences' suggestions.

I like and appreciate your article a lot. The only thing, I don't go conform with is the constance of the expliciteness.

While it may be actually easier for newcomer authors to keep one level of expliciteness, the change of expliciteness can be used as a beautiful stylistic device to show the change of a character through a story (a little exaggerated: While one year ago, she would have never believed that penetrating her bare bottom could be anything else than offensive, she now couldn't await the thrusts of this throbbing cock into her lubed asshole). It can also be used to show the difference between characters (Character A: "Tits out!!" - Character B: "Don't offend my beautiful breasts, dickhead!"

I totally agree, that changes in expliciteness and wording shouldn't be used arbitrarily, but using it as a stylistic device can be a quite powerful weapon and lead to beautiful and anticing stories.

Sorry, but your take on punctuation is wrong, and it's not just me saying this but also my old textbooks and hand-me-down books on writing that found their way onto my shelf like The Creative Writer's Style Guide.

The distinction between commas, semi-colons, colons, and ellipses is not the duration of the pause. They serve different semantic roles.

The pause from a comma comes as a SIDE-EFFECT of the brain "changing tracks" when you put a clause where it wouldn't naturally fall in the sentence, or when you're distinguishing the boundary between things in a list. (He said he likes it. He likes it, he said.) There's even a rule of thumb you can use to guess whether a comma is merited by seeing if mentally forcing out the pause feels more alien than drawing out the pause you want to put in. (In simple terms, the purpose of a comma is to distinguish things like "Evening primrose bloomed on Sunday," and "Primrose bloomed on Sunday evening." That is, "On Sunday, evening primrose bloomed," and "On Sunday evening, primrose bloomed.")

Semicolons denote when you're joining two independent clauses with an implied conjunction. Think back to the FANBOYS acronym from school. If it sounds right when you replace your semicolon with "for", "and", "nor", "but", "or", "yet", or "so", then you can keep it. ("I like this; She likes that" is "I like this, but she likes that," but communicated by implied tone of voice.)

As Wikipedia says quite simply, colons introduce an explanation, list, or quote. (There are only three people I care about: Me, myself, and I.)

Under this paradigm, ellipses are allowed to be used for some kinds of pauses by default because it's more unacceptable to abuse commas, semicolons, or colons for pauses unrelated to their semantic purpose and there's nothing else better-suited to the role. This is considered an acceptable compromise because, after a certain point, the boundary between a pause and two incomplete thoughts becomes hazy.

(And yes, this is the convention I've observed, having been reading a TON of amateur and professional fiction over the last three decades. In fact, I can't remember EVER seeing someone using colons purely to denote pauses.)

While not these specific misconceptions, I've had to correct many similar ones when proofreading stories for people. (eg. plenty of comma splices, greengrocer's apostrophes, missing Oxford commas, etc.)

Also, while requiring 7-bit ASCII made sense in 1997, in this day and age, I think it's reasonable to specify UTF-8 plaintext instead. Emoji are still verboten though.

That was excellent! Thank you!

Thank you, just had my first attempt sent back, now I have found this article I understand why a lot more, very helpful!

This was really helpful!

Some points I disagree with (eg. erotica vs. pornography, the necessity of plot/character arc, where to use pronouns, and punctuation - some points depend on the length of story, I guess) but I've definitely learned something from this guide, thank you!