The Writing Of - A Family Ritual

This short essay was inspired by the thread What I wrote and why: Fairytale of New York, which was posted in The Author's Hangout by StillStunned.

A Family Ritual is a short (3,300 word) story, which was published in Incest & Taboo on February 24 2024. It has been variably received, though probably with more positivity than I had anticipated. While some comments expressed consternation, others showed that at least some readers got what I was trying to do.

At the [significant] risk of sounding pretentious, the purpose of any art (even porn) is to engender a reaction: happiness, arousal, laughter, tears, melancholy. But also sometimes: loathing, anger, revulsion. Obviously the reaction will be different for different people. But different parts of a story could also lead to different reactions in the same person. I wanted to explore that a bit here.

In the same way as with my WIWAW article about writing A Hard Day's Night, I won't totally follow StillStunned's more analytical template, but I hope that this is still in his intended spirit.

There won't be a lot of commentary about literary technique here, I told the tale in a pretty straightforward manner with few bells and whistles. Instead I wanted to talk about why I wrote the story and what I was trying to achieve in writing it.

It's ancient -- and no doubt deeply boring -- history, that I wrote several incest-themed stories when originally publishing on Literotica. I'm not going to go over my full motivations here (is that a cheer I hear?) but, broadly, I was naively trying to shock (I had no idea how quotidian incest stories are here) and I was -- to use a medical term -- kinda fucked up at the time.

What I did was to parlay a relationship I had with an older man into a father / daughter thing. This was partly suggested by us dabbling in DD/lg on occasion. As my mental health improved, I decided to rewrite all of my incest stories to remove this fabricated aspect in entirety. So I acknowledge that there is more than a little odor of "people in glasshouses..." about this post.

Nevertheless... I have a negative attitude towards incest. Thankfully, I have no personal experience of it, but the phrases it brings to my mind are ones like: abuse of power, control, non-consent, and damaged lives. It feels akin to rape to me, and I guess it often is, for all practical purposes.

After my initial, admittedly misguided, foray into the area, it's a category I have steered clear of for these reasons. So, given this, what were my...

Some of these relate to The 750 Word Challenge. I used this to explore a variety of styles of writing and to publish in a number of categories for the first time (Erotic Horror, Gay Male, Mind Control, Mature, Non-human, Transgender & Crossdressers etc.) So the idea of trying new things and stretching myself as an author was on my mind.

I have published in I/T before, but very much with the accent being Taboo. I wrote a well-received story called Mors Immatura (untimely death). This was about a father-in-law and daughter-in-law who were both bereaved of their spouses by the same car accident. So no cheating, let alone incest. I thought it was a sweet story about recovery and how the departed live on in the living. But I felt that I needed to acknowledge the elephant in the room this time by writing actual incest.

I'd written father-daughter before, and then disavowed it; beyond role-play, I find the power dynamics icky. As for the son sitting on Mom's lap during a car journey, please! It would have to be sibcest (do cousins even count?) So my options were clearly: brother / sister (which kinda ends up the same as father / daughter or mother / son but with less gray hairs), brother / brother (I've now written Gay Male, but it's not that natural for me) or sister / sister. Given I love writing lesbian stories (and lesbian sex scenes) my path was clear.

I should probably mention here that I don't have the best of relationships with my older step-sister. The idea of creating a more supportive sisterly vibe was probably an element of authorial wish-fulfillment.

Given that the subject is incest, I wanted to write a semi-credible story, not just "you're hot, sis, let's fuck!" I began to think about why sisterly incest might be something not entirely negative in the lives of women. I also wanted some reason that incest served, some purpose for it, emotional or practical.

This is where I came up with the idea (probably far from original) of parentless sisters, effectively abandoned by society and having to do whatever they must in order to survive. It's melodramatic, almost a Victor Hugo plot, but I thought that maybe -- given no formal schooling -- the women in my story might resort to prostitution.

This kinda gave me an in on the incest front. Perhaps incest was both a way to contrast with their day jobs, and to make sex more about love than money. They might have a different view on sexual mores to many people. Perhaps incest was also a way to prepare younger members for their work satisfying men's sexual needs, or to show them that sex could also have a non-transactional aspect.

Of course this is kinda dark / twisted, but that's the vibe I wanted. I wanted a contrast between what would be tender lesbian sex -- if the participants were unrelated -- and the act being incestuous.

That was the heart of the story. But I felt this was insufficient motivation by itself. That's when I came up with the scenario: Mom abandons them, Dad drinks himself into oblivion, then he repeatedly rapes the oldest sister (who does everything she can to not have the same thing happen to her siblings, I guess she martyrs herself). This is probably a bit tropey, but it obviously gives the oldest sister a massive trauma to try to deal with. In her agony, maybe incest with her younger siblings might feel like a way to wash away the pain of non-consensual sex with her father. Maybe it would be a way to make the equation sex + family equal something less negative. Again it's dark / twisted, but I could see a kinda logic to it.

From there, it wasn't a great leap to envision a youngest sister, about to become a woman and sterling herself to take on sex work like her older siblings. My idea was to have some ritual to memorialize her transition, to prepare her for the work ahead, and to bind her more closely to her sisters. It's not hyperrealistic (see a later section), but it has a certain internal consistency where all of them have suffered loss and trauma, and have no one else to rely upon.

So that became the core of my story. An attempt to contrast forced parent / child incest with consensual sibling sex. An attempt to contrast sex work with sex willingly entered into by the sisters. In the mini-universe I created, sisterly incest was kinda the least awful option. A way to try to reclaim the positive aspects of sex when these were not accessible to the women via more traditional channels.

I didn't want the reader to feel comfortable with this work. Even though the final scene is pretty straightforward lesbian, I wanted the reader to be constantly aware that it wasn't just some hot sapphic sex.

I didn't want to either celebrate or fetishize the incest. I wanted it to feel jarring. But I did want an overlay of genuine sisterly love and for everything to be totally consensual. I wanted the reader to have to work out this incest / supportive family grouping dichotomy in their heads, without me spelling it out (see the next section).

The same goes for earlier in the story. Tiff masturbating while thinking about her sisters is meant to be erotic, but with and asterisk and a footnote saying "she is fantasizing about incest FFS."

I also wanted to splice everyday interactions between the sisters with reference to other things: impending incest, Tiff's future employment, and so on. The idea was to make everything a little bit off.

I didn't want to get into traditional stroker territory. But I equally didn't want the story to be totally bleak. My vision was a group of sisters doing some highly non-traditional things to strengthen and support each other, essentially because their traditional options were so limited.

This is a tricky thing to pull off, but I think I at least partially achieved it.

I said that I wouldn't spend a lot of time on technique, but one thing I have been exploring is not being totally explicit about everything. Allowing space in the story for readers to insert their own interpretations. I did that quite a lot in A Family Ritual. Many things that the characters say or think are a little ambiguous. That was intentional.

For example, I never explicitly mention prostitution. Though the implication is pretty clear. I don't catalog the oldest sister's mental state, but hint at her needing to seek healing from what a family member did to her.

I think this approach drives reader engagement. It makes it more their story. But there is a potential downside. When a reader fills in the blanks with something they have a negative view of, they seem more likely to ascribe their own reaction to the author, as opposed to what they themselves brought to the story. I guess that's unfortunate, but their emotional state is still a reaction to the art, which is what most authors want.

It's what I want.

A Family Ritual is a hybrid of realism twisted askew and pure fabrication. I write this way quite a lot. I think it gives me space to address more difficult issues without veering into polemic.

Are the family arrangements that I describe likely to exist in the real World? The chances are maybe slim. But there is at least some emotional and practical self-consistency to them. The situation is not totally incredible.

Would social services neither care, nor never have anyone bring the girls' living arrangements to their attention? I really hope not, but who knows? Strange things sometimes happen in the more remote parts of our country (as well as in the depths of our cities).

I wasn't going for gritty reality. That would have been too boring and depressing. I was going for world building with just a tincture of believability. I think the little world I created kinda makes sense, if you squint hard enough and hold your head at precisely the right angle. That's more than enough scaffold for me to hang a story off of.

I think it's important to say that I wasn't trying to troll the I/T category. I was looking to tell a story reflecting my own sensibilities, and offering a scenario in which incest kinda made some sort of crazy sense to the protagonists.

Of course, I realized that it wouldn't be scratching the incest itch of most readers in the way that I assume they like. But I wasn't trying to kink shame anyone. I was looking to offer a different perspective. A Family Ritual is a genuine attempt by me to tell a story in the category and to use it to explain what many might view as extreme and outré acts. From comments, some seemed to understand this. Some is more than fine for me.

The broader degree to which I achieved my objectives is something I will leave to readers to determine for themselves. I'm sure there will be diverging views. Again, art is not processed in the same way by everyone consuming it. It's an essentially personal experience, much like writing.