All Comments on 'The Vine'

The framework of this story is nice; the story itself is sweet and charming. The plot is completely believable. Reading sexy poems with someone you find attractive is a turn on, and it's particularly a turn on for someone who is very focussed on words and literature. So your brainy, slightly geeky librarian is likely to be easy to seduce with words. Had we but world enough, and time... You know what you want to tell, and you tell it well. This is good. It's very nearly very good. So what isn't? The dialogue didn't work for me. It didn't feel like the speech rhythms of real people. It might help to try saying your dialogue out loud, as if playing it in a theatre. At present it seems to me slightly stilted. There's also a thing you do with a speech which is what people do, but which doesn't work so well written down: "I have never done this Travis you are going to have to help me along. It is not that I do not know what to expect. It's just that I have never actually done this with a guy so you will need to help me along." Kara said. Firstly, there's the phrasing issue. People on the whole don't speak in well constructed sentences. Hesitations and pauses are key to how people actually talk (especially when excited). Secondly, there's repetition. Speech is highly redundant - people do repeat, frequently. But it doesn't work so well when written. If you want the repeat of 'you will need to help me along' you need to make it clearer that you are consciously using repetition as a rhetorical device - otherwise, it looks as if it's just careless. "I have never done this, Travis", said Kara. "It's not that I don't know what to expect... it's just that I've never..." - she looked down again, blushing - "never actually done this. Like, with a guy... or, or, or, at all. So you'll have to help me... please?" The other thing is it seems to me you're wasting some of the potential of the material you've chosen to use. The Vine (as a poem) seems to me to speak as much about bondage as about seduction - Lucia, in the poem, is bound to be penetrated. Perhaps you don't see it that way, but it is at least a possible reading of the poem, and something you might think about playing with. Incidentally, I don't see what it is in the poem that makes you think Lucia is a virgin. I also don't see what in the poem makes you think that Lucia is unknowing - passive, certainly, perhaps because bound. But, again, if you see the 'unknowing' as being a key part of the sex act in the poem, is there a way that you could use that? Is there a way that Travis could take Kara before she's really aware that sex is going to happen? Or could bind her before she knows that sex is going to happen? It would be nice if when your characters are quoting poetry you formatted it on the page as poetry, but it's a small point and one which Literotica does not make easy. Please don't take this as negative or hostile criticism. If I didn't think your story had potential and was worth developing, I wouldn't have bothered to write so much about it.

I wish I had had a study partner like Kara.

Boyd

I liked this one...this is every bookwormy girl's dream!

I thought this was sweet and sexy, a great fantasy for a innocent girl.. Great read.. who says school cant be fun or that a jock cant like a bookwork

Rhode,

you have some very unique writing dialect and a keen sense of imagination that many lack. i especally love the part that involved teacher and students, because it happens all the time people just don't confess. furthermore, I would love to see more of your work and good luck.

sencerly a secret admirerer

Very well written... Possibility of a sequel?

Far more interesting would be their class report. Methinks you need to finish this story properly.