LFC: Do I worry that I'm repeating myself?

[elfs]

In a recent exchange I had, someone mentioned that he had given up writing erotica because after a few stories he felt that he could just copy the original love scene and plug in the new names. He felt he was just repeating himself over and over.

Oddly enough, I don't get this feeling. This may come as a surprise to some of you since I have so far what is unquestionably the biggest number of stories ever posted by a single author to alt.sex.stories: The Journal Entries is up to 288 episodes and will probably pass 300 in the next couple of months-- and that's not counting the 30-odd love scenes scattered through my two fantasy novels, the pirate romance, and miscellaneous short stories.

I used to worry about it-- was I just repeating myself? I've worried about it a little since starting in on the Polly & Tau arc: I was starting to feel like I was writing romances with sex, rather than sex with romance, so I decided to go gonzo and write an arc where there's almost nothing but lots of fucking going on. (Since the Journal Entries are a universe, I tend to call plots focusing on one collection of characters an arc.) There are two or three sex scenes per episode, and the episode run about four thousand words each.

But I don't worry that I'm repeating myself too much. The characters are different: Polly is jerking zirself around with zir own fears, and Tau is a really unusual character for me: extremely self-contained, focused and objective, but also obsessed with zir own pleasure, to the point where almost six weeks goes by before they have their first kiss (they've been fucking up a storm all this time) and months before they start using "the L-word."

If your characters, settings, and circumstances aren't interesting, there's no point to writing the sex scene. If they are unique people in unique places under unique settings, then your readers will want to know how the sex scene either advances each character towards a goal or pushes her away from the goal: and that's what you should be writing.

Best advice I ever got: "If the scene is about what the scene is about, then the scene sucks."

Comments

Well...

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Variety is probably a greater challenge for authors who write exclusively about humans. :-)

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Re: Well...

[genericjoe.livejournal.com]

I dunno, the best sex scenes are those between interesting people. Elf's people aren't always in normal-human bodies, but they are still very human. That's part of the fun of it, and the main reason you even care if they have sex.

Yes, he writes about some inhuman personalities, AI, robots, etc, but there is always something human about them, some sympathetic trait that makes them interesting enough to care about and to imagine them fucking:)

[bbw-seska.livejournal.com]

Hi there (yah the new kid puts in her 2cents right away, lol).

Way I see it sex is sex. Period.
In writing though what makes the sex interesting is what's all around it.
The characters, their past, their personalities, etc.
Therefor somehow the literotica I write is never the same, it can't be since I don't write to exactly the same stories.

And as a big fan of the journal entries, I've honestly never seen a entry that was like one of the others, like I said, it's all progression and long as you keep your characters "alive" you won't repeat yourself anyway.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

i think, possibly early on, a few of your stories seemed to be in, for lack of a better word, a rut. The plots were good, and the characters as well, but when it got around to the sex scene, it seemed like it fell into a default 'shardik impresses girl with skill at oral sex, shardik gets his hard-on back because it's been ignored and now it's not, shardik has sex with girl'. That was a while back, though, and you seemed to have gotten out of it.

As long as the sex scenes themselves are varied enough not to give that sense of "didn't i just read this?" well-written plots and characters will carry it through nicely.

I was happy to see some new stories after a long lull, and enjoyed the ones you have up so far. I have to say, though... they're a bit melancholy. Not a knock on the stories themselves, they just all had that theme to them. I guess a number of the previous ones have, as well.

It's kind of a strange turn, after so many stories which often have the pendorian zest for life as a central theme. It takes a dogged kind of optimism to be able to look at a life that could extend for thousands of years, and decide that you'll be happy with it. I guess it just feels odd to look at some of the more somber, problematic, or even in the case of the eternally doomed noble, just plain sad relationships. Not bad, just... different.

[kengr]

Speaking of your stories, a friend suggested that you might want to look into this:


Stories on MP3
The "Adult" Reading for the Blind Project
http://www.asstr.org/~Stories_on_MP3/