LFC: Do I worry that I'm repeating myself?
Nov. 1st, 2006 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn 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."
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."
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-02 09:13 am (UTC)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.