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Qualities of Decent Written Smut
12 years ago
This is a prelude to another journal I'll be posting and something that was too long to stick inside another journal.
While I'm not claiming to be a master of written porn, or even that great at it, there are some qualities I've noticed that are important to keep a reader interested and to convey the feeling you want (to actually arouse your readers). I've seen that many writers don't take into account these things and... quite frankly, I find it difficult to find arousal in a lot of stories. Plus this is something others will be needing (as you'll see in the next journal).
1) Repetition
Repetition is -bad-. Read the first sentence of this journal. Does it stick out as awkward? It might not, since it's rather mundane, but the words "another journal" being repeated can really fly in the face of sensibilities. Repeating words/phrases in the same sentence are very obvious and kill the flow of a "natural idea". When something is repeated, that provides a feeling of "this wasn't very well planned out, they didn't know what they were trying to say", because when it comes own to it, if you have to repeat something, you are complicating the thought and didn't put too much consideration into the thought as a whole.
This doesn't apply to just a single sentence or words either. If you repeat a word or sentence structure many times throughout a paragraph, it is recognizable. When you start each sentence in a paragraph with "He", your eyes and brain pick up on it, or when you use a certain grammatical pattern over and over like:
"He did one thing, then he did another thing. He went back over here, but didn't go back over there. He stuffed his cock deep inside, swirling it around and around until he came."
Even repeating the same "idea" over and over again can be tiresome for the reader:
"His cock began to grow in his hands. It grew harder and harder, filling his palm and sliding over his fingers. He drooled at the thought of how much he was growing. Oh god how it grew."
Yes, we get it, his cock is growing. While it can be nice to add emphasis to an idea, there also needs to be a degree of subtlety so the reader doesn't feel like they're bashing their head against the wall because they're being treated like idiots for not understanding this growth from the first time you presented the idea. Even if the sentences aren't together, such as something else happening in between, if you keep returning to the same idea over and over, the reader is going to get frustrated because things aren't actually going anywhere and they're being forced to re-read the same thing again and again, wasting their time. Like this paragraph.
2) Grammar
You might think "Why do you care about grammar when you're just trying to get the reader off?" Well, while it can be easy to get some readers off, it is more difficult for many readers, and even more difficult to make it an experience worth remembering. That's like saying "A good horror game only needs jump scares to frighten a player"; while it's possible to frighten a player with jump scares, it won't for most and you need much more for people to remember it as being good.
So, how grammar ties in is similar. It's not just about the ideas and fetishes and sex going on in smut, it's also how well you are able to -convey- those ideas. The reason we have writing, or art in general, is to share an idea; to get other people to understand something, to communicate. The reason we have grammar is to best communicate the idea through writing, to have a flow of conscious comprehension that allows the idea to come together in a fluid and natural-feeling way. Bad grammar can be as jarring as repetition (repetition is actually a part of it) and can completely make the story fall flat on its face.
2) Use big words, but in restraint
A thesaurus is a great way to get around the repetition of words as above. And different words for the same thought can help add nuance to the thought, pushing it in a particular direction than if you used other words. Don't be afraid of using something that might be alien to many readers, if put in correctly, the rest of the sentence will define what the word might mean and they can continue on anyways.
However, at the same time, don't put in big words to make you feel special. Just because you know what this rare word means doesn't mean the reader gives a damn, and can come off very awkward if you didn't use the word entirely correctly. Although different words might be defined as synonyms of each other, there is a reason why they are different words to begin with; words are developed to convey slightly different ideas. "Cunt" and "pussy" might both mean "vagina", but one is traditionally more vulgar than the other and can make a scene feel more "dirty" than the other.
3) Length
While a whole novel of erotica could be nice (if written really really well), a single scene that is too long can totally kill a reader's arousal. For one, longer scenes tend to run into the repetition issue more easily. For two, when a person is in the mood to read smut, they kinda want to arrive at the "climax" while they're still in the mood.
I'm not saying "short and sweet" is the key, though. Too short can have issues as well. A reader often comes into the scene hoping it will cover a certain aspect of sex and provides enough detail to really make the scene come to life in their mind. If they're getting really into the scene and suddenly the climax goes off before they were ready, that can be rather frustrating.
It's difficult to gauge between the extremes. This is where experience and proofreading really comes into play. Try reading the stories of others and get a feel for what was too long and what was too short and try to aim for something in between. Perfection probably won't be achieved (I struggle with this all the time and I've been doing this for years now), but the closer you get the less noticeable the issue becomes.
4) Emotion
This is a really tricky one. Yes, sex is often full of love and thus it's pretty easy to add emotion. But no, it's not. "Saying" there is emotion and "feeling" the emotion are very different. The former is like reading a textbook, the latter actually immerses you in it.
While you can potentially see good smut with emotion, it becomes much more difficult when you're getting into all of this fetishy stuff. Reading off a laundry list of different extraordinary body parts and special features seriously breaks the immersion. It's difficult to achieve immersion when you're dealing with something that doesn't exist in real life, especially when you're going to the extremes of such things. Yet, a reader comes to this sort of material in hopes of achieving immersion in this fantasy, in hopes of experiencing something in their mind that they can't in real life. So, this is a rather important goal when writing fetish material.
There are more emotions than just "serious love" that you can mix with smut as well.
I myself tend to slip in more humor with my smut. This is probably just personal preference, but when I think of intimacy, I prefer it to be enjoyable and light-hearted. Laughter is a wonderful thing and experiencing it with arousal provides that emotional dimension, a dimension that makes the bizarre more palatable.
I have seen other writers blend in horror and gore into their smut as well. Those... are not my cup of tea at all. I don't correlate "scared" and "disgust" with "arousal"; to me they are negative experiences that contradicts the positive. I'm sure some people some people do prefer that, for reasons I don't think I'd truly want to understand, but it's not something I'll ever want in my works.
5) Make it convincing
This applies to all smut, but especially with the fetishy stuff. Emotion is needed for immersion, as above. Yet, immersion also needs to be assisted by having a believable experience. This is why Mary Sues suck. When something in the story is so unbelievable, like having a cock the size of a house, it takes a lot for a mind to accept it. Nobody has a cock that large in the real world and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to walk or jam it into some girl's cooch.
If the story has extraordinary things, there needs to be links to the real world for a person's mind to connect to.
What makes the house-sized cock more believable? Well, there's some weight issues, so the person won't be able to move unless they're really really strong, that makes some sense. And if it was used on a girl, she would need to have a similarly gigantic pussy or she would be really really stretched (and probably break, which is icky, but you can say she is a goo girl who's really stretchy to begin with). While those additions might seem excessive to the point of having a gigantic cock, they help the reader think "yeah, this is a bit more believable, my brain can imagine how that would work".
On the other hand, don't over-complicate things in the process. If you add a mechanism to explain how there is such a big cock, such as chemical that caused hyper-active penile growth, don't delve too much into how the chemical was derived from sheep from mars that had eaten a special vegetable grown on venus. There's a point where the reader already accepted it and going further only makes it feel like a college course; "Giant Penis Growth 101". I have seen this several times where a writer has this great idea and they build up this whole world around it and they want to show off every aspect of this world and... I just don't care anymore. While adding explanations can make the story more convincing and immersive, take into account that the reader is already coming into the story with a certain degree of suspension of belief and don't need -that much-. If you do have this complicated explanation, it should somehow actually beef up other parts of the story, such as the chemical derived from giant sheep on mars who the character will eventually meet up with later in the story because they actually have vaginas big enough for him to fuck, or something.
6) The End
After a sex scene reaches climax, and hopefully the reader did too, there should be a refractory period. Things were fairly intense and while it is now time to relax, don't just cut off the scene there. Don't go on with a huge explanation afterward either, but provide some "aftermath" to the scene for the reader to calm down with and continue the immersion. Sometimes the aftermath can be the sexiest part as well. And in a game, little quirky kinky bits can help push the player back into the right mood to make them want to keep playing and hopefully achieve another climax. I'm not going to go into too much detail into this, but it was definitely something worth mentioning since this is often overlooked.
7) Roleplaying is -NOT- a Story
Don't get me wrong, a good roleplay requires good writing, but a roleplay is not a story. It is a great story if you're the one roleplaying, but other people do not like reading someone else's roleplay. Well, some people do, but a good roleplay does not make for a good short-story or book. Just because you are good are roleplaying doesn't mean you should transcribe your roleplays as stories for others to read or that you should write a story like you do a roleplay.
Roleplays and stories are two different forms of written works. I suppose you could argue that a roleplay can be a story with a special kind of discourse between characters, but you have to be super-awesome mega-writer to be able to do that in a way that a lot of people would actually care about. Otherwise, making a roleplay a story just comes off as a lazy way to write a story and screams "hey guys, I like to roleplay a lot and here's a sample so maybe we can roleplay together some time".
The Other End
Okay, that's all for now, I think. There might be other things I'll add later, but those are the major points I wanted to get through. These are what I try to expect of myself and what I hope to expect of others who may work with me. Even though you'd have to be a master to really get these down perfectly, simply keeping them in mind can make a written work many times more pleasant.
These qualities pretty much apply to writing in general. However, despite what many writers think, it is generally more difficult to achieve these with smut than it is with other types of stories, due to the fact that you're dealing with more extreme ideas that have to tie into the reader's emotions more thoroughly to achieve the desired affect and it is more obvious when that effect is not achieved. Yet, doing these -exceptionally well- with non-smut can be even more difficult, since the emotions are less easily defined, I'll grant that :P
While I'm not claiming to be a master of written porn, or even that great at it, there are some qualities I've noticed that are important to keep a reader interested and to convey the feeling you want (to actually arouse your readers). I've seen that many writers don't take into account these things and... quite frankly, I find it difficult to find arousal in a lot of stories. Plus this is something others will be needing (as you'll see in the next journal).
1) Repetition
Repetition is -bad-. Read the first sentence of this journal. Does it stick out as awkward? It might not, since it's rather mundane, but the words "another journal" being repeated can really fly in the face of sensibilities. Repeating words/phrases in the same sentence are very obvious and kill the flow of a "natural idea". When something is repeated, that provides a feeling of "this wasn't very well planned out, they didn't know what they were trying to say", because when it comes own to it, if you have to repeat something, you are complicating the thought and didn't put too much consideration into the thought as a whole.
This doesn't apply to just a single sentence or words either. If you repeat a word or sentence structure many times throughout a paragraph, it is recognizable. When you start each sentence in a paragraph with "He", your eyes and brain pick up on it, or when you use a certain grammatical pattern over and over like:
"He did one thing, then he did another thing. He went back over here, but didn't go back over there. He stuffed his cock deep inside, swirling it around and around until he came."
Even repeating the same "idea" over and over again can be tiresome for the reader:
"His cock began to grow in his hands. It grew harder and harder, filling his palm and sliding over his fingers. He drooled at the thought of how much he was growing. Oh god how it grew."
Yes, we get it, his cock is growing. While it can be nice to add emphasis to an idea, there also needs to be a degree of subtlety so the reader doesn't feel like they're bashing their head against the wall because they're being treated like idiots for not understanding this growth from the first time you presented the idea. Even if the sentences aren't together, such as something else happening in between, if you keep returning to the same idea over and over, the reader is going to get frustrated because things aren't actually going anywhere and they're being forced to re-read the same thing again and again, wasting their time. Like this paragraph.
2) Grammar
You might think "Why do you care about grammar when you're just trying to get the reader off?" Well, while it can be easy to get some readers off, it is more difficult for many readers, and even more difficult to make it an experience worth remembering. That's like saying "A good horror game only needs jump scares to frighten a player"; while it's possible to frighten a player with jump scares, it won't for most and you need much more for people to remember it as being good.
So, how grammar ties in is similar. It's not just about the ideas and fetishes and sex going on in smut, it's also how well you are able to -convey- those ideas. The reason we have writing, or art in general, is to share an idea; to get other people to understand something, to communicate. The reason we have grammar is to best communicate the idea through writing, to have a flow of conscious comprehension that allows the idea to come together in a fluid and natural-feeling way. Bad grammar can be as jarring as repetition (repetition is actually a part of it) and can completely make the story fall flat on its face.
2) Use big words, but in restraint
A thesaurus is a great way to get around the repetition of words as above. And different words for the same thought can help add nuance to the thought, pushing it in a particular direction than if you used other words. Don't be afraid of using something that might be alien to many readers, if put in correctly, the rest of the sentence will define what the word might mean and they can continue on anyways.
However, at the same time, don't put in big words to make you feel special. Just because you know what this rare word means doesn't mean the reader gives a damn, and can come off very awkward if you didn't use the word entirely correctly. Although different words might be defined as synonyms of each other, there is a reason why they are different words to begin with; words are developed to convey slightly different ideas. "Cunt" and "pussy" might both mean "vagina", but one is traditionally more vulgar than the other and can make a scene feel more "dirty" than the other.
3) Length
While a whole novel of erotica could be nice (if written really really well), a single scene that is too long can totally kill a reader's arousal. For one, longer scenes tend to run into the repetition issue more easily. For two, when a person is in the mood to read smut, they kinda want to arrive at the "climax" while they're still in the mood.
I'm not saying "short and sweet" is the key, though. Too short can have issues as well. A reader often comes into the scene hoping it will cover a certain aspect of sex and provides enough detail to really make the scene come to life in their mind. If they're getting really into the scene and suddenly the climax goes off before they were ready, that can be rather frustrating.
It's difficult to gauge between the extremes. This is where experience and proofreading really comes into play. Try reading the stories of others and get a feel for what was too long and what was too short and try to aim for something in between. Perfection probably won't be achieved (I struggle with this all the time and I've been doing this for years now), but the closer you get the less noticeable the issue becomes.
4) Emotion
This is a really tricky one. Yes, sex is often full of love and thus it's pretty easy to add emotion. But no, it's not. "Saying" there is emotion and "feeling" the emotion are very different. The former is like reading a textbook, the latter actually immerses you in it.
While you can potentially see good smut with emotion, it becomes much more difficult when you're getting into all of this fetishy stuff. Reading off a laundry list of different extraordinary body parts and special features seriously breaks the immersion. It's difficult to achieve immersion when you're dealing with something that doesn't exist in real life, especially when you're going to the extremes of such things. Yet, a reader comes to this sort of material in hopes of achieving immersion in this fantasy, in hopes of experiencing something in their mind that they can't in real life. So, this is a rather important goal when writing fetish material.
There are more emotions than just "serious love" that you can mix with smut as well.
I myself tend to slip in more humor with my smut. This is probably just personal preference, but when I think of intimacy, I prefer it to be enjoyable and light-hearted. Laughter is a wonderful thing and experiencing it with arousal provides that emotional dimension, a dimension that makes the bizarre more palatable.
I have seen other writers blend in horror and gore into their smut as well. Those... are not my cup of tea at all. I don't correlate "scared" and "disgust" with "arousal"; to me they are negative experiences that contradicts the positive. I'm sure some people some people do prefer that, for reasons I don't think I'd truly want to understand, but it's not something I'll ever want in my works.
5) Make it convincing
This applies to all smut, but especially with the fetishy stuff. Emotion is needed for immersion, as above. Yet, immersion also needs to be assisted by having a believable experience. This is why Mary Sues suck. When something in the story is so unbelievable, like having a cock the size of a house, it takes a lot for a mind to accept it. Nobody has a cock that large in the real world and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to walk or jam it into some girl's cooch.
If the story has extraordinary things, there needs to be links to the real world for a person's mind to connect to.
What makes the house-sized cock more believable? Well, there's some weight issues, so the person won't be able to move unless they're really really strong, that makes some sense. And if it was used on a girl, she would need to have a similarly gigantic pussy or she would be really really stretched (and probably break, which is icky, but you can say she is a goo girl who's really stretchy to begin with). While those additions might seem excessive to the point of having a gigantic cock, they help the reader think "yeah, this is a bit more believable, my brain can imagine how that would work".
On the other hand, don't over-complicate things in the process. If you add a mechanism to explain how there is such a big cock, such as chemical that caused hyper-active penile growth, don't delve too much into how the chemical was derived from sheep from mars that had eaten a special vegetable grown on venus. There's a point where the reader already accepted it and going further only makes it feel like a college course; "Giant Penis Growth 101". I have seen this several times where a writer has this great idea and they build up this whole world around it and they want to show off every aspect of this world and... I just don't care anymore. While adding explanations can make the story more convincing and immersive, take into account that the reader is already coming into the story with a certain degree of suspension of belief and don't need -that much-. If you do have this complicated explanation, it should somehow actually beef up other parts of the story, such as the chemical derived from giant sheep on mars who the character will eventually meet up with later in the story because they actually have vaginas big enough for him to fuck, or something.
6) The End
After a sex scene reaches climax, and hopefully the reader did too, there should be a refractory period. Things were fairly intense and while it is now time to relax, don't just cut off the scene there. Don't go on with a huge explanation afterward either, but provide some "aftermath" to the scene for the reader to calm down with and continue the immersion. Sometimes the aftermath can be the sexiest part as well. And in a game, little quirky kinky bits can help push the player back into the right mood to make them want to keep playing and hopefully achieve another climax. I'm not going to go into too much detail into this, but it was definitely something worth mentioning since this is often overlooked.
7) Roleplaying is -NOT- a Story
Don't get me wrong, a good roleplay requires good writing, but a roleplay is not a story. It is a great story if you're the one roleplaying, but other people do not like reading someone else's roleplay. Well, some people do, but a good roleplay does not make for a good short-story or book. Just because you are good are roleplaying doesn't mean you should transcribe your roleplays as stories for others to read or that you should write a story like you do a roleplay.
Roleplays and stories are two different forms of written works. I suppose you could argue that a roleplay can be a story with a special kind of discourse between characters, but you have to be super-awesome mega-writer to be able to do that in a way that a lot of people would actually care about. Otherwise, making a roleplay a story just comes off as a lazy way to write a story and screams "hey guys, I like to roleplay a lot and here's a sample so maybe we can roleplay together some time".
The Other End
Okay, that's all for now, I think. There might be other things I'll add later, but those are the major points I wanted to get through. These are what I try to expect of myself and what I hope to expect of others who may work with me. Even though you'd have to be a master to really get these down perfectly, simply keeping them in mind can make a written work many times more pleasant.
These qualities pretty much apply to writing in general. However, despite what many writers think, it is generally more difficult to achieve these with smut than it is with other types of stories, due to the fact that you're dealing with more extreme ideas that have to tie into the reader's emotions more thoroughly to achieve the desired affect and it is more obvious when that effect is not achieved. Yet, doing these -exceptionally well- with non-smut can be even more difficult, since the emotions are less easily defined, I'll grant that :P
Xadera covered grammar pretty well. You don't have to be perfect (and dialogue should reflect how your characters talk), but non-dialogue prose should be of good to high quality if you want readers to stay immersed.
Minor gaffes in spelling are excusable. Frequent misspellings where it's clear you're just guessing and can't be bothered to look it up, less so. This is especially terrible when you are writing erotic fanfiction - it's Hermione, not Hermoanie, unless you're writing a parody. If you don't know, look it up. If you do know, try to get it right.
I'm probably coming across as a bit of a "snob", but... I enjoy reading, and I read professionally-written fiction and high-quality fanfiction daily. If I'm going to read your erotica - especially if you are a review-whore and want comments and ratings - I want something that's _readable_. If I find myself mentally correcting your spelling more than once a paragraph (on average), you're breaking the flow too often and I'm not turned on at all.
(Oh - and if you're writing "original" characters, try not to change their names in the middle of the story. That's just... crazy.)
*gets off the soap box*
A definite must-have to any aspiring writer.
But I do have to agree. Roleplay is something completely different. It is not really an actual story. Or perhaps a game? Though, just like Stories, I would think Roleplay is something you shouldn't think is also based in real life. Which I tend to get fairly frustrated with.
But in other words, yes. I do quite agree with your points there, and I really do need to learn to have better grammar and stuff, since it does not help that I did not get the best classes for English, and for my parents being mostly from a foreign country. :3
I am going to post the URL on some sites I frequent.