A self-aggrandising writing guide

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Bit, pieces and FAQs

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"So what happened to A Mother's Wrath/Dixie's Downfall?"

I noticed a trend among my stories, that the ones that didn't do that well, are ones I lost passion for part way through and fought my way to the end anyway. So eventually I learned to abandon stories if I was no longer feeling them rather than fight to the end. Most of the time this takes the form of an unfinished story languishing at the bottom of my Google Drive, but in the case of A Mother's Wrath and Dixie's Downfall it was an abandonment mid story, the ratings of their most recent parts already showing the downward trend started by my loss of enjoyment. I have since taken steps to make sure my multi-part stories aren't left unfinished any more, but I'm afraid it was too late for those two.

Sorry.

"You've written a lot about what goes well, like some sort of smug prick, can you go over some past mistakes so you can feel less up yourself?"

I was posed this question by long time reader iwroteathing. As I learned a lot through trial and error, it would be disingenuous to brag about the things that went well without keeping my ego in check with the errors and what I learned from them.

The general theme of my low performing stories, was that my motivation was less about telling a concise story with exciting themes, and instead was just a checklist of bad things to happen to someone. There's also a trend that when I made my story a series of bad things, instead of thematic evolution all I could do was make the bad things get worse and worse to the point where it became a bit ridiculous.

The Rubber Duck series (currently bottom and second from bottom on my ratings) came from a weird place. I was still new to writing and enamored by how there was no taboo barrier to my content. So I went down a rabbit hole of trying to write the most degenerate thing I could. To this day it is my only work that features incest, the sexual activities were degrading past the point of sexy to funny/sad, and the underlying themes were dropped in favour of a checklist of "what's the worst that could happen?" Which also meant that the emotional impact of characters was neglected in favour of just layering on more sadism.

Similar problems infested Wheel of Vengeance, it started with a pretty concise theme of mutually destructive vendettas, where the sisters will pass up prosperity in favour of attacking each other, and how it is just up to those feuding as to how much damage is done before reconciliation becomes inevitable. That theme went out of the window super early in favour of a shopping list of humiliations that I then quickfire moved from one to another with a scale that became a bit silly by the end.

I feel a little bad about how badly rated Do We Have A Deal was considering it did have a consistent theme that wasn't abandoned. The piece was a criticism of the libertarian ideal government, one that enforces deals made by its citizens and otherwise didn't intervene. I'll admit I was still learning writing and the theme allowed the scenario to become a bit over the top. Pig transformation notwithstanding I think the main thing that tanked this one was that it did become very vicious and didn't build towards anything productive.

"Your stories mostly have something akin to a happy ending./I would have had the story X end worse for Protagonist Y."

When you write thousands of words about a character, diving into her desires and emotions, inevitably you become attached to them and wish them well. I have found this is often the case with most readers as well. People don't want to see characters avoiding all consequences of their actions, and nothing is less satisfying then a story that ends with "everything went to plan and then she got to go back to her old life without any problems", but that doesn't mean they would be happy reading an ending where a character they have grown to like faces the darkest fates possible.

I like thinking up endings where a character is not where they would have chosen to be, but is nonetheless happy where they are. Their boundaries have been pushed and their life finds a new equilibrium with their desires. The leading cause of a story dropping in quality or me abandoning it altogether is when I lose all love for the character.

So although I admit I am less sadistic than many of my readers, I feel like writing tragedies would not bode well for the quality of my work.

"I hope you write a sequel to X so I can see what happens next."

I am always so thrilled that someone has enjoyed my story enough that they want to hear more, but usually if I don't have a sequel planned, one isn't happening. Much like TV shows will need the stakes to be constantly rising, or the powers scale up with each new villain, I am very mindful that deviancy needs to increase over a story, nobody wants to read a sequel where the character goes through a less humiliating series of events to the one before. I am aware that such constant escalation doesn't only make for a poor story, it takes away from the preceding stories in the series.

I should also mention a lot of my stories end with some form of "the adventure continues." Where the next sexual situation is set up and then the outcome of which is left unstated. I do this partially to cement in that the protagonist's new equilibrium with their sexuality is an ongoing part of their life and not a flash in the pan, and partially because of my point earlier about the most erotic thing for a reader existing in their mind. Setting up another situation gives the reader a chance to add their imagination to the mix and conclude the story based on what each individual thinks would be the sexiest outcome. So I don't really plan to follow up on what happened in those kinds of end scenes because nothing I write would be better than ambiguity.

"I have an idea for a story, what if..."

Whenever I am sent a prospective plot line from a fan, it takes away a smidge of the imposter syndrome that permeates my writings (despite what this over-indulgent tract would suggest about my ego). I consider the weakest part of my writing the actual writing style, I am impatient and minimalistic and so do not indulge the amazing depths of prose that good writers will expertly craft. Instead I like to think that my strength is coming up with a good plot that follows a good theme, I make rollercoasters not symphonies.

So when someone suggests a plot for me to write, they are endorsing my writing style (as that is all that is left to fill in) and that just tickles me. It's like asking Jackie Chan to star in Pride and Prejudice, or wanting to play tennis against LeBron James. It's not totally beyond their wheelhouse but it isn't what they are especially good at.

So thank you to everyone who has seen my works and it has inspired you to be creative, it is a huge compliment. All I can say is that while I am inspiring you, maybe you can draw inspiration that someone with so little writing talent has been so well received, don't be scared to start writing yourself and inevitably you will overtake me in quality.

"So you're a big old misogynist right?"

I get forms of this observation occasionally, and it is a fascinating reflection of the gender politics of sexuality. I am a heterosexual man, so the target of my fetishes will always be women. I am into humiliation, degradation, and power plays so my stories will always feature a woman going through those. Does that make me a misogynist? I'm hopeful that it doesn't inherently do that.

If we take the truths that having sexuality is not a bad thing, then imbuing female characters with sexuality is not in itself misogynistic. If we take that one step further and say that there are women who enjoy fetishes that are related to their downgrading of status, writing stories about women in possession of that fetish isn't inherently misogynistic. But just because something isn't inherently immoral, does not mean that the space is not susceptible to that immorality. My writings are not immediately misogynist as a result of their subject matter, but underlying logics and metaphors can easily be drilled down to misogynist places and I have to be on guard against that. (I have not always been so in the past and I am aware of the stories that do not reflect well on my personality).

So I have been exploring my biases and I do know about some underlying misogynies that I have been trying to move away from in my writing. The total removal of consent being later justified by the enjoyment of the subject has been one I have been guilty of many a time. It is built on a misogynist belief that a woman is not capable of discovering her sexuality without (often non-consensual) intervention from a man. So in my more recent stories, when reluctance or dubious consent is present, I always have some clear indications from the protagonist herself that this is a fetish she wishes to explore.

As I mentioned earlier on, the exaggeration of the number of women that have these fetishes is also something that could indicate an underlying misogyny. Unfortunately for my genre, there's not much I can do about that except try to limit characters with that fetish in situations that are not sought out, and acknowledge that the prevalence of women with this perversion is as unrealistic as the prevalence of men willing to kill in the action movie industry.

I hope that making my protagonists fully fleshed out human beings, discovering a fetish for themselves (maybe with a nudge here and there) can assuage my own guilt about the susceptibility of my work to misogynist tropes and attitudes, but I am always happy to correct if there is a blind spot in my biases. (I have corrected stories in the past when something unforgivably toxic has inadvertently found its way past my filters.)

"You're not woke, are you?"

Naturally, because all media now has to be defined by its relative position on the skewed overton window of the current culture war, even a niche smut peddler like myself gets asked if I am "woke".

To start with, I believe the term "woke" is used to describe someone who commits mental energy to having empathy with those whose lives differ from their own. How this became pejorative is a quirk of toxic American political discourse that is sadly also beginning to infect the UK. In my personal life I strive to consider others and confront my biases, but my work on Literotica is hardly groundbreaking leftist philosophy.

It's pretty tricky to keep politics separate from your work when power dynamics are an inherent part of the fetish you are writing. People have noticed quite a few anti-capitalist undertones coming to the fore recently and I'm not apologising for them. The extremely wealthy in society are often lauded as somehow better human beings and pour money into PR campaigns to make them seem like anything other than wealth addicts. I take great delight in pointing out that, if anything, their extreme wealth makes them worse people, not better.

I should also do a bit of explanation of race in my stories. Occasionally a character's race will be important to the plot. For example, in Becoming a Sex Doll, the theme was the discarding of human traits in pursuit of "perfection." Although later in the story the traits that were discarded were shame and modesty, at the beginning Eziamaka's heritage was a feature of her humanity, then she straightened her hair, simplified her name, and did a bunch of stuff someone with West African heritage would consider distasteful to their culture. I will try to be as careful and well researched as possible when this is required, and will take criticism with good faith if offered.

Sometimes I will add some back story that includes heritage to flesh out a character, but other times I will just write race blind. If you reread some of my works you will be surprised how often the race of a character isn't even specified, and with death of the author (a theory of writing I agree with) if you decide a character I write is of a different ethnicity to the one I was imagining when I wrote them, you are just as right as I would be if I jumped in and said otherwise.

Although I should point out one trope of my section of the writing world that gives me no end of annoyance. Despite a lot of writers thinking otherwise, having sex with a black person is no more or less humiliating than having sex with a white person. I cannot tell you how often I will close down a story I'm reading because the big reveal of the most humiliating peak of the story is that the character is having sex with a black person, sometimes justified as humiliating by doubling down on stereotypes to make interracial sex more bestial or a bigger drop in status. This is a trope you will never find in my stories.

Similarly, if a character is engaging in a same sex erotic act for the first time, I will usually try to play it off as a novel part of the humiliation she is going through rather than in and of itself a humiliation. While it is cathartic to confront a characters heteronormativity, it reinforces toxic gay panic themes which are uncomfortable to play with.

Finally, there has been a notable absence of transgender characters in my stories. This is because a) my sexual preference is for cisgender women, it is no better than any other sexual preference but it is the only one I'll personally indulge in my protagonists. b) including a transgender person in a lovemaking scene would once again toe the line of trans panic which is very toxic these days. I don't want sex with someone transgender to be a surprise twist, or constructed as something considered more deviant or humiliating than any alternative. c) I run a very significant risk of misrepresenting a community very much currently under attack, especially when the right wing commentary on sexuality forms a cornerstone of that attack. I have often envisioned side characters as transgender, but as it wasn't relevant to the story it was never stated in the text. Feel free to decide a side character has a different gender to what was assigned at birth and you will be 100% right.

"Do you have a partner/girlfriend/wife/family? Do they know what you write about?"

I try to keep personal details far from my work, you can glean things from the sort of stuff I write (and my nationality by how I spell colour and specialised). But I will say that nobody in my life knows I write erotica.

"Which of your own stories are your favorites and why?"

Picking a "favourite" is tough considering different stories scratch different creative itches for me. Usually I defer to the wisdom of crowds and feel that generally speaking the Literotica rating system tends to get it right.

Although I do wish Up the Farce was rated better. Outside of writing erotica I am a big fan of comedy and Up the Farce was my first foray into writing an overtly comedic work. So it stands out a bit among my catalogue (which is probably why it isn't rated as highly as I would like.)

"What first inspired you to start writing stories/what writers do you like?"

For me, it wasn't actually erotic literature that made me want to write. My masturbatory material was mainly in the form of comics, hentai, and longform captioned images.

The first erotic story I wrote was a continuation of a drawing and caption story written by an artist called Lerra22. It was a slow day at work and I had an office to myself so I started hand writing what I thought should happen next. I got so into it I ended up continuing the story on my commute home, standing in a corner on the London underground so nobody could see my notepad.

Once that mania hit me, I wrote Queenfall over a couple of days, barely sleeping, I was so taken by it. I've since calmed down but that rush of creativity and eroticism stayed with me since.

These days I follow a couple of authors on Literotica, and I have saved my absolute favourite stories in my favourites, but I still take a lot of inspiration from comics (e.g. Rebecca Hap and DoFantasy), artists (e.g. Crisisbeat and Erenish), and Hentai (e.g. Jordi, Sanbun Kyoden, and Tanaka Aji).

"What do you think are the pros and cons of writing series versus writing standalone stories?"

As you can tell, I prefer writing standalone stories. I want to avoid fetish creep and the feeling of obligation trumping my creative process so I don't tend to write series a lot. Recently the main reason I will write a series is to engage with the audience between parts (e.g. Vicious Rumours and The Fixer), before I would do multi-parts because I wanted to tell a bigger story, but I now know the folly of such endeavours.

From a Literotica perspective, I also feel like multi-part stories are easier to get higher ratings on. Nobody is reading subsequent parts to give them a low rating unless you royally mess up and often people will read the first part in a new light and rate highly given what it is building to. So although I am stoked that Vicious Rumours Pt. 1 won a readers choice award, I genuinely consider DomBox's silver medal the year before a bigger achievement.

"What kind of writer's block have you been having lately? Like, not having ideas, or not being able to write, or something else?"

Oh boy! So a comedy writer I greatly admire called Daniel O'Brien was once asked about writer's block and came up with a great metaphor. He said that miners don't get to not work at the coal mine because they have mining block, and builders won't halt construction because they have builders block. He then said his advice is to just write through it and that's what I do.

That's why, for me, writer's block is not the inability to write anything, it's the inability to finish anything. Since I published Party Animals, I have started 6 stories that I have abandoned due to losing faith or enthusiasm in their premises. I have learned from my mistakes and would rather put out nothing than fight to the end of something I don't believe in, but the downside is that instead of my quality fluctuating, it's my output.

"How do you keep track of your characters? For example in Fixer, where there were multiple strands, each of which could have been a mini series in their own right. Do you know where each may end up at chapter one or is it more an evolution?"

Sort of. When consuming media I'm usually terrible at keeping track of characters, but when writing I just seem to be able to hold them together. I think it's because I design characters as they relate to the theme, which means that their input in the plot comes before any other details. However they can surprise me and sometimes things have to evolve.

In The Fixer, I planned a few characters, then kind of forced reader invented characters into the thematic boxes I wanted. Clementine was the equal and opposite reaction to the morally corrupting influence of power, Grace was the demonstration of the need for human connection despite its disadvantages, Nicole was the self-destructive destination of unfettered indulgence, etc... this meant that at any moment I didn't have to remember characters, just what theming would help a moment and I could drop the appropriate character into that, even at times when the characters took the story away from me.

And as with a lot of devices that give the illusion of intelligence, erotic literature allows you to retroactively add things to make the story deeper and more engaging. Characters can be added when you reach the point in the story you need them for and then you can go back and thread them into the narrative. It's a simple way to make a story more complex and look smart in the process.

"You clearly have a penchant for self inflicted humiliation. But do you rein yourself in to meet Literotica rules or the audience expectations or do you just let it flow and see where each devious humiliation evolves?"