(Or: Who's your main character? )
(This
is an 8 part "class" on writing better femdom fiction I've
wanted to do for a while. For the first round, "students"
were chosen by volunteering on the message boards of
orgasmdenial.com. Those students will get definite replies to
their comments and review of their work. If there is more
interest, I may run the class again with another set of students, but
no promises for now.)
We
all know why people read femdom stories. They want to see how the
women will get the guy this
time,
how he's going to be dominated this
time.
Is
she a seductive femme-fatale who uses her irresistible charms?
Is she a blackmailing bitch who just loves to watch him squirm?
Or she a trickster who is just a few milliseconds faster to the
handcuffs than he is?
If
femdom stories had advertising posters, the women would be front and
center on them. The women are the stars, just like Freddie Kruger is
the star of the Nightmare on Elm Street stories, not any of the
forgettable kids who always defeat him in the end. Just like how
everyone remembers the name of the shark in Jaws, but very few
remember the names of the three guys on the boat.
And yet, the women are NOT your main characters.
Yes,
they drive all of the plot with their desire to dominate men. Yes,
they get all the good lines, all the cool entrances and exits, and
all the last laughs. But they aren't the main characters because they
don't get to make the one big decision that matters.
Consider
this story: an impossibly sexy woman has a man hopelessly trapped at
her whim, then declares that she is going to sexually tease and
torment him, forever. And then she does.
Yawn.
That's
the "plot" of 90% of the femdom fiction written today, and
it's boring.
Now
consider this story: an impossibly sexy woman has a man hopelessly
trapped at her whim, then declares he must make a choice: for one
month, he can either wear a chastity belt and let her take him with
her strap-on any time she wants, or she'll provide everyone he knows
with iron-clad "proof" that he's an anal slut who loves
taking it in the backdoor!
Now
it's
a plot. Now
it
has tension. Now
it
has a dilemma for the man: let this woman humiliate him in private,
or keep his anal virginity but lose his pride in public?
What's
the difference between those two plots? A choice
for
the man. Something to put the end just a little bit in question. (I
mean, we all know which way the story is probably going to go, but
he's got a valid choice now.) There has to be something for the
submissive to struggle against.
Because the submissive is the main character in femdom fiction.
The
dominants are overpowering. They are enigmatic. They are forces of
nature. In my Gods at Eighteen series, (start
with your free copy of Kylie's Story here) resisting a girl after
she's Awakened to her psychic sexual abilities is like trying to
resist a hurricane.
But
it's not interesting to follow the narrative of the overpowering
hurricane. It's interesting to follow the lives of the tiny people
struggling not to get blown away.
In
the Cocksitters
Club chapter one (which all you students should have read by
now), I could have told the story from Lori's point of view, as she
delights in teasing the belted Robert. But why? We all KNOW what
she's going to do. In a world of mandatory male chastity belts, she's
the hurricane of cockteasing. Nothing is going to deter her from
making his balls blue.
(And
if something did manage to deter her, that makes the story weird and
boring. No one wants to watch a version of Jaws in which the shark
mopes around the bottom of the ocean, having an existential inner
conflict about becoming a vegetarian. That's snooty avant garde
fiction, not the fun, fast pulp we're shooting for.)
So
what did I do? I told the story from Robert's viewpoint, and I didn't
just make him helpless right away. I didn't stack everything against
him. I gave him a real, valid choice that was within his scope:
resist or submit? Fight his new cocksitter or accept her presence?
(Going
deeper for a second, notice how I gave him little choices that circle
around the main choice: does he get Lori pizza or not? Does he go to
bed when she tells him or not? Does he go jogging with her or not?
This is what lets you have little victories and failures in every
chapter, and not just have the characters yell about the main huge
conflict in every scene.)
Don't get me wrong; women drive the plot of femdom fiction, all of it.
Imagine
a story like this: a man brings up the idea of male chastity to
his girlfriend. She's not that into it. He buys the belt
anyway, gives her the key, and asks to be kept in it a week.
She reluctantly agrees, but at the end of the week, he doesn't want
to be let out!
That's
not a femdom story. That's a topping-from-the-bottom story, and
it probably won't excite many femdom readers. (It sure doesn't
do jack for me.)
Let's
make the woman drive more of the plot: a man brings up the idea of
male chastity to his girlfriend. She's not that into it. He
buys the belt anyway, gives her the key, and asks to be kept in it a
week. She reluctantly agrees, but by the end of the week, she
likes the control and doesn't want to let him out!
Now
it's got a little spark, right? The woman surprised him and
drove a plot turn. That's a classic story we've all seen
before. Only the female character in a femdom story can power
that sort of turn. Now let's take it up one more level, by giving
the man a big choice:
A
man brings up the idea of male chastity to his girlfriend.
She's not that into it. He buys the belt anyway, gives her the key,
and asks to be kept in it a week. She reluctantly agrees, but
by the end of the week, she realizes she likes the control and gives
him a choice: she'll give him that threesome he's always wanted, him
and her and her hot-but-proper best friend, but he has to trade
his plastic chastity belt in for a steel one. But the moment he
blows his load during the threesome, (“and you can blow your load
anywhere you WANT” she promises) she and her friend
are going to tackle him and put the steel chastity belt on him.
She thinks she'll keep him locked up for a month this time. To
start.
Sound
a little better than before? Can you see the main character
agonizing over what he's going to do? Can you feel the
tension? It's because he had a choice.
But what kind of choices can submissives really have?
One
of the best femdom stories I've read was about a man who was sort
of into being made to swallow his own cum, and kept pestering his
wife to "make" him do it. He would ask all the time,
but only actually swallowed it about twice a year. She got fed
up with that (ha!) and gave him a choice: eat your next load and
never, ever ask me to do this for you again...or you have to eat
every load you shoot, for the rest of your life. And she
meant it.
Now
that's a choice! This great story was really short,
under 5000 words I think, but so powerful because the choice was so
agonizing. And the choice was a classic one: be careful what
you wish for, you might get too much of it.
In
my Dude Ranch
novella, men pay to be kept completely naked at a vacation resort
run by cockteasing 'cowgirls'. They can't wear clothes, can't
touch themselves, can't choose if they cum or how, and some can't
even change the channels on the TVs. What type of meaningful
choice could they possibly make?
The
main character falls in love with a visiting cowgirl. She gets
in trouble for returning his affections, getting stripped and teased
herself. Will he stand up to protect her, knowing it will make
his last few days at the ranch 1000% harder? Or will he do
nothing?
That's
the classic Hamlet choice: to act or not to act?
Here's
one tip for crafting great choices: take something the character
really really wants, something they really really hate, and
then make it so they can't get one without the other.
And
then repeat.
Students
in my femdom writing class: comment below on some choices you can
have your men make in your stories. The more agonizing the
better!
So,
to recap, when you are coming up with a story idea, sure, go ahead
and spend a lot of time making the woman cool. She's the
hurricane. She's going to bring the energy to the story, drive
the plot forward and take the poor dude for a wild ride.
But to make it really interesting, don't forget to give the man one
big, agonizing choice to make.
Because
how
he deals with that choice is the crux of what makes it a femdom
story,
and not just a femdom setting
or a femdom idea.
Hope
this helps, and see you all next time.
(P.S.-
you can totally replace “man” with “submissive female” if
you're writing that type of femdom story. I don't do that very
often, but that's hot as well.)
Oh boy! Really enjoyed the reading material ;)
ReplyDeleteBtw, you asked us to tell you about the font, and well, it's super small. but once you increase the zoom it's alright, so it's readable.
A quick question\thought, you said that our female characters should lead but by placing the options, and not actually making the decisions(a really poor rephrase of your words, sorry), because she's the hurricane of the story, keeps the main character running for his life, but not making any big choices... my question is, what if instead making her deter from blueballing the shit out of him, i make the female character make a few choices that makes her go deeper into her desire to dominate the dude, and then also refering to your second class(sorry, I've cheated:( ) make the essclation flow from her direction, every time the story takes her deeper into that "domme space", like reading a book about a serial killer, that every victim makes him think about what he's doing, but instead of detering him from killing again, just makes him more ruthless in the next chapter... do you think that could fly?
now for the homework! a choice, a choice... A guy gets stimulated insanely by his mistress, knowing he has no premission to cum, but she won't stop unless he begs her to, at the beginning he obviously begs her to stop, fearing her wrath and disappointment, but every time he's struggling more and more towards just shutting the hell up and letting her finish him off... the fact she's raising the antes after everytime (it can begin with a simple handjob, go on to a blowjob, boobjob, and so on...) really doesn't help the poor fella. eventually, she tells him how horny he got her, and just jumps on his cock and start riding it really slowly... that brings another thing into consideration... does he beg her to stop before she cums? when he reaches the edge, does he hold on to it hoping she'd cum as fast as possible, or taking the chance and beg her to stop, knowing she probably would, but by that provoking her wrath, or just lets go and explode with her... a pretty simplistic approach, but that's all I could think of :(
oh, that and the basic "lock the chastity belt, or walk away and never see me again", but I felt it'd be stupid to come into a homework assigment and just toss of stuff I've read in a billion and three other stories
The Black Sheep,
DeleteGood questions! Just to clarify a bit, when I said, the men must have a choice, I meant just the one big choice that mattered. In a story with 100 choices, it's okay if the dom makes 99 and the main character has to make just one.
For example, the "I think we should get the steel chastity belt instead of the plastic, honey" or "Let's try another week of denial and see what happens" are all choices the dominant should make. That's the energy driving the plot. But to have tension, the man or sub must have SOMETHING to agonize about, even if it's just as simple as trying to decide to tell his family that his new fiance has him in chastity until the wedding or not.
On your dom-as-main-character idea, on of the fundamental tenets of fiction writing is: first you must excel at following the rules, and then you can break them.
What I've presented is a general rule for easy, fun, femdom fiction: the sub is the main character because the sub gets the interesting choice. I'm sure there have been good stories written from the Dom's point of view, it's just much harder. You should only explore the black diamonds after you've mastered the bunny slopes.
For your idea, (which I'm calling "The Dexter Hypothesis" since that's my gold standard for serial-killer as POV character fiction) I think it will be tricky to make that work, for two reasons.
First, the main emotion you want to give readers of your femdom fiction is excitement mixed with fear. (The slasher movie analogy keeps coming back.) Typically, the reader identifies with the sub, wants to go through what the sub is going through. When the sub is very nervous about what is about to happen to him/her, a small portion transfers to the reader. If you set the Point-of-View (POV) as the sub, you're golden. Easy sailing. Much harder from the other side.
Secondly, everyone likes the underdog. No one likes the heavy favorite. All good stories are about the underdog succeeding. If there was a war story about a huge, powerful, well-funded empire going up against a small, rag-tag group of rebels and the empire crushed them effortlessly in the end, we'd feel cheated as readers.
Go back to the Dexter analogy. He's a serial killer of serial killers. Great at it- almost a perfect hunter. The top dog, right? What do the writers do EVERY season of Dexter, to give him a challenge and provide tension? Match him against an even MORE perfect serial killer that he has to take down. And then add extra challenges for him, since Dexter is trying to do things the 'right' way. Boom! He's the underdog again!
So, for your idea of dom-as-main-escalating deeper into her desires... we have to like her. That means she has to be an underdog, up against something MORE powerful than herself. Maybe a richer, crueler dom who starts to steal away her subs? Struggling against just her own desires to be meaner to her subs... that's tough.
That's more like a character-study fiction, something English lit students would read, and not like the fun, fast pulp/genre fiction I'm training you for.
My advice, get a few pulp/genre books under your belt to learn this rule and the others, and THEN you can try breaking the rules, to explore new styles of book.
A reply to your assignment in the next post.
Black Sheep,
DeleteThe choice you've suggested is a classic one. "Please myself or please my Dom" is the choice every boy thinking about raiding the cookie jar before dinner has had to make.
The proposed escalation gets a little bit muddy, you're bordering close to an omni-fuck scene there, if you just keep it as straight fucking for longer and longer times, it will be stronger. Then the man has a horrible choice to make: my woman is soooo close to cumming- do I keep thrusting and giver her an orgasm or stop so I please her by not cumming?!
Bonus idea: in any boxing scene in a Rocky movie, it's not about the boxing- it's a test of wills between the two combatants. In all the dogfight scenes in Top Gun, it's rarely about the aircraft- it's a test of wills between the two pilots. And in any dom/sub sex scene you write, it's not really about the sex- it's a test of wills between the two participants.
The Black Sheep, the choice you've proposed sets that test of wills up perfectly.
Nice work.
Ozyrck here--I'd just as soon not link to any of my vanilla life on-line IDs.
ReplyDeleteI do see your point about making the submissive character drive the plot, but I don't think that making a conscious choice—particularly one big choice—is the only way to do that. Many of my favorite situations involve the submissive being set a challenge by the dominant and the tension comes from his struggle to accomplish it.
For example, suppose we have a male who has been kept chaste and teased. His dominant says that she will allow him to have sex with her, but only if he can keep from making himself cum. She unlocks him and leaves him alone for a day. When she returns that night, if he has kept from cumming he can fuck her, if not, he gets locked back up.
The story of that day, with the dominant calling and texting him, trying to get him to lose control and the submissive trying to keep his hands off himself, could make a really hot story. Is it a choice? I suppose on some level it is, but the submissive wants the one outcome—sex with his dominant. He has chosen that, the question is can he do what it takes to make that choice a reality?
I suppose in a narrative sense you'd call that the “Man Against Himself” conflict.
Very nice article, it really got me thinking.
Ozyrck,
DeleteYour choice is a great one- pleasure now or pleasure later? Only a truly wicked dom would set up a situation like that!
On your other comment, I think the narrative gets stronger if the choice is a conscious one. Consider your above story with NO choice for the man:
the dom leaves for a day of shopping, the man is tied hand and foot to his bed and she says "If you can keep from cumming all day, we'll have sex tonight."
Not much of a story without a choice from him, right? Even if she leaves porn playing on the TV to torment him, it's not a STORY until he has a choice to make.
But your point is valid: it gets a little melodramatic if it's ONE HUGE CHOICE that he dithers about constantly like Hamlet. (That's why skilled authors hide the one big choice in a bunch of little choices that escalate over the course of the story.)
Good thoughts.
Hi DonnaS here.
ReplyDeleteInteresting reading, but I am wondering if the submissive has to be the main character - or is that because you are targeting submissive men as your audience.
I wrote a one off story http://www.orgasmdenial.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11013 and tried to do it from the domme's view point - I got some "good ink" as responses; so perhaps their is a demand for a different view point?
I wrote that story to try to get across a different point of view to the normal submissive male one that seems to be so common, so I did it almost from my viewpoint.
The point you make about choices, I think is a very good one, otherwise the story never seems real, just objects on a stage; I will be sure to make sure that I remember that for my next effort at writing.
Thanks for the lesson.
One thing first: apparently links don't work inside of Blogspot comments, at least not on mobile devices, so anyone wanting to read Miss Donna's story she refers to, search for "Through the Looking Glass" on orgasmdenial.com.
DeleteOkay, as to if the Doms can be the main character, the "Rules of Femdom Writing" I'm laying out here apply to what used to be called "stroke" stories in the past, and what would be called "genre" or "pulp" stories by mainstream publishing.
They don't apply to experimental literature or capital L "Literature" where anything can happen, even an ending with no plot threads resolved. I'm trying to give folks guidelines on making fun, fast, light reading that titillates all involved.
That being said, the plot of femdom stories is still stronger if the sub is the main character instead of the domme. If you have an invincible superhero as your subject, the story is only interesting if told from the viewpoint of puny humans racing away from the damage (Godzilla) or if the superhero comes up against something even more invincible than him/herself (the GOOD Superman movie, #2 with Zod. Or in my examples, a richer, snobbier or crueler Domme at odds with the lower-tier main character Domme).
Looking at the story you had as an example, there are some great things going on in it. It is very evocative, very well described, very textured and rich with ambiance.
But if I had to describe the plot, it would be: Woman prepares to dominate man. He lets her. He offers to put himself in chastity. She accepts.
It's missing a little something for my taste, some struggle, some conflict, some back and forth with heightening tension. All these are accomplished by forcing the sub closer to a cliff of decision he doesn't want to jump off of.
But it's a beautiful piece, I would characterize it as more like Femdom poetry instead of genre fiction.
Thanks for your thoughts, your compliment on the lesson, and your previous writings.
PFD
And as a PS, I think there DEFINITELY is a demand for a erotic/comedic story told from the POV of the #101 ranked Domme in the world, as she fights up the Domme ranks to achieve her lifelong dream to be in the top 10!
DeleteShe could have friends/mentors higher up in the ranks, subs unwilling to go through the harsh training required, and of course, a nemesis who is in the #5-7 range trying to sabotage her efforts!
A lot of potential for fun there!
I agree the story needs a stronger theme, I think your summary is correct and that is what I am hoping to get some steers for.
DeleteKind words, to describe it as poetry!