It happens to all of us: we get a great
idea for a femdom story, put down about 1-3 hot and heavy pages, but then our energy to keep writing dribbles away like a ruined orgasm:
Just last week I was writing the next
installment of “The CockSitters Club” (a world where all men must
stay in chastity belts 24/7, and a group of girls have a business
holding men's keys while their wives are on vacation).
It was called “Victoria's Litter”,
and was about a sitter who strips her charges nude and keeps them
like literal dogs during their entire stay (always crawling on all
fours, no talking, must eat and use the bathroom like a dog) and it
seemed like SUCH a hot idea when I first thought of it, but after I
got about 5 pages into it.... meh.
On the thread on www.orgasmdenial.comthat inspired this post, someone commented: “I've started numerous
[femdom] stories in the past years and they go nowhere.”
Why does this happen to everyone?
The answer is, because your story has lost its charge.
Let's talk about what causes causes a
story to be 'charged' or not. 'Charge' is an idea from vanilla
romantic fiction, where a man and woman love each other for some
reason, (providing attraction) but can't be together for some
different reason (providing repulsion).
Think of the main characters like two
highly charged metal plates, one positive and one negative. The
opposite charges attract- the plates REALLY want to be together! But
if you let them touch (the main characters have sex), there's a zap
of power, the charge between the plates equalize, and there's no
tension in the story anymore.
So the best-selling romantic fiction
authors are like circus strong men, holding these two massive, highly
charged plates just inches from each other, keeping them close enough
so a few sparks can jump across the gap (a look here, a quick kiss
there) but never letting them touch (complications of the plot) no
matter how hard the plates attract.
It's this 'charged' tension of
attractive and repulsive forces that keeps readers reading and
writers writing.
(Oh, and it almost goes without saying,
if you keep the main characters too far apart- too much repulsion- no
sparks can make the jump between the plates. No tension there
either.)
So let's tie this back to what we're
writing: fast, fun, femdom fiction. Two of my previous blog posts
for writing better femdom stories gave us the following rules:
And in the first post I talked about my
favorite way to achieve 'charge', which was:
Take something the main character really wants, take something they really hate, and make it so they can't get one without the other.
The nerdy boy can't go to prom with the
hot girl unless he agrees to let her lock him in chastity.
The rich stock broker can't keep his
past embezzling a secret unless he strips nude for his secretary
every day.
The adventurer can't get the golden
idol without sneaking into the mountain fortress of the tough Amazon
warriors.
All those plot starters have charge,
because they take a good thing and a bad thing and make them a
package deal for the main character.
So why did “Victoria's Litter” fail
for me, and why do some of YOUR femdom ideas peter out?
Because I didn't leave room for
escalation (the boys were basically nude, locked and helpless from
the middle of the first scene) and they no longer had any choices to
make (Victoria had thought of everything).
The electric plates had touched; the
tension was gone. I tried to recharge the plates (the boys have to
attend a garden party for Victoria's friends as dogs, complete with
anal plug tails!) but it was too late.
Charge gone, tension gone, writer no
longer felt like writing.
But don't worry, I'm still revising
“Cocksitter's Club #1: Lori's Interest” for release in September,
and I've started a page one rewrite of “CockSitter's Club #2” for
September release as well.
And this time I'm making SURE to leave
room for the Universal Locking Law to escalate things for the boys,
and giving them meaningful choices to make to keep the charged plates
from touching!
Try the same thing out if you find your
own interest waning in a femdom story you're writing. Ask yourself:
- What does the main character want? What does he hate? Are they tied together?
- What important choice does he have to make? Are there a series of smaller choices he can make on the way to let me escalate things?
- Am I maintaining 'charge' by keeping the desired things close together, but NOT touching?
That should get you writing again.
That's all for now, I've got to get
back to writing, too. And look out for this related topic, coming
soon:
I think you're being overly specific. That's one reason why you could get writer's block at that point, but it's not the only one. What I've found is that I often get writer's block at the point where the characters get together not because the spark has gone, but because I haven't planned what to do at that point. For me, building a femdom story requires solving the question of how and why these two (or more) people are getting together and having femdom fun. How did they find out that the other was into it? Or through what other roughly realistic scenario did they wind up involved in a bunch of teasing and/or ballbusting? This is always a puzzle. You want it to be believable, but somewhat surprising such that it's worth telling the story. And then there's always the questions of why didn't thing A or B or C get in the way. So it's like a puzzle and I wind up with a plan to solve it, especially for stories with teasing where I always have to answer the "and why doesn't he just go jerk off?" question. So I build a complex scenario with a plan of how they get to the point where sexy fun stuff happens, but in my plan, that part just winds up looking like "sexy fun stuff happens". Once I get there, though, I'm often stymied. The reason, though, isn't the lack of tension, it's that I don't have a plan. I don't know what fun sexy stuff is supposed to happen when or how. So I've figured out that I need to have a secondary planning phase which happens once I've written up to that point where I actually plot out the fun sexy stuff which is going to happen and then write an outline. And once I've done that, it's not usually that difficult to write it.
ReplyDeleteSmack,
DeleteSome good points. What you call 'the puzzle' I call the 'Reason' and the 'Excuse'.
The 'Reason' is why you're writing the story in the first place, i.e. the predicament for the man you've just GOT to see played out.
The 'Excuse' is all the supporting framework in the story that lets you believably get to the Reason, i.e., he lost a bet, he lost a court case, he's being blackmailed, he got caught doing X...
It's a balancing act: if your Excuse overpowers your Reason, you've got some of these long drawn out stories on Literotica where we have to learn for 3 pages about background in the man's life before we get to any fun ("I just started a new job in Florida. Let me tell you about how I got to Florida...")
But if your Excuse isn't strong enough to support your Reason, disbelief is broken, i.e. the woman he just met at the bank decides to make him her nude, never cumming, begging whining strap-on bitch in front of 99 of her closest friends after 2 minutes of knowing him.
Your point of not knowing what to do next could be another reason for Femdom Writer's Block, but I usually find if I have the main dude's arc planned out, (Tip #7) there is always the next stop to escalate to.
Thanks for that long post- I always wonder if anyone really reads these technical posts, and now I know!
ReplyDeleteI also think, having now read it, that your incomplete cocksitters club part 2 story suffers not just from a lack of escalation, but from a lack of dramatic tension, generally. Dramatic tension often comes from seeing characters struggle to get the things they want or need, but by the point you discontinued your story, you made it clear that Victoria will always get whatever she wants, the guys will get nothing they want, and you haven't explored at all the differences between what they think they want and what they actually need. Victoria doesn't seem to have any actual needs or wants. She's sort of a flat character. And none of the guys seems to secretly want or need someone else to take control or to punish them, so they have no incentive to do anything, nor is there actually much they could do. There's no "how do they escape" puzzle. They don't escape and that's obvious. So there's no source of dramatic tension at all.
Your previous writings on how to write femdom stories specify that the dramatic tension must come from some decision which the male is going to make. I think that's a fine source of dramatic tension, but I don't think that it's the only possible one. So if you wanted to redo this story, you could introduce other sources of dramatic tension. For example, Davi could be struggling between a desire to submit and be abused and to stay a puppy versus his feelings of loyalty to his brothers. Or if you were willing to write from Victoria's perspective more, she could be considering taking one of the boys into her bedroom, but conflicted about how that fits with her own image of herself as a bad-ass cock-teasing cocksitter. Or we could have the boys be able to earn an orgasm, but only if they completed some very arduous task and we could watch them struggle to do it, unsure if they were going to succeed or not. Or we could have Victoria make a bet with a neighbor about who is the better dog trainer and then we might watch her try to make the more headstrong boys actually be loyal to her rather than just submitting to the threat of pain. Or Victoria could be so annoyed by Carlos that she starts making plans to actually have him castrated and it's up to Davi to try to avert that. So there are still a lot of possibilities, but there needs to be something like that actually driving dramatic tension. If the reader already knows exactly what's going to happen, that's when a story is dull, but there are a lot of things which could be employed to keep things unpredictable.
Not gonna double reply, but yeah, Victoria's Litter lost charge for exactly the reason you state: no real decisions to be made by the boys after the first page. Good for a fantasy caption, not good for a 30K word story.
DeleteBut for the revamped CockSitter's Club #2: Maggie's Stallions, I'm leaving LOTS of choices, and it's turning out much better.
Thanks for the comments and the good ideas, Smack!