Writing Better Femdom Fiction - 3

Lesson 3: Dialogue is Hard, But Hot!

(Or: Don't yada yada over the best part!)

All femdom writers are excited to get to the good stuff. (Some a little bit too excited, but if you just pinch the tip or use some numbing cream, that problem can be cured.) And when they do get to the good stuff, at the moment when they should be basking in the glory of what made them want to write the story in the first place, we get scenes like the following (a man lost a SuperBowl bet to his wife and her sisters, and this is his first hour of sex slavehood, after stripping immediately without a single protest):

Miss Allison proceeded to administer 10 strokes with a leather paddle to my naked bottom. Following the punishment I was order to crawl to each of the women present, kiss her feet and ass, and beg to be allowed to serve her during the week. I went from Miss Allison to Miss Ashley and finally Miss Ann; begging each of them to allow me to serve them. When I had completed my task I heard laughter coming from behind me. I turned to see Sarah, my step sister and Samantha, her sister. Both were looking at me with amusement.

Let me tell you a little about my step sisters... (two paragraphs of exposition/body details follow)

What?

No, seriously, that's how the story pays off the first, long built-up (in chapter 2 no less) humiliation scene. You can read it yourself here. 

Okay. This is the main character's lowest point. He's never been nude before his sister-in-laws before. His wife and her hot sisters are stripping him of his clothes, his pride, his sexual freedom for the next month and laughing about it! Then he is publicly spanked! It's probably, bar none, the most embarrassing and humiliating thing that character has EVER DONE in his LIFE. EVAAAAR.

And the author yada-yada-yada-ed over it in just a paragraph, with NO dialog from any of the four involved parties.

Lessons 1 and 2 of Writing Better Femdom Fiction talked about large, overarching theories that apply to whole books, like the need to give your submissive main character a meaningful choice to make, and the need to escalate the plot/sex/action from the beginning to the end of your story. Lessons 3 and 4 are going to go small scale, with tips to make your individual component scenes sizzle.

Let's look at that Miss Allison paragraph again. All description. All passionless, matter-of-fact description, actually. It's like how a police report might describe the scene. Or a robot. (And not the fun sex kind of robot. The boring, kill-all-humans kind.)

How could we make it better? What if I added just one line of dialog from each woman present? It might look like this:

After I had reluctantly handed over my last piece of clothing, Miss Allison smiled and reached behind the couch to pull out a long, leather paddle.

“Now hubbie, we're going to see how much of a  tough guy you really are!” my wife laughed. And when she brought the paddle down onto her open hand, the slap was like a gunshot.

“Oh my goodness, he's shaking like a leaf!” my step-sister Sarah cackled. “I think he might actually cry!”

My youngest and most attractive step-sister, Samantha, took a front row seat with glee.  "I've never seen a MAN get spanked before!  This going to be so much fu-"  She cocked her head, looked between my legs, then started to laugh too.  "Oh my god Allie- he's getting HARD!"

What did the dialog do? Well, it definitely made a humiliating scene actually humiliating. The scene got hotter, and we got a little peek into each domme's personality, versus nothing in the original. But it also did something else.

The scene just got a lot longer. The original italics snippet was a little over 100 words, and in that scene the sub got paddled, crawled to lick each woman's feet, had a drawn out begging session with each, and then got laughed at.

In my revision, which is over 130 words itself, he hasn't even gotten his first spank yet! If I kept up at this pace with all this silly talkie-talk, the revised scene might take 1000 words to do what the original author did in 100! And that's why authors shy away from dialog.

But it's still worth it.

If you want humiliation in your story, you need teasing. If you want teasing, you need dialog.

Because all teasing is verbal.

When kids tease each other on the playground, they do it verbally. If the mean kids don't interact verbally with the nerds, that's something else. Indifference. Isolation. Exile. But it's not teasing. For there to be teasing, someone has to be speaking the teases.

Even a scene that goes: Lucy teased her brother about his small cock mercilessly, not letting him hear the end of it for a whole day after she had caught him jacking off. That's just describing verbal exchanges that happened when we weren't there to hear it! It's the difference between eating great food and hearing someone talk about eating great food.

Now, authors definitely have to control pace. You can't describe everything in full detail, or every story would be a 15 book series. You have to yada yada yada over some transitions, some passages of time. And some elements actually get better if you don't include, but only alude to them having happened off camera. (Side note: “Don't include, only alude!” is a great chant for some protesting mob to shout, I just don't know for what cause.)

Femdom authors want to “get to the good stuff”, and dialog seems to slow them down. Much better to start a scene with exposition and setting up, right?

Let's look at the first scene of this week's reading, The CockSitters Club #2. It starts right off with dialog. The scene is off and running from sentence one. It's got energy and it's going somewhere right away. I find that starting scenes with dialog makes the fictional universe seem fuller, like the characters have lives and we're just eavesdropping on them. Here it is again:

“Hey Mr. L? What was it like, having a free cock you could touch anytime you wanted?”

Robert almost spit out his drink.

It was day three of his wife's vacation. He and Lori and were on the couch, watching another of her stupid MTV teen dramas, as Robert counted down the minutes to his 'bedtime' and first release from chastity under Lori's watch. He had gotten a little more comfortable having the young, giggling, blond skipping around the house as his temporary keyholder, but not comfortable enough to talk about things like that.

“What?! What do you mean?”

“Well, the Universal Locking Laws passed like three or four years ago, and I wasn't really interested in, you know, boy parts back then,” she giggled, stretching her yoga-pant clad legs on his coffee table.

To his wife Martha, 'at home casual' meant baggy sweatpants. To someone Lori's age, apparently it meant black yoga pants so tight he could see every curve and outline of her lower body! Robert had already snuck enough peeks at her ass through the skin-tight pants to make tonight's masturbation session truly something special. He might have to ask Lori for extra time out of his cage, to rub out a second load!

“And my younger brother's been locked ever since he started getting erections, so he's never really been free-”

“Never?” Robert coughed, setting down his drink.

“Of course. All boys are locked when they hit puberty now. Duh!”

“Oh my god...”

“So I was wondering, what was it like when you weren't wearing a cage all the time?”

I get SO enchanted by the power of this rule to make scenes hot and lively that I agonize about including descriptive paragraphs, like the one above describing Lori's tight yoga pants. Even though I've seen stories where the description of the cocktease's outfit takes up a metric page, I thought about cutting that paragraph out completely, just to have Lori's latter dialog about her brother hook up with her earlier sentence about boy parts more organically.

If I was publishing this as a book, on a second draft I'd probably take that paragraph out. Going away from the hot dialog bugs me that much. The first description paragraph is necessary to set the time and setting after the chapter break, but the second, even though it's the only description of her sexy outfit in the scene, is unnecessary. Seeing it break the flow there still bugs me.

And look what else dialog can do. When Robert says, “Oh my god...” We know exactly what he's thinking. We don't need a [Robert was shocked by what he had just heard. He couldn't believe it!] that lazier stories try to include.

The rest of the chapter is similarly dialog heavy. How necessary is dialog? When he finally gets out of his cage, Lori says: “It's like, an adorable little toy penis!"

There is literally no hotter way to have that humiliation come across. It has to come out of her mouth, directed at him. You can't yada yada it, you can't omniscient narrator it, you can't have him internal monologue his shame any better than that.

Dialog is the hottest way to have teasing or humiliation occur in your femdom stories.

In my free ebook The Sissy Sort, the very first sentence is dialog, and the first scene gallops forward from there. It's got energy, speed. If you read that short book again, notice the difference between the scenes that start with dialog and those that start with exposition- the latter noticeably drag in comparison because of the extra set up exposition requires.

You may think a scene starts off better with It was a dark and story night. I was perusing a local biker bar, feeling out of place because I was just made the youngest corporate lawyer in the city, when I saw her, a tall, strong biker chic. Let me describe her for four paragraphs. She had black hair and...

The next time you feel tempted to that, instead start the scene with: “You're looking to get fucked in the ass, aren't you suit boy? That's the only reason you'd walk into a place like this dressed like that.”

And see if the scene doesn't have more energy because of it.

What do femdom stories with NO dialog feel like? Unbelievably, they still pop up, like this one called “Cuckold Humiliation”. A decent premise, but without any dialog, it reads like a dry cardboard imitation of a story instead of a living, vibrant thing, doesn't it?

If eyes are windows to the soul, dialog is the window to the soul of your characters. Just one chuckled “Good boy,” is worth five paragraphs of narration of describing how "fun" and "playful" your domme is.

Look at the end of Cocksitter's Club #2 again. When Lori's teasing Robert to keep it up just a little more, imagine how dead that scene would be if I narrated the action instead of letting Lori speak for herself.

In the book I consider one of my best, “The Drake Cheerleaders Incident”, one of the reasons for the unusual 'post-teasing-catastrophe' interview format is that I wanted to write an entire erotic book which was 95% dialog. Every scene setting, description, action, is all immediate and intimate, because it's all spoken by one human to another.  I think, anyway. 

If I had to pin down the one thing I think makes P. F. Dee femdom stories lighter, more fun, and more lively than most of the others out there, it's that I use dialog when others use narration.

In summary, if you want to make your teasing or humiliation scenes spicier, use dialog. If you want to show the personality of the characters, use dialog. If you want to be lazy and skip past all the good parts, then just narrate things, I guess. You'll finish faster. And we all know how sexy that is.

Students in my class, take the scene below and write your own dialog where the XXX's are, then post your repaired snippet in the comments to show everyone how much better the scene gets with words!

Rob, his older sister, and two of her sorority sisters kept walking on the beach, until they suddenly came to a sign that read: “Nude beach ahead. At least one member of every party must be naked to cross, or face fines of up to $300.”

XXX.

XXX!

Rob took off his clothes and handed them to his sister.

XXX

As they walked forward, Rob tried not to stare at the tiny bikinis the athletic girls wore, knowing what would happen. But the girls were apparently perfectly okay staring at him.

XXX

Robert blushed, but then disaster struck- his cock started to get hard!

XXX.

XXX.

XXX!

End of scene.  

Hope that helped,

P. F. Dee