These are just my thoughts and do not represent the views of the Admins, or my fellow mods, but I thought I’d share them as advice to new, aspiring, or developing writers - take them or leave them!
I’ve read hundreds of stories here on Lush, and there are some key elements that separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m not talking about accurate grammar and punctuation, which we can take as a given, so much as story construction and character development, and that’s what I would like to discuss here.
What is a story? Think of any story, be it Harry Potter, Star Wars, or Pride and Prejudice, and you will notice that they all have certain things in common. They all have one or more characters who go on a ‘quest’ of some sort, and is/are changed as a result of the ‘journey’ they have been on. They often have flaws or weaknesses (Kryptonite, Harry Potter’s scar, etc.) and these often put the quest in peril. The reader’s satisfaction comes from seeing the characters develop as people, overcoming their weakness to triumph at the end. Throughout the tale, the characters, not the action, remain the most important element of the story. Sure, there are exceptions, but that’s the general ‘formula’.
My point is that erotic stories should broadly follow the same pattern. Microfiction, Flash Erotica, and poetry will differ, but a longer story will usually have most of the above elements, and the story will have a clear beginning, middle, and end, rather than being just a series of loosely cobbled together events.
Key to this is characterisation, and this is where many writers could improve their stories, in my opinion. Sticking with Harry Potter, why do we as readers empathise with him, and become invested in his quest? The answer is that he is like us at the start; uninitiated, naïve, and relatable. He is keen to get out of his current, unfortunate circumstances and realise his potential. The same goes for Luke Skywalker, Jane Eyre, or any of a thousand central characters. Roald Dahl had it down to a tee! These characters represent ‘us’ in the story, with all our flaws and insecurities, and that is the key to our interest in them and their success.
So, getting back to Lush, if I read about a character called Bob, where the only description I’m given is the length of his cock, or Sue, whose vital statistics are all I know about her, why should I care about what they do? What follows will not be a story, but a description of two people having sex, which is not the same thing. Even worse, it will likely be highly improbable sex, which brings me to my final point.
By developing a three-dimensional character with desires, feelings, and motivations, your story becomes more plausible. Let’s face it, much of the sex in erotic stories veers between the highly unlikely and the borderline unfeasible, so we need to lead our reader to that point in the story carefully. Key to that is a character’s motivation; what do they want, and why do they want it? How many stories have we read here where two people being in the same room is deemed sufficient motivation for them to fuck? It may be, but only if we already know that they are both highly sexed, have been locked in prison for five years, and have already been conducting a torrid affair by correspondence. Then it makes sense. See the point I’m making?
What I don’t want to do is encourage everyone on Lush to write in a formulaic or repetitive way, and nor am I saying that the above is the ‘correct’ way to write. There are plenty of good stories which don’t follow these ‘rules’, and I’m sure you will suggest a few in response to this. But in my experience as a mod on Lush, investing more time in characterisation, and developing a clear structure to the story are the two ‘quick wins’ that many writers would benefit from focusing on.
