Leaderboard

WARNING: Politics and bad language… but I was provoked (on the bad language). I make no excuse for my politics. Hahaha... The Speaker of the House of Commons in the UK (John Bercow), has said this about the possibility of Trump talking to MPs: “We value our relationship with the United States. If a state visit takes place, that is way beyond and above the pay grade of The Speaker. However, as far as this place is concerned, I feel very strongly that our opposition to racism and to sexism, and our support for equality before the law and an independent judiciary are hugely important considerations in the House of Commons.” So basically he’s said: hey, let’s not. Unlike the BBC, I don’t think I need to include the idiot comments (who shall remain unnamed), being as he is a complete and utter **** who used £4000 of public money to keep his fucking stables warm… FFS. But he’s not happy… bizzare! He’s like one of those minority members of UKIP, who you just think… what the hell are you doing there? Get out you imbecile! But then for some people greed trumps everything (so to speak) – even victimisation of your own ethnicity, since he was born in Iraq and so has been unable to enter the US for the best part of a week. What a moron!

Latest sign that I’m too often using my phone to write porn: The first suggestion after I type “big” is “melons.”

Ages ago, after the first Harry Potter film, I saw the DVD on sale, decided to buy it (thinking I’d give it away as a gift), watched it, and became hooked. Read the books (1-4 at the time), saw the second film, and didn’t really want to wait. I started to stumble into fanfiction, started reading, (initially I thought it was stolen material, as in, hacking JKR’s computer, before I came to understand it). I enjoyed it and kept reading. There was one particular fanfic I wanted more of, but the author wasn’t updating and I grew impatient. Until this point, I hadn’t written anything since my high-school/middle-school days, so I wasn’t very confident, but I wanted it to continue; I picked up the keyboard, started typing. That first fanfic is still posted (not on AFF because I wasn’t aware of AFF at the time, and it also violates the rules here), the sequel is still a WIP (last updated ~5 years ago); and I had even written adult “versions” for chapters of both fics that I’ve never posted. Nowadays, I write original science fiction in a distorted dystopia that might come to pass. I suppose the moral is whatever cracks the ice, gets you to write. For me, it was a nearly abandoned fanfic that I felt the urge to continue, and in the process, I overcame my self doubts. My original stories wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for breaking the ice a decade and a half ago, playing around in JKR’s sandbox for a while.

Ahhh… The art of fanfiction, the title says it all. I read HP like everyone else while still in middle school and I remember waiting anxiously for the 5th book. You see… I am Romanian. I read in Romanian and when our small town library got the 5th book in English, there was no translation yet into Romanian. I had to read it. So I did. I was 14 and I so wanted to know what came next that I worked really hard on my English. I remember beeing a teenager, back in high-school and discovering fanfiction through a good friend of mine. She was into LOTR (still is!). I was 16, devouring Dostoyevski and heavy novels of epic proportions, I fancied myself in love with German expressionism and I even attempted to understand Wittgenstein. I was an idealist. I started reading other things to get a grasp of how things work in the modern world and I found fanfiction but I had little idea about the original works. Then it all clicked. Must have been that age. Ha haa! There was an abundance of fanfiction with an erotic twist. Even now, I think that so-called adult-themed fanfiction draws the most readers. I don’t think it’s that easy to write about such subjects, especially when you’re underage and have no experience except for the giggling fumbling awkward kissing in your highschool hallway. I see that most male slash is written by women. I read a couple of slash novels but to be honest I preferred the fics for some reason. I am still trying to figure out that reason. These days I find myself cleaning my hard-drive. I find fics I started a year or probably two years ago. I mend them and I send them out. It’s quite cathartic. I’ve written before. Not fanfiction. I’ve written in my own language on different subjects. I tried serious stuff but when you’re in 7th grade, you know little about the world around you and you are anything but a serious writer. Then I started writing in my first year of Uni. Together with a friend of mine, I managed to create a 200 pages monstrosity that ended up in a dusty drawer because we had exams and serious life stuff to battle. I write sparingly in my own language. It takes a bloody long time. I am my worst critic, after all.

Oh, surely not…*g* Erotic fiction is a challenge in its own right, fanfiction or original. I’ve seen too many professional authors stumble over their erotic scenes to doubt it. You can almost see the cringe they had while they were writing. Erotica demands a lot from a writer, and you can’t be afraid of exposure. I think you have to put a lot of yourself into it for the characters’ sake, and draw on all of your experience (sexual or otherwise), without being self-conscious in the slightest. As if you were taking your experience and lending it to them without conditions. If there is embarrassment, self-consciousness or giggling, then that had better be coming from the characters, not yourself. You don’t even need to be vastly experienced to do this, since any gaps can be bridged via deductive leaps, but you must do it. Character and sexual writing are all tied up together. If you want to write good erotica, as opposed to generic porn, you need to make the characters drives and motivations as much a part of the sex as the physical act itself. Why do they want it? How long have they wanted it for? How much (or how little) does it mean to them? The easiest way to describe what I mean is to think in terms of RL. Say, if we have a sexual encounter, we don’t draw solid lines around it and section it off from the rest of our life forever. Nor can we, because depending on the circumstances, there may be consequences to face. The same is true of fictional characters. Sometimes, sex just happens. It’s natural. It happens to you, just the same as it will happen to them. To be brutally honest here, I often find the lack of sex drive in characters off-putting in a show. The lines around what is acceptable sexual tension and what they refuse to write/produce/show often makes the characters and their world seem stilted and grey to me.The world is not sterile. If the whole human race danced around each other endlessly like that, we’d never reproduce. As much as I still resent RT Davies for killing my best man off (sniffles), at least he’s never shied away as a writer from creating fully formed characters, complete with normal sex lives/drives. Hell, that he does create such great characters is one of the reasons I’m so annoyed at their sudden death. Once you’ve thought about all those things, then you can consider the technicalities of writing sexually (tension, pacing, rhythm, word choice and so forth). And, if you’re a woman writing m/m slash, that’s a whole other can of worms to pick through and research to be done. Although I do think that if you’ve done the earlier groundwork, as above, then you can still be very convincing, even if you don’t know exactly how the male orgasm feels.

I didn’t mean to say that at all. Quite the contrary, I think making the characters believable is the only serious challenge of writing a erotic fanfic. Writing an erotic fanfic is easier in other ways, but characterization is one area where being erotic does not help and so it is foremost in my mind. I am binge watching to try to find a good way to get the characters to do the things I want them to do, and it is all because it is so important to be faithful to the characters. In an ordinary fanfic you’re putting the characters through an adventure, and that invites direct comparison with the source material. It raises the question: if my fanfic were an episode of the show, would it be one of the better episodes, or one of the worse episodes? For an ordinary fanfic that is a huge challenge to overcome on top of making the characters believable. For an erotic fanfic there is no comparison with the source material because your fanfic could never be an episode of the show. Instead of trying to do what the show does and replicate what makes the show great, we’re trying to do something the show could never do and so we don’t have to try to replicate any greatness. We still have the challenge of bringing the characters to life, but that seems tame by comparison. There are other ways to make fanfic writing easier. Instead of writing an erotic adventure for characters of a show or movie that you like, you could write a fanfic for a video game. Even excellent video games are traditionally quite weak in their stories, so even if you don’t have any great ideas for your fanfic’s story you can still often improve upon the source material. A long time ago I once wrote a fanfic for a card game; the game had practically no story at all so it had to be mostly my own ideas, but I knew that no matter how mediocre my ideas might be they were still going to be worth writing because they were a better story than the game had to offer.

Because I regularly write adult-oriented fanfics (ie, porn) about characters that never have sex in canon (because they are characters from children's cartoons), I feel compelled to put my two cents in here. I agree with those who say that fanfics are generally easier to write than original fics, because you're using “prefab” characters and settings that you don't need to develop from scratch. But -- and I think the OP was getting at this – writing fanfic poses the unique challenge of portraying someone else's characters in a believable way. I don't agree with the OP that this should be less of a concern when you're writing erotica. On the contrary, the challenge in writing such fanfics is creating a situation in which the characters can have sex without readers thinking, “No way, these characters would never do that.” Because, IMO, there's no point in writing a fanfic if the characters aren't recognizable as the ones that the fans love. Part of the fun of writing porny fanfics is figuring out how to make the sex happen in a way that is believable and in-character for the participants. One way in which I do this in my cartoon fanfics is to use plot devices that are in keeping with the show. For example, on the cartoon series The Loud House, one of the characters is basically a mad scientist who invents all sorts of cartoonishly impossible things but doesn't always think about the consequences. So in my recent story “Whoops,” I had her develop a synthetic pheromone to get her lab rats to breed but that ends up affecting everyone in the house. Massive porniness ensues. Of course, it doesn’t have to be anything so far out. Characters may discover that their sexuality emerges under certain circumstances. In my Phineas and Ferb story “Tri-Date Area,” the three main characters decide to try dating one another (ie, having a three-way relationship), and one of them finds that these circumstances bring out her sexual desires with an intensity that being in a typical, two-way relationship did not. Okay, my two cents turned out to be more like a buck fifty.

We need to discuss this in depth. I mean it! I really think we do. I need to figure out why as a woman I like male slash so much. Ah, time to psychoanalyse, I guess.

made my day! … and that’s why the dinosaurs disappeared. Thank you @pippychick for talking about this. It’s quite enlightening.

Thank you! I hope it continues to justify your love.

We have goddess save and now we have goddess tohsaka who’s a legit slut.

Ok, well I’m not sure I completely agree with all your assumptions there about fanfiction in general (forgive me), but I only really read and write adult fanfiction, so maybe.... I do think we should all strive for quality, especially where we are paying homage to something we love, example: Perhaps We May Hear Golden Trumpets by Aspen. And my favourite fanfictions of all time are where the writer (at least for me) does exceed the skill/standard of the original creator, example: Obsession by Ningengirai (read/heed the warnings please!). The fanfictions I’ve quoted there are both beautiful examples of great in-character writing. Every sentence serves the characters and their development as well as the action, and are mindblowingly gorgeous into the bargain. Yes, they are adult, but that is not all they are. I believe those writers have created something that transcends simple glorification of the original authors, great though those people might be. The kind of fanfiction writers I love don’t set out to “outdo” or please the copyright holder, they set out to please the characters. We write fanfiction because the characters tell us to, not because the original author said it is okay (though I am really glad that most of them do allow fanfiction of their worlds and universes). Ok… have I finished growling? Yes, I think I have! Onward! (sorry about that) Well, I am not sure after all of that how to answer your question. For me, I would say that I don’t get into Character A’s head… I let them into mine, and usually they’ll tell me everything without me needing to think about it at all. Where the original media is visual, there is actually a lot more to play with. I often find that most actors have certain tics and idiosyncracies that they can’t help, that become part of each character they play, and I’ll sometimes consciously echo those in fanfiction. Really good actors invent those same tics and idiosyncracies for each character they play. Use them. Where the media is a book, you can always try and flavour your language to create a reminder of the source material, although I think you can go too far with this, so be sparing and don’t lose your own narrative voice. If you spend a lot of time with the souce material (i.e. hours and hours) those things will happen without needing to really think about it too much. A lot of fanfiction is about creating a very subtle kind of echo that the reader doesn’t notice, while still managing to inject something new that you want to put there. Dialogue is a place where a lot of writers fall down for me, and bad dialogue will almost always make me stop reading a story immediately. For instance (to use two of my favourite fandoms), Elrond would never say: “Hi!” Partly because ‘Hi’ is not an acceptable greeting, partly because he’s always more wordy than that, and partly because everything Elrond says must enable him to use up a series of differing facial expressions ranging from mild surprise to intense frowing (I do blame Hugo Weaving for that). Whereas Jack Harkness would never only say: “Hello.” You know, because he’d have to flirt. Even if Character B was a blob of brown goo with a couple of antenna sticking out. In fact, he’d consider that some kind of new and exciting physical challenge. Listen to the characters. They’ve usually got loads of words of their own, all saved up, just waiting for someone to write them down. Sometimes I hear them so clearly I end up with lots of dialogue that I then have to fill in. Not a pleasant writing experience, but at least it means the characters are coming through loud and clear, and it usually means they’re interacting well with each other. Ok… now I sound completely insane. At the same time, never write dialogue exclusively. Always give your characters something to do, or think or feel. Usually when I do this, I find the characters start thinking in adult ways, and before you know it… they’re at it. Admittedily, it’s a lot easier to make Harkness do this than some others. If your character is kind of hard to impress or doesn’t want to misbehave for some other reason, then seduce them into it. Make the story work for you so that the character can’t help but respond. You don’t have to change the character’s personality. You change their environment and their interactions until they have no choice. In one of my stories the Marquis de Sade spends the entire twenty-five or so chapters completely seducing and ruining a priest. All characters have weaknesses you can exploit, no matter who they are. Sometimes you might hit a dead end, so just go back and try something else. I should note that by “seduce” I don’t necessarily mean sex. I mean to seduce as in to develop the character in such a way that adult fiction will be the end result. Characters are not fixed points (well, except for Harkness, but since he’d do anyone at the drop of a hat, he doesn’t strictly count… neither does he count). If you develop the character slowly enough, and believably enough, you can’t fail. And lastly, if you’re still wanting advice and not thinking: why the hell doesn’t this pippychick bird ever shut up?! then I’d say a good way to check if you’re going in the right direction is to imagine the scene(s) you’re writing from the pov of each of the characters. It should work just as seamlessly for them all. Even if Character B will never be the pov character, make sure you know why they do and say the things they do. The reader might not consciously notice, but it will give your story plausibility if the motivations are there for all of the characters. And the reader is who we’re trying to catch at the end of the day. We make the characters think and feel because we want the reader to think and to feel along those same lines. The reader is the one we want to seduce, via the characters. Right. I am finally shutting up.

Blackbird Chapter 14 BronxWench I love your words. ‘Lexicon’ is so much more interesting than ‘vocabulary’, and another of those words that reminds me of Skyrim. Thank you for not spoiling the end, even if my neurosis-turned-separate-entity is dying to know your thoughts, but I am one of those readers that reads reviews before I read the fics, so I appreciate it. It amuses me that you chose a line that I almost took out. You’re very good at making a writer take another look at, and appreciate their own use of the language, so thank you! Pippychick (for 13) I’m so thrilled, I’m almost giddy. I think that’s the one technique I read about years ago and really wanted to run with: the use of other senses to bring scenes to life. I’m glad it’s working and I appreciate the validation. As for your comments on the events. You’re quite clever. (for 14) In real life, I won’t even kill a spider, but the violent scenes are the funnest to write. As long as I can picture them well enough in my head so the descriptions don’t get muddied and the pacing doesn’t drag. LOL And here I am, when the chapters start creeping up on the 4k mark, getting all squirrely thinking ‘ain’t nobody gonna read this long!’ You mean not everyone has my commitment issues? Weird.

I get the feeling Shirou is going to buried under/in-between a lot of dense, female flesh.