The Rules of Writing, Part 2

  I had planned for my next blog post to be an announcement of another free title, but seeing as Amazon have decided to be super slow with their price matching this time around I'm going to have to return to the same topic I started on a few weeks ago!

  So, last time I talked about the basics of grammar and spelling, then went on to talk about how the pacing and structure of good stories tends to fall into a very recognisable pattern time and again. This week I'd like to begin by discussing some more stylistic "rules" that are present in various genres.

  It might surprise you to know, but before I started publishing at the end of last year I didn't have much knowledge of romance or erotica as genres. I'd certainly read them in the past, but I'd never discussed them in depth with anyone, connected with serious fans of the genres, or looked into the various characteristics of these types of stories.
  Anyone who's a serious fan of genre romance will know that one rule holds true across the board: your story must conclude with a Happy Ever After/Happy For Now, where the hero and heroine finally get together, overcome their problems, and settle down into their blissful new lives together. There's no other genre I'm aware of where fans will react as negatively to a story that breaks the rules than romance, to the extent of a HEA/HFN being a required element for the story to be classified as a romance.
  What this boils down to is simply a case of readers knowing what they like; and a happy ending is what the vast majority of romance readers want out of their novels. It doesn't matter if you want to make a point or write a thoroughly realistic tale where things don't work out quite as the hero and heroine might have hoped -- that isn't what readers are looking for in your work.

  This is an interesting phenomenon to think about in the literary world, and I think it's comparable to the issues I had with the Hunger Games ending, only expanded to cover an entire genre rather than an individual series. Readers like to know what they're getting, and I think this is something that some writers fail to appreciate in its entirety. There's a sweet spot to be found between pandering to your audience with simple, easy, by-the-numbers storytelling, and alienating them with something that challenges their expectations to an unpleasantly jarring degree.

  I've always maintained that I prefer to think of myself as a practical storyteller rather than an artist; I'd much rather be known for entertaining people rather than challenging them. That isn't to say I want to spend my career writing bland and predictable stories, but I do believe very firmly in working within the boundaries of the rules to create something interesting and engaging rather than pushing the boundaries of what's considered acceptable for the genre.
  I read a post over on kboards today about an author who'd finally given up after over half a decade of writing, citing his frustration with the indie publishing scene and the difficulty of getting his work recognised. But, by his own admission, this author was writing stories that were completely unpitchable to traditional publishers, difficult to market, and hard to classify. He just didn't seem to be writing with any particular audience in mind.

  Maybe it makes me a horrible sellout, but I like to dial back my artistic vision to a level that's practical, realistic, and viable as a way of making my living in the self publishing business. What that means, the majority of the time, is working within the framework of the rules, giving your audience what they want, and trying to put your own spin on tried and true concepts rather than splurging your creative juices into the void and hoping they crystallise into gold.

Wild Changes Published!

Chapter five of Wild Instincts is all done and available to purchase on Amazon and Smashwords! Things are definitely beginning to change up for our hero and heroine as the story reaches its mid-way point.

Exiled from their pack and alone in the wilderness, Lyssa and Thorne are forced to rely on each other to survive. But with rival packs and their own alpha hunting them, the burdens of survival and their own feelings for one another are soon pushing the two young werewolves to their limits.
  How much does Lyssa really know about Thorne's past, and how far is she willing to go to preserve her volatile relationship with him? As tensions build and emotions flare, the couple begin to discover new things about one another as they face the reality of their future together. If they want to stay safe from the dangers of the wild, something will have to change between the two forever.

With this instalment published I feel like I'm getting into a better rhythm with my writing. The past couple of months have been a little sparse on the new releases front, but, issues like lack of sleep aside, a large part of it has been the increased length (and hopefully quality!) of the chapters in this serial. I've gone from a weekly publication schedule of ~5000 word stories to a bi-monthly one of ~10,000 word releases. My focus for the foreseeable future is still going to be on finishing Wild Instincts, which should conclude by part nine or so much like His Darkest Desire did.

I still have an editing backlog to go through on my older titles, and I'm really disappointed in myself for not getting that done sooner, but it's still on the cards! Besides which, I'm getting a hankering for starting a new project again. No crystallised thoughts on that the next serial novel is going to be, but I very much want to try out something written in the third person with perspective shifts between the two main characters. It's been bugging me that I never get to poke around inside the head of my hero in Wild Instincts -- particularly since I feel like he's starting to become a very interesting character, with a very solid arc of development compared to my last sexy studmuffin.

So expect more Wild Instincts in the coming weeks, and maybe the beginning of something new!

Writing Sex Scenes is Hard

  ...And I feel like it has a tendency to get harder the more you learn about it.
  Like every creative craft, there's always an urge when writing erotica to go one better than the last scene you wrote, and it tends to result in some very challenging bedroom segments that you spend hours trying to get just right.

  When I first started writing sex it was purely a case of splurging out a ton of stuff that I found totally hot all over the page -- and that isn't necessarily a bad thing when you're writing one-off smutty shorts that're aimed at cheap and cheerful thrills. With erotic romance, however, there's so much more to the anatomy of a sex scene than meets the eye.
  When writing vanilla segments of a story I can usually put out a good two thousand words a day without much slowdown, but when it comes to the sex that output tends to get cut in half. The story is the bread and butter of an erotic romance, but the sex is the succulent filling. It's the focal point, where you can be sure you'll have your reader's undivided attention, and where a good author will be able to create a memorable sequence that will stick with you long after you finish the final page.
  As a result there's an almost painstaking urge to pay that much more attention to writing a sex scene than to any other part of the story. Every word choice has to be sexy, the pacing has to be spot-on, the emotions of the characters involved need to be crystallised and poignant. The bedroom scenes I've written in the past that I've been least happy with (in eRoms, at least) are the ones where the sex feels forced, inorganic, or irrelevant to anything beyond the scene at hand.

  Needless to say, it often feels like a pretty daunting task to get the sex scene in a chapter of a serial right. It's a more directly climactic (hurr hurr) moment than almost anything else in your writing, and once your mind starts to be bombarded by all the things you feel obliged to include in it, the simple process of sitting down for an hour or two and bashing out a sex scene starts to become a lot more complicated.
  I'm at the point now where my sex scenes almost always take multiple writing sessions to get finished, because they tax me a lot more than anything else. That's not to say they're tiring or exhaustive to write (although feeling a little breathless by the end is never a bad thing!), but a good sex scene is definitely a challenge to get right.

The Rules of Writing

Psh, nonsense! There's no such thing as rules when it comes to writing! Right?

Well, yes and no. As is the case with many creative pursuits, the "rules" exist in an incredibly grey area that's more of a three-dimensional spectrum rather than a list of checkboxes.

To some degree I believe that grounding your writing in a set of rules is what makes any author successful -- or at the very least, it makes a successful author even more successful. Almost every writer will believe certain literary conventions hold more weight than others, but very few believe in an all-encompassing set of principles that will work for any writer.
As a result, the "rules of writing" are less about discerning what's right and wrong and more about researching, understanding, and ultimately settling on a set of rules that are right for you.

Obviously the most commonly agreed upon rules relate to things like spelling and grammar. Presenting literature in one consistent, easy to understand format for a global audience is something that's hard to argue against. But even these things can be broken and tweaked by an author to varying degrees of effect.
I consider myself a very pragmatic person, and I have absolutely no qualms about using "incorrect" grammar/spelling at times if I feel it conveys my point better to a general audience. That's not to say that all of my mistakes are intentional (goodness, no. I still feel guilty about the amount of re-editing plenty of my old stuff needs), but I'll often do things like string two words together (like alright, or checkbox -- which my browser likes to underline in red) when the common usage sounds more fluid and direct than the dictionary entry. Spelling and grammar aren't set in stone. Language evolves, after all; but 99% of the time you want to ground it in the rules everyone commonly agrees upon.

But then you get to things like characterisation and storytelling. There is a very strict formula to these things, believe it or not, and understanding it is key to constructing a compelling piece of writing.
The important thing to understand about the structure of storytelling is that it isn't a guide all stories must follow in order to be satisfying -- it's a structure that forms itself naturally almost as a by-product of a good story being told.
  I've talked briefly in the past about structure and pacing, and the graph I included in that post is a pattern that will almost always apply to any good story as it unfolds. Tension builds, danger increases, action hots up, and emotions boil. There must be a constant increase of emotional engagement with the reader as the narrative progresses. If there's a steady decrease, stories feel unfulfilling. If you've ever read a book or watched a movie that felt like it ended with a whimper rather than a bang, it's probably a result of this engagement curve progressing in the wrong direction.
  If a story is all action, all emotion, all tension all the time, then it becomes tiresome, and the dramatic thrills cease to be impressive. This is what happens when you watch a mind-blowing hollywood special effects extravaganza and find yourself completely unimpressed when something explodes in a (non-)dramatic fireball for the dozenth time. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a consistently low amount of emotional engagement results in something that feels slow and boring.

So with all we've learned about structure and pacing in mind, storytellers have come up with a pretty consistently engaging pattern for how to set out your story. You want emotional engagement to rise, peaking in a series of climaxes that increase in intensity until you finally arrive at the big dramatic conclusion.
Now, this doesn't always apply to every story, and you certainly don't have to plan out everything to adhere to this curve, but if you write with it in mind you will write an engaging story.

Goodness, this post is dragging on, and I've barely even talked about half of what I wanted to mention. I think this might be a blog post that warrants a sequel at some point in the future, where I talk about genre-specific rules, the line between the cliché and the bizarre, and the fact that you can count every single plot type ever conceived of on the fingers of two hands.

My overall point to conclude the initial segment with is this: Storytelling may have no hard and fast "rules", but what it does have is a series of observable patterns that are consistently applicable to many of the most successful stories we've seen over the years. A proactive author will study these patterns, understand how and why they work, and decide on how they want to use this understanding to shape their own writing.

Wild Consequences Published!

Two blog posts in one day, oh my gawsh! This one's just an announcement, though. Wild Consequences is finally done and available to purchase on Amazon and Smashwords!

Lyssa's wilful disregard for her Alpha's rules is about to catch up with her.
Alone in the forest with Thorne, what began as an expedition to reunite with her family quickly turns into a struggle for survival as the dangers of the savage wilds descend on the pair. With everything she cares for at risk, will Lyssa's instinct force her to give in?
The dangerous attraction between her and Thorne is intensifying, the urge to acknowledge it is growing stronger, and the consequences of survival may mean more than either of them is ready to bear.

11260 word short story featuring graphic descriptions of sex. Not for the faint of heart!

These chapters just keep getting longer and longer, but hopefully the next part won't take quite as long to come out.

Oh, and check out the book review I posted earlier if you missed it!

Book Review: Maia

One of my favourite books, which I may have mentioned once or twice before on this blog, is Maia by Richard Adams. It's certainly not the "best" book I've ever read in an objective sense, but it has a very special place in my heart as one of the few stories I've ever been able to completely lose myself in. I wanted this book to go on and on, and I've never felt so sad about coming to the end of a story as I was when I closed the cover on Maia.

So, what's it about? Like all good stories, it's the tale of a character going through her life. While superficially a novel somewhere on the Game of Thrones spectrum about the political machinations of a fantasy empire (though Maia is closer to -- and even drops some veiled references to being -- historical fiction rather than fantasy), the heart of the story centers around the titular character and her trials and tribulations as she grows from a teenage girl into a young woman. It encompasses elements of action, adventure, romance, and, our favourite, erotica.

Now, there are a lot of things one can criticise Maia for. Most notably the paper-thin romance subplot and the disappointing wind-down to the end of the novel after its climax, along with the unsatisfying resolution to the main antagonist's story contained therein. However, while these are pretty large problems in the scope of the novel as a whole, they're overcome by the endlessly compelling moment-to-moment storytelling and the endearing nature of the book's protagonist. Maia is one of those heroines I would've gladly stuck with for a thousand additional pages just for the joy of spending more time with her. Richard Adams is a master at creating varied, nuanced, deep characters, and it shines through more strongly in this book than in any of his other works, I feel.

Maia also has the special status of being one of the first books that got me interested in erotic storytelling. While by no means a work of erotica in the modern sense, Maia frequently uses sex as a storytelling device, and manages to make several sections of the book disturbingly exciting as a result. It's a bit of a shock, coming from the author that gave us Watership Down, but Adams' ability to lace a story with so many erotic elements definitely speaks to his skill as a writer. Maia is a dark book, but it isn't grim. This is the key distinction I like to repeat over and over when I talk about all my hang-ups with Game of Thrones -- dark subject matter does not have to be bleak and depressing if the author utilises it correctly.
  Maia spends much of her time in the novel as a concubine, a pampered sexual servant to the rich and prosperous in the city of Bekla. This section allows the story to take on a very traditionally erotic style of narrative; the discovery and exploration of a young woman's sexuality.
  We're also treated to a handful of other sex scenes throughout the novel, one of which is the most telling and explicit exploration of a character I've ever come across in literature. Without spoiling too much; the fantasy of an all-powerful authority figure submitting to the most debasing humiliation possible at the hands of her slave is by far the most memorable scene in the book to me.

Maia is ultimately a very traditional story about a girl rising from simple beginnings to a position of power and status in society, and the trials and tribulations she faces along the way. The simplicity of this formula is what makes it work, and this book is a testament to the richness that can be wrung from even the most basic premise by a talented author. But what makes Maia so charming is that Adams takes this premise one step further: the heroine moves on from the pinnacle of high society to realise that all of the money and status in the world never make for true happiness by themselves. It's a fantastic arc of a young girl developing into a mature woman by realising that the fairytale fantasy is neither what she wants, or even needs, out of life. While the central romance is, as mentioned, relatively weak in itself, the thematic purpose it serves of allowing Maia to grow as a character in this way is utilised perfectly.

I could gush about a dozen different characters and scenes all day, but ultimately Maia is rich and compelling storytelling on its most fundamental level. It sucks you in, takes you on a journey, and provokes you in all the right ways without ever letting itself go off the rails. It may be a little rough around the edges, but if there's one goal I aspire to as a writer it's to some day write a book that's comparable in scope to Richard Adams' Maia.

Dark Fantasies

It's been a while since I wrote about anything specifically erotic, so today I'm going to go through some of my thoughts on a subject that's been on the back burner for a while now: dark fantasies.

All of us have probably had them at some point. Sexual fantasies that stray out of our comfort zone, into the realms of something that can be frightening, disturbing, or unsettling, and that leaves you feeling decidedly uncomfortable afterwards. But there's something compelling about these fantasies that draws us to them in the first place. They're the sexual equivalent of peeking through a gap in your fingers, or hiding behind the couch as you watch a horror movie.
As human beings we have an innate curiosity to explore our emotional extremes, and, while things like the cathartic appeal of horror movies and Stephen King books are relatively socially acceptable these days, the idea of dark sexual fantasies is most certainly still a taboo beyond the taboo.

The lack of social acceptance is probably a part of why we're drawn to these ideas and images in the first place (making anything forbidden is a surefire way to make it feel hotter and naughtier), but it's not their core appeal. BDSM and Master/Slave relationships are getting a lot of spotlight in the wake of 50 Shades, and they certainly touch on the disturbing side of an erotic dark fantasy. There's something very worrying about the idea of giving control of your life over to someone else. In the healthiest of relationships this ideally comes about as the result of a strong bond of trust between two partners, but it's almost more exciting if there isn't that bond of trust. After all, the whole premise of such a relationship is a game of make-believe where one person is forced to do things against their will. It ties in strongly with noncon/rape fantasies -- it's all about the emotional unburdening of having control completely taken away from you.
Master/Slave fantasies are one level below this, though. They have the safety net of knowing it's all still a game. A good Master doesn't really want to abuse and humiliate you; he's doing it all for your own pleasure as much as his.

But then you move up to the really dark fantasies. We're on the level of nonconsensual sex here (though some peoples' fetishes extend even further beyond that -- and that's a place even I'm not comfortable delving into!). For the longest time I didn't get this kink. It was very disturbing to me, and I couldn't see how anyone could derive pleasure from the idea of being forced to have sex against their will.
I think the key to understanding this type of dark fantasy is to underline the fact that it is a fantasy. The real life equivalent of this is harrowing, horrific, and absolutely not desirable in any way. For a lot of people (myself included, for many years), the distinction between the two is very difficult to make, because it's such an emotionally charged subject.
The best example I could give would be to equate it to fictional violence. I'm not someone who enjoys a lot of blood and guts in my movies, but I understand that many other people do. Whole subgenres have sprung up around it in years past, and it's become so socially acceptable that "torture porn" movies have even become a thing. I personally find these pretty distasteful, but, looking at them with an objective eye, I have to appreciate the reasoning behind why they exist.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we're creatures of emotion, and fiction gives us a safe space within which we can explore the most disturbing extremes of the human condition without having to deal with the consequences. Through dark fantasies we're able to explore the primal parts of ourselves that still crave something we've come to understand is wrong.

I can't see myself ever writing something as dark as a full-on rape fantasy, but I've certainly brushed up against the idea of dubious consent a few times (something that'll be recurring in my Wild Instincts serial). The wonderful thing about fiction and fantasy is that it allows us to do and experience things we wouldn't otherwise dream of. For anyone who enjoys taking the occasional dip into their darker side, the line between fantasy and reality is very important.
Just because you dream of being forced and taken by an unstoppable alpha male, it doesn't mean you want that to happen.