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Author Topic: Writing difficulty  (Read 10751 times)

chaospersonified

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Writing difficulty
« on: 17 Apr 2015, 12:00 »

I've been writing pretty regularly and posting my stories online for going on four years in October.

It's all the same genre of thing, semi-realistic fetish stories with a very specific target audience, and it's been great! I've got stories with tens of thousands of views across the three different places I posted them. I've made kind of a name for myself in that community, to the point that I found myself listed in one guy's profile as his favorite writer. Been in direct communication with all but one of the people who originally inspired me to try my hand at writing this style, that one person not having been active in the better part of the past decade. It's been fantastic, and I am without a doubt, a better writer now than I was when I started, even if I still think the guy who listed me as his favorite is a bit of a maniac.

I'm not bragging, I mean, not with the intention of being seen as better-than, I'm saying this all because it's kind of an issue now that I'm trying to write other things. I've been so invested on the one project that it makes anything else feel strange.

I don't necessarily think of the stuff I write as porn, exactly. I'm only just now writing my first full-on sex scene, and my characters are pretty in-depth, with back stories and personalities that aren't paper-thin People get off to it, I know that much, so it qualifies in that regard, but in the last year or so, I've been trying to make the fetish aspect more of a side plot, something that's also going on, has an effect on the main arc, but isn't that. This is where it becomes a dilemma.

In the past few months, I've been trying something new. To make this next bit easier, let's pretend that I'm writing about a tattoo fetish. I'm not, but it's easier to explain that way. The trope in this community's stories is often that all guys are either in two groups, entirely into women with tats, or complete assholes who abhor anything other than a woman with unmarked, perfect skin. All women are either already tattooed or they're entirely against getting tatted up, which changes, of course, when they get drunk one night and try it, at which point they're suddenly all aboard, preaching the word of tattoos, and covering every last inch of their bodies with ink. Obviously, that's not true of reality, so I've always tried to write more nuanced levels of acceptance than these, but the newest thing that I wanted to try was what if they weren't into it? What about the conversation in a relationship where the woman admits, worried it would mean the end of the relationship, to her partner that over the weekend, she had dragon inked on, wrapping around her torso and lower back?

It's gotten a pretty big response, and I'm prouder of some of these stories than I am of a lot of things I can show my parents. One story I wrote, probably the saddest thing I've ever written, got a six paragraph literary analysis from a woman who, from the emotional tone of her response, had been through something similar, or was just worried something like it might happen to her. She said it was a really well done story, but summed up her problem with a question, "Why would you write this?"

 I didn't have an answer. I wrote it because I thought of it, and I wanted to see if I could tell the story right.

More concerning is, why can I write that, and not something else I've had planned out for a while. I didn't like writing that story, I mean, I didn't hate it, I'm proud of it, but I'd rather write something happy than something with a downer ending! This other thing is... well, less depressing than what I actually wrote, but it's not related to that fetish genre in any way. I've tried a couple times, but I always get distracted partway through, abandon the file, put it on a flash drive and then lose that.

What's my issue, here?



This is what I've been guessing.

I think of my stuff as plain, short stories that happen to include a mild pornographic theme. The problem I'm encountering is that I've gotten so invested in said theme that trying to write anything else is less interesting to me than trying to discover a nuance of someone's attitude towards tattoos to write into my next story. I don't know, it's not that other things are uninteresting, it's more that in this case, writing has been linked to sex in my brain, so there's a part of me that's confused, 'Why am I not aroused? I'm writing! That's what happens when I write! Eh, what's the point?' It's a stupid part of my brain.


In simplest terms, the problem is this:
 How can I make the shift from fetish "porn" short stories into regular short stories when it's so much more difficult to write stuff that's not stimulating on anything more than an intellectual level?

Has anyone else noticed anything like this before? Not so specific, necessarily, but have you ever gotten so in depth on one theme, written so much about it that when you try to write something different, something unrelated entirely, you feel you should find a way to include that theme in some way?
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Thrillho

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Re: Writing difficulty
« Reply #1 on: 18 Apr 2015, 03:59 »

I have written so many murder ballads I've almost forgotten how to just write love songs.

You just have to do it, man, and accept that writing with different themes is basically starting from scratch again. It's bound to suck at first, as your first fetish stories will have sucked.
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