That's no way for a lady to behave!

[NoJo]

I wrote a lesbian story, it came out okay, but Jeez, I got so damn confused with all the "she"s and "her"s....

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I wrote a lesbian story, it came out okay, but Jeez, I got so damn confused with all the "she"s and "her"s....

I know exactly what you are talking about

 

[Djmac1031]

I dunno.

I just try to write characters realistic enough so that when they cross that line into fantasy behavior, my readers believe it could happen.

Whether I actually succeed or fail in that regard is up to the readers, of course.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Problem two is that people/readers are conflicted and want different things in reality from what they want in fantasy. There's the woman who wants to marry the stable stockbroker but who fantasizes about the bad boy on a motorcycle. There's the nice guy who wants to marry the girl next door but secretly fantasizes about the girl in the braless crop top who goes dogging at the local park.

What if a man looks like a stable stockbroker but is in fact also a bad boy on a motorcycle at weekends? What might persuade the girl next door to wear a braless crop top?

Once she's done that, what might get her to consider dogging at an otherwise-quiet layby a sensible distance from home? I doubt anyone goes dogging in their local park, but it's not a hobby I'm familiar with.

That potential overlap, of reality and fantasy, is where I like writing. Others prefer pure fantasy. Pure reality includes too much depressing stuff I want to ignore, though other authors and readers like it.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I wrote a lesbian story, it came out okay, but Jeez, I got so damn confused with all the "she"s and "her"s....

I feel this. Just finished drafting my first lesbian story. The plot required one of them to be slightly older than the other so I found using 'the older woman' the 'the younger girl' a good distinguisher. I'm going to double down on that strategy next time.

"The red-head looked down at her blonde lover."
"The bank manager squeezed tightly the hand of the clerk."
"The Cure-fan spanked the arse of the Ledhead."
"The Gemini took the Libra roughly from behind."

 

[Bramblethorn]

1) How do the women in your stories behave? Do you have any particular types of behaviour that you gravitate to or avoid when writing?
2) How do you view drunken, crude, loutish, drug-use, violent behaviour? Do your women cuss like sailors (In or out of the bedroom) or do they hold to standards of behaviour that even an Victorian Finishing School ma'am would find unrealistic?

My female characters tend towards genteel, usually due to a mix of mildly posh upbringing and sometimes social anxiety/awkwardness that has them wary of giving offense. I'm happy to read about characters who curse like sailors, it's just not something where I have much experience.

That said, some of the pivotal moments in my stories come when somebody goes out of their comfort zone. A shy employee who's pissed off at her boss acts out by having sex with his daughter; a nice young lady from a conservative family decides to try escorting; aforementioned nice young lady accidentally drinks rather more than she realises and gets overly talkative.

One exception is Nadja from Loss Function. I can't remember how much I detailed on the page, but I made it clear that she swears like a trooper, and part of her introduction is her joking about butt-plugs at a funeral. Part of that is cultural, but she's also somebody who's cultivated an aggressive attitude to cover some major insecurities. Lucy in Red Scarf has issues with alcohol which I didn't explore in great detail because it's not her story, but it's hinted that she's been using it as an unhealthy coping mechanism.

3) Even if you are writing characters who are unleashed with regards to Q2, do you like your female characters to be fundamentally good or are you happy to have your men hook up with girls who are bad-to-the-bone.

Bold to assume there are men in the picture ;-)

Most of my female characters are imperfect but trying to be good. Partly because I think most people are, partly because it's something that's often undervalued in fiction - there's this sort of Very Serious Literature attitude that says if your story doesn't end in disillusionment and misery you're just a hack catering to unsophisticated readers. I think there's just as much room for sophistication in kindness as in meanness, and in particular in challenging the idea that people have to be perfect to make one another happy.

FWIW, the most evil character in any of my stories posted here was unfailingly polite and never did anything to people that they hadn't given permission for.

4) How do readers react to your characters? Are there any types of behaviour that get complaints?
(Note this is all about behaviour rather than appearance or agency, which we've discussed recently.)

I don't get a lot of complaints about my characters' behaviour. The few I can remember:
- when the love interest in a romance did something dishonest that hurt her partner (unsurprised by that reaction!)
- when a paid escorting arrangement between two people who cared very much about one another didn't end up with them getting married and living together happily ever after.

Put it another way. Very few people would argue that 'kindness' was a bad trait for any person to have. So I write a first date scene and on their way back from the restaurant, my heroine discovers an injured street dog and I spend the next 5k words describing how she nurses it back to health. My readers are sure to love that right as I am demonstrates a supposedly attractive trait - they'd much rather have that than me rushing to the bedroom scene surely?

It's certainly not unattractive, but I'd want to consider how that affected the story pacing. If you're aiming to keep them dangling by stalling on the sex scene, sure thing.

At the risk of reversing my metaphors, I will say that "kind to an injured animal" is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. It's something that could be spliced into almost any story. If one really wants to establish a character as kind, and make the audience feel that, I'd be inclined to think about what "kindness" looks like for that character in that particular story.

Nadja, for instance: she's brash and although she mellows a little through the story, she's never going to be Miss Manners. For her, kindness might mean seeing somebody caught up in complicated grief, and cracking a dirty joke to break them out of it. When she's hurt somebody, and can't find the courage to say "I fucked up and I'm sorry", it means trying to make amends with baked goods.

Jesus. What ever happened to men and women being equals? Or that people can be pushed so far IRL but snap in the end and push back? What about compromise? What about 'It's my turn this time' as she reaches for the strap on?

Apologies if my vision went blurred making sense of the discussion, but is a summary to say that your readers appear to want things pos/neg black/white sub/dom? Isn't that kinda boring to write and if so, why play to cheap seats? Writing formulaic porn I suppose has its place, but the real world is not so simple.

I dunno, maybe I'm the idiot, thinking that people can be fair and decent to each other?

Funny thing is, one of my favourite parts of writing BDSM is playing with the dissonance between the apparently violence/cruelty/inequality of the scene and the underlying relationship of care/affection/respect between the people in that scene.

 

[Bramblethorn]

What if a man looks like a stable stockbroker but is in fact also a bad boy on a motorcycle at weekends?

Who else can afford that expensive bike?

I feel this. Just finished drafting my first lesbian story. The plot required one of them to be slightly older than the other so I found using 'the older woman' the 'the younger girl' a good distinguisher. I'm going to double down on that strategy next time.

"The red-head looked down at her blonde lover."
"The bank manager squeezed tightly the hand of the clerk."
"The Cure-fan roughtly spanked the arse of the Ledhead."
"The Gemini took the Libra roughly from behind."

First person is your friend. Just sayin'.

 

[alohadave]

A shy employee who's pissed off at her boss acts out by having sex with his daughter;

I love this idea. I might try to work this into a story.

 

[TheRedChamber]

First person is your friend. Just sayin'.

But supposing 'I' get involved in a threesome in chapter two. What then, Bramblethorn, what then?

This story felt third person because it was about the couple rather than one more than the other. First person can end up either with a self-insert blank character or else it can become too much 'my' story. (although I ended up writing 'close third' anyway.)

 

[TheRedChamber]

Bold to assume there are men in the picture ;-)

Look I did make an ernest effort to bisexualize my original post - thanks for pointing out where I slipped up.

It's certainly not unattractive, but I'd want to consider how that affected the story pacing. If you're aiming to keep them dangling by stalling on the sex scene, sure thing.

At the risk of reversing my metaphors, I will say that "kind to an injured animal" is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. It's something that could be spliced into almost any story. If one really wants to establish a character as kind, and make the audience feel that, I'd be inclined to think about what "kindness" looks like for that character in that particular story. Nadja, for instance: she's brash and although she mellows a little through the story, she's never going to be Miss Manners. For her, kindness might mean seeing somebody caught up in complicated grief, and cracking a dirty joke to break them out of it. When she's hurt somebody, and can't find the courage to say "I fucked up and I'm sorry", it means trying to make amends with baked goods.

My example was intended to be slightly facetious. I think the point I was trying to make was that there are behaviours or characteristics that people want in partner, but don't necessarily find erotic or hot in stories and which writer may or may not need to focus on when writing. I guess as you write much longer stories you can weave in much more characteristics and as people get to know and like characters more deeply things like kindness get more important. I like your example of the cakes because you might see it as kindness, a lot of less sophisticated male readers might see it as 'ooh, domesticated.'

I was thinking about times when my characters are kind to each other and, for the romantic leads, its actually quite complicated because while they are certainly nice, respectful, polite to each other there's always an edge of romantic self-interest - my male character buys the boots my female character can't afford - kind or just a blatent ploy to get her to notice him. Side characters can be a bit more unquestionably kind in their role in the story.

Generally I don't go out of my way to establish that my female characters are 'kind' in the way I might for 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' or 'kookier than a box of frogs' probably because, at the level of fantasy, kindness isn't something I find fundamentally hot, though I'd soon notice if a real-life partner wasn't. On the other hand, I can imagine some Mills and Boon romance having the hunky CEO of an international company miss his flight because he finds a wounded dog by the side of the road and the female MC and readers swoon at how caring he is (I dunno, sledgehammer example, by all means finese it).

 

[NoJo]

Who else can afford that expensive bike?

Yeah, the Geezer Rider of today is often the Porsche Driver of yesterday.

 

[Bramblethorn]

But supposing 'I' get involved in a threesome in chapter two. What then, Bramblethorn, what then?

Something like this, perhaps:

"Come on, you." I wound her hair around my hand and led her to the sofa. "And you"—that to Lucy—"budge over."

Lucy squeezed back into the corner near the fire, and I lounged back across the armrest at the other end, my feet not quite touching her. I dragged Lily backwards into my lap, facing towards Lucy, and laid my right hand over Lily's belly as my left stroked her ribs, slid up to tease at her breasts. My fingernails skittered over her soft skin, leaving ephemeral white traces, grazing over her nipples. I whispered a question in her ear, and she shivered, and whispered "Yes".

"Isn't she beautiful?" I asked Lucy.

"Yes... yes, she is." Her mouth didn't quite close when she finished speaking.

"When she's wearing this scarf, she's mine." My right hand slid down, fingers curled to trail through her curls. "Do you want to see what happens next?"

Lucy's eyes widened, and in my head I counted three before she slowly nodded. Then my hand slipped down between Lily's thighs. She sighed, and brought her knees up, welcoming my fingertip as it dawdled over her labia, stroked and teased and opened her.

"You can touch her feet if you like," I said, and Lucy reached out as if hypnotised, took one of Lily's feet between her hands. Lily stretched out her leg—pressing my fingers tighter between her legs—and laid her foot in Lucy's lap. I pinched her nipple softly, and she sighed again, purred as I rolled it between my fingertips.

If I'd known those two characters were going to end up on a collision course, I might've given them more distinctive names. But even so, I don't think the "she"/"her"s in that passage are too ambiguous. I think it helps to have a bit of a story running through that scene; it's easy to get lost with "she kissed her, and then she kissed her back, then she stroked her back" but when it's established that Lily is the one being shown off, and Lucy is the one that she's being shown off too, then it's easier to interpret from context.

I had another threesome scene in "The Floggings Will Continue", again with two female characters who aren't the first person. Again, it helps to have the story arc informing the action - Kelly and Tim (narrator) are both hot for Sigrid, but not for one another, so when "she" is doing sexy stuff to Tim, it's not going to be Kelly.

This story felt third person because it was about the couple rather than one more than the other. First person can end up either with a self-insert blank character or else it can become too much 'my' story. (although I ended up writing 'close third' anyway.)

Yeah, that's fair. Like most tools, it has its time and place, and it needs to fit in with the other requirements of the story.

 

[NoJo]

What then, Bramblethorn, what then?

...so saying, he tapped his Meerschaum against the obsidian ashtray and refilled it with his favourite Trichinopoly shag, waiting for Bramblethorn's response. But it was too late, Bramblethorn lay dead, poisoned from the strychnine that TheRedChamber had added to his Battenburg cake.

 

[onehitwanda]

...so saying, he tapped his Meerschaum against the obsidian ashtray and refilled it with his favourite Trichinopoly shag, waiting for Bramblethorn's response. But it was too late, Bramblethorn lay dead, poisoned from the strychnine that TheRedChamber had added to his Battenburg cake.

I don't think poison works on Australians. We tried.

They sent Vegemite over as a warning.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't think poison works on Australians. We tried.

They sent Vegemite over as a warning.

And drop bears.

They instinctively go for an American accent, and bright Hawaiian shirts piss them right off..

Also, spiders.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Just for those who never believe the stories:

Drop Bears

Your nightmares just got worse - drop crocs, too!

 

[SimonDoom]

Just for those who never believe the stories:

Drop Bears

Your nightmares just got worse - drop crocs, too!

Picnic at Hanging Rock needs to be remade, with drop bears as the explanation for the disappearance.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Ok, we'll start with some music to set the tone of the thread...

In another thread that's going on at the moment about long/short stories (yes another one!), I observed that the reason why alohadave might be writing shorter stories was that his female characters are whipping their boyfriend's cocks out within the opening few sentences (and that this isn't necessarily a bad thing!). As my stories tend to overplotting and overwriting and cocks generally don't make an appearance until the second page, I decided over the weekend to adopt this writing strategy just for fun and see what I came up with. I ended up writing a couple of thousands words stream of conciousness, stream of filth - student union party, one of the girls is drunk and has her beau's cock out in semi-public, the 'responsible' FMC friend, grabs the male best-friend, and pulls the couple away to go and foursome in their dorm room; the girls set the pace and bring the condoms, the boys aren't going to risk their good fortune by arguing and, character-wise, could be replaced by dildo's if dildo's could cum. As I was writing it, I was reminded of the above song, and was thinking of using the names as an Easter Egg, which was what put it in mind.

Another story I'm writing has a drunken girl's night out turn into a first-time lesbian encounter. Thus, at the club, the character who has already decided what she wan't is responding to male enquiries of 'Can I buy you a drink?' with the words 'Piss off'. See, snappy writing! She'll later be 'manipulating' the MC into letting her crash at hers, rather than going home.

Thing is my characters are usually a bit more well-behaved than this, if not sometimes downright prim. As my nana would say if she were on this thread, is any of this behaviour 'attractive' or 'appropriate' for a young (or not so young) lady? The scenario I outlined about would have been one I'd be delighted to find myself in during my real student days (but alas), but as this is fantasy, maybe I'd prefer it if the ladettes needed fewer rum and Ribena's to get into those positions.

Anyway, all this got me to thinking about the behaviour of my female characters in stories.

I'd like to do another author's shooting the breeze about the topic. (Don't worry, I'll do a 'that's no way for a gentleman to behave' thread next week if this one goes well...) That is, I'm not particularly seeking advice or help, just interested in how other people approach this. The discussion questions.

1) How do the women in your stories behave? Do you have any particular types of behaviour that you gravitate to or avoid when writing?
2) How do you view drunken, crude, loutish, drug-use, violent behaviour? Do your women cuss like sailors (In or out of the bedroom) or do they hold to standards of behaviour that even an Victorian Finishing School ma'am would find unrealistic?
3) Even if you are writing characters who are unleashed with regards to Q2, do you like your female characters to be fundamentally good or are you happy to have your men hook up with girls who are bad-to-the-bone.
4) How do readers react to your characters? Are there any types of behaviour that get complaints?
(Note this is all about behaviour rather than appearance or agency, which we've discussed recently.)

Some possible archetypes to help the discussion along.

The Naive Girl - even if she's not a virgin, there's a lot she hasn't done and she'll need (between one sentence and 3 pages of) convincing before she does it. None of this was her idea, in fact she probably hadn't heard of this particular sexual practice until moments ago, but she really wants to make her boyfriend/daddy/prime minister happy.
The Quiet Freak - doesn't have many friends, keeps to herself, maybe mistaken for the naive girl until the MC gets her into bed and realizes that she has whole volumes of notebooks of stuff she's going to make him do and that he is in way, way out of his league.
The Frustrated Housewife - her life is boring. Like the naive girl there's a whole bunch of stuff she's never done, but unlike the naive girl, she's thought about it. A lot. But she'd never actually do it because she's moral and upstanding. Until...
The Femme Fatale - there's something she wants and (un)luckily for the MC he can help her get it because he'd never get within a million miles of her otherwise.
The Man-Eater - unlike the femme fatale, the thing she wants is a lot simplier to provide. She's still going to eat him up and spit him out though.

My FMCs - of which I have a dazzling range - tend to be:

1. Petite
2. Blonde
3. Flat cheated
4. Foul mouthed
5. Self-deprecating
6. Too much in your face
7. Sexually confident
8. Possessed of a weird sense of humor
9. Kind under a world-weary exterior
10. Fond of being tied up

I am just so creative to come up with all these de novo characters.

Em

 

[TheRedChamber]

My FMCs - of which I have a dazzling range - tend to be:

1. 
   
2. Blonde
4. Foul mouthed
10. Fond of being tied up

I am just so creative to come up with all these de novo characters.

Em

So a story request. Your MC is tied up and then the Dom gets the ball-gag and some hair dye.



I jest, although there may be milage in a forced make-over story...

 

[EmilyMiller]

So a story request. Your MC is tied up and then the Dom gets the ball-gag and some hair dye.



I jest, although there may be milage in a forced make-over story...

That’s some sick shit right there.

Em

 

[Duleigh]

Just for those who never believe the stories:

Drop Bears

Your nightmares just got worse - drop crocs, too!

Drop Bears are instrumental in my Geek Pride story, they live on the continent of XXXX