How far will you go to research for a story?

[Inkent]

Hi

Not sure if I'm so out on a limb here, does anyone else try to explore or experiment to understand how an person (or persons) feel to then be able to use the experience to develop characters?

I'm no youngster, haven't led a path on the straight and narrow, therefore have a wealth of personal experiences to draw on. Throw in friends that don't mind me probing them when I have questions (most know I write on Lit)and I'm pretty well covered. But not completely, at least in my mind.

My wife is into BDSM, not heavily(in both senses of the word!) whereas it's ok for me, but doesn't necessarily get my motor running, although I did finally find what what does do it for me almost by accident. I'm more than happy to be a voyeur and watch my Mrs do her stuff as a dominatrix and I certainly have a nice story in mind to pull on the dynamics we have. I have some other stories I want to develop, but flounder on emotions that may be felt, so I can certainly "nudge" my Mrs and she'll happily come exploring with me.

We attended a BDSM market (LAM- London Alternative Market) and were looking at these big chunky leather collars with a bid stainless ring on the front. I asked if she would want to see me in one, she readily agreed then picked the one she liked, and put in on me. The affect it had on her was amazing, after standing back and looking she grabbed the ring and pulled me in, then basically said, if she was a guy, she would have a monster hard on right now. The dynamics of power (in day-to-day life, I'm the more dominant one) really turned her on. We brought it, and I've worn it since. The beauty of it is I can ask her how she feels, I know how I feel with it on, so I store away those thoughts and conversations for later use when writing.

I'v pushed the boundaries harder, I ordered a male chastity case which she received yesterday. It's one of the last pieces I need to have a decent library of emotions to draw on, last night she fitted it to me. Fuck, talk about turned on! I asked her how it made her feel, what could she imagine doing if she kept me in the cage. And with that, her mind exploded with things she could imagine doing, we are very open, so no holding back. We'll discuss how I felt, and how would I feel if put into the scenarios that were clearly turning her on. Without going into detail, she ended up having, and I'm fairly sure it was, the most intense orgasm ever.

I may have opened a Pandoras box, where I was looking to feel and understand emotions, will have to see how this plays out. Am I alone in looking at using real life scenarios created explicitly to help with writing?

 

[KeithD]

I went to the lengths of trying out sounding for an sr71plt essay (and several stories) here. I think that's pretty much "to the limit" on how far I'd go.

 

[SimonDoom]

I rely on real-life experiences all the time in writing, but that's not the same thing as research. When it comes to research, my answer is, "Not much." I don't write period pieces and I seldom write stories that involve scientific or cultural knowledge that I don't already have. So research isn't that important in my stories.

Some disagree but I don't think it's that important to "learn all about the kink" before you write about it. In the case of BDSM, for example, you can write a story based on what the BDSM kink means to you. There's no need whatsoever to master the "rules" promulgated by the BDSM community in the real world.

 

[litfan10]

My answer is I'm a product of my times. When I first started seriously writing I didn't have Internet or even a computer, they were still government, university or big business only. I was used to researching by telephone or library trips using lots of books or microfiche.
That's what you did. That's what you knew you had to do.
I feel there was a higher demand for accuracy and details back then so you did your due homework. But back then you knew instinctively when enough was enough and when it was time to write. Today it is easier to get sucked in a time hole of research.
Now with personal computers and the Internet research is so much less time consuming as long as you know when enough is enough so I still put my all in to be accurate and detailed. It's what I expect from myself when I write.
I relish in the ease and lack of time consuming of today.
Happy writing

 

[TheLobster]

Wikipedia and Google Maps, and that's if I'm feeling generous.

 

[lovecraft68]

I rely on real-life experiences all the time in writing, but that's not the same thing as research. When it comes to research, my answer is, "Not much." I don't write period pieces and I seldom write stories that involve scientific or cultural knowledge that I don't already have. So research isn't that important in my stories.

Some disagree but I don't think it's that important to "learn all about the kink" before you write about it. In the case of BDSM, for example, you can write a story based on what the BDSM kink means to you. There's no need whatsoever to master the "rules" promulgated by the BDSM community in the real world.

The people who write BDSM without consent because they want to are a disgrace. They're ignorant and pushing dangerous misinformation.

BDSM is more than a kink, its a lifestyle, and one with three simple, but important rules. People who write as every woman is not only submissive, but bitch gets hers as it should be, have no right being in the category, and wouldn't be on a site that knows what they're posting and not just begging for clicks. Most people like you who will write it based on your uninformed whims probably need to be spotted two letters to spell it. BTW, I've seen an example of your BDSM ideas. People have loose lips around here.

 

[StillStunned]

I went to the lengths of trying out sounding for an sr71plt essay (and several stories) here. I think that's pretty much "to the limit" on how far I'd go.

That's well beyond the limit of anything I'd do for the sake of research. Or for any reason, actually.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I love deep dives. For my current geek story, I needed to look into the murder of the last Russian Tsar and spent three or four days reading up on that horrid night in 1918 - even though that event barely fills a page in my story. But I felt CONFIDENT portraying the event, so time well spent I guess.

 

[KeithD]

I love deep dives. For my current geek story, I needed to look into the murder of the last Russian Tsar and spent three or four days reading up on that horrid night in 1918 - even though that event barely fills a page in my story. But I felt CONFIDENT portraying the event, so time well spent I guess.

Hope for that you included Robert K. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, pages 513 through 517, which is the best (and most harrowing) depiction of that that I've found. (I had to include a summary of that in a play I wrote on the Anastasia pretender Anna Anderson in her later years).

 

[AchtungNight]

I usually just write by the seat of my pants. But if necessary I will research something heavily. A kink or setting I have not used before, a new celebrity subject whose fans I want to appreciate my work, stuff I feel the need to learn more about. Particularly if it’s important to the story or inspiration.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Wikipedia and Google Maps, and that's if I'm feeling generous.

Yet readers will often pick some nits if you get it wrong. Somebody got me for calling Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons as My Name is Charlotte Simmons. He was a bit snippy about it too. Yes, I did correct it, but he was long gone by then. At least I spelled "Wolfe" correctly.

 

[KeithD]

Yet readers will often pick some nits if you get it wrong.

And, more often than not, they haven't gotten it right. They haven't bothered to do proper research themselves.

 

[gunhilltrain]

And, more often than not, they haven't gotten it right. They haven't bothered to do proper research themselves.

Yeah, I had one tell me that Marion wasn't a female name; it should be Marian. He even cited John Wayne's original name, which was Marion Morrison. (Sound like a Johnny Cash song, A Boy Named Marion.) I was able to cite a number of famous women named Marion.

 

[TheLobster]

Yeah, I had one tell me that Marion wasn't a female name; it should be Marian. He even cited John Wayne's original name, which was Marion Morrison. (Sound like a Johnny Cash song, A Boy Named Marion.) I was able to cite a number of famous women named Marion.

I’m not sure about English but Marian with an ‘a’ is decidedly a male name (masculine version of Maria) in a number of languages. Not to be confused with Marianne or Mary-Ann, of course.

 

[SimonDoom]

The people who write BDSM without consent because they want to are a disgrace. They're ignorant and pushing dangerous misinformation.

BDSM is more than a kink, its a lifestyle, and one with three simple, but important rules. People who write as every woman is not only submissive, but bitch gets hers as it should be, have no right being in the category, and wouldn't be on a site that knows what they're posting and not just begging for clicks. Most people like you who will write it based on your uninformed whims probably need to be spotted two letters to spell it. BTW, I've seen an example of your BDSM ideas. People have loose lips around here.

As usual, I have no idea what you are talking about.

I've never written a "bitch gets hers as it should be" story. My stories are sex-positive, and as positive about women's sexuality as men's. I also have not written a non-consent story, so far, and my only BDSM story so far is predicated on very clearly given consent. So, I have no idea what your point is. But I often don't know what your point is, because you make airy generalizations about people without backing them up with facts. It's your M.O.

If I like BDSM as a story kink, I don't have to give a damn whether it's somebody's lifestyle. I couldn't care less. The kink is whatever it is to me, and that's all that matters. Nobody else gets to define what I find enjoyable about it or stop me from reading or writing what I find enjoyable. All Literotica kink categories should be seen and treated as "big tents" to accommodate a wide variety of readers and authors who want to define those categories as they wish to. That's what makes sense for readers, and it's what makes sense for Literotica. The only people it bothers is those like you who constantly get angry about what other people are writing. I don't ever get angry about what other people write.

 

[lovecraft68]

Anything where that plays with lines of consent doesn't work under fake it until you make it. Any kink that is very specific doesn't apply either. Keep it simple witb group sex, milf, or some general category, you can get away with a lot. You mess with consent or a niche fetish or kink-Kieth's example of sounding for instance-readers will call BS.

I wouldn't wipe my ass with most of what's in the BDSM category these days, and I've lived that lifestyle for over 35 years. I know what you're trying to play off that you know.

 

[Bazzle]

I have another "line" of writing smoking fetish model backstories.

The why on earth did they start smoking, the why on earth do they still smoke, and the why share their habit with perverts.

I use that non fiction story to write my fiction. Basing it in some reality.

B

 

[StillStunned]

It's probably fair to say that there are ranges of BDSM. From clubs with strict rules and membership policies, all the way down to the millions of couples who experiment with tying each other up and taking out a paddle. I wouldn't ever presume to write about the former, but I'd be annoyed if someone told me I couldn't write about the latter because "that's not how our kink works".

 

[Bloomer73]

I do try to conduct research for my stories. I wrote a series on here called 'Amy's Lays by the Thames'. It was inspired by an audio book I listened to about a guy who walked the length of the Thames River from its source in Gloucestershire to the North Sea. In my book my heroine only went as far as Tower Bridge (though she went a lot farther in other ways). When writing I tried consulting maps and watching You Tube videos featuring other Thames workers to see how long it took them and tried to structure the tale accordingly. I also tried researching places for her to visit or stay and even researched information on wide house boats for one chapter. One thing I did do was when featuring pubs and inns that she stayed in or visited, I kept their real names when she just had a meal or spent the night but if there was any 'how's your father' I changed them. I don't know why. I even looked up how long after having sex a pregnancy test can work, for two of my characters who are friends of my lead character and when she's visiting them in Oxford they're so turned on by her stories about her hook-ups the couple have sex off page and the friend announces she's pregnant when she reappears at the end of the story.
I'm currently writing a multi-chapter story set in the 1970s. It's about a woman inspired by Mary Millington the famous seventies British porn starlet. I've had to do quite a bit of research relating to fashions, hairstyles and consumer products from the era and looking up places that existed back then. It can be quite annoying. As if writing about my own country in the seventies wasn't difficult enough, in one chapter I had my heroine go to Copenhagen to take part in a couple of Color Climax loops and I had to make a lot of things up as I couldn't find some of the information such as where CC shot their films. I did find out where they were based and got bios on some of their performers from a message board specialising in vintage porn and watched (purely for research purposes ) some CC loops. In one early chapter when she first moves to London and is staying with a Uncle and Aunt and she's along watching their TV I even looked up a website containing copies of the Radio Times to see what was on BBC 1 & 2 on roughly the night in question to give her something to watch. I'm currently writing a chapter involving my character meeting up with a married couple who are fans of hers for a threesome and when writing about how it was arranged I was very conscious of the fact that it would take weeks to set up as there would have t be exchanges of letters via snail mail to learn about each other and then learn the couple's address and phone number. Today this could be done in a day or two with an exchange of texts and/or emails.
When it comes to the sex itself I like writing in particular about group sex and girl-girl but I've never had group sex and of course I've no idea what girl-girl sex is really like from a first-hand basis which is frustrating as I must surely be getting things wrong.

 

[WrongFrog]

I spent several weeks researching the obscure and worship of a minor god of a major pantheon for the stories I'm about to release on Lit.

And I spent way too much time arranging and rearranging a bunch of dolls and doll furniture in order to figure out where to put all the moving parts in a sex scene. Plus filling out a spreadsheet to make sure I had the right number of hands, mouths, holes and hole fillers without any awkward extras- we're not writing about Cthulhu accidentally ever again.

If I'm writing about things I'm not personally experienced in, I'm looking for top rated reads in those fields. I still need to go do some snooping around Catholicism and Catholic churches for one particular piece. I'm referencing both a Bible and an encyclopedia of European folklore for a different book. I've been known to call my favorite and closest people to all them random sex questions because I know their kinks.

You can always skip doing heavy research and avoid needing accuracy by the simple truck of "add magic and stir"- that's the only way some of these very popular omegaverse series hang on to a scrap of readability.

 

[HopelessDreams]

I typically do more research than the bare minimum that I would need to avoid getting details wrong. This is because in the process I tend to become interested in learning more about the topic, the related info can inspire more ideas for the scene that I'm writing, and of course doing research can be a way to procrastinate if I want a break from the writing itself.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I just spent three days reading articles and watching videos on photography and all the technical bits of cameras to write a pro photographer character. Hardly the only time that I've done something like that.

Depending on the story, authenticity can be very important to me in my work. If I'm using a specific city as a setting, I'll have the google maps out for street names and neighborhoods and such.

 

[Inkent]

Like yourself, I like to go for accuracy, real places, I'll even look through clothing images to find a dress, etc, to describe in detail so it is in keeping with the character.

And the moment, I'm chasing down and gathering info on emotions things I've not experienced before, and I'm finding mixed information one, makes sense, as we are all individuals and emotions are quite personal.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Hi

Not sure if I'm so out on a limb here, does anyone else try to explore or experiment to understand how an person (or persons) feel to then be able to use the experience to develop characters?

I'm no youngster, haven't led a path on the straight and narrow, therefore have a wealth of personal experiences to draw on. Throw in friends that don't mind me probing them when I have questions (most know I write on Lit)and I'm pretty well covered. But not completely, at least in my mind.

My wife is into BDSM, not heavily(in both senses of the word!) whereas it's ok for me, but doesn't necessarily get my motor running, although I did finally find what what does do it for me almost by accident. I'm more than happy to be a voyeur and watch my Mrs do her stuff as a dominatrix and I certainly have a nice story in mind to pull on the dynamics we have. I have some other stories I want to develop, but flounder on emotions that may be felt, so I can certainly "nudge" my Mrs and she'll happily come exploring with me.

We attended a BDSM market (LAM- London Alternative Market) and were looking at these big chunky leather collars with a bid stainless ring on the front. I asked if she would want to see me in one, she readily agreed then picked the one she liked, and put in on me. The affect it had on her was amazing, after standing back and looking she grabbed the ring and pulled me in, then basically said, if she was a guy, she would have a monster hard on right now. The dynamics of power (in day-to-day life, I'm the more dominant one) really turned her on. We brought it, and I've worn it since. The beauty of it is I can ask her how she feels, I know how I feel with it on, so I store away those thoughts and conversations for later use when writing.

I'v pushed the boundaries harder, I ordered a male chastity case which she received yesterday. It's one of the last pieces I need to have a decent library of emotions to draw on, last night she fitted it to me. Fuck, talk about turned on! I asked her how it made her feel, what could she imagine doing if she kept me in the cage. And with that, her mind exploded with things she could imagine doing, we are very open, so no holding back. We'll discuss how I felt, and how would I feel if put into the scenarios that were clearly turning her on. Without going into detail, she ended up having, and I'm fairly sure it was, the most intense orgasm ever.

I may have opened a Pandoras box, where I was looking to feel and understand emotions, will have to see how this plays out. Am I alone in looking at using real life scenarios created explicitly to help with writing?

That certainly sounds like it could be written up into a good story!

How is the LAM these days? My story Wheelchair Bound? is based partly on it.

Most of my research is online - much use of Google Maps and recently reading many Nature papers from 2005 - but also finding porn pics to see what bits of someone would be visible in certain positions, and occasionally realising how a sensation being experienced could be described for a story.

 

[MyBareTorso]

Google... that's about it. As others have said, personal experience is different to research. I wouldn't say hanging out at nude beaches is research, but it certainly factors into my stories.