How Much "Fantasy" Do You Use?

[madelinemasoch]

I don't like a lot of "fantasy" as a writer. Meaning, I don't want the erotic core of the thing to totally take over the entire setting and all of its characters and just make it all one big unified whole with no conflicts or problems or enemies and adversaries to the good light thing that I'm encouraging in the stories. I hope that makes sense. For example, if I have a character who's a poor white man and blames it on immigrants when it's actually his boss's fault, and then he becomes a cuckold to his wife who's having sex with an immigrant, I wouldn't want the immigrants to also then fuck his boss's wife. I would want to portray the boss as the actual opposing force to both his prosperity and his cuckoldry, for example by making the boss even more racist and prudish and misogynistic. I find the opposite oftentimes happens and there's a temptation there to do that kind of thing on this site because (within site guidelines) anything goes and slathering on more of the specific "kink" for lack of a better term that you have on offer in the story will probably get your story more praise and attention, even if that means sacrificing either the integrity to the original idea for the story or the quality of its writing, which in my opinion go hand in hand anyway. I think this is how you get "black man fucks the whole family" stories and shit like this coming out on here.

It's my opinion that a lot of the stories on this site do this sacrificial deal with the devil (the market) so to speak–I'm not interested in idle chatter that justifies that state of affairs, by the way, so please don't tell me "that's just the way it is and we can't do nuffin about it"–and I find that phenomenon fascinating to see exactly how it got this way. I say all this to say I have a reason for not allowing "fantasy" to take over the story, and that's because the ideas do not want to be stereotypical or unrealistic beyond the boundaries that they set for themselves. There's a certain self-constructed standard that unfolds in my ideas for stories that I do not want to violate for fear of ruining the idea. I would rather polish and nourish what it is they want to be rather than try and force changes upon them in the writing that would affect the authenticity and quality of the piece. I think if you have so much sexual fantasy guiding the writing, it drags the actual story you write away from the original idea you had. What about you?

 

[SinclairGroupLLP]

I think it depends on the story, honestly. I know I have hit a variety of different types of sex scenes, from vanilla to kinky, and they all work within the confines of the story. If your world building makes that possible, it is doable.

Otherwise, I would agree. Sacrificing the plot for more sex seems like it would spoil many stories. There’s always the danger of the bridge too far. I’ve had to dial a few things back because I thought they were unrealistic or out of character, even though folks in the comments were begging for those scenes.

Now, all that being said and while I may be in danger of channeling my inner PSG, I think we’d be flattering ourselves to think that most of the stories on this site have plots beyond the sex in the first place. That would make the Black Guy Fucks the Whole Family thing less a corruption forced by the market and more likely just an extension of somebody’s wank session by the author, which was likely their goal in the first place.

For a lot of people, if you want them to choose between masturbation and art, they’re going to jerk off happily and ignore the art.

 

[SimonDoom]

I agree with the above comment. It depends on the story. I'm tolerant of a lot of fantasy in an erotic story. It depends on how artfully it's done.

I find as a reader that I'm much less picky and critical than some readers on this subject. I don't demand that the author's view of what's reasonable and realistic must match mine. If the writing is good I can put up with a lot.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Depends entirely on the story. I don't think PSG's wrong about the sex-to-plot ratio in most stories. But a story can be good with lots of sex and very little plot, and it can be good with lots of plot and very little sex. There are writers who I wish would do more relationship drama, pay more attention to character development and so on. There are also writers who I wish would, like, maybe try a little harder at writing the sex part (though in fairness, I'm a hypocrite here. Sex scenes are high-effort writing for me). Where that dial gets set ought to vary by story and by author. People have different skills and abilities, and people think they have certain skills and abilities, and sometimes those two things don't match up.

There's a certain level of fantasy that's necessary as lubrication in some categories, I think. Realistic I&T is not nice or fun. There's a reason it's taboo in the first place. NCR is another category that requires -- I think even by the rules of submission -- some level of fantasy for stories to be accepted. I'd be interested in a Quaranteam story, to name one popular series in the MC category, from the perspective of a woman with that fantasy lubrication stripped away; I'd expect it to be pretty horrifying, actually, rather than a male harem fantasy fulfillment.

If we're talking about physical mechanics, honestly, I can handle quite a bit of fantasy. I'm not likely to view one sex scene as better than another because Author A pays more attention to, like, the geometry of the scene than Author B. I expect a certain degree of porno logic and four-dimensional space when it comes to what fits where and how people are arranged, especially in group scenes.

Edit: I'll also say: for me it depends a lot on how the author lands the plane. I finished a novel today; the third part of a trilogy. The story across the three novels relies on a lot of fantasy -- two people meet, they fall in love and have great sex almost instantly, they do everything they can to stay together. And the ending of the final novel in the trilogy is so bad that it makes all that fantasy seem disrespectful to the audience, because it feels like it's been retroactively concealing what the story's been about the whole time. That kind of fantasy is, I think, a covenant between the author and the reader. The author has to make the payoff worthwhile.

 

[Bamagan]

Every time I check back in with reality, it's gotten worse (full of lies and balderdash, and I regret having any grasp of it whatsoever). I definitely gravitate towards the less realistic offerings here, and towards those where any conflict that exists is situational or circumstantial, as opposed to antagonistic. I can get drawn into a story with a 'villain' or 'drama', but I'd generally rather just read about one or more people enjoying some kind of sex.

 

[LisaMayTurner]

What exactly is the definition of "fantasy" as it's going to vary from one bunch of people to the next depending on what cultural and sexual tastes they have. I mean, Spiderman with a huge stiffy in his outfit and travelling on a London Bus wearing a sexy black latex skater dress and 6 inch heels in the company of two handsome men with a promise to come are two different things.

 

[AlinaX]

Unless they aren't...

 

[LisaMayTurner]

Unless they are...

 

[TheRedChamber]

There’s no one approach to erotica, yadda, yadda, yadda…However, I’d like to propose that the old tagline for Superman can be usefully pressed into service in most cases – ‘You’ll believe a man can fly!’

If the premise of the story is ‘man fucks her whole family’ then approach it with the reader promise that ‘You’ll believe a man can sleep with her whole family!’

In other words, try to construct the scenario in a way that suggests that this could actually happen. Each step on the road - ‘hey, why not let my lover bang my sister’ – ‘hey, why not let my lover bang my mum’ – needs to follow logically from the first – events can be unlikely, but just enough within the realm of ‘it could happen’ that the reader – who presumably wants it to happen – is swept along.

I remember critiquing a story on here years ago in which the (18yo for Lit purposes) high school student got an unexpected handjob from the girl he liked during movie-time at the back of the class. The problem with it was that the writer seemed (IMHO) to pay absolutely no thought to how this would actually go down. That is to say, there was no talk of how dark the room was, how loud or fascinating the movie was, or how coats were strategically placed. My closing comment was something like ‘I want to believe this, but I don’t.’

Readers want to believe and will give you a lot of leeway, but ultimately it’s up to you to sell the fantasy.

 

[madelinemasoch]

There’s no one approach to erotica, yadda, yadda, yadda…However, I’d like to propose that the old tagline for Superman can be usefully pressed into service in most cases – ‘You’ll believe a man can fly!’

If the premise of the story is ‘man fucks her whole family’ then approach it with the reader promise that ‘You’ll believe a man can sleep with her whole family!’

In other words, try to construct the scenario in a way that suggests that this could actually happen. Each step on the road - ‘hey, why not let my lover bang my sister’ – ‘hey, why not let my lover bang my mum’ – needs to follow logically from the first – events can be unlikely, but just enough within the realm of ‘it could happen’ that the reader – who presumably wants it to happen – is swept along.

I remember critiquing a story on here years ago in which the (18yo for Lit purposes) high school student got an unexpected handjob from the girl he liked during movie-time at the back of the class. The problem with it was that the writer seemed (IMHO) to pay absolutely no thought to how this would actually go down. That is to say, there was no talk of how dark the room was, how loud or fascinating the movie was, or how coats were strategically placed. My closing comment was something like ‘I want to believe this, but I don’t.’

Readers want to believe and will give you a lot of leeway, but ultimately it’s up to you to sell the fantasy.

This is actually a great point, because it kind of adds to what I said without sidestepping it. If you can get the reader to believe your fantasy then perhaps it doesn't trail too far. I can see a lot of writers here taking that as a bit of a challenge or aspirational goal to pursue.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I don't like a lot of "fantasy" as a writer. Meaning, I don't want the erotic core of the thing to totally take over the entire setting and all of its characters and just make it all one big unified whole with no conflicts or problems or enemies and adversaries to the good light thing that I'm encouraging in the stories. I hope that makes sense. For example, if I have a character who's a poor white man and blames it on immigrants when it's actually his boss's fault, and then he becomes a cuckold to his wife who's having sex with an immigrant, I wouldn't want the immigrants to also then fuck his boss's wife. I would want to portray the boss as the actual opposing force to both his prosperity and his cuckoldry, for example by making the boss even more racist and prudish and misogynistic. I find the opposite oftentimes happens and there's a temptation there to do that kind of thing on this site because (within site guidelines) anything goes and slathering on more of the specific "kink" for lack of a better term that you have on offer in the story will probably get your story more praise and attention, even if that means sacrificing either the integrity to the original idea for the story or the quality of its writing, which in my opinion go hand in hand anyway. I think this is how you get "black man fucks the whole family" stories and shit like this coming out on here.

It's my opinion that a lot of the stories on this site do this sacrificial deal with the devil (the market) so to speak–I'm not interested in idle chatter that justifies that state of affairs, by the way, so please don't tell me "that's just the way it is and we can't do nuffin about it"–and I find that phenomenon fascinating to see exactly how it got this way. I say all this to say I have a reason for not allowing "fantasy" to take over the story, and that's because the ideas do not want to be stereotypical or unrealistic beyond the boundaries that they set for themselves. There's a certain self-constructed standard that unfolds in my ideas for stories that I do not want to violate for fear of ruining the idea. I would rather polish and nourish what it is they want to be rather than try and force changes upon them in the writing that would affect the authenticity and quality of the piece. I think if you have so much sexual fantasy guiding the writing, it drags the actual story you write away from the original idea you had. What about you?

It seems like you've transitioned away from being a writer here to being a reader, which is okay. There are innumerable people here who only joined to be readers. You are critiquing what the other people are writing here, not looking for advice I think. Or maybe you do wish to get back into it; I don't know. You seem to be suggesting that you might. Or maybe you publish elsewhere.

In my own case, I haven't read anybody's story on here for over a year. There is only so much time I wish to give to Lit (it's already quite a bit) and somehow I've wound up publishing here and looking at AH, but that's enough for me. Thus I have less of an idea of what all of these writers are doing.

Thus I'm not sure that telling you how I write is going to be that useful for you. I have no idea of how what I do overlaps with what you want to read. If you wish, you could just read the stories on my list, although at least half of them haven't held up that well in the six years I've been doing this.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

How Much "Fantasy" Do You Use?


All of it.

 

[Bamagan]

How Much "Fantasy" Do You Use?


All of it.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Hmm, hmm, hmm... I find this topic both engaging and confusing.

I do agree that there are many stories that require too much suspension of disbelief, and they rarely belong to the SciFi&Fantasy, or Erotic Horror category. The stories where mom spies on her son removing his clothes and her first thought is that she wants to fuck him right then and there, without any internal conflict or struggle. There are many such examples across all the categories.

Personally, I also dislike such stories, although I wouldn't judge them quite as harshly as you do.
No matter how strong or kinky the fantasy is, I want the author to make me believe it, to take me there step by step and show me how two ordinary, if somewhat kinky people, can get there. It's the journey, not the destination that makes me enjoy a story. The fantasy doesn't have to be realistic, but I want the author to make an effort and not overstretch my suspension of disbelief, again, regardless of how strange or extreme the fantasy is.

That, of course, requires time and a gradual progression of a relationship, which isn't the way most authors here write. Short stories that focus on a single sexual encounter, or even longer/chaptered stories where the specific relationship is already in place, that's what most of Literotica is about, as far as I have seen. In most stories, we start with the destination already in sight.

The confusing part of your post is, well, the fact that you are the one saying this. The first time you started posting your stories, you asked for some feedback if I remember correctly, and I remember reading a chapter or two of your femdom series. That series, and I am quoting myself now, began with a femdom relationship between a domme and a white guy already turned to eleven.
In all the series you posted at the time, it was the same thing, as far as I remember. There was barely any journey - the dynamics of an extreme, kinky fantasy were already there from the very start.
Now, I am not calling you out here, but you can understand how this can sound confusing to me. I agree with what you posted, it's just that I never saw you practicing what you are preaching.

 

[Nynah]

I think there are a lot of readers here who want to find a story that is at least halfway plausible. If a situation is realistic enough that it could feasibly happen, then I find dipping into a little bit of fantasy for the payoff is just the right amount. Threading that needle is very tricky and I've read many stories here that start believably enough to just jump the shark two pages in. Not to say that those are bad, especially if you're just looking for the erotic parts (which is where the suspension of disbelief tends to do the most heavy lifting). After all, I'm sure most of us are here to find that escapism that real life does not hold for us.

If you're here for a story that gets right to the point and has characters doing the nasty, then this place has that in spades. Stories that set up situations and characters that are a bit more plausible and don't require as much buying into "fantastical" (read: highly unlikely) elements are fewer and far between but if done right, I find they make for a much more intimate and erotic experience.

 

[madelinemasoch]

I think there are a lot of readers here who want to find a story that is at least halfway plausible. If a situation is realistic enough that it could feasibly happen, then I find dipping into a little bit of fantasy for the payoff is just the right amount. Threading that needle is very tricky and I've read many stories here that start believably enough to just jump the shark two pages in. Not to say that those are bad, especially if you're just looking for the erotic parts (which is where the suspension of disbelief tends to do the most heavy lifting). After all, I'm sure most of us are here to find that escapism that real life does not hold for us.

If you're here for a story that gets right to the point and has characters doing the nasty, then this place has that in spades. Stories that set up situations and characters that are a bit more plausible and don't require as much buying into "fantastical" (read: highly unlikely) elements are fewer and far between but if done right, I find they make for a much more intimate and erotic experience.

I think you’re right about that.

 

[madelinemasoch]

I do agree that there are many stories that require too much suspension of disbelief, and they rarely belong to the SciFi&Fantasy, or Erotic Horror category. The stories where mom spies on her son removing his clothes and her first thought is that she wants to fuck him right then and there, without any internal conflict or struggle. There are many such examples across all the categories

That’s a great example of what I’m talking about.

The confusing part of your post is, well, the fact that you are the one saying this. The first time you started posting your stories, you asked for some feedback if I remember correctly, and I remember reading a chapter or two of your femdom series. That series, and I am quoting myself now, began with a femdom relationship between a domme and a white guy already turned to eleven.

Which one was it, if you could remember? It might have been Cuckold Camp or The Gauntlet.

In all the series you posted at the time, it was the same thing, as far as I remember. There was barely any journey - the dynamics of an extreme, kinky fantasy were already there from the very start.

Well, actually, in the Gauntlet, the submissive protagonist does not have any prior relationships to the characters he encounters throughout the story. The premise of both that and Cuckold Camp have fantasy built in to them, as well as the setting, which I think I was using as a bit of a crutch as a writer at the time, because it would probably be illegal to have places like that in real life and no such places exist, as far as I’m aware. In Black & White i was kind of being lazy as a writer and speedrunning the dialogue scenes as well as the setup to the domination, but the first chapter is actually the setup even though it directly implies the characters have history. A lot of my old stories were as you describe, though, and to the extent that they weren’t, the backstory was left undeveloped for a later date. In some cases this was important to character believability in a paradoxical way (Eleanor from CC is the best example of that) but it’s nothing I wasn’t planning on expanding upon in later stories.

Now, I am not calling you out here, but you can understand how this can sound confusing to me. I agree with what you posted, it's just that I never saw you practicing what you are preaching.

you’re right, but y’know, those stories were 1-3 years ago, and I wouldn’t be posting a thread like this if I wasn’t thinking about it as an author. Give me about 5 months and I think I’ll have something ready that leads you all the way up from beginning to end of one character’s journey into the kind of dynamics that I was exploring in earlier stories, fit with backstory and motivation and the kind of inner (and outer) conflict that leads a story to blossom to fruition.

I’m planning on and working on stories that tell us how these characters got where they end up. I’m more interested in that kind of thing now than I was before. And I think I’ve been improving in the shadows since I’ve been gone. I just don’t yet have one ready to share.

 

[YmaOHyd]

That, of course, requires time and a gradual progression of a relationship, which isn't the way most authors here write. Short stories that focus on a single sexual encounter, or even longer/chaptered stories where the specific relationship is already in place, that's what most of Literotica is about, as far as I have seen. In most stories, we start with the destination already in sight.

I just want to say -- I don't think there's anything wrong with slice-of-life sex scenes, especially in standalone stories. A story that takes thirty or forty thousand words to put the characters in bed together isn't necessarily more virtuous than one that starts with them there, as long as what's happening in the bed reveals something about the characters beyond Tab A Slot B. There's a whole school of thought that short stories shouldn't have a beginning or end; just a cut taken from the middle, and what happens before and after is left to the reader.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Well, the stock answer, "it depends".
There us an inherent willingness to suspend belief in this genre, but I don't care for stories that push the boundary into ridiculousness.

I'm okay with something unlikely happening, after all, that's part of what makes fiction interesting. When it becomes absurd though... oh look... sister wakes up one morning wanting to fuck her brother... uhh... now we've gone over the edge.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I'm curious: what do "too much fantasy ruins my reading experience" people think of directly sexual nonsense, like "A sixty-year-old man has four orgasms in the same night"?

-Annie

 

[NuclearFairy]

I'm curious: what do "too much fantasy ruins my reading experience" people think of directly sexual nonsense, like "A sixty-year-old man has four orgasms in the same night"?

-Annie

Depends, is this a biblical man who could live to be over 900? If so, then I might buy that.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Fantasy as what we fantasize about, not a fantasy setting? Perhaps girl-on-girl might be my fantasy, but I don't write my fantasy much.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I'm curious: what do "too much fantasy ruins my reading experience" people think of directly sexual nonsense, like "A sixty-year-old man has four orgasms in the same night"?

-Annie

I guess... is it part of the story? Presumably there's a reason the guy's 60. Presumably his age matters in some way. And if that's the case, then I'd probably be annoyed that he's got bifocals and arthritis and has to take pills before he eats so he can digest his food but also has implausible sexual stamina and appetites. If the sexual stamina and ability to perform contradicts something about the character, yeah, that's a problem. There's an otherwise-excellent story where a guy recovers from years-long impotence and has a multiorgasmic sexcapade, and that element always rang a little false to me.

But on the other hand, I don't mind living by the foreword to the Senior Year Memories series:

[...]we're living in the wide wonderful world of porno-land here, where clichés roam free and things might get a little unrealistic from time to time, please remember it's all in good fun.

If performance concerns aren't really part of the story, and the story is about people having good sex, I'm fine with male characters having six orgasms in four hours or whatever. I'm also fine with the female character(s) being implausibly hot, with someone having the body control to finger two people simultaneously while performing oral on a third, and with everyone having access to their hole of choice without space or geometry concerns in a foursome or a moresome. If that's the story, that's fine. That's a level of disbelief I'm willing to suspend, just like I'm willing to believe that Anne Hathaway is ugly until she takes off her glasses and gets a haircut for the purposes of the film. I find that a lot easier to live with than the sort of Hallmark movie third-act twist (they're getting married in an hour, but she thinks he's cheating on her! And he thinks she's cheating on him! We've been watching these two people have a relationship for 50,000 words now! Will they fix their problems in the next three pages?) that a lot of writers resort to.

Fantasy as what we fantasize about, not a fantasy setting? Perhaps girl-on-girl might be my fantasy, but I don't write my fantasy much.

Fantasy as in, I think, allowing the sex to drive the plot rather than the plot driving the sex. Having characters behave in contradictory ways in order to generate more of the kind of sexual kink that the story is delivering.

 

[StillStunned]

Whether it's a stroker or erotica, I think it's important that the sex should be both intrinsic and organic. As long as it's both of those, it can't be too much.

 

[madelinemasoch]

Another somewhat related thought to ponder: I think that the artist requires total freedom to create, and I think this freedom is inherent and constitutive of the human being whether governments and institutions and ideologies affirm or deny this right to think. There's this underlying groundwork of liberation to the entire act of writing it, so it's not something that has to be directly embodied in a character. It's already there within the author and the work.

Writing is basically the only thing that interests me anymore. I think I need a lot of complexity and all of the layering in a story. That happens when you do channeled writing and just flow onto the page, because you say more than you intended to. The words you chose have a multifaceted manifold of meaning within the context of the story and the realities that they give expression to. It's almost like a mystery that you already know the answer to without consciously realizing it at the time you encounter its vicissitudes. I need all that involved in order to be interested in something. Not to toot my own horn, but I think I must have a pretty high IQ. Not that it matters too much. You can be a great writer and not be technically intelligent at all. But I think that writing is basically the perfect medium, especially for the overthinker.