What I Wrote And Why - A Family Ritual

[EmilyMiller]

In my first two WIWAWs, I explicitly stated that I was looking for feedback on specific elements, but to respect the story for what it was. As in, with a fantasy story, don't say it's stupid because you don't like fantasy. If it's written in 1P, don't say you never read anything in 1P because you hate that style.

I think that's a fair enough request to make. If you're writing a WIWAW about your theme, you should state that that's the topic of the thread and criticism of style, or spelling, or length, or whatever, isn't what you're looking for. On the other hand, if you're expressly discussing elements of your style, you could exclude theme from the criticism.

This makes WIWAWs a more focused tool than general reviews by readers or other authors.

You shouldn’t have to explicitly say “don’t be a douche” in a WIWAW or any other context. Behaving like a reasonable human being should be the default setting.

Ad hominems are never OK and simply highlight that the person using them has nothing useful to say.

Say what you like (and dislike) about my writing and that’s cool. It would be nice if you did so in a civil manner, but if you can’t, then that’s on you. Most people seem OK with these basic rules of interacting with other people.

But go after me as a person and be prepared to be told to fuck the hell off. Or ignored. Or first one then the other.

When did politeness get so hard to do?

Emily

 

[8letters]

Here we are on page 4, and I don't think I've seen anyone engage with Emily's WIWAW. The points I think should have been engaged with are:
* Emily decided to publish an I/T story that "wouldn't be scratching the incest itch of most readers in the way that I assume they like." Was that disrespectful to the I/T readership?
* Emily has a section entitled, "Leaving Gaps", where she discussed leaving "space in the story for readers to insert their own interpretations." Did that work well in the story?
* Emily has a section entitled, "Realism". Did the story stand out for plausibility or implausibility?

My takes are (put "In My Humble Opinion" at the start of each of these bullet points):
* It's fine to publish a story in a category that most of the readership is going to dislike. They know where the Back button is. I did it with my one LW story
* Meh on "Leaving Gaps"
* Realism - in the issue she was striving for - would the eldest sister be allowed to raise her siblings - I think is fine

Bonus take!
When I first read the story, my feeling was that Emily published the story to lecture I/T readers on the horror of Real Life Incest. Now, I think it was just a story idea that Emily found exciting enough to sit down and bang out.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Here we are on page 4, and I don't think I've seen anyone engage with Emily's WIWAW. The points I think should have been engaged with are:
* Emily decided to publish an I/T story that "wouldn't be scratching the incest itch of most readers in the way that I assume they like." Was that disrespectful to the I/T readership?
* Emily has a section entitled, "Leaving Gaps", where she discussed leaving "space in the story for readers to insert their own interpretations." Did that work well in the story?
* Emily has a section entitled, "Realism". Did the story stand out for plausibility or implausibility?

Thanks for embracing the spirit of WIWAW - or at least as I understand it.

My takes are (put "In My Humble Opinion" at the start of each of these bullet points):
* It's fine to publish a story in a category that most of the readership is going to dislike. They know where the Back button is. I did it with my one LW story

I wanted to write the story - it’s not my finest work, but sometimes an idea won’t let you be. It couldn’t have gone anywhere but in I/T. So the question was publish or not. I decided to publish. And the sisterly incest aspects are portrayed less negatively than anything else in the story.

* Meh on "Leaving Gaps"

Yeah - I’m working on that

* Realism - in the issue she was striving for - would the eldest sister be allowed to raise her siblings - I think is fine

I can conceive of it happening - but I can also see it being a very infrequent thing

Bonus take!
When I first read the story, my feeling was that Emily published the story to lecture I/T readers on the horror of Real Life Incest. Now, I think it was just a story idea that Emily found exciting enough to sit down and bang out.

No desire to lecture whatsoever. My desire was simply, how can I write a story about incest that also reflects my own sensibilities?

No malice a forethought.

Emily

 

[lovecraft68]

My baseline suggestion is not to ask for critiques from AMD and O. They pursue personal agendas/prejudices that are not elements of a good critiquer. They have no more training for this than those they are critiquing. This was a good example of the danger of their critiques.

Exactly.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Exactly.

Well we agree on something.

Emily

 

[lovecraft68]

Well we agree on something.

Emily

Probably more than you think. I don't have any animosity towards you. I'm just old school blunt. I use negative comments and reviews as inspiration, sometimes I forget not everyone responds the same way.

I think you take things to heart here and get yourself unduly worked up, then post about it, and the best way I can say this is that it gives power to your trolls, or bad reviewers, when you do that.

We're the all powerful authors and should not be troubled by the peasants who are displeased by us. Let them throw rotten fruit at the castle as we drink their tears.

 

[8letters]

I want to dig into a couple parts of Emily’s WIWAW:

Nevertheless... I have a negative attitude towards incest. Thankfully, I have no personal experience of it, but the phrases it brings to my mind are ones like: abuse of power, control, non-consent, and damaged lives. It feels akin to rape to me, and I guess it often is, for all practical purposes.

I'd written father-daughter before, and then disavowed it; beyond role-play, I find the power dynamics icky. As for the son sitting on Mom's lap during a car journey, please! It would have to be sibcest (do cousins even count?) So my options were clearly: brother / sister (which kinda ends up the same as father / daughter or mother / son but with less gray hairs), brother / brother (I've now written Gay Male, but it's not that natural for me) or sister / sister. Given I love writing lesbian stories (and lesbian sex scenes) my path was clear.
:
So that became the core of my story. An attempt to contrast forced parent / child incest with consensual sibling sex. An attempt to contrast sex work with sex willingly entered into by the sisters. In the mini-universe I created, sisterly incest was kinda the least awful option. A way to try to reclaim the positive aspects of sex when these were not accessible to the women via more traditional channels.

First off, I want to discuss I/T on Literotica. In publishing incest stories on Literotica for over ten years, I have never had a reader request that I write a story about them and a family member. I can't even get people to suggest names for characters. They very much want that somewhere out there, there are two family members having consensual sex, but they can't imagine having sex with one of their own family members.

Secondly, I want to walk through Emily’s comments on the kinds of incest stories on Literotica.

I'd written father-daughter before, and then disavowed it; beyond role-play, I find the power dynamics icky.

As far as I can tell from news reports and such, father-daughter incest is the most common kind of incest in real life, and it is enormously destructive. There can be no consent when someone is emotionally and financially dependent on someone else. To me, it’s very, very hard to get around that power dynamic. In most of the father-daughter stories I’ve read on this site, the story starts with the daughter being in love with the father and wanting to have sex with him. That really smacks of wishful thinking; the kind of thing a father would use to justify sexually abusing his daughter - “She loves me, so she wants to have sex with me.”

I published one father-daughter story. The daughter was having sex with her father as a way to get him to spend more money on her. I came to feel that was an inappropriate thing to normalize and I had it taken down. I’m writing a new story that has father-daughter sex, and I’m working hard to build up why it would be a positive thing for the daughter to initiate sex with her father.

As for the son sitting on Mom's lap during a car journey, please!

It’s the mom who sits on the son’s lap. But as I wrote a WIWAW on how implausible mother-son stories are, I understand why Emily would pass on them.

So my options were clearly: brother / sister (which kinda ends up the same as father / daughter or mother / son but with less gray hairs)

I strongly disagree. The siblings are not dependent on each other for financial or emotional support. Having sex with a sibling is something they choose to do instead of being required to do it in order to keep living in the household. The icky power dynamic is not there.

brother / brother

MM sex is not popular with I/T readers, and you’d get a low rating and probably lots of negative comments.

sister / sister

FF-only sex doesn’t appeal to me, so I’ve not paid attention to how those stories do. FF sex is quite popular in I/T as a complement to a MFF threesome.

Lastly, to what I’ve thinking about since I read your story:

So that became the core of my story. An attempt to contrast forced parent / child incest with consensual sibling sex.

Your story is a noncon story. What Liz does to Tiff is not that different than what their dad did to Liz. Tiff is financially and emotionally dependent on Liz. Tiff does not choose to initiate sex with Liz and her two other sisters. Instead, Tiff turning eighteen is what triggers her having sex with her sisters. Now, Liz doesn’t physically compel Tiff to have sex with her and the other sisters, but she doesn’t need to - Tiff has no alternative to having sex with them. Tiff is accepting of her fate, but that doesn’t make it consensual. Liz was also accepting of her father having sex with her. The fact that the sex is noncon makes Liz’s talk of Tiff becoming a prostitute in order to support the family very, very icky to me.

Emily, you wrote what you wanted, and I'm fine with that. But I don’t think you understand exactly what you wrote.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I want to dig into a couple parts of Emily’s WIWAW:


First off, I want to discuss I/T on Literotica. In publishing incest stories on Literotica for over ten years, I have never had a reader request that I write a story about them and a family member. I can't even get people to suggest names for characters. They very much want that somewhere out there, there are two family members having consensual sex, but they can't imagine having sex with one of their own family members.

Secondly, I want to walk through Emily’s comments on the kinds of incest stories on Literotica.

As far as I can tell from news reports and such, father-daughter incest is the most common kind of incest in real life, and it is enormously destructive. There can be no consent when someone is emotionally and financially dependent on someone else. To me, it’s very, very hard to get around that power dynamic. In most of the father-daughter stories I’ve read on this site, the story starts with the daughter being in love with the father and wanting to have sex with him. That really smacks of wishful thinking; the kind of thing a father would use to justify sexually abusing his daughter - “She loves me, so she wants to have sex with me.”

I published one father-daughter story. The daughter was having sex with her father as a way to get him to spend more money on her. I came to feel that was an inappropriate thing to normalize and I had it taken down. I’m writing a new story that has father-daughter sex, and I’m working hard to build up why it would be a positive thing for the daughter to initiate sex with her father.


It’s the mom who sits on the son’s lap. But as I wrote a WIWAW on how implausible mother-son stories are, I understand why Emily would pass on them.


I strongly disagree. The siblings are not dependent on each other for financial or emotional support. Having sex with a sibling is something they choose to do instead of being required to do it in order to keep living in the household. The icky power dynamic is not there.


MM sex is not popular with I/T readers, and you’d get a low rating and probably lots of negative comments.


FF-only sex doesn’t appeal to me, so I’ve not paid attention to how those stories do. FF sex is quite popular in I/T as a complement to a MFF threesome.

Lastly, to what I’ve thinking about since I read your story:

Your story is a noncon story. What Liz does to Tiff is not that different than what their dad did to Liz. Tiff is financially and emotionally dependent on Liz. Tiff does not choose to initiate sex with Liz and her two other sisters. Instead, Tiff turning eighteen is what triggers her having sex with her sisters. Now, Liz doesn’t physically compel Tiff to have sex with her and the other sisters, but she doesn’t need to - Tiff has no alternative to having sex with them. Tiff is accepting of her fate, but that doesn’t make it consensual. Liz was also accepting of her father having sex with her. The fact that the sex is noncon makes Liz’s talk of Tiff becoming a prostitute in order to support the family very, very icky to me.

Emily, you wrote what you wanted, and I'm fine with that. But I don’t think you understand exactly what you wrote.

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. You are right about the non-con. But I thought about it differently. Not that the coercive factor was Liz, but the situation that the girls had been left with. The awful hand that life had dealt them.

As an aside, Liz is as damaged by what happened to her as any real life victim of sexual abuse would be. I’d have expanded on this if I felt I could manage to write much more. Her lived experience is truly awful. Her view on life is irretrievably twisted by it. My thought - not made explicit for reasons of not spoon-feeding the reader - was that she was in some way unconsciously aping her father, becoming him. So good spot. I’m glad you saw something like that, even if my view of it is a bit different.

But… beyond this, there is the clear affection that all the sisters have for each other. They have invented a society with its own twisted rules and expectations. That was meant to be a touch of satire about the role of women in society today (but you can get too cute with this stuff). Within these rules (which Tiff fully accepts the same way many women accept their roles in real society) there is consent. Liz even (wordlessly) asks Tiff twice. It’s their mutually agreed rules - probably bad rules, scratch that, definitely bad rules - that provide the framework, not Liz imposing her will on Tiff (but also see the damage inflicted on Liz, which clearly colors her actions).

I intentionally left this area kinda open to interpretation. So it’s totally cool for you to think about it in a different way. I’m merely responding to the “did I know what I was writing?” question. I did, but I didn’t ram my stance down readers’ throats [OK different image there for a second, where was I?] so your interpretation is supported by the story and is entirely valid. I’m merely sharing my interpretation.

Emily

 

[AchtungNight]

Good critique from 8letters (whose opinion I shared) and response from EM. I too felt Liz was copying her father and didn’t like it. Non-consent makes me squirm in a bad way no matter the circumstances. Reluctance is different, in certain genres like Erotic Horror nc is appropriate in my opinion, but I don’t like seeing it in other categories. Now it was Em’s intention to include it, so I’ll give it a pass ultimately. But that can’t make me enjoy the work.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Good critique from 8letters (whose opinion I shared) and response from EM. I too felt Liz was copying her father and didn’t like it. Non-consent makes me squirm in a bad way no matter the circumstances. Reluctance is different, in certain genres like Erotic Horror nc is appropriate in my opinion, but I don’t like seeing it in other categories. Now it was Em’s intention to include it, so I’ll give it a pass ultimately. But that can’t make me enjoy the work.

At the risk of repeating myself, the work was not intended to be enjoyable. Much like Jude The Obscure is not intended to be enjoyable (but with much worse writing in my story).

Emily

 

[EmilyMiller]

Just sayin’

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/what-i-wrote-and-why-just-keep-swinging.1606037/

Emily