I know many of us have enjoyed reading (or re-reading) Passing Cloud’s lovely erotic tale of girlhood experimentation, “School Memories.” It’s a terrific piece, one that I’m happy we’ve included here in the archives at Juicy Secrets. Of course, the author never quite finished the story back in 2014, leaving us to wonder what might have happened next.
In a comment at the end of the last posted chapter, Drod says: “Perhaps our three hosts here could make a collaborative effort, and continue the series?” That’s an interesting idea, though I doubt we’ll actually do it, given that neither Cheryl nor myself are very much into collaborating with other authors (JetBoy, on the other hand, has a long and successful history of doing so). Plus, I have good news — we heard from the author recently, and we’ll be publishing a new chapter in a few days!
Still, Drod’s proposal made me stop and think: If I did choose to extend “School Memories,” where might I want to take it? As I spent some time pondering the question, I realized that I’m actually not very pleased with the direction the story is going. I was much more fond of the character ‘Sis’ when she was an innocent but eager naif, rather than a budding dominatrix.
Of course, this is not my creation, it’s Passing Cloud’s. The original author chose to have the plot go that way, the actors evolving as they were. Many of our readers probably like it just as it is. But if I had been the one to write the story, I think I likely would have decided to go back and make some significant revisions before publishing — probably throwing out everything from about the middle of Chapter 3, where Sis says she wants to be “in control,” and starting over from that point.
And as I thought about that, I remembered the struggles I had in writing my own story, “Secrets.” I’d been working on the piece off and on for quite a long time, for four or five years or more, when I realized it was going wrong. I had taken the narrative in a direction that wasn’t pleasing to me. I’d made a mistake, and I knew I needed to correct it.
Anyone who’s ever done any serious writing has probably experienced this. It’s not a good feeling — to know that you have to toss out so much of what you’ve written, discarding the product of many hours’ work. Still, it must be done.
This is somewhat unorthodox, but I’m going to let you have a look at some of the material I rejected. Below is a long passage, about 3000 words, that I wrote down in a fever pitch of excitement. It’s fairly hot, I think, and it might be good in another story, with other characters, but it’s not right, at least in my opinion, for this story, for “Secrets.” You may feel otherwise.
If you’d like to compare what follows with what I eventually published, go to this point in Chapter 9. As you can see, they’re very different. Anyway, here is the section I eliminated:
Around 5:30, I served our dinner on a picnic table on the back patio. We had a nice time together, enjoying the food, laughing and joking. When they’d finished their burgers and fries, I gave them each a big dish of ice cream, and they really enjoyed that. They went inside then to play in Kerie’s room while I cleaned everything up.
I was in my bedroom putting away some of the clothes I’d washed earlier in the day when the two girls came into the room. It was a few minutes before 7:00.
“Mommy, we have a question,” Kerie said.
“Uh-huh.” Tossing the last two pairs of socks in the drawer, I closed it and asked, “What is it?”
Kerie sat on my bed. “Um, it’s about what we talked about earlier. About our game and about not talking to people and stuff. You know?”
I sat down on the bed next to my daughter and patted a space for Melissa to sit down too. “Go on,” I said.
“Well, since I already told Melissa about it, it’s okay if we can talk about it, right? Long as we don’t tell anyone else?”
“Yes,” I smiled. “If you two want to talk about it, that’s fine. Just be sure you keep it only between yourselves though.”
“Yeah,” said Kerie, “and, um, since I already told Melissa about it, and since you know that she already knows about our game, would it be okay if I showed her how we do it?”
I frowned. “What do you mean, showed her?”
“I want to let her see. I wanna show her how I do it with you.”
I was completely taken aback. I didn’t know what to say.
“Please, Mommy?” Kerie begged. “She won’t tell anyone. She promised.”
I felt in a daze. The little game I’d started playing with my daughter just a few weeks earlier was now threatening to become an open sexual display — for the benefit of a 9-year-old girl!
“Please, Mommy?” She had her hands on my legs.
I was wearing cutoff jeans that left most of my thighs bare. My thin short-sleeve sweatshirt did nothing to conceal my braless nipples, which were now standing erect. Kerie’s risqué proposal may have caught me by surprise, but it was also exciting me tremendously.
I pretended to want to refuse, however. “No, honey, really I don’t think we should do anything like that. Our game is just for us. It’s private.”
My daughter slid a hand underneath my sweatshirt, reaching up to fondle one of my nipples. She could see the evidence of my arousal, and she knew what it meant.
I took her hand in mine and pulled it away. “Stop that, Kerie, it’s not polite.”
But I didn’t want her to stop. I wanted her to continue, and to do even more. I loved having her touch me that way. I even liked having her do it in front of another little girl — maybe especially in front of another little girl.
I looked at Melissa. Her big blue eyes were sparkling, her pretty face shining with interest and curiosity.
And it seemed that my daughter could tell, whether from the tentative tone of my voice or perhaps from my body language, that I did not really mean it when I told her to stop.
She began to pull my sweatshirt up. “I wanna show Melissa how your nipples get big.”
This time I did not take her hand away. I allowed her to lift up my top, revealing my breasts. I raised my arms and let Kerie pull the sweatshirt all the way off. I sat quietly on the bed between the two little girls, and I let my daughter touch me.
“See?” she said to Melissa. “Look how big they get.”
She fingered my nipples, using both hands. Already erect, they grew even longer and harder.
“Do your mom’s nipples get like that?” Kerie asked.
“Sometimes,” answered Melissa, “like when she gets out of the shower.”
“But you’ve never touched ‘em, right?”
“Uh-uh. Not like that.”
Kerie was playing with my nipples, gently tugging at them and twisting them between her fingers. It was making me very wet.
“Do you want to touch them?” she asked Melissa.
“Okay.”
Now I really knew I should stop them. It just wasn’t right for a grown woman, an adult, to engage in sexual activities with children. I should never allow this 9-year-old girl to touch my nipples. But I did.
“Mmm,” I moaned as I felt Melissa’s little hands on my breasts.
“See,” Kerie said, “she likes it.”
Melissa not only fingered my nipples, but extended her hands to caress the sensitive skin around them. Her hands were too small to cover my breasts completely, but she held them and gently squeezed them.
“They’re really nice.” This was the first thing she’d said to me since they came into my room. “I like your tits a lot, Ms. Gregory.”
“Thank you, honey.” My voice was thick with arousal.
My daughter began to undo the buttons and the zipper on my shorts. I didn’t stop her. She tugged the shorts down my legs. Now I was wearing only a pair of blue cotton panties. In the center of the panties was a large dark spot, where my dripping pussy had made them wet.
“Look,” Kerie pointed. “When my mom gets excited, she gets wet like that. Your mom probably does too, when she, um, masturbates. Can you see how wet my mom’s undies are?”
“Yeah,” breathed Melissa, bending her head down between my legs to stare at me.
Kerie was wearing a long yellow t-shirt over a pair of flowered leggings. She suddenly pulled the t-shirt over her head and off.
Grinning, my daughter pointed at her flat chest. “I don’t have any boobies at all yet.”
Then she looked at Melissa. “But you do. Show my mom your little boobies.”
“Okay.”
The little girl lifted up her tank top, letting me see her small breast bumps. She looked down at them. “I hope they get bigger. My mom’s aren’t very big, though.”
She looked at my tits again. “I like yours, Ms. Gregory.” And she put her hands on them once more.
I inhaled sharply.
My pussy was tingling, my erect nipples throbbing with desire. The combination of being naked, or nearly naked, in front of the two girls, then seeing this lovely child’s tiny little titties, and having her hands on my breasts, was driving me wild.
“Take your shirt off,” Kerie told Melissa.
After the girl did, my daughter asked her, “Do you have any hair yet, down there?”
Without waiting for an answer, Kerie pulled her leggings down below her hips and tugged her panties down too, letting us see her hairless crotch. “I don’t.”
Melissa smiled as she looked at her friend’s smooth slit. Then she got off the bed and opened her shorts, letting them fall to the floor. She pulled her panties down too, to her knees, and proudly displayed her pussy to us. “I started getting some a little while ago.”
Whatever she had was still so sparse that from where I was sitting, which was only two feet away, I could barely see it. It seemed more like light brown peach fuzz than actual pubic hair.
“Cool.” Kerie stepped closer to admire Melissa’s evidence of maturity. Then, as she sat down on the floor to finish pulling off her leggings and panties, she said, “Take off your undies too.”
When they were both naked, they climbed up on the bed beside me.
“Mommy, move over there and put your head on the pillow.”
I did as my daughter instructed. Then she knelt between my legs and started tugging on my panties. I lifted my hips to allow her to remove them.
Holding the blue cotton panties in her hands, Kerie commented, “Look how wet they are inside.” Both she and Melissa touched the dark spot, feeling the sticky wetness on their fingers.
Kerie pushed my thighs apart, then laid on top of me. I put my hands on her little bottom. Her skin felt warm.
“Come over close so you can watch us better,” she said to Melissa.
And then, with a barely pubescent 9-year-old girl sitting naked at my side, another girl, my not yet pubescent 8-year-old daughter, began moving her naked body against mine, showing the other girl the ‘game’ we played, showing her how she could fuck her mommy and make her come.
It took me longer than usual to climax. I was nervous about having Melissa there with us, although at the same time I was also very excited by it. But instead of being able to concentrate solely on the sensations that Kerie’s body was bringing me as she thrust her little pubis against mine, I kept glancing over at Melissa to see how she was reacting.
She was wide-eyed, as might be expected, but she also showed some definite signs of arousal. One hand was at her tiny breasts, gently squeezing them, and the other was between her legs. I wasn’t sure if she was old enough yet to masturbate, but she seemed to have the right idea.
The girl’s eyes kept going from my tits, to my face, to my tits, to my legs and Kerie’s bottom as we moved together, and then back to my tits. She seemed to love seeing the way my breasts would jiggle each time my daughter pushed against me.
The distraction of having another girl there watching us delayed my orgasm, but it certainly didn’t prevent it.
Kerie kept moving on me, up and down, faster and faster. But she could sense, perhaps, that I needed a little extra stimulation, so she put her little hands on my tits and began squeezing my erect nipples, while at the same time, she said, “Mommy, I’m fucking you. I’m fucking you with my pussy, Mommy. Do you like it when I fuck you, Mommy?”
Hearing that really made Melissa’s eyes go wide.
When Kerie grabbed my tits that way, it surprised me, and her vulgar language stunned me for a moment, but my shock changed almost immediately to excitement. Yes, I loved it when she fucked me! And I loved having her hands on me! Yes, I wanted her to make me come! Make me come right in front of Melissa!!
I started to say those things to her, but before I could utter a word, a huge orgasm overtook me. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Without warning, my whole body was contracting in, then exploding out, then doing the same again. It was the most intense orgasm I had ever felt—
—and someone was crying out, screaming. I had a vague idea that it might be me, but everything all around was dark or foggy, no, it was red and steamy, no, white hot, burning, ah, now it was black and smooth and oh so sexy.
Minutes passed, I don’t know how many, until I came back to my senses and found myself laying on my back in my bed, naked and sweating. My legs were flung wide apart and my pussy was dripping wet. There were two little girls with me, both nude, Melissa on one side, Kerie on the other. They were looking at me and smiling.
As I opened my eyes and glanced around, taking in the scene, my daughter leaned over to give me a quick kiss on the lips. “Was that a nice one, Mommy?”
“It was — oh my god, I hope I didn’t scare you, Melissa.” I put my hand on the girl’s knee.
“Uh-uh,” she said. “It was awesome.”
“Yes, it was,” I grinned. “Awesome is a good word for it. Wow.”
I looked up at Kerie. “It was definitely a nice one, sweetheart. A big one.”
“It’s called an orgasm,” said Kerie to Melissa.
“I know that,” answered the girl, slightly peeved.
“There’s another way I can do it with her too,” Kerie went on, “make her come, I mean. Do you want me to do that now, Mommy?”
“Do what, honey?” I shook my head a little, trying to clear the post-orgasmic haze.
“Make you come with my hand, with my fingers inside you.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I —”
But my daughter did not wait for my consent. Before I knew it, she was down between my legs, spreading my pussy lips apart.
I meant to object. I meant to stop her from doing this in front of Melissa, but when she started rubbing my clit as she slowly slid a finger into my vagina, it felt so incredibly good that I could not find the will to protest.
Taking my breasts in my hands and gently massaging them, I closed my eyes to focus on the intoxicating physical sensations as my body responded shamelessly to Kerie’s touch. I felt laden with moisture and warmed all through, like a sponge dipped in a hot bath. I knew my pussy was dripping wet. It made it easy for her to put another finger inside me and begin fucking me harder.
I raised my knees, opening my thighs as wide as I could. I lifted my pelvis from the bed, offering my cunt to my daughter. As I pinched my nipples between my fingers, I felt a climax beginning to build.
“That’s right, baby, fuck Mommy,” I heard myself say. “Fuck’s Mommy’s pussy with your finger, and make me come.”
Kerie grinned at Melissa. “See how much she likes it?”
“Wow.” The other little girl was kneeling next to my daughter between my legs. They were both staring at my wet cunt.
“You want to watch, Melissa?” I asked. “You want to watch me come while Kerie fucks me with her fingers?”
She nodded eagerly.
Kerie put two fingers inside me and pressed them in deep as she continued rubbing my clit with her other hand.
I closed my eyes and squeezed my nipples. “Oh god it feels so good. I’m gonna come on your hand, baby.” I was very close to another climax.
Then I made myself open my eyes again. I wanted to see this, to fully understand and accept exactly what was happening.
My daughter, my 8-year-old little girl, had her fingers in my vagina and was moving them in and out, intent on giving me an orgasm — while her best friend, a cute little 9-year-old girl, was watching intently.
I was having sex, lesbian sex, with a minor, and not just any minor, but my own child. It was incest, and I loved it.
“God, fuck me, Kerie,” I urged, “fuck me hard and make me come!”
And with those words, I did begin to come.
I think I must have squirted, which is very unusual for me. I know that when I finished I was much wetter between my legs than I normally am, and Kerie’s hand was literally dripping with my fluids.
“Oh my god,” exclaimed Melissa.
“You wanna try it?” Kerie asked the girl.
“Really? Can I?”
“Sure. Here, I’ll show you how.”
Melissa bent down, very close to my pussy.
I was still short of breath after my orgasm, but I tried to object. “No, Kerie, we shouldn’t. Not without…”
I was about to say, ‘not without her mother’s permission’, until then I realized how absurd that would sound. What mother would allow a 9 year-old girl to put her finger in a woman’s pussy?!
So, I just laid back, spread my thighs wider apart, and let it happen.
“Put one hand up here.” Kerie was showing her friend how to stimulate my clit. “And rub like this.”
I’d barely come down from one climax and now they were trying to give me another.
“You have to make sure she’s open all the way, so push her apart like this.” My daughter was separating my labia. “Then rub your finger in here, so it gets really wet and slippery, and then just slide it inside. See where that hole is? That’s her vagina.”
“This is so awesome,” I heard Melissa say.
Then I felt a finger pressing inside me. I groaned. “Push it in further,” I whispered.
Melissa was just a tiny girl, barely four feet tall. Even though she was six months older than my daughter, she was shorter than Kerie, so her little fingers weren’t very long at all. But it still felt so nice to have her reaching up inside me, probing my cunt, exploring my hot wet sex.
“Oh god yes goddamn yes fuck me, fuck my cunt,” I whispered.
The child began moving her finger in and out.
“That’s right,” instructed Kerie, “and you can put another finger inside now.”
I wondered what Rose, Melissa’s mother would think, if she could see us now. Of course, right at this moment Rose Harper was hopefully being fucked by my own sister, so she might have other things on her mind. God, I love having sex, I thought. Especially sex with little girls, like these two.
Melissa was eagerly fucking me with one hand while her other hand massaged my clit, but it wasn’t quite enough.
“Kiss me,” I demanded.
“What?” asked Kerie.
“Melissa, kiss me down there,” I said. “Kiss my pussy.”
“Okay.”
The child put her mouth down to my sex and began kissing me. That was all I needed. I came again, loudly and wetly.
When I recovered, I looked down between my legs and saw that the two girls were taking turns rubbing their hands inside my slit to get them wet with my juices, and then they were tasting me, licking and sucking their fingers.
“Do you like it? It tastes good, right?” asked Kerie.
“Mm-hmm,” Melissa answered, nodding as she sucked on her fingers.
It was the hottest, naughtiest, sexiest night of my life.
“What else do you want to do?” I heard Kerie say.
“Can I touch her tits again?” asked Melissa.
“Sure.”
My daughter had apparently taken ownership of my body, and was offering it as a sexual playground to her little friend. Of course, I didn’t mind, I didn’t mind at all.
They moved up by my chest, one girl on either side of me.
“I like your tits, Ms. Gregory,” Melissa said.
“Call me Shelly,” I muttered, still in a post-climactic daze.
That made them giggle.
“She likes it when you touch ‘em,” Kerie said. Her hands were on my breast. “Rub the nipple and make it hard.”
Melissa’s hands were now on my other breast.
“You can suck on them too,” I told them.
Along with ownership of my body, I’d apparently lost possession of my senses as well. I was saying things I never would have allowed myself to say in a normal state of mind.
“Really, Mommy?” asked my daughter.
“Yes, suck my nipples. Both of you.”
And they did. The girls each latched onto a nipple and began sucking like babies. I closed my eyes, relishing all the wonderful sensations as I slid a hand between my legs, massaging my clit.
We went on this way for a while, until Kerie said to Melissa, with a grin, “You want to try fucking her?”
“With my fingers again?”
“No, with your whole body, like I did before.”
“Oh! Really? Can I?”
“Of course you can. Mommy loves it!”
That’s about as far as I got before deciding I wasn’t happy with all this. Sure, it’s arousing as hell, to me anyway, but it doesn’t seem to fit within the story I was intending to write.
The segment posted above gives Kerie a completely different personality, much too knowing and too bossy. It also gives Melissa undue prominence, making her a major character when what I really wanted at the time was to shift the emphasis back to Valerie and her family. So, I decided this had to go. (I didn’t entirely delete it, however, or you wouldn’t be able to see it now; instead, I created a duplicate copy of the story and made my revisions there, keeping this just in case I ever changed my mind and wanted to go back to it.)
This is how the process of writing works, in my experience. It’s not often I will throw out as much as I did in this case, but it’s certainly not unusual for me to delete several paragraphs or even a couple of pages and start over again if I think I’ve gone wrong. Of course, I hate to admit, even to myself, that I’ve wasted time writing something I won’t use, but I’m almost always much happier with the results when I’m done.
An enlightening look at the process, NM. And you’re right, while very hot, it doesn’t really fit with the innocence of the previous part of the story. I haven’t really been reading School Memories as I wasn’t enjoying the budding dominatrix part of the story, but that’s just me. It’s the author’s story and it goes the way they want and many here do seem to enjoy it. It’s one of the great things here at Juicy Secrets, you’ll eventually find something to whet your appetite.
Yes, or maybe “wet” it, hee-hee. 😉
As a working editor in the eighties I showed an author a quote from Dr Samuel Johnson (he of the dictionary) in which he advised authors when revising (a necessity) to remove all the passages they thought were wonderful.
It wasn’t the better known “murder your darlings” advice, I’d remember that one, but she was horrified at the time.
However, when she had finished that book, her biggest project at that time, she did agree. The ‘purple’ passages were nearly always cut the next day.
Draft, revise. Draft, revise. Draft, revise. It’s the only way.
Just a thought.
You really are a naughty, and devious, Mommy.
On the pretext of a writing lesson you get to show us, all of who love stories of mummies having sex with their daughters, a really hot passage in which two lovely little girls fuck a lovely naughty mommy.
Great idea. Thank you.
Well, as you can see, Poppa, there is madness to my method. 😛
I’ve picked up a lot of writing hints and tips over the years. Not all of them stayed in my mind though. But I have definitely taken this one to heart.
I used to write fanfiction many years ago (my stuff is still on fanfiction.net, I’ve lost the login details so it sits there mocking me) and I always hated having to delete large reams of text even if the story wasn’t working. It always felt like I’d put so much time and effort into those words that I didn’t want to let that all go to waste.
Reading this advice made me realise that’s what I was doing, and that it’s okay to excise even substantial amounts of work if it needs to go.
I’m busy working on a story right now and this has already helped me immeasurably.
So I know it’s been a few years but thank you.
Ooookay, so I replied to a comment instead of the actual post. That makes me look clever.
Get it together, Mouse!
In the context of Secrets, I can see where this direction wouldn’t have fit the bigger story. Kerrie is definitely too young to be taking control. Shelly certainly isn’t the type of woman to have sex with little girls without parental consent.
I also think that the ending to Secrets was a bit rushed. Given that both Shelly and Jae have big nipples, I would have loved to read about them rubbing their nipples on Nettie’s clit and slit. After all, Shelly has rubbed her cunt on Nettie’s chest.
Another thing that I would have loved to see in the epilog is Kerrie eventually meeting Julie, Katie and Molly. It would have been a fitting way to tie both series together and set up a potential sequel.
Excellent blog post, NM! You are so correct about the need at times to go back and start over, so to speak. I have had to do this countless times. It’s like killing your young. I have even kept pieces I have cut from chapters/stories on what is called the “Dashboard” here, which houses all the posts, comments, and such, but includes the ones you as readers cannot see yet.
I do my work on the Dashboard, and my fellow writers can tell you that often what you see is not how it began. NM suggested a great deal of shifting of scenes that I had written over several chapters, back when I was working on Part Two of I Was the Daughter of a Porn Star. After considering her suggestions, I realized she was 100% right, so a great deal of rearranging, some added material, and some deletions had to be done.
I’ve had to eliminate thousands of words when I realized the story had headed in a totally wrong direction.
Naughty Mommy has given you quite a prize in this blog post, especially if you are interested in writing yourself. I find it always enlightening to discover I am not the only writer who faces a dilemma. And I want to thank Naughty Mommy for sharing this with you. It shows she cares about what you, the reader, finally sees. I can assure you (as I’m also certain I need not do) that there are far too many stories out there on the WWW that the writers did not care one bit about as far as polishing the story to be what it needs to be.
Thank you, NM!!
Thank you, Cheryl! xoxo
It’s an easy pitfall to drop into, taking your story in a direction that leaves you feeling dissatisfied… a bad situation made even worse when you’ve posted those chapters for the world to see. I recall some very good stories from various erotic sites that went wrong that way — and in nearly every case, the author simply gave up on the whole thing.
That’s why I prefer not to post a story until it’s finished, no matter how long it is. Unfortunately, that leads to my having a bunch of mostly good but incomplete works, all in some stage of completion. I put in just as much writing time as a man with a full-time job and a wife is able, but you good people have only seen about a third of the actual text I’ve churned out. Many of the “new” stories of mine that appear here were started years ago. A totally crazy approach, admittedly, but it works for me.
One of my main pieces of advice to would-be authors is to never make a story public until you know how it will end. You may still go on unwelcome digressions, but long as that beacon of a settled conclusion is always in range of sight, your story will make it home safely. (And if you do throw in one of those digressions, don’t post/publish it until you know how that will end!)
I’m lucky enough to not ever have needed to discard a huge chunk of a story, but do have to constantly eliminate small bits that horrify me on a second reading. I’m constantly striving for a kind of wild poetry in my erotic prose… a writing approach that can produce some of the most godawful crap you ever read in your life. (That crap is, I’m certain, still lurking in some of my stories here, mainly because I failed to catch it.) Anyhow, I’ll read a passage the day after setting it down and mutter “What the fuck was I thinking?” then terminate it with extreme prejudice. Be glad that you don’t encounter more of these glitches in the JetBoy lexicon.
I salute Naughty Mommy for having the courage to share what is, for her, a direction that she decided was wrong for her story. Then I applaud her because the excerpt she provides, though inappropriate for “Secrets,” was still hot as a smoking pistol. Would that all our mistakes could be so damn good…
That’s a good point, JetBoy, about deciding how a story will end before starting to post it. I remember reading somewhere a long while ago a tip from a novelist who counseled: “Write the ending first.” Excellent advice, but also very challenging. I’ll admit that in my own writing I often fail to follow that approach.
Thanks for your comment!
well very interesting to see what’s on the cutting room floor , and yes although it didn’t fit with the story I am glad we got to see the ‘out takes’ because it made me cum just the same.
One of the first questions I asked my students was “Where do you begin your writing?”
I was not teaching fiction-writing, which I don’t think can be taught, you need to learn it.
Ninety-five per cent would say, “At the beginning” with a look that said, “Isn’t it obvious?” The smug five percent, who probably read or heard someone like NM’s novelist, would say “At the end.”
My reason for asking the question was that it is much easier to write five to ten thousand words of a report or a proposal if you know where you are going with it.
I think I’ve said here before, that Iris Murdoch, a very successful English novelist in the 1960s and 1970s, said that thinking about a novel was much harder than writing it.
Not everyone can write in such a disciplined way, and you need to learn your own way, but it will help you to write well and develop characters coherently and keep them acting consistently, if you know where you are taking them.
Whatever you do, keep writing. It’s a skill and you improve it by practice.
If you create true-to-life characters (true to you, at least), then the story can essentially be handed over to them… let them tell you where to take the plot. It’s like creating friends who pitch in on the task of writing. Sometimes I’ll lay down a sentence or line of dialogue, then imagine the relevant character shaking their head, telling me clear as a bell that No, that doesn’t make sense, I wouldn’t do that, I’d say it this way instead. They know.
I tried my hand at writing a science fiction novella several years ago. It was in an established setting so I had some basic parameters to work with. At one point I was considering writing an entire series. I knew the ending (established in the setting) point of view (an alien species hostile to Humanity at that point) and even some of the peripheral characters (again, established in the setting). What made me stop was the realization that I was playing in someone else’s sandbox. The novella I had written was in a time period that was effectively a blank slate (two paragraphs of obscure background material). I wrote that story (and parts were posted on the website of the game associated with the setting) but decided to end the project as I realized that while I had a good concept, my writing was at fan fiction level at best. I had no editor or collaborators to tell me if I was losing focus or jumped the rails entirely (it also didn’t help that parts of the story were told in third person form as I had a narrator at the beginning of each chapter). The writers here are far more talented than I could ever hope to be.
Keep writing, Charles… that’s my advice. PoppaBear says it too, just up above: “Whatever you do, keep writing. It’s a skill and you improve it by practice.”
My early attempts at erotica were pretty unimpressive, but I stuck to it and began to see improvement with the passage of time. Think of what you’ve got as a writer’s muscle, one that gets stronger and more capable with regular exercise. Time to visit the gym in your head, Charles, and “feel the burn.”
(And if you decide to try your hand at lesbian fiction, send it to us when you’re done!)
If I get the free time and urge, I’ll probably take another stab at science fiction. I had an alternate version of the story I had written in mind, but it was only a short story. If I locate my notes, I may dust it off at some point.
Yes, Charles, do keep at it. I sometimes cringe reading my early stuff. But I’m one of those people who can’t NOT write. Lisa can vouch for that. When I’m deprived of being able to write for more than a few days, I get really bitchy to say the least. Lisa says it’s my therapy. I think she’s right.
Very interesting blog NM. I guess I have this to look forward to, hopefully not too soon though. JetBoy mentioned ‘not posting a story until it is done.’ I have followed that advice with the two stories I have posted so far. I think maybe waiting awhile after they are done and then rereading them before posting would be a good idea also. I know with “The Holly and the Ivy,” there are things I would like to add and change.
Amanda: if you do have changes you’d like to make to your story, let us know. We are able to work whatever magic you like. (Actually, if you want to alter anything, send the request to ME — Naughty Mommy already has more than enough site work on her plate!)
My goodness, yes. I’ve gone back to stories and chapters posted months ago and made changes, additions, and deletions. I’ve actually blushed upon reading something I’d written because of the problems with it.