So I was curious about the process used by other authors in creating stories.
Mine changes with each story, but I thought I might share the one for my latest: How I Stopped Philosophizing and Started Moaning
It started when I saw a YouTube video of a philosophy debater I watched occasionally, who had a guest star I found attractive in a homely, intellectual-next-door kind of way. I found out he had a philosophy channel. I started writing a more typical chat exchange through webcam with a special subliminals component, and the main thread that emerged was that the controller used the subliminals to convince the guy that, in order to create a sort of AI duplicate of him, he needed access to his most personal self and forced him into revealing more and more of his sexual self until he basically became just a body to fuck. It was a very rough draft of something basic, but the shedding of the facade came up a lot because of his philosophy background. And that’s where I got my hook.
The other aspect was his intellectual way of expressing himself, which I picked up from his videos. It stood out as different from the basic scenario, and that gave me the idea of eroding that command of language gradually, until he became just a babbling idiot with no thoughts other than sex.
I also wanted a story that wasn’t too long, so I opted for a structure of intro + 12 parts, all of them about 300 words, to get around 3600 words. I split my original messy chat into 9 parts (having not done the ending in that version) and left 3 parts for the ending, where most of the sexual action happens.
The story would be better told from his POV, and I thought some figure of authority would be better suited as the controller, and to keep it all within the academic world. Since the guy was British, why not Oxford, and doing things over tea? A tea at his flat with his thesis adviser. From his videos, I spotted a sage green teapot in the bookshelf behind him, and an event where, in the middle of one of his videos, he had stripped off his jumper because it was too hot and kind of apologized for the change of clothes. I kept that part verbatim, it was just perfect.
The tea became the voodoo for the control, and I wanted that to remain ambiguous, because somehow the guy seemed so repressed that I didn’t put it past him to have these inner submissive fantasies on his own, despite being straight.
For the devolution of language, once I had written one of the parts, I used an online tool that gives statistics about the complexity of a text: average length of words and sentences, % of complex words, and reading level. I made a graph for those values from beginning to end and modified my text until it gave the right stats. So each part is less intellectually complex than the previous one. Language becomes more simplistic and fragmented.
I was able to make the thesis adviser an invasive presence right from the start. And always have the YouTuber at a disadvantage: like showing up unexpectedly with the flat in a messy state, porn tab on the laptop, fishing a tissue from a bin with cum from the YouTuber’s earlier masturbation session. Little things like that to kind of disrupt the ordered intellectual patina of the YouTuber.
So I went, part by part, adjusting and polishing the language, to keep it within the 300 word limit while targetting the right readibility/complexity level. All the while telling a story that got hotter and hotter.
Anyway, as you can imagine, it took a lot of work to get all of that right. I’m not sure why I go to such lengths for my stories. I get a feeling that the elevated language and the philosophy theme at the start might discourage people from giving it a chance. But anyway, I don’t think I can write in a different way. It is certainly an involved process just for porn.
So I was wondering if others would like to share here what their process is, maybe taking one specific story to focus more on as an example.