Process for writing a story - authors please share

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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.

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It’s interesting to hear different writer’s perspectives on how they come up with their stories. I’ll share how I wrote my first story.

I was a reader of GSS for a few years. I always felt inspired by different stories I read, which made my mind wander and come up with various scenarios I really liked. In the case of my story here, Give in to the Foam
it randomly came to me one night and slowly I started to daydream and add more about the place my main character was located, which was the central part to my fantasy. I didn’t have a plot developed until I decided I wanted to give a reason why he gets put where he does. That led me to start to flesh out ideas and plan how I wanted things to go.

I started by just writing an intro to get to where my daydream started, and from there I wrote a rough outline of each chapter. I didn’t know how I was going to develop it or what the ending would be like until I was actually writing, but the story kind of wrote itself at that point as I thought of more ways for my main character to be messed with.

Having an outline was helpful, but I felt like I went off from it as I wrote. I modeled the word count after my first chapter. I wrote each chapter with the intention of having some sort of climax (literally) in each one so they would be satisfying, so part of the plot development was also centered around that. Depending on how much exposition I decided to have before and after, sometimes the word count changed. I wrote around 1500 words per chapter.

I think in the future, I’ll probably continue with this same method because it seems it works well for me. I’m still new to writing, so if anyone has any feedback or would like to read my story I’d really appreciate it!

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I’ll join this conversation as it has some tones with my most recent topic. In this case I’ll talk about to the two series that I recently worked on: Slave Academy: Our Boys in Uniform and Change of Attire.

These two series are different from most of my work as they emerged out of discussions with the authors of the original series. Where they are similar to all of the stories I’ve written in that I think about the story and some aspect of it that catches my attention and play it out, these two stories I took my ideas to the respective authors and got their approval.

So, in the case of Slave Academy: Our Boys in Uniform, it came after reading through the Resistance and just latching on to Lane and Andrew’s political career. I just placed them on the state level on route to Washington. But I also thought about Todd and what would things be like if the Academy had a JROTC program that he got his hands on. I shared just basic ideas with Swizz and got his approval to go ahead, then I wrote the draft of the first chapter and showed it to Swizz. He made some comments about the work. He pointed out that I didn’t really go into the town and show how the people living there go about their day. That comment lead to the drive around the town and the drive past the Academy. Another comment he made was that Joe was a favorite character and should show up; I followed his advice and put him there with Todd and Nathan. (I actually did have a scene after the BBQ where Joe and Nathan go back to the Academy parking lot and get Joe’s car, but I thought it didn’t add much to the story and never worked on it.) But the core idea of the cops coming to Cod Cove as the way to get back into the world and the joint mindscape were ideas Swizz approved and encouraged.

Change of Attire just started out as me writing my take on the Cordz. I just thought that the Corduroy uniform would be too obvious for the takeover and maybe it needed to go undercover. I wrote it out posted it and then jockboi51 the author of the Cordz went and came up with his rewrite. At the same time, he reached out to me, and we began conversing about the ideas for over respective stories. So that story really emerged out of that correspondence: me having ideas, throwing them to him for feedback, and then putting the work down in Word.

But I definitely enjoyed the collaborative moments in these works and would love to have more stories that have that collaboration behind them.

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That’s very detailed.

I’m more of by the seat of my pants kind of guy, not intentionally. I usually have a few main points/ideas/scenes I want to reach and then fill in the blank as I’m writing.
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But sometimes things get weird and the characters do their own thing. Like in the original plan of one of my stories, the two characters were supposed to end with anal sex, but by the time I got to writing the ending, I realized that that wouldn’t actually happen, so it finished with a handjob instead.

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I’m a seat-of-my-pants writer lately, but previously I’d done very structured outlines for science fiction stories I’ve written. Oftentimes I let the characters speak for themselves and do their thing. I’ll tweak outlines to accommodate this. I also tend to break up my outlines with dialogue sketches I can already hear in my head.

I once excised an entire prominent character from an outline at the writing stage. Not even consciously! I got to the meat of things, realized I’d just never used the poor bastard, and decided the story was fine without him. There were certainly more than enough characters.

I think my issue is that I tend to get quite long-winded and I have trouble condensing things as it all feels important to me. An outline helps with mitigating this.

It’s interesting how each story develops from the outline stage. I don’t have an outline quite yet for Ollie’s Journal, naughtily enough, despite having written 90 pages. I keep meaning to do that, especially because everything between New Years and Ollie’s 18th Birthday on May 30th is… very hazy. It’s my project for the week to start nailing this down and making things concrete.

I find that an outline doesn’t need to be especially detailed. Even a bullet-pointed list of desired events in order can be incredibly useful. I tended to do more detailed outlines in the past, but nowadays I’m leaning more towards bullet-points. It can vary by project.

I feel as though I’ve been lacking in this department, however, as most of my non-sci-fi writing has been erotic roleplaying for a good while now.

Ideas come to me in fits and spurts. I am very reactive to others’ material, and my ideas will initially form as reactions to things I’ve read before mutating into their own thing. A lot of my Doctor Who and Star Trek fiction, on the other hand, starts with either kernels of ideas or from titles. I don’t think it’s good form to start with a title, despite professionals doing it sometimes. I try to keep this to a minimum.

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For me I have a general outline of how I want the story to go. I used to do a lot of public speaking and so I follow the same pattern as speech writing as I do for fiction writing. So from the beginning I try to map how characters start and where they finish. From there I will try to break it down into chapters for what each chapter will be about. So it is a loose outline but has at least that structural skeleton of the story. Not too detailed just one or two beats on how to advance the plot and characters.

From there I just begin writing, so each chapter I know I have specific points I have to hit, but how I hit them can be whatever I am in the mood for or whatever makes sense. I don’t know every detail as I write, or how character A gets to point B - but I write and try to keep it as natural as possible. When a chapter is done, I keep notes for later reference.

Doing it this way helps me keep on task, though admittedly it does sometimes shift where the end point is but that is usually not necessarily a bad thing as it is going to be close.

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I don’t often respond to this post but this one got my interests so here it goes.

I write my stories in a very linear fashion. The order you read the words is likely the order I wrote it. So I might have an end in mind but I start at the beginning and just move my character’s forward. If I have notes or ideas for late I write them on the bottom of my word document that I review whenever I sit down to start writing again, or sometimes during if I get stuck.

I don’t do full outlines for two reasons, one, I often have to rewrite them over and over as I write and have different ideas or I realize problems in my plots. The second reasons is if I write too detailed of a outline I’ve already written the story and have no interest in (re)writing it. So I stopped doing them.

I have also learned not to force a story, when I do that they often don’t turn out all that great. If an idea isn’t working or doesn’t flow right I just set it aside and do something else, I have upwards of a dozen stories on my desktop at any given time that I am bouncing between because of this.

Now as for my story ideas, I get them from a few places. First Books/TV/Movies/Games where they do something and my mind makes it kinky. Like Marine in the Mirror, the idea of a carnival mirror showing a different version of yourself has been in a lot of stuff over the years. I just made it a lot kinkier. Two, my dreams, I have some very hot dreams now and then, Taming the Seal started as a dream (I had been watching Seal Team but I have no idea why my dream decided to mix it with an incubus but it did) and then I play with it and write what I remember later. Another is just looking at photos and thinking what could be happening, PT with Coach was because of the photo linked in the story. Stories with photos is also where the idea for my tumblr came from. And last, I like playing with tropes. All He Desires was just playing around with the classic magic spell to make a stranger fall in love trop, I just inverted it.

I will also add that I enjoy writing and sharing ideas with others, I often share and talk about my stories with my pups, I had someone I was bouncing ideas off of for Taming the Seal, and the photo that gave me PT with Coach was shared on twitter to come up with a story. Same with the Crossroad Club.

So lots of different ways to come up with ideas but in the end I mostly write the same, from beginning to middle to end.

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