Focus Mode
How To Write Better Slash (Yaoi) Stories.
I am about to tell you a major “secret” to writing better slash — or yaoi, m/m, whatever you like to call it. It’s not truly a secret because anyone can know it, but only serious writers will benefit from the knowledge. You have to do some work to apply it, and not everyone is willing to exert themselves. If you are willing, though, there’s a good chance that this “secret” will change the way you think about your sex stories.
How your preference for slash developed. .
Let’s start with your experience as a slash reader. When you first got into erotic stories, you probably got a charge just to be reading graphic material. You were astonished that anyone could write such explicit stuff so boldly, and it all excited you. As you read more, you started to develop preferences. You moved from liking “anything with sex!” to resonating with certain situations or scenarios that generated automatic excitement. One of those situations, for you, was m/m.
Every erotic reader is like this. Everyone likes certain material over others, whether the preference is for male/male, student/teacher, dragons-n-swords sex, voyeur/exhibitionist, or maiden/tentacles. These inclinations are what make you want to write, they can also limit the quality of your storytelling. If you’re not watchful, you won’t develop your stories to be at their best because of this genre bias.
Is your love for m/m stories stopping you from writing your best?
When you read through your own drafts, you are naturally excited by your own ideas. If you don’t get past them, you won’t see the weaknesses in your work. Bad plots can seem strong, and tepid scenes can seem smoking hot, just because you’re in love with the idea of slash. Every writer is like this, but in my experience, erotica writers tend to fall prey to this worse than other writers.
Even readers who also have an m/m bias still want real storytelling. Good fiction technique makes everything better, even if you just want to write fluffy fanfiction. In the best derivative works, readers don’t have to rely on their prior knowledge of the characters because you fully develop them in the context of your story. The story world becomes new and fresh. Perhaps best of all, when you set your “jewels” — your sex scenes — within the proper framework, they become more arousing than if they just appeared by themselves. If you leave your stories half in the shell, only the people with a wild enthusiasm for slash will get as good of a story experience.
If you’re serious about writing, you won’t feel easy about leaving your stories underdone. You shouldn’t be comfortable with it — it’s a total cop-out. You know your job is to help as many people vividly experience your story as possible. This means looking beyond the m/m genre’s surface excitement. Chances are, you’re not interested in writing all possible m/m stories, any more than a shoe fetishist is attracted to all shoes. Your slash affinity makes you more open to m/m possibilities, but your ideas come from a combination of this affinity, specific characters, and your unique philosophy of storytelling.
Which fandom do you like best, and why?
As an example, let’s look at different slash fanfiction domains. Most writers concentrate on a few characters in one or two fandoms, not all slash pairings in all fandoms. People who write Harry/Draco stories from Harry Potter aren’t necessarily interested in writing Jim/Blair slash from The Sentinel, or Naruto/Sasuke yaoi from Naruto. Something about the Harry/Draco combination specifically interests them — not only because they’re two male characters, but because they are uniquely Harry and Draco. What’s more, Harry/Draco throws a different spectrum of possibilities than a combination like Harry/Ron or Harry/Snape. They’re all male/male pairs, but the personalities, the way they react to each other, their histories are all different. Of course they are going to generate different stories, but you will only be interested in a small selection of the possibilities.
If you concentrate on what’s different about your stories within the slash framework, you will start to see past your bias. You’ll be able to develop real stories beyond the m/m situational appeal that are vivid and arousing to many people, even ones who “don’t like slash.”
And that should leave you with the satisfaction of a job well done.
If you liked this article and seriously want to improve your writing, join my mailing list by filling out the form below. For the first message, you will automatically get sent my three best recommendations for books on writing — and they are somewhat obscure, so you probably won’t have heard about them…
No comments:
Post a Comment