How do you decide how smutty to let your fic get?
In number of encounters or detail levels of encounters? If it's number, I figure if a particular romp doesn't advance the plot or illustrate something major for a character, I leave it to the imagination.
If it's level of detail, I get bored very quickly with thrust-by-thrust choreography. I've noticed my characters snark a lot during sex, so I go for dialogue rather than "A's hand went to B's hip" etc.
Some of both. Those are good things to think about, Connie.
Hmm.
When I write the pr0n, the whole thing is pretty much
all
about frustration and desire and emotional stuff. The interesting thing is finding the tension and the lust and cranking up as much as it will go, rather than fitting extremity A into slot B.
Emotional entanglement as opposed to physical entanglement. Yup.
nods
Which isn't to say that there isn't physical entanglement - just that it's written with a view to what each person needs at that time, what's going to push
their
buttons at that point, rather than what's neccesarily prettiest. Type of thing.
I like emotional entanglements with explicit sex scenes.
So say a person was thinking about maybe posting a fic, but had never done that before, because the whole creativity thing was generally not her forte. How would a person go about making sure that it didn't suck?
The person would find a writer or reader familiar with the source. Preferably someone who sees the characters in a compatible way. And ask them to read the story, and comment on it. (It's best if it's someone the writer already knows in some way: beta-requests from total strangers tend to be ignored or rejected.)
Said writer would specify the kind of comments they want: plot-related, character-related, word-by-word editing, whatever. Said beta reader would give comments, making sure to phrase them inoffensively. Writer would make changes, or not.
Writer would post story to LJ, lists, and archives. Feedback would come in.
Cheers for the advice. It's probably just hormones or something anyway.