Answers to questions on writing

[louiselux]

Here are some answers to the questions people asked in March - these are for anenko and daegaer

Your stories include sexual elements quite often, and they're all awesome and unique. How do you tackle the issue of sex in your fiction, and keep things fresh both for yourself and your readers?

Thank you, first of all! Most of the sex I write is created for purposes of titillation, but not just physical. Often there is a strong emotional element, which is a key part of the excitement for me, and I think for women in general. I want to push the characters and to find out when happens when they are exposed emotionally, or when they're confronted with a desire they have to admit to, or when the sex is an expression of love or an expression of need. Or an expression of a fucked up situation. Thinking about this now, it occurs to me I like my characters to be in a mess emotionally and this fuels the intensity of any sex that happens. That's what I like to write about, and it's possible that I put a lot of myself into my stories. A lot of the sex I write is outside my experience (obviously) but I do love to extrapolate. Also, I read a lot, other stories but also about sex, about kinks and what different types of people do with each other. Research, I suppose, because I do love to find things out. Maybe that helps or maybe it's just a way of wasting time on the internets, I don't know.

Often, I approach a sex scene by thinking in some detail about the emotional investment each character will have in the sex, and this might be the thing that keeps things fresh. There's always a new angle to look at things from. Or, you know, put them in a different setting because lord knows I love an AU. But I think that the quality of sex scenes rests on understanding your characters and writing them well in the first place. If you get them right initially, the sex should fall into place.

The one thing I try very hard not to do when writing sex scenes is to make it all about the physical action, because it bores me rigid when I read a scene where the sex goes: they did this, then they did that, then this. Instead, I want to know how the sex is changing them.

I read some very good advice on writing erotic sex scenes by resonant8 How to write a sex scene . It taught me a lot. The one single most useful thing I learnt was her advice to 'pick one zing and stick with it', which to me means: what is the single most important thing that this sex scene is telling you? What is the defining hot thing? Often, at least in my case and in slash generally, this is tied to emotional developments in the story and the characters.


I'd be really interested in your thoughts about co-writing with someone. I found Cupidity to be seamless - did you find that your style and emungere's matched easily, or did there have to be a lot of editing?

My thoughts, let me show you them. Generally we've had a good reaction to the things we've written together. When someone else asked us how the process worked, emungere put it down to sparkly magic.

Sparkly magic is actually a good way of thinking about it. It's hard to say how we keep the joint writing process smooth, but it's a combination of practice, very frequent communication and both of us having similar styles and approaches to writing already. I think if we had vastly different styles it might not work. We write a lot of random ideas in IM, passing them back and forth, and that is really a good low pressure way to start writing with someone.

I think finding a good writing partner depends partly on luck. Before I met emungere I only knew her as someone I distantly fangirled and then we talked, and wrote something short, and kept on writing and now I fangirl her from close up instead. Honestly, I do. From my perspective, possibly the most important thing to do is to work with someone whose writing you admire. emungere can do things I can't do and I try and learn from that. I hope it makes me a better writer.

We don't set any ground rules, but that's probably because we talk often on IM, so anything that crops up in the writing is discussed straight away. We plot in IM, but also we feel quite free to introduce new ideas and events. I think the good communication is a big part of the writing working so well.

We've been betaing each others sections, but also getting others to read it too. I think it's probably best to get at least one outside view. Editing is the hardest part and needs honesty and patience and tact. emungere almost never shouts at me for my comma abuse, for example. I think you have to have a lot of trust in your co writer, but I think if you've been writing together for some time, this should come naturally as the writing relationship grows stronger.

For Cupidity, we collaborated on each chapter. I noticed that it often worked out that one of us would write the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, say about 1.5k words. So then the other would pick it up and write the end of that chapter and the beginning of the next. Sometimes one of us wrote nearly a whole chapter each in one go, but not often. We’ve done that in the past, on other stories, and found it much slower and harder. And maybe collaborating on chapters means the writing is more seamless? We talked each day about the plot and what was going to happen, so we mostly knew what we had to write. However, this is time consuming. If you wanted to do something less insane, you could write a few chapters each and pass it back and forth.

Also, the times when we got stuck always seemed to be a good time to pass it over to the other.

I hope this has been useful. If there's anything I haven't answered, please do feel free to ask more.