In the long story writing process, extra credit doesn’t have a linear place. Ideally you are doing extra credit from the very beginning. On the other hand, some of the best extra credit I have done is in the rewriting process. The goal of this lesson is to get you thinking about extra credit at every part of the process.

What is extra credit? It is anything you add to your story that makes it better. It can be a neat gimmick, how you pace your story or some sort of innovative presentation. You have already determined what the story is going to be about, this is an emphasis on how you tell it.

The first thing I want you to consider is your medium. Back in the day, i was limited to presenting my stories in txt files. With a blog as my medium, I can really cut loose. I can add images. I can add video. I can make links to lead the reader to other parts. Think about how you want your story to be read. Think about how you want your chapters listed in the sidebar. Get your mindset out of thinking about books and use your blog potential for all it’s worth.

Another thing to think about is pacing. I think the greatest secret to any kind of writing but especially sex writing is the use of cliffhangers. There are a million blogs out there and you need to keep your long story on your readers’ minds. Sometimes you can do this with a story long mystery but the easiest way to do it is to always have a question at the end of your chapter that the reader wants answered. Sometimes it is a hint of what is to come and sometimes it is a mindfuck that leaves the reader wondering what just happened.

DO NOT INTERRUPT A SEX SCENE FOR YOUR CLIFFHANGER. When was the last time you had your sex interrupted and you were happy about it? Don’t do it to your readers.

Use images but be a good person and credit the images you use. Better yet, make your own. Consider one image that you use for all of your story parts as a sort of brand identifier. Don’t fill your story with lots of random porn images because that is just tacky. Think of images as enhancers, not content in themselves.

Finally, have fun. If you come up with an idea that makes you smile, go for it. make e-cards for your story. Make fake blogger profiles for your characters. Do whatever amuses you and odds are you’ll amuse others.

I could fill this page with more extra credit ideas but I’ll hold back. The point of extra credit is to upgrade your story through personal innovation. What is a good idea for me might not be for you. Look at the other mediums you enjoy and see how you can wrap them into your story.

That concludes my lessons about how to make a long story. I hope that you feel comfortable making that sexy novella that has been percolating in your head. I firmly beleive that every person has one really good long sex story inside them. Sex is something that was meant to be shared, so get working and share your lengthy masterpieces with the world.

You have your plot laid out. You have your characters fleshed out and they are chattering non stop in your head. Now all you have to do is write the long story. That is so much easier said then done.

This is the breaking point for most writers. Stories die in infancy with barely a chapter written. Grand designs slow down until all is left is bitterness and e-mails from readers asking for the next part. This is where your story has the greatest chance of failure because odds are it will never be finished.

Now, I don’t have a cure for writer’s block. If I did, I would have marketed it and bought my own island by now. Instead of a gimmicky cure, I want to teach you what I beleive is the fundamentals necessary for a long story to be written.

Enthusiasm

You have to be excited. You have to love your story. You have to be obsessed with it. Your friends need to be jealous of your story because you rather spend time with it then them. You have to fucking love what you are writing.

A lot of my friends have created stories they knew were good and original but in the end they never finished them. Why? Because once the charm of the novelty faded, they realized they needed to crank out even more pages. They fell out of love with their story and that is the kiss of death.

Writing is work. Figuring out plot problems and writing difficult chapters can be a pain in the ass. Writing takes up time could be spending in City of Heroes or fucking people. If you don’t love your story then you don’t prioritize your story which means you will do other things rather than finish your story.

You have to love your story like a girlfriend because it is so much more demanding.

Environment

Your creative mind is a machine. It wants to work but sometimes it needs to be tricked. It needs to be put in writing mode. If you do certain thing every time you write, then your mind will respond when those certain things happen. Much like your body remembers dance moves from years ago, your creative mind will do the task of writing.

How you craft your environment depends on the individual. For some people, it’s the music they play while writing. For other people, it’s the special set up they have for their word processing program. Pay attention to the things around you when you get the most writing done and recreate those situations. Over time, your mind won’t be able to stop writing if those stimuli are present.

Time to write is often the most difficult thing to achieve. You need to figure out how to carve writing time out of your day. It is not a matter of knowing a secret to making time, as much as it comes down to you making time to write out of sheer force of will. Get up early before every one else, stay up later or just sacrifice what time you have for entertainment to write instead. No long story was written during five minute breaks. You have to have a good amount of time to let your creativity go.

There are other tricks I use to keep me thinking about a story even when I am not writing. I usually pick a wallpaper for my computer that reminds me of the subject I am writing about. For our kinky school concept, I would use images of sexy school girls or bondage. I rent movies with a school theme. I keep myself submerged in the subject which helps keep my enthusiasm up as well as keeping my mind on the task. Sometimes when I am out and about, I ask myself how one of my characters would handle whatever I am doing. What would a kinky schoolgirl buy for groceries? What movie would she want to see?

You go to a gym to workout. You go to an office to process work. You need a creative space to do creative things.

Exclusion

You know this. You really do. You know that if you want to get a big project done, you don’t have time to do other little projects. This is a little different from enthusiasm, because you can be excited by something and yet still spend your time doing something else.

If you really want a long story done in your lifetime, then you need to work on it at the exclusion of other things. That means no stopping to write short little stories. No stopping to “get this idea down on paper.” This means no writing other commitments while working on the big story.

Of course there can be exceptions but you learn these in time. I still create role-playing game adventures while working on long stories. I don’t write short stories though. I am good writing about writing, but if I start entertaining, then I start taking away from my long story energy.

Some people take breaks when they are stuck in a long story. I personally think it is okay to take a break from writing, but I don’t think you should write something else on your break. A long story requires a very high level of mindfulness. You need to know where you are going and where you have been. Writing something else altogether takes you out of that long story head space. Again, for some people it works but for me it is fatal.

A long story requires your best focused work. Be faithful to the story. Your other stories can wait.

Now you have written your story. Congratulations. You are almost done. There is another step to take and we will cover it next lesson.

Your homework is to apply the three E’s to yourself. Plan out your writing environment. Plan out what projects and commitments you will delay during this long story. Build up your passion for your long story and really make yourself want to read it.

This assignment counts towards 15% of your grade.

When I start a long story I always outline the story before I start. The Internet is littered with the first chapters of stories that are never completed. In my mind, this is because the writers wrote themselves into a corner that could only be solved by rewriting an earlier chapter. That’s a bit hard to do at chapter 4.

Today I’m going to sketch out my creative process for you. My method might not work for you but heck, it might help some aspiring porn writer out there. My method won’t get you a publishing deal or millions of web hits, but it may help you make a story that you love for the rest of your life.

The first thing I do is get a sense of what kind of story I want to do. It can be something as vague as wanting to do a BDSM story set in a circus, or wanting to tell a romance set inside a brothel. I feel the most important thing to do is pick something you absolutely fucking love because you might spend the next six months thinking about this story. You need to pick something that will interest you when you are at your most frustrated and depressed. Pick something that excites you, interests you and intrigues you. Pick something you are willing to be committed to because these long stories are as intense as relationships.

For this example I am going to pick BDSM school. My vague idea is that I want to write about a formal school setting with lots of BDSM elements. At this point I may be thinking of something like a British school complete with uniforms, corporal punishment and very stiff lips. I might recoil a little at the idea of doing a British school since I have read that a million times. In that case I poke around a little and see how a Japanese public school is run. Or maybe I think that is a cliche too and I decide to go with something different and weird like seeing how Russian schools are operated.

Google and Wikipedia are my friends at this stage. I am reading and learning obsessively. The more you know about your subject, the more confident you will be with your story. Research also gives you your best ideas. I might come across an article about how private schools are funded and it could give me ideas about the background of my school. Reality is far more weird than fiction; use it to inspire you.

As you can see, I even at the idea stage I am not locking myself down into anything. You let your mind gravitate to obvious ideas and then if you love it, fine. But if something strikes you as something you’ve seen written everywhere, then look around to see what you haven’t seen before. Sometimes the novelty of your new idea will excite and inform the rest of your story.

For this example, let’s say that I decide to go with an American school system set in some remote rustic location. I decide that for legal reasons, all of the characters are over 18, and that this school is voluntary. In fact, this school is an underground secret school that you can only get in by recommendation. Maybe some sort of foundation pays for it all. I like the idea of a kinky school that young women are sent to in order to become better kinky women in life because I am a sucker for coming of age stories. This school is meant for pre-college girls, so the school more resembles a public school as oppossed to college life.

This is when I make a list of all the things I like about the genre my story is set in. I base my list on movies, books and experiences I have had with the subject of school. I include things that I want to write about, or things I think are so important to the setting that I need to take them into account. My list for a story like this would look something like this-

school uniforms, hall passes, detention, school sport, school mascot, rulers, bookbags, desks, principal, school nurse, chalkboards, cafeteria, lockers, passing notes in class,

Some of these ideas just lay there on the list and that’s okay. I can’t think of anything sexy to do with a locker but I keep it on the list just in case. On the other hand, as soon as I thought of detention, I imagined a special room just for detention that would be all these restraint devices. I know that no matter what, my character needs to get detention just so I can do a scene there.

At this point it is crucial to me to have an idea of an ending. You may find that weird considering I don’t have characters, a plot or much of a setting. The thing is, you have to know where you are going before you can set out to go there. I ask myself what is it that I want to be the climax? When people are done with my story, what do I want them to take away? What do I want to see?

For example, do I want the final scene to be a student over coming all odds to be kinky Valedictorian? Do I want to write about a group of friends who graduate together and learned an important lesson about friendship? Do I want tell the story of a good student who goes bad, or a bad student who goes good?

You don’t need to write the final scene. You just need to have some sort of idea of where it is all going. You are creating a theme for your entire story which climaxes at the end. Once you have an ending, you know what kind of story you are telling and more importantly, what are the key characters and scenes that will bring about this ending.

Often, this is when I find out my setting doesn’t work. If I decide on that my ending needs is about the journey a teacher goes through, as opposed to a student, then I need to change my approach. That’s okay. We’re trying to solve for what kind of story you want to tell. The only right anwser is coming up with a story you are willing to write for the next year.

For my example, I am going to say that I want to do a story about a trashy slutty girl who becomes a refined submissive slut. The ending will be a final exam where she puts all of her lessons together and does a splendid job. I get the vague idea that the final exam is a sort of gangbang ordeal, where she must adapt and serve one teacher after another in rapid succession.

With that ending in mind, I have can start extrapolating the story. For the final scene alone, I need to have several teacher characters, a bad student who goes good, and some important lessons. I start sketching some of this now. I might write up a list of teacher types: the 50-something strict female teacher, the learing male teacher who likes students in short skirts and the sadistic fitness teacher. Each of these characters suggest their own chapters or plot threads. Maybe the gym teacher becomes an inspiring figure. Maybe the learing male teacher is a romance plot. Toy around and see what you like.

I tend to work backwards. From my ending, I ask how do we get there and where did we come from? My brain at this point is bubbling with ideas. I am constantly reading about my subject matter and watching movies that I feel are similar. I take millions of notes. I might sketch out the romance plot with the male teacher and then decide later it is too distracting and toss it all. I might see a movie where there is a scene set on a bus and I decide that somehow, I need a bus scene. That leads into thinking that I need somewhere to go, and that makes me think about field trips. I might get inspired and plot out a chapter on where they are going and what my character does.

At this point, you have a theme, a setting of some sort, an ending and lots of chapter ideas. Now is when you really need a character to anchor this story on. We will cover that in our next lesson.

Your homework is to start thinking about a long story plot. Come up with a theme, a setting and climax.

This assignment counts towards 35% of your final grade.