On Writing (Thru A Dom Punishing)

aka: Thoughts On Writing Erotica (As Expressed By A Dom Punishing A Sub)

I was naked. I had my arms bound above my head, exposing my armpits. There was a crowd gathered around, notes in hand. Sir stood beside me.

"Now," he said. "Who knows why this story starts in media res?"

A young woman put her hand up. "To skip over the boilerplate?"

"That's right!" He smiled broadly. "A lot of amateur writers enjoy establishing the worldbuilding under the assumption that it makes the work more plausible, or because they think that's what you're supposed to do. This is a mistake. Readers want to enjoy your story; you present them with the action, and they'll go out of their way to explain and justify it to themselves. If anything, going into detail about how it works will actually cause your reader to ask further questions - saying that laws passed to publicly humiliate criminals with nudity, for example, will just make them ask who would vote for that and poke more holes in your world. You can come up and give our narrator one hit from the paddle."

Oh no! The young woman grinned as she skipped up. Sir handed her a frighteningly large paddle. She came over to me.

WHACK!

It hurt! My ass stung so strongly. I gasped for air. And it wasn't just that it hurt physically; it was deeply humiliating. I was merely a tool for demonstration, an object to be handled in order to demonstrate a principle. My pain existed to make a point to someone else. I felt my face burn.

"See how the narrator described her humiliation? That's a deeply subjective viewpoint. A lot of kink isn't so much about the physical aspect as it is the feeling associated with it, and that's mostly what you want the text to be. Even the one really physical aspect - her face going red - is tied deeply into her subjective feeling. This is humiliation kink, and everything is built around maximising that. Even this part, with me describing what's happening, is there to pace out the emotion; she is part of a larger world, and she's right at the bottom with the least amount of power."

He was right. I felt so small and silly. He was talking about me like I was a toy to play with.

"This is a deeply erotic experience. The reader gets to feel the emotions of and identify with someone erotically humiliated, unguarded and with no distance. What exposition exists is there because it truly cannot be avoided. Notice there's no explanation for what's happening here, because the point isn't to explain - it's to mix erotica with meta-analysis of writing erotica. Asking how this situation came to be is missing the point and beneath us."

The group nodded thoughtfully. A young man put his hand up. "Surely you need to explain that this kind of thing would be morally wrong in the real world, right? If not a literal warning beforehand, then some kind of moral ending in which the dom gets their just desserts?"

Sir shook his head. "Not at all. Remember: this is a fantasy. You need to ask yourself, what am I actually trying to achieve here? In this case, the fantasy of being humiliated with your own naked body and a complete loss of control. Take my sub here." My heart dropped. I was about to be used as an example. Sir came up to me and untied my wrists, then pulled my arms down. He was so strong! I was so weak! He retied my wrists together behind my back. "See how she keeps stressing her humiliation to the point of hysteria? That's exactly what she's here for. If I were to be humiliated, she would feel powerful." He pushed me inelegantly towards the crowd, frogmarching me. I could feel all their eyes on me. "I need a volunteer."

Hands went up. He held onto my wrists with one hand and took a marker out of his pocket with the other, handing it to a young woman with her hand up. "Draw whatever you want on her face while I speak." She grinned evilly and started drawing a moustache and glasses on me. "Admittedly, this is why many subs are explicitly being punished, to quietly indicate that they're actually getting what they deserve through their humiliation and create no narrative indication their dom will get comeuppance. This sub, for example, constantly talks in movie theatres."

The group gasped. "My god!"

"She's a monster! Can I spank her?"

I closed my eyes and felt tears fall down my face as the marker dug into me. Oh, I deserved everything I was getting, and I knew it! Why couldn't I have just kept my big mouth shut while people were trying to watch the movie? And now here I was, a naked demonstration of humiliation principles.

"I'm glad you're getting into the spirit of things," said Sir with a smile.

"Where do we get our ideas?" asked one woman.

"Reading very widely. Contemporaries and peers, of course; going through not just people writing stories in your genre/kink, but the visual arts where you can lift drawings people have done as descriptions for what you do to your subs. Obviously, you don't want to blatantly plagiarise - you want to put your own spin on it - but you can share in ideas. Even more than that, you want to read outside your genre to find things to bring to it. For example, this very story came about from rereading HP Lovecraft and seeing how he incorporated meta-analysis of horror into a few stories; "The Unnameable", "Pickman's Model". Much more obvious, of course, but still fun."

"Is it better to write short stories or serialised?"

"It's really up to you. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Longer serialised stories have the advantage that individual chapters don't have to be properly structured; you can just stop writing at a certain point and it becomes a cliffhanger. Short, individually structured stories, on the other hand, have to have a cool ending. They have the significant advantage that you can just jump in wherever you want, but they must climax. Although you do also have the advantage in that you can suggest far more than you actually show, letting your audience's imagination fill in. And on that note: who wants to paddle the sub?"

Hands went up everywhere. "I do! I do! Let me get that theatre-talking asshole!"

"Well, you're in luck. You'll all get to! Hand me the paddle." What?! Someone gave him the paddle. I struggled, but his grip on the rope around my wrists was too strong, even with only one hand. "We're each going to paddle her five times, just for fun. I'll kick us off."

No! No! I needed to be free! I tried shaking as hard as I could. But then four different people held onto me, by the head and shoulders and legs. I was trapped! My heart pounded. I was sweating with terror. My knees shook. Help! Help me!

WHACK!

"One!" cried out the crowd. It hurt! It humiliated me! Naked! Held down by a crowd!

WHACK!

"Two!"

Author's Note: I'll be going on hiatus until I finish Tiffany: Girlrider Goblins.