A Dialog & Writing Lesson
an erotic lecture on erotic writing
MMM
©01/02/2000 Felix Lance Falkon
<[email protected]>
- The author permits any kind of archiving, posting, reposting, and
reproduction in fixed form or otherwise, free or for profit, of
this story.
- This work is unsuitable for minors. Standard warnings apply:
slippery when wet, use no hooks, for external use only, and watch
for falling rocks and fallen women whilst reading.
Morganstern looked up at Jon’s lithe body as Jon started
his first thrust—but with no more than an inch inside, Jon
stopped and held himself perfectly still. Morganstern—the
bigger, more heavily muscled of the two naked writers—asked
Jon, “What’s the matter?” “Short fuze,
real short.” “Afraid you’ll go off too
soon?” “Sure am,” said Jon.
“May I make a few suggestions?” asked
Morganstern.“Go ahead,” said Jon. He sank another inch
deeper into Morganstern. “Suggest away.”
“Don’t put your reply in the same
paragraph as my question, the way you did in the first paragraph
of this story. Instead, start a new paragraph with every
change in who’s talking, as I’m doing now.”
“Uh—why?”
Morganstern felt his abdominal muscles contract into a taut,
concave ripple as he curled his hips up to meet the next impaling
thrust. He took a deep breath, tightened the layer of muscle that
swept across his broad chest, then said, “It makes it lots
easier for the reader to tell who’s saying what. It’s
like . . . like in that first paragraph, the reader’s not
quite sure who said, ‘Afraid I’ll shoot too
soon.’ Also, you’ll have shorter paragraphs, which are
easier to read than screens or pages full of uninterrupted columns
of type. Newspapermen call writing such long paragraphs
‘tombstoning,’ because the results look like grey
tombstones.
“Indenting every paragraph also makes a story much easier
to read. And since that’s the way almost all printed fiction
is done, it’s what the reader expects. Don’t distract
the reader from what you and I are doing, here in bed; don’t
distract him from what we’re saying to each other Right
Now.
“And if you’re preparing a story you’re going
to post on a newsgroup or transmit by e-mail, put a blank line
after each paragraph, limit line length to about 65 or 70
characters and spaces, and indent each paragraph five spaces
instead of using the Tab key. And—do not
make the right margin straight—that is, do not ‘right
justify’ a text file; leave the right margin ragged the way
I’m doing here.” Morganstern felt Jon slide in another
inch. He met that thrust with another wiggle and squirm, felt Jon
push even harder in response.
“Okay; what else?” asked Jon.
“When you ask a question in dialog, put the question mark
or exclamation point at the end, inside the quote marks,
without putting a comma there.
“Oh.” Jon took a deep breath, went in even deeper.
“And—did you say you had more suggestions?” he
asked.
“Yup. When you have a bit of dialog that
doesn’t end with a question mark or exclamation
point, and is followed by ‘he said’—or
‘he asked’ or ‘he replied’ or a phrase
like that—then use a comma—inside the
quotation marks—like this,” said Morganstern.
“Use a period just before the closing quote marks when you
don’t have a ‘he said’—or
’asked’ or the like following the quote
marks—like this.” Morganstern squirmed again.
“If you begin a sentence with ‘he said’ or the
like, put a comma right after the last word before the quote
marks, and capitalize the first word after the quote
marks.”
Jon cautiously began another thrust. “Oh. I think I
understand.”
“Three more things: Don’t feel that you have to
reach for substitutes for ‘said’ in speech tags. Using
‘observed’ or ‘expounded’ or
‘intoned’ is far more distracting than the simple
‘he said,’ which is almost invisible to the reader.
Any fancy substitutes distract the reader from what’s being
said, from what’s inside the quotation marks. Of course, the
verb in a speech tag has to be one that makes sense: you
can’t ‘smirk’ a sentence; you can’t hiss,
‘Take that!’“With questions, use ‘he
asked.’ Use ‘whispered’ or ‘growled’
or verbs like those very sparingly. Use them only when
you’re giving the reader additional information that the
context doesn’t already make clear.
“An example: ‘“Good morning,” Kurt
snarled.’ In this case, the way Kurt said that is entirely
at odds with the words Kurt used. So, you have to use
‘snarled’ to make the reader aware that you intend
that contrast.
“And the other two things?” Jon asked. He was
breathing harder now, and pulling back between strokes.
“One way to break up the monotony of ‘he
said’ ‘he said’ ‘he said’ is to
leave off the speech tag entirely—but only when it’s
perfectly obvious who’s speaking. With just the two of us,
and you asking questions and me answering them, we can leave out
‘Jon said’ and ‘Morganstern said’ and go
for several paragraphs without confusing the reader. With ordinary
conversation and only two speakers, you should identify
who’s talking about every third paragraph. And always make
it clear which ‘he’ you mean, especially if
you have three male speakers going at it.
“And if one of us talks for more than one paragraph at a
time—as I’m doing right now—leave off the
end-of-paragraph quote marks until the last paragraph of
that speech,”
Morganstern said as he tightened his arms around Jon’s
chest, locking their naked bodies together. “But you still
need opening quotes at the start of every paragraph of a
multi-paragraph speech like this one.
“Another way to break up the monotony of ’he
said’ is what I’m doing right here.” Morganstern
felt Jon’s muscles tighten, felt him go in all the way with
his next thrust. “In the same paragraph with a within-quotes
speech, end the quoted part and then put in something like my
feeling you tighten up as you ram yourself hilt-deep into me. This
can advance the plot at the same time that the writer establishes
who is saying the words inside the quote marks. But again: readers
just don’t notice the ‘he said’ as long as what
he’s saying is interesting.”
“Yeah? Hey! I noticed that when you interrupt the quoted
part that way, using a verb that is not a synonym or
substitute for ‘said,’ you end what’s inside the
quotes with a period, and start what follows the quote with a
capital letter.” Jon stopped his next stroke in mid-thrust.
“And with questions and question marks, like this?” He
grinned down at Morganstern.
“Exactly.” Morganstern felt Jon thrust harder with
his next stroke, felt a bit of rotary motion as well. “Just
like that . . . and like this.” Morganstern grinned back up
at Jon.
“And I even noticed how you’re using single quotes
inside the double-quote marks without you having to tell me.
But—how come you’re using the double open-quote
marks—“—and the double close-quote
marks—”—instead of just hitting the plain old "
key?”
“You can do it either way. The “ and ” are
easier for your readers to convert into the typesetting
double-quotes. And if a reader is more comfortable with the "
symbol, he can easily convert from the “ and the ” to
the " mark. Using anything not on a standard keyboard in e-mailed
or news-group stories—like using the typesetting
double-quote codes—is a real pain for readers whose
equipment doesn’t fit yours just right.”
“Well,” said Jon, “I still think this a
really weird time to make with a grammar lesson—but
yeah, my equipment fits into you real nice and tight.”
Morganstern felt a grin spread across his own face.
“Well, the grammar lesson’s keeping you cooled down,
isn’t it? Instead of going off too soon, the way a lusty
young colt like you almost always does when he’s mounted on
a big, hunky muscle-stud like me, you’ve been riding me
for—Hey! Slow down; you’re almost there!”
“Yeah—I—noticed. Talk—to
me—about—something—else—quick,” Jon
panted as he slowed almost to a stop.“Lemme see—you
got me going too—there’s, yeah, emphasis: since
plain-text e-mail doesn’t have underlining or italics, use
** to begin emphasized words and * to end that
emphasis. Do the same for your character’s unspoken
thoughts. The reader can convert those asterisks to his own
word-processor’s codes for underlining or italics. Watch out
for the difference between the dash—which pushes phrases
apart—and the well-placed hyphen, which pulls words together
into compound words like ‘plain-text’ and
‘e-mail.’
“What about those—what do you call
’em—three dots?”
“They’re called an ellipsis. You can use one
instead of a dash. Most readers will see the dash as showing an
abrupt change in what you’re saying, or—at the end of
a word—that you’ve suddenly stopped. The ellipsis . .
.” His voice trailed off, then re-started. “The
ellipsis originally meant that something is missing. Some writers
use it to imply that you gradually stopped, either in the
middle of a sentence . . . or at the end of a complete one. . .
.” Others feel that the ellipsis is badly over-used as an
all-purpose kind of punctuation.” Morganstern wet his lips.
“Note: complete sentences, period plus three dots.
Incomplete ones, just . . .
“New subject: some writers have a bad habit of reaching
for substitutes for words he’s already used. A very smart
science-fiction writer once wrote, ‘English has no synonyms;
it has a great many words that mean almost the same
thing.’ And as Mark Twain wrote, ‘The difference
between the right word and the almost right word is the difference
between the lightning and the lightning bug.’ He also wrote,
“Use the right word, not its second cousin. To
paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ’Good writing is putting
down the right words in the right order.’”
“Some writers—present company excepted, of
course—will assemble several ways to identify someone in a
story, and then use them in rotation. Such a writer would refer to
you as ‘Jon,’ in your next appearance as ‘the
lithe-bodied youth,’ then ‘the lusty writer,’
next by your last name alone, then as ‘the naked young man
mounted on Morganstern’s magnificently muscled
physique,’ and then back to ‘Jon’ when you show
up in the story again, leaving the reader unsure if you are one
character, or five, or some number in between.”
Jon snickered, then said, “ ‘Magnificently
muscled’ indeed!”
“Well, I am. And I worked hard to get these
muscles.”
“I know, I know. And since muscle-hunks like you happen
to turn me on—”
“I noticed that already.”
“—but I don’t know if I like conceited ones
—“You wouldn’t want me to lie about my
magnificent musculature, would you?”
“—and I can’t tell if you’re kidding
when you say things like that, and if we start laughing while
we’re doing this—” Jon thrust hard,
squirmed, eased back. “So—let’s get back to the
writing lesson, before I—you know.”
“Right.” Morganstern took a deep breath, feeling
his broad chest expand, remembering, for a few seconds, the smell
of the gym down by the beach. He remembered the ache in his
muscles after a hard workout, remembered the time he’d
stayed behind after the other bodybuilders left for the evening.
He and gym’s night manager had stripped down all the way,
stiffened up, and then, on a bench in front of the gym’s
biggest mirror . . . Morganstern shook away the memory and said,
“Just as bad, or worse, is to begin a story with tiresomely
detailed physical descriptions, measurements, and biographies of
all the principal characters—which is precisely what we did
not do here. Instead, we followed the ancient precept:
start in the middle of things. Homer did, some three
thousand years ago, with: ‘Sing, Goddess, of the
anger of Achilles, . . .’ right smack in the middle of the
Trojan War. His words sing to us yet.“Thus, we started
this story, quite literally, during your first thrust.
Blocks of explanation, like these paragraphs, are all very well to
cool someone down. But fiction works better if the writer slips in
background details and descriptions of the principal characters a
few words at a time, early in the action, and with the lectures,
if any, broken up by action and dialog.
“This deep into a story really isn’t the time to
stop for a static description of my curly brown hair; my
electric-blue eyes; even my youthful, snub-nosed face. The reader
might have decided, pages and pages ago, that I have aquiline
features and dark eyes and straight, black hair, because I
didn’t show the reader otherwise in the first few
paragraphs, either by having me remember how I look or by
letting the reader see those details through my eyes. And
since you don’t have a convenient mirror in this room for
me—and the reader—to look at myself in, then . . .
“You’re right, of course: mentioning my
‘magnificently muscled physique’ was
overdoing it, especially this far into the story. I can
mention how your lean, narrow hips feel, gripped between my
powerful thighs, because that’s what’s happening to me
right now, and —”
“Now you’ve done it!” Jon thrust faster,
harder, faster still.
“Can’t you . . . slow down?”
“Not now. Too hot. Real hot.”
“I . . . noticed,” said Morganstern, trying to meet
every impaling thrust.
Jon suddenly gasped aloud, rammed himself all the way in, went
rigid, and then slowly, slowly relaxed and started breathing
again. “I was going along okay, stretching it out just like
you told me to, until you reminded me just what we’re doing.
All of a sudden, I couldn’t stop.” He panted for a
moment, then said, “I bet you can’t keep this lesson
going with you on top.”
“I can so! Where’s my shirt? I always carry a few
extra in my pocket, so I can put one on before we . . .”
“Don’t worry—I got a supply in my bureau. Let
me see.” Jon straightened his arms, looked down between
their still-linked bodies, and said, “Yeah—as long and
thick as yours is, an ‘extra large’ oughta fit just
right.”
“That was deftly done,” said Morganstern, as they
uncoupled, Jon rolled off, and—a moment later—sat up.
“Huh?”
“Without stopping to explain or to cite my length and
width, you rather neatly established that we’re using
protection and that I’m an ’extra large.’
You’re letting the reader decide just how long and thick and
wide that might be.”
“Yeah?” Jon, now on his feet, pulled open the
bureau’s top drawer and passed a foil-wrapped packet to
Morganstern, who stood up, stretched, then opened the packet.
“I suppose we could start measuring each other—chest,
arms, waist, hips—drop to the calves, work on up to thighs
and—you know. That could—that would be more
interesting than just saying how tall you are and how big around
the chest and, as you put it, how long and how thick where
it—it counts.” Jon grabbed a towel, unsheathed
himself, and wiped himself dry. “Like—Hey! Like the
beginning of this story, where you established—without
stopping to say so, that you’re bigger than me—and a
real muscle-hunk at that—and that I’m built okay
too.“
Another problem.” Morganstern finished putting on the
‘extra large’ contents of the packet, then squirted on
a dab of lubricant. “If you write that one of your
story-studs has—say—a ten-incher, some readers will
think this is excitingly long, but others will think your story is
laughably overdone. ’What is all right for B, will quite
scandalize C, for C is so very particular.’”
“Again—huh?”
“A quote from Gilbert and Sullivan. From The Yeomen
of the Guard, I think.” Morganstern gestured at the bed
with a sweep of his right hand. Jon stretched out on his back, and
tucked a pillow behind his head. Morganstern knelt between
Jon’s thighs, leaned forward, found his target, thrust, and
stopped with an inch or so inside.
“One writer likes his characters kind of chubby and
well-furred; another likes lean, well-defined studs in their late
teens that he picks up at body-building gums.” He eased an
inch deeper, felt Jon respond with a squeeze and a squirm.
“Got any Rules for which kind of characters to
pick?
“Nope. I don’t have any Rules for the writing
game—just lots of suggestions. You can write a
story that’s all dialog, with no speech tags at all; you
just have to realize that when you do, that format will take some
of the reader’s attention away from what’s going on in
the story. Some readers want characters that are whipping or
otherwise humiliating each other; some readers prefer characters
that are calmly doing dreadful things to themselves. Still others
are more into the Main Event—what we’re doing
now.” Morganstern went a bit deeper, pulled back, thrust
again, watching Jon grit his teeth, feeling Jon tense his muscles
and then relax with a sigh. Another thrust. Jon’s eyes
focused on Morganstern’s and the two men grinned at each
other.
Morganstern felt himself begin to tense up inside. He slowed
his stroke as he added, “Some get turned on by characters
who use all the standard four-letter words, along with a few of
the well-chosen five-and six-letter ones. Others—”
“—manage without any dirty words at all—like
we’ve been doing here—”
“—which works as a demonstration, but does call
attention to how the story’s told, rather than what
it’s about. And then there are people really into incest or
under-age characters; but most would rather stay away from those
areas that, as the old cliché has it, are illegal, immoral,
or fattening.
“More suggestions?” asked Jon.
“An important one: although Kipling wrote: ’There
are nine and sixty ways, of constructing tribal lays,’ a
most effective way to construct a story is to pick exactly the
right point of view from which you can best tell that story, and
then put your reader firmly into that point-of-view
character—seeing what the character sees, feeling what the
character feels, thinking and remembering and deciding as the
character does those things. In short, make the reader be
that chosen character throughout that story.
“The reader,” said Morganstern, “will have
the experience of being in the story if you—the
author—avoid interrupting the action to address the reader
directly, avoid making the reader jump into another
character’s head, and avoid making him look down on the
scene from a set of disembodied eyes hovering over the action.
Also, do not start the story with a lecture, or biographies of the
characters, or a descriptive passage told from any point of view
other than your chosen character; don’t delay getting the
reader into the story’s point-of-view character and
into the story itself.” “Hey,” Jon said,
“I thought you said that if a quoted paragraph doesn’t
end with a close-quote mark, then the following paragraph is
automatically being said by the speaker of the preceding one.
So—why did you identify yourself as the speaker
again?”
“It’s more important not to confuse the reader than
it is to depend on the reader noticing that missing close-quote
mark. Now—where was I?”
“About four inches in and counting.” Jon squirmed
up against Jon’s next impaling thrust.
“That too. Point of view—a long story may be better
told with a few shifts from one character to another—but
only if there is a clear break—always marked with extra
blank lines in manuscript, screen, or printed page, and sometimes
a line of three asterisks as well. The first sentence following
the break must put the reader firmly into the next point-of-view
character’s head. I saw one story recently in which
the point of view shifted from one of the story’s two
characters to the other with every paragraph. That is
hard to do well, but it’s a very interesting way to tell a
story: the reader is alternating between the two sides of the
interaction between those two characters. However, I still think
the most effective way to tell a story is almost always to tell it
from one point of view, so the reader can really get into that
character’s memory, and eyes, and ears—”
“—and other appendages.” Jon grabbed
Morganstern’s hips, pulled him deeper. “Then if I
wanted the reader to watch us from above, watch your back muscles
working, watch your hips pumping, pulling back, thrusting again,
then—”
“Well, you really can’t do that and still hold
this story together. You could go back and
rewrite the beginning so that I look up at the mirror on the
ceiling over the bed and watch you pumping away on top of my
muscular self, but that’s about it. Having me remember
now what I saw then doesn’t work at
all—you don’t have a mirror on the ceiling,
because if you had, I would have noticed it
then—and so would the reader, who is supposed to be
me throughout this adventure.
“A minor suggestion—one easy to do, even when
rewriting a completed story—is to avoid having characters
with names that sound or look too much alike: ‘Joe’
and ‘Moe,’ for example, or even ‘Danny’
and ‘Dennis.’ With our
names—‘Morganstern’ has three syllables,
‘Jon’ has one. Our names don’t start with the
same letter. And they don’t rhyme . . . there’s no
chance for the reader to get confused.” Morganstern eased
himself deeper.
“There—all the way in. You still—”
“Billy!” yelped Jon.
“‘Billy’? That would work—two
syllables, doesn’t rhyme with either—”
“I don’t mean Billy, a two-syllable name; I mean
Billy, my kid brother, who just came in through the hall door I
forgot to lock.”
Morganstern jerked his head around, looked back over his
shoulder, saw a sturdy young blond stride towards the bureau,
shedding clothes as he went.
“Not to worry,” Billy said as he finished stripping
and reached into the bureau. “Even though I can’t buy
beer yet, I’m old enough to vote, so I’m not
jail-bait, in case you’re worried about that when I make
this a three-way.”
So that’s why Jon has that size on hand,
Morganstern told himself as Billy stiffened up, pulled on an
’extra large,’ and climbed onto the bed.
Jon said, “Billy, this is Morganstern. Morganstern,
Billy.”
“And,” Billy added as he knelt astride
Morganstern’s thighs and slid himself into place,
“with you sandwiched between me and Jon, this doesn’t
count as incest either.” He slid half-way into Morganstern,
paused for Morganstern to catch his breath, and completed his
impaling thrust.
Morganstern felt a beardless chin snuggle against his neck,
caught a whiff of something spicy. “Aftershave?” he
asked.“Stuff I put on my hair,” Billy said, tightening
his grip on Morganstern’s chest.
Morganstern, spitted to the hilt and stretched tight, rammed
himself all the way into Jon, who gasped and then said,
“Billy?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s using an ‘extra large’
too.”
“He is?” Billy pulled back a couple of inches,
thrust again.
“Sure am,” said Morganstern. “Jon’s a
nice fit; good and tight, and the way he’s squirming now . .
.”
“You’d squirm too,” panted Jon, “if
this muscle-stud had rammed himself into your tail end.”
Morganstern felt Billy pull back and then ram himself in all
the way, heard Billy eagerly say, “Hey, guy, that sounds
great! After we finish this round, let’s swap around; me on
the bottom, Jon on top, you in the middle again. I want to find
out how tight you’ll fit into me.”
“Before we do that,” Jon panted,
“there’s that mirror I bought yesterday. With three of
us working together, we can mount it on the ceiling, right over
the bed. And Morganstern, if it’ll keep you from going off
too soon, you can explain to Billy why we can’t just look
down on the scene from near the ceiling.
“You can tell a story that way,” said
Morganstern, now comfortably sandwiched between Jon’s and
Billy’s warm, naked bodies. “It’s
just—usually—more effective to pick one point of view,
and then let the reader be that character all the way
through a story to the end. I mean, why would anybody
want to wiggle out from between you two hunky studs and go
flitting, batlike, up amongst the cobwebs? Instead, I’ve got
Billy’s chest against my back, and Jon squirming under me,
and I’m feeling Billy inside me and me inside Jon, and all
three of us—oops!”
Morganstern heard Jon ask, “That turn you on too far?
“Yeah.” Morganstern felt himself fast coming to a
boil as he thrust harder, faster, harder still.
As Billy speeded his own stroke, he said into
Morganstern’s ear, “I’ll try to catch
up.”
Seconds later, Morganstern felt his muscles tense. Another
stroke, and he went rigid. Billy thrust a few times more, then
went rigid too while he and Morganstern pumped themselves dry.
Still later: long, delicious minutes later, Morganstern slowly
relaxed, still catching his breath.
“Convinced?“Convinced,” said Jon, from under
Morganstern.
“Beats cobwebs any day,” said Billy, a sweat-damp
weight relaxing on Morganstern’s back. “You did seem
to be laying it on a bit thick—’Morganstern heard
this, . . . Morganstern felt that,’ . . . you
know.”
“ ‘Merely corroborative detail, . . .’
” said Morganstern.
Billy’s voice joined Morganstern’s. Together, they
said, “ ‘. . . intended to give artistic
verisimilitude . . .’ ”
And Billy, alone, finished the quote: “ ‘. . . to
an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.’ Poo-Bah,
The Mikado, words by Sir William Schwenk Gilbert of
Gilbert & Sullivan.”
“If I laid it on thick enough for you to notice, then I
laid it on thick enough to distract the reader,” Morganstern
said.
“Come on, guy; you had to lay it on to make your
point.” Billy sat up. “I’ll get the ladder; you
two bring up the mirror. By the time we get that thing up and
mounted, we ought to be all reloaded for another round. So: what
tools do we need?”
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