Bondage fiction is a lot like heavy metal...the lyrics don't really matter as long as the sound is right. Lots of poseurs try to fake their way through the motions, but true believers can always suss the real deal after the first three notes. Cool costumes help, but aren't always essential. And girls can play lead, too.
In other words, it's a genre, and hallowed be its tenets, customs, mores and conventions. So don't get cute and push that freakin' envelope. Wanna write a slave farm epic? Cool! Sure worked for Anne Rice ("Exit To Eden") and Laura Antoniou (four volumes in "The Marketplace" series, with five and six on the way). Or perhaps a journey-into-submission-at-the-hands-of-a-kind-and-loving-yet-borderline-berserk-master? Get in line behind me and Chelsea as we wrap up our next novel, "Association."
When it comes to plot, "original" is overrated. Look at "Harry Potter"...take two helpings of "Star Wars," stir well with "Lord of the Rings" (are Gandalf and Dumbledore the same character?), add a dollop of "The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe," a pinch of "The Borrowers," a dollop of "Encyclopedia Brown," etc., etc. What makes it all work are the characters...we care desperately about what happens to Harry, Ron and Hermione, no matter how derivative the context. Heck, Anne Rice didn't even bother making up new characters for three books worth of "Sleeping Beauty," despite potential lawsuits from Disney (not to mention her stated dislike for fan fiction).
Okay, enough sermonizing. First, watch every Alfred Hitchcock movie with a critical eye to how he sets his stories in motion, and read lots of Stephen King (especially "On Writing") to learn how to push intricately weird tales along to a satisfactory conclusion. Both auteurs take ordinary people and thrust them into extraordinary circumstances, which sounds an awful lot like what happens to everyone in the bdsm playpen.
It's perfectly okay to string together a bunch of hot scenes, but if that's the case, don't try to embellish the action with a superfluous plot you don't really care about. I like G.C. Scott's approach in "The Passive Voice," where the narrator is having the time of her life and so is her boyfriend, who displays exactly none of the conventional "dom" behavior patterns. Ye gods, you mean people actually *enjoy* bondage?!? A similar let's-f**k! approach highlights Alma Marceau's "Lofting," although I wish she hadn't received a thesaurus for Christmas (too much reliance on "anguish languish" is no replacement for a story that only moves a few feet further than "I saw, I conquered, I came.").
By the same token, don't forget the hot sex in pursuit of a coherent story. John Warren's "Murder at Roissy" is a great example of a good fetish writer who got way out of his league by setting a mystery thriller in a bondage resort and falling short on both accounts (didn't we learn anything from the movie version of "Exit to Eden"?). Then again, Laura Reese managed this stunt in "Topping From Below," and promptly fell off the wire by utilizing exactly the same plot in "Panic Snap." Not a crime.
Start your bdsm story in the middle. In conventional plotting, Act 1 is supposed to introduce the characters, Act 2 puts them in jeopardy, and Act 3 is how they figure out a solution. By opening with Act 2, you give the reader something stronger to chew on than "she shivered as she heard the wheels of his car crunch on the gravel driveway." Backfill the who/what/where/when and go straight for the why. This works especially well if you're telling one of the bdsm Big 3 plots: voluntary journey into submission; slave farm follies; non-consensual victim learns to love her rapist.
Get out of the house. Sure, lots of important moments in our lives take place in the bedroom, but they're rarely interesting to anyone else. Unless you elevate the domestic interiors to something along the lines of "House of Leaves," set your story anywhere but the basement. Send your bdsm characters to school, work, a club, a hotel, the aforementioned slave farm, the harem, a pirate ship, your favorite city, anywhere but a dungeon (unless it's located in a castle circa 1300). Bend time backwards, or spring ahead to the sci-fi future.
Write about something ELSE you know. For example, Chelsea and I have been massively amused by the recent technical and social gyrations over Napster, so we made up something similar as an integral plot device for our new bdsm novel, "Once Bitten." If your other hobby is cooking, start your story in a S&M; restaurant like La Nouvelle Justine in New York (no longer exists). If you vacation every year in Mexico, set the proceedings in a remote fishing village where nobody speaks English except this strange Yanqui who owns the big house on the hill and wears leather all the time. If you dig "The X-Files," invent some aliens with a taste for abduction. Even better, get out there and learn about something new, then incorporate that research into your story. Trust me, your characters will be thrilled to have something else to talk about.
Personal advice for the typed cast: a lot of my short stories have focused on established bdsm couples instead of new-relationship dancing. I often write from the female submissive's point of view instead of my opposite real nature. I try to make sure the ending bears some resemblance to the beginning. And I avoid listing physical characteristics to make the fantasy insertion process easier for readers who aren't 6' 4" and/or built like Barbie.
But the most important tip I can give any writer is a simple one: read your story out loud. Seriously. No fair lip-syncing either...your ears are way smarter than your eyes. You will be astounded how easy it is to edit this way, especially when it comes to crafting believable dialogue, finessing sentence flow and trimming those "whichy thickets," as Tom Wolfe calls passages filled with superfluous descriptors which tend to add unnecessary density that bores the reader who didn't need such levels of detail, etc.
Power chord accompaniment optional. Salty Vixen, Erotica Writer, my favourite subject to write is BDSM 😉Â
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