Dissecting a Succubus - "Joey Farrell Walks into an Obvious Booby Trap" (pt 3) (Patreon)

Ever have the feeling you've forgotten something…

Yup.  I was about to do a behind-scenes piece for "The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins", when I remembered I hadn't finished doing the one for the story before that.  In my defence, I've been bunged up pretty badly for the past week or so with one of the various nasty flu bugs floating around.

Back to where we were.  I was writing a behind-scenes look at my previous short story – "Joey Farrell Walks into an Obvious Booby Trap."  Part 1 covered the "monster" and part 2 covered the two central characters.  Part 3 was about how to smash everything together into a story.  I was going to put part 3 out earlier, but after falling behind with the carnivorous plant girl story I knew I needed to get something more concrete done than a little behind-scenes piece.

Well, the short story is done, so let's finish off this combo of behind-scenes trivia and writing tips and advice.

The easiest setup for this story would be to have Joey Farrell walk down the road and then randomly fall out of reality into Oppa's pit of tits.  This is the "screw your plot, here's the monster and/or fucking" (depending on whether you're writing horror or erotica).

Personally, I like to add a bit more plot to a story (even if it is "low-culture" monsters/pervy sex).  It gives it a little more flavour and should improve the overall story.  After I knew I was going to do a booby monster girl story, the brainstorming went something like this:

- Oppa is static, therefore I have to bring the protagonist to her somehow.

- Maybe she could be some kind of trap.

- If she's a trap, who would set her?

- Ah, why don't I use that warlock character from "A Trial in Vennington".

- So the protagonist is chasing the warlock, and triggers the trap to fall in on Oppa.

- Why is the protagonist after her?

- "A Trial in Vennington" featured idiotic and overzealous student antifa types, why not balance things out and this time have a more positive left-wing studenty type.  This also opens up interesting conflict of ideals between the sort that do activist stuff to improve their local community, and the more narcissistic sort that do activist stuff purely to improve their own personal brand.

- So what would set Farrell and Weaver in conflict?

This is where I looked to real-life events for inspiration.  In the US there have been various spates of violence between antifa and free speech/alt right types, most infamously an incident where a college professor dressed up in black and clonked someone on the head with a bike lock.  This felt like a good spark.  Weaver likes to manipulate people to violence, why not start with the protagonist dealing with the aftermath where a friend got carried away, forgot real-life violence has consequences, and was now having to deal with those consequences.

I liked this.  Perhaps a little too much as on the first draft I got a little carried away and wrote a lot more of the introduction and a longer scene between Farrell and his imprisoned friend.  I liked what I wrote, but there is important advice to any writer – "kill your darlings".  It doesn't matter how much you like a section of writing.  If it doesn't further the plot, it's bloat.  Get out the chainsaw and cut it out.

The same also applies to politics and "message".  You're probably familiar with the various arguments raging between the "get politics out of our games/comics/films/etc" people and the "everything is political" people.  Generally, if an audience are complaining about too much politics, what probably happened is the creator got their priorities the wrong way around.  Plenty of great writers snuck a little message/politics in there, but they always remembered that the other stuff (the erotica, the horror, the sci-fi) had to come first.  Getting them the wrong way around, which a lot of creators seem to be doing nowadays, just bores and annoys the audience.  People generally don't like being preached to.

The simple tl;dr is this: a little seasoning is great, just don't let it take over the whole brew (or story).

Also, the one thing I did realise after writing a chunk of the first draft was that somewhere along the way I forgot about the idea of Farrell actually chasing Weaver, then triggering the trap while following her through a disused church (or something like that).  I think that would have been better – more dynamic – but sometimes you have to keep going with what you've got otherwise you never finish anything.  Maybe I can use that in a future story.  Maybe this time make the monster girl a pit of vaginas, or kissy lips.  Who knows…

Right, that was a bit more in-depth than I originally intended.  I hope this was helpful and/or interesting.

I'll try and stick up some notes (and this time notes rather than a three-part essay!) on the more recent carnivorous plant girl story over the course of this month.

-manyeyedhydra