3/17/24
Are These Real?
This is number fifty-four in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“…THERE’S NO SKIN between them and the words you write.” I’ve treasured that review of Model Student: Mural since the day it was written in 2012. The author of this comment questioned whether the characters were real or not, but surmised, “They for sure exist inside you.”
I used to tell people that my stories were mostly true in that they were certainly true, but mostly only in my head.
Still, for nearly every character you find in one of my stories, you could find a real-life inspiration. Only the names, descriptions, and events have been changed to protect me. I mean the innocent.
In fact, aroslav’s Wonders of My World series has more real characters in it than any of my other books and I’ll tell you a little about why. When I started this series, I intended it to be about my world travels—the amazing nine months I spent traveling around the world. But if I was telling that story, why not tell the story of my other travels, as I went solo around the country in my truck and travel trailer for a few years?
The first book of the series, US Highways, was set when I began my big adventure in August of 2013 and extended to the end of my first full circuit around the United States, in the winter of 2014. American Backroads was set from 2015 through February 2016. Then there’s the book I actually wrote first, Border Crossings. It was first released on SOL as Seven Wonders of the World. I’ve released a couple of short stories in the series since then, but soon, I hope to release a fourth book in the series I’m working on under the title “Lay of the Land.”
The pattern of the stories is that I have an adventure in the present in each chapter, but I keep jumping back to an adventure sometime in the past. What most people don’t think about is the names of the characters of the past all happen to coincide with names of characters in my other books. In fact, I’ve written a little about the person who inspired the character in that other book. You’ll read about Cassie, Samantha, Hannah, Dee, Shannon, Carly, Whitney, Kate, Paula, and Belle. Each was at one time or another a real person in my life with whom I’d either had an interesting erotic adventure, or a favorite fantasy.
The entire Wonders of My World series is available as a collection at Bookapy.com. The eBook series and the free series on my website are richly illustrated with photos from my travels.
How does one manage writing about sex with a real woman when one never actually had sex with that woman?
Very carefully. I’ve made mistakes before. I try to avoid them now.
The first rule, of course, is not to use their real name. Either first or last. This gets a little tricky because the older you get, the fewer names you haven’t heard. You have to have names for your characters, but you have to be careful what the name is. First of all, if you don’t associate the name with the original person and mix and match first and last names, you can get away pretty cleanly. If a character is based on Susan Lancaster, though—even if in a fantasy—you can’t use either Susan or Lancaster in her name. Much better to call her Beth Williams, because Susan won’t recognize herself in that.
You might keep in mind, that all those really nice people you had fantasies about, who are now stalwart members of the church, and serve on the city council, are not likely to be reading your erotica stories. If they are, they are really unlikely to complain about recognizing themselves or admitting they were there in the first place.
Still, even my sister was convinced that she knew who everyone in one of my stories was and disagreed emphatically with how things were related—and that wasn’t even erotica. And she was wrong. I had to explain that characters might sound familiar because I borrowed characteristics from people, but the story was fiction! It seems people often forget that.
The second rule is to change something besides the name. Make your blonde a redhead. Change her eye color. Make her short and fat or tall and fat. Give her a southern accent. Change her race, religion, or politics. No matter if you are basing a character on a real person, you are writing fiction! You don’t have to be faithful to every detail in her description.
Third, remember that no matter what part of your story was based on a real person, you are writing fiction. Have I mentioned that? It’s important! You don’t need the whole character. Think about what attracted you so much to this person that you want to write about her. Maybe it was just a favorite expression. Perhaps it was just the size of her nipples. Do you associate a specific smell with her? Cardamom? Was there a memorable event? That time when you rode the log flume and discovered when you were both drenched that she wasn’t wearing a bra? Extract that detail and apply it to someone else.
In my initial version of Living Next Door to Heaven, I modeled a lot of characters after kids I knew when I was growing up. When I finished the story and decided to publish it in eBooks, I realized how much I’d duplicated their names and characteristics. The names were so close to the actual names of kids I knew that before I published the books, I changed all the names! That was not appreciated by people who read the first version and had become quite attached to some of those characters. And when, years later, I wrote a sequel and used all the new names, I still had people writing to me to complain about the names being different.
I was successful, though. One of my neighbors from that era got hold of the series and read it enthusiastically. But when I mentioned who some of the characters were, he looked at me blankly. “That was our Jessica?” He didn’t even recognize the description of his own house where the action took place. He recognized the names of the horses.
When I’m asked, as I am in many instances, whether these characters are real, I still respond “Mostly real.” They are real, but mostly only in my head. They are an amalgamation of memories of different people pressed together to create wholly unique individuals.
If you think you recognize someone in my books, remember:
“This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and probably mildly insulting. Please don’t tell them.”
Basing fiction on reality is a pretty common theme in both literature and politics. Don’t like the way something happened? Rewrite it. It gets a lot more complicated, though, if you are basing your fiction on your autobiography. Next week: “Life as I Would Have Lived It.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
