4/7/24
Learning to Listen—and to Ignore
This is number fifty-seven in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon Community to support my writing.
“THIS WOULD BE BETTER if it had some ‘real’ sex in it.”
“We’d never let our daughters behave like that! What I want to know is, as parents, What Were They Thinking?”
“There’s way too much sex in this.”
“I can’t wait to see the coach get involved with Dennis.”
“What’s the message in this story?”
“It’s a bad title. It should be something like “Becoming the Assassin” instead of just The Assassin.”
“This story shouldn’t have a murder in it! You betray the author reader contract!”
“Brian should keep growing until he has about nine or ten inches.”
One old saying is “Opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one and they all stink.”
But sometimes we get really valuable advice—even when it’s unsolicited. How do you manage to sort through all the advice you get about writing erotica (or anything else) and separate the good from the bad? In my world, that has meant learning to listen—and then learning to ignore.
2016 had been an incredible year for me. I went around the world—in a literal rather than sexual way. My major opus, Living Next Door to Heaven was finished, as well as the Hero Lincoln stories in the Damsels in Distress universe. I was writing my travel memoir series Wonders of My World. I was looking through my lists of ideas of what to write next and none were exciting me. I decided to conduct a survey.
I didn’t have great expectations for the results of the survey, but I wanted to know my audience a little better. I used Survey Monkey to post a survey for free and announced it on SOL, where the majority of my readers were located. The free survey offer was for up to 100 responses. I had to purchase a subscription when I received 424 responses to my survey!
I was blown away. It was far more than I ever expected. It took all of September and October to begin to make sense of them all. But what I discovered brought me much closer to my readers. I found out how old they were, what gender they were, what they preferred to read, where they got reading material, and what kind of other erotica they liked.
An idea began to gel in my mind. Whatever I wrote next had to get me back to my roots on SOL. It had to be art something.
I put those words at the top of a page and let my mind run free. The narrator would be Art the artist whose last name was so strange that no one ever remembered it. In fact, it was French for ‘strange:’ Étrange.
I started writing.
The Strange Art series was only three short books starting with Art Something, but I felt I had really gotten back to what I loved about writing. And my readers seemed to think so, too.
I loved the whole concept - pictures rather than words but the words came. You painted Art’s surreal canvas with such flair and imagination. Morgan Le Fay, Arthur Pendragon and Annette as Lady of the Lake were bold characters but they had such a positive support structure around them. Parents and teachers - that’s how it’s supposed to work! -Cyssternius
Why?
I’d taken time to listen to my readers and discovered they liked what I wrote when I was writing what I really enjoyed.
Art Something and the entire Strange Art series is available on Bookapy and in paperback elsewhere.
I’d like to say all I have to do as an author is listen to what my readers want. I can’t. I have received some really poor advice from readers that I’ve followed—much to my detriment. The vast majority of my survey respondents (306) said they preferred stories rated as “Some Sex.” That’s what I felt I wrote. Typically, there was a long lead-up to getting to any “real sex” at all. In Living Next Door to Heaven, it was near the end of the fourth book, The Rock, before Brian and Whitney had intercourse. There had been an incredible amount of sex play before that, but according to some readers, it just wasn’t enough.
“This would be a lot better if it had some real sex in it,” was a common message I received, not only on that book, but on several that came after.
I listened—when I shouldn’t have.
Both the Team Manager series and the Photo Finish series have more sex in them than was needed. One of my editors, who I usually trust to be aware of when I stray, told me that Shutter Speed was approaching a stroke story! But did I listen? I lost a lot of readers because of the amount of sex in the series. Some of those now remaining might be disappointed that there is nowhere near the amount of sex in the last volume, Follow Focus.
So, how do you balance what advice to take with what not to take?
I return to Shakespeare’s sage advice. “This above all: to thine own self be true And it must follow, as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man.”—Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3. And yes, he put those sage words in the mouth of a pompous fool, showing good advice might come from any source.
First of all, listen to those you have asked for advice. Typically, they have nothing at stake in the advice they give. Nonetheless, weigh their advice against your intent. If they advise a different path than the story you want to write, think about what is leading them to that path. You may still need to clarify your ideas. You can’t really get good advice on topic A if you ask about topic B.
Second, identify your advisor’s triggers. I use the term much more loosely than popular culture does. Triggers can be both positive and negative. I’m reminded of the preacher who was asked about pills. He immediately jumped to the gos-pills and how the gospels talked about baptism. There was no subject that could have been addressed to him that didn’t end up being a conversation about baptism. This is just as important as a person who reading the word “abuse” assumes the entire story is about abuse and has specific issues already in mind when they first encounter the word.
Third, decide what’s in it for the person giving advice. On Thursday this week, the scores on six of my sixty-two stories went down by .01. Nothing improved. This is typically the sign of a reader who is upset about something I’ve written or implied. Therefore, without reading any further, assumes everything I write is similarly flawed and deserves his scorn—expressed by a low vote. You have to admire the person’s fortitude to open every story and vote it down, but you don’t need to pay attention to it. His vote, whether it changes the score or not, doesn’t matter. It is not a valid bit of advice for my writing.
You might assume from the above that I’m obsessed with scores, but part of my centering ritual each day is assessing all my statistics. I track the number of downloads, scores, and comments of each story, sales of each book, amount of money in each bank account and charges on each credit card. It’s a massive spreadsheet! But it doesn’t track “What I Did for Love.” Next week.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
