World-building vs titilation: If your erotica is set in a fictional universe, how do you balance backstory with plot?

[boozer1337]

This is something that has frequently eluded me over the years, and I was wondering what others writers might have to suggest!

I write femdom erotica that is very often set in a fictional universe. Sometimes it's an already-established fictional universe such as the Sex Mage World created by Salamando and PancakesForDinner over the last two decades. Other times it's set in a matriarchal universe of my own invention, similar in its setup to the sex mage world except without the magical element.

I'm currently writing a story which involves a man being on trial for making AI porn involving women he knows without their permission. The trial however is merely a setup for the plot, it's the aftermath of it which is the main focus on the story. In writing the trial scene, I have a flashback to the moment he was arrested - and at this point I'm going off on a tangent explaining how this alternate universe came to be the way it is, with female characters holding all of the positions of authority from his boss to the police, and eventually the judge and jury in his trial.

I have a whole backstory in my mind about this, but it's very contemporary-politics related and not erotic at all. At the very least I worry that talking too much about it will be boring for the audience, and at the very worst I worry that talk of real-life actual politics in a fictional erotica story might be an active turn-off, considering many people read such stories as an escape from the real world and all its troubles.

Initially I was actually just going to briefly and vaguely allude to the new order if you will, and not really explain how it had come into existence - for example, a few vague references to "crimes such as this were taken far more seriously since the womens' revolution than they ever had been in the past" and "the sex police had come to be among the most feared policewomen since the change of government", but without going into any real detail about it. However, writing it today it occurred to me to delve a little into the lead-up to the aforementioned revolution just as an aside to the story, in which I'm envisioning essentially a "general strike" or "laying flat" type movement among the women of this universe, which ultimately leads to regime change.

Essentially I'm returning to writing this story after not looking at it for a while, and I feel the world-building I had for it was fairly weak, and have massively fleshed it out this morning. I'm also aware though that people don't necessarily read erotica for deep worldbuilding and certainly not any kind of real-world politics, which the entire internet is already over-saturated with.

How does one balance world-building enough that the story doesn't seem like it shoddily glossed over the worldbuilding to get to the actual plot, vs worldbuilding so much that people are reading paragraph after paragraph and wondering when we get back to what's actually happening with our actual POV characters?

 

[ticklish.mark]

From my experience writing in other erotica genres, write enough for the reader to know what's going on and to understand the character's motivation. People usually don't care about extreme world building in an erotica, but they will care about how the world effects your character and how he interacts with it. Don't approach it like you're explaining an alternate universe. Go at the world's history like it's your character's history.

For your specific story, I'd suggest to mention the woman's revolution in relation to your character's crime. Tie it to how he's maybe afraid of getting caught along with how he's frustrated with his lack of power in this new society. Maybe contrast it with the past to highlight the differences. Don't drop a wall of text to set up the world and all it's rules, but sprinkle in a paragraph or two here and there so the reader can understand the how.

For example, maybe in the flashback he's writing about how angry/annoyed/what have you he is about how his boss makes him feel powerless or how she acts better than him just because she's a woman. When the police come, focus on how much worse it is to be caught by these policewomen rather than the average police officer ever since they were established as a result of the crack down on sex crimes after the revolution. When he's on trial, maybe he's bitter that instead of having a jury of his peers like his father or grandfather would have (assuming the revolution was recent), he instead has a jury of all women who already have their minds made up before hearing his case.

They reader doesn't need to know the revolution happened in 20XX or 19XX lead by activist Jane Doe that resulted in the creation of the anti sex crimes police force and subsequent laws and culture that made it harder for men to take positions of power that lead to a woman's take over. But they do need to know how the character feels in this world, why he made the ai porn despite the risks and how great those risks were.

 

[sophilos]

A mere suggestion. Write your backstory as an allegory, a quick sketch of "this has happened before, and it didn't turn out well". As you develop your plot, you can adjust your allegory to leverage the foreshadowing influence of your backstory. The darker the allegory, the more tense the climax of your main plot, the more gratifying the resolution.

And a distinctly odd suggestion. Write your allegory in past tense and your main plot in present tense. There is an argument to be made that present tense engages the reader more closely, and you may feel this as you write.

Regardless, writing in the present tense chops out dozens of elaborate verb formulations. For myself, I find that I write more quickly without the word "had" frequently noodging at my keyboard.

Regards, fellow ink-stained wretch.

 

[Sablesword]

I find creating situations and settings to be one of the fun and easy parts of writing. I have a number of different settings I created for the sake of featuring "happy comfy female enslavement with lots of bondage and hold the SM please," and because I also like tickling, I had them include the sort of happy ticking that the 'lee enjoys at least as much as the 'ler. ("I beg the tickle, master!")

I've also devised a few settings without slavegirls but with tickling as a regular accepted thing - and because I'm a fan of tickling but not tickle torture I've tried to subvert or steer away from that. Which meant devising reasons for the tickling that accept or even require the 'lee to enjoy it. Sometimes (especially in my earlier stories, e.g. the Centaur Tickling stories) the tickling is presented as a faux torment rather than a real one.

Anyway, I put a lot of think-work into the reasons why a setting is the way it is, and then I DON'T "show my work." I weave in snippets of the parts the reader immediately needs to know, and put in an occasional thumbnail history sketch about the background, but I'm an "iceberg" writer - 7/8ths of what I have isn't shown. It's just there to give an impression that there are explanations beneath the bits the reader gets.

Another way to look at it is how the original Star Trek series did things: How long did it take for the audience to 'get' Vulcans, or the transporter, or communicators, or the sick-bay diagnostic display? (Although the last two have now been defictionalized, making it hard to imagine what they were like to viewers to whom they really were science fiction.)

I will occasionally write up some of my notes as optional information for the interested reader, as in my essay on my Demancipation alternate timeline. And speaking of that alt-history, one thing I try to avoid in my alt-history or science fiction futures is putting in contemporary politics and culture-war issues. Some seeps in anyway, regardless, but I avoid divergences in the present, in favor of divergences occurring in the past or the future.

Another important tool for me is to "change the laws of physics" so as to make an implied "Don't try this in your own timeline," and more importantly to avoid any sort of implicit or explicit recommendation about how the real world is or should be. The Demancipation alt-history, for example, has real and recognized psychic powers as part of the reason why their version of the 19th Amendment enslaved all women instead of giving them the vote.

So after my rambling here, my advice to the OP is to push the point of departure for his fictional timeline back to the 1950s or the 1960s at the latest, to work out his background based on this, and to give the readers a sentence or three that are less to explain and more to reassure the readers that there is an explanation. E.g. "The agents were all women, of course. Substance F was discovered back in the 1950s, but it wasn't until the lie-flat protests of JFK's second term that women really began to take control of society, a process accelerated by the formation of the Federal Sex Police in 1986." And that's all the explanation to be given, with women in charge being taken for granted in the remainder of the story.

 

[Tickleslave83]

I like this question because I am a person who primarily write speculative fiction along the lines of dystopia frequently. The way I see it in the current political climate if you put any politics in the book at all probably half of your audience is not going to like it. I say don't try to please everybody though, if you want to make a point put it in there and if the readers don't like it well then it's not for them. I have no problem putting contemporary politics and my stories and mine are highly satirical and I am definitely a very partisan writer, I think people will either really like myself or if they disagree with the point I am making really really dislike it.

As to the world building I think it's better if it sort of just casually putting in the background. The way I see it imagine you are writing from the perspectives of the characters in this world where the world that they inhabit is normal to them. To the reader they won't necessarily have the same background knowledge as the characters in the work but you can sort of casually dropped hints as to how this came about.

Now in erotica maybe some people aren't as into world building but I can't help but put speculative themes even in my erotica. I haven't really written much about tickling in my erotica but in the erotica that I have had one I did sort of a satire where the Covid virus causes people to become allergic to clothing so it just sort of becomes in the background of the story where you have this new class that suddenly arose that is forced to go naked and how they deal with the society. Another one I had a society where criminals were punished with nudity as a form of humiliation because it was more effective than prison because of the power of social Shame.

I think the good thing is if you are using speculative fiction in particular and creating an entirely new society all you do is have to put like one little change in there that suddenly changed everything. Then it can just be part of the background, like it may casually come up that your characters mention oh inception such a year there was this revolution and I can remember what it was like before that, and then you just occasionally give little bits of background story that anyone who grew up in this fictional universe would automatically know but that would be new to the reader. So you should treat it like your characters know this stuff as well as people might know the real world history. So if you wanted to have like an alternate history like somebody said of JFK not dying, I've written a lot of speculative fiction about that topic to say the least. But yeah you just try to think about logically how the world would be different if you had this one little change and you try to create the world that people would recognize but is slightly different from this change but otherwise makes sense.

Something I bring up very frequently as I think it was Ray Bradbury who said this, or maybe it was fine line, I can't remember exactly but something I frequently bring up when people ask this question, you can put an outrageous idea in your story but if you make your characters behave logically as you would imagine characters what in those circumstances people will accept the weird premise of your story if the characters behave in an otherwise normal manner. So you would probably have to make your characters sort of just be part of this society and have the society seem normal to them except for maybe this one little thing that is slightly different and changes everything. The ideas that you have to make your characters act believably in light of what unbelievable circumstances they find themselves in.

Once again in erotica people might not care as much about world building but if you're like me you can't avoid putting that in there. But if you're going to put real world politics and they are sometimes better to have it be sort of maybe a joke here and there or just something in the background, not constantly nailing you over the head with it. Like a character joking about a fictional president or a fictional revolution that happened, or casually dropping I remember before the revolution it was like this (sees like the way things are now perhaps) but then X but then now things are like X and so on and so forth.

Or in one of my non-erotica stories I had basically a situation that you go into sort of like a future history where the novel takes place over the course from 1920 to about the year 3000. So you have a situation where women were increasingly oppressed beginning in 2025 (and I wrote that in 2020 and I kind of guess on the ball on that one unfortunately) which leads to women organizing and then in 2042 there is a mass revolution of women around the world sort of like the Arab spring where women occupy all the major governments of the world and then we see startling change to a much more egalitarian world that then is projected centuries into the future. So you just have to put in sort of one little change but you should give some idea of how this happened, like if it's going to sound like something unbelievable try to make it still sounds believable, like a lot of the times unexpected things happen or a revolution just happens out of nowhere, this is not actually without historical precedent, so you can weave these things into the story and then you just continue with the logical outcome of whatever situation that you put your characters in. Like if you're going to make some kind of dramatic or fantastical change you should try to make how it happened seem believable based on what we know about the real world. You can have a fantastical premise to your story but still make it believable in a way that people could say yes this is a little out there but I can see how it could possibly happen under the circumstances set out in the story.