It Turns Out That Writing Is Impossible.

[rionaleonhart]

My thought process over the course of the fic I'm currently working on:

- I'll just write a simple PWP for smut practice.
- I've been sort of wanting to write Robert/female Chris Goes Wrong fanfiction, given that Chris is occasionally a woman in unofficial Play That Goes Wrong productions; let's go with that as the premise. Just get them into bed, and...
- ...
- But it'd be interesting to explore how Robert and Chris's relationship is different when Chris is a woman, isn't it?
- Actually, what's most interesting is all the ways their relationship isn't different, and it's hard to demonstrate that when male Chris isn't there.
- So if I summon male Chris from a parallel universe—
- In which case I suppose it makes sense to make this a sequel to my fic in which Robert summons himself from a parallel universe—
- But I need this to stand alone, because 'M/M/M Robert/Chris/Robert selfcest threesome' and 'M/F Robert/Chris AU' probably appeal to different people, so I'll need to incorporate enough setup for this to make sense if people aren't interested in the preceding fic—
- oh, God, I'm never going to get to the sex, am I

I can't just write smut! I don't know how! I thought the issue here would just be my inability to write sex, but apparently I also have to jump the hurdle of making the characters have sex in the first place. Somehow I find myself unable to write them in bed without first going 'but how did they get into the bed?', and the bed just keeps moving further and further away.

If you have any tales of your own silly struggles with writing, I'd love to hear them!

Comments

[pauraque]

This post cracked me up because it's something that would absolutely happen to me. I always get way more interested in relationship dynamics than smut, and whenever I finally get there, I've run out of steam and don't care about the smut anymore. (How I didn't figure out years earlier that I'm ace, I really don't know.)

[wolfy_writing]

But I need this to stand alone, because 'M/M/M Robert/Chris/Robert selfcest threesome' and 'M/F Robert/Chris AU' probably appeal to different people, so I'll need to incorporate enough setup for this to make sense if people aren't interested in the preceding fic—
- oh, God, I'm never going to get to the sex, am I

Oh no, the too much context problem! I’ve been there. I can actually write smut just fine, but I get down weird rabbit holes about explaining why something is happening and get blocked.

[apiphile]

I frequently have to wrestle characters into bed with each other against their will too, mainly because I like writing about suspicious and distrustful bastards and this doesn't always led itself to the vulnerability of fucking. ALSO they will insist on opening their mouths and putting their feet in there.

Getting from A to B in any area (sex, fights, arguments, travel, you name it) remains a struggle because it's hard to measure the time-in-writing against the time-in-action; if I have a long break for description or interiority that feels like a lot of time must've passed in the characters' lives but then when you read it back it's clearly unreasonable for their physical situation/relationship/whatever to have changed that much in such a short space.

[wolfy_writing]

I think ADHD brain might be unintentionally helpful in writing smut, because having a mental default of really strong difficult-to-resist "But I wanna do the thing that will feel good in the immediate future" impulses makes it easy to come up with scenarios where characters will have sex regardless of whether it's a good idea.

[deemoyza]

I relate to this a lot! Strangely enough, though, the actual smut isn't necessarily a problem for me -- fitting it into the narrative is. Oftentimes,I'll have a spicy little scene ready to go, but I can't post it until I come up with an in-universe explanation of how it started. And, much like you said, the explanations branch and spiral from there. And sometimes, when I finally make it to the sex scene, the tone of the story will have changed so much that I either have to rewrite the scene or cut it altogether.

It's a miracle I've written any explicit fics at all! XD