Once Upon a Time...

Once upon a time, all an author had to do was start a story at the beginning and keep writing until they reached the end. And sometimes that is still the way to do it, especially if you happen to be producing an eroticised version of a traditional fairytale. However, some bright spark started spouting Latin and going on about stories starting in the middle of the action: ‘in media res’. It was, in fact, some Roman dude called Horace talking about Homer’s The Iliad in the first century BC. Thank you Wikipedia. So not some fancy pants technique made up by twentieth-century movie directors to confuse us, although the writer Kurt Vonnegut took it a step further by saying: “Start as close to the end as possible.”

So where are you going to start your story? Let’s take our couple who are about to get up to some kinky shenanigans at the allotment:

Once upon a time there was a boy called Nick and a girl called Leanne and they grew up and moved in together and got an allotment. And one day, Nick was making a chicken coop, while Leanne planted broad beans. Little did Nick know that Leanne was also planning to lock him in the chicken coop and drop nettles on him. But he wouldn’t have minded, because Nick is sexually submissive and a masochist.

Are you asleep yet?

So how about this:

Before his brain told him to stop, Nick’s hips started to thrust. The nettles’ tiny hairs punctured his skin, injecting their poison. He pressed his butt down hard to immobilise it, whimpering around the glossy Red Windsor dessert apple he was holding in his teeth as he did so. His jaw ached as he tried to avoid biting through the fruit.

‘Push it into your mouth as far as you can then bite down,’ Leanne had said. ‘Keep it there while you jerk off for me. If you bite through it, I won’t give you permission to come.’

Starting off like this allows us to take in some facts without them being spelt out in such a prosaic way. Nick is lying in some nettles and is holding an apple in his mouth while he wanks. Leanne has ordered him to do this, so we know about the power dynamic and the kinkiness. But we’re still going to have to provide backstory at some point about exactly where they are and what they’re doing.

There are different ways of doing this. The simplest is to give a paragraph or so of the action, then put in a break mark, a row of asterisks or whatever the style is, then go back to the beginning. If the initial image is striking enough for the reader to hold in mind while they go back to the start, I think this can work, but it also risks looking lazy. The alternative is to drip feed in the backstory a bit at a time. And this risks being confusing if you’re not clear about the frequent shifts between current action and what’s gone before.

Which leads on to the subject of whether you’re writing in the present or past tense to begin with. As with third-person narrative, I think past tense tends to be the default when you begin writing. But again, the alternative can provide more immediacy and pace, particularly for erotica. With the past tense, even though the reader doesn’t know what is going to happen before they actually read the words, they know subconsciously that this fiction they’re currently pretending to be true is over and done with: ‘His jaw ached as he tried to avoid biting through the fruit.’ Will he bite through it and be denied permission to come? With the sentence in the past tense, the reader’s expectation is that he will avoid it. The fictional narrator knows this already and has given no clue otherwise. Here's the alternative: ‘His jaw aches as he tries to avoid biting through the fruit.’ The narrator is still in the middle of the action and so, therefore, is the reader. The future is a lot less certain. Anything could happen.

Writing in the present tense make it easier to put the backstory in too without having to use the word ‘had’ a million and one times: ‘Nick lies down in the coop. He made it for the Plymouth Rock pullets they’d ordered.’ Otherwise you end up with: ‘Nick lay down in the coop. He had made it for the Plymouth Rock pullets they’d ordered.’

As for the second person future tense – only you know how that one will turn out. Incidentally, though, Alison Tyler currently has a call for submissions out for stories in the second person (not future tense!), deadline April 15. Details at her blog.