Rachael’s Slippery Tip #3: Building to a Great Climax
A good story is like a good one-night stand.
First there’s the attraction, then some foreplay, and it all leads to a fantastic climax (or two, or five). If any of these parts are missing, then it’s just doesn’t work quite as well. It’s the same with a story, whether it’s a 3-page quickie or a multi-chapter epic. You don’t need to be a literary expert in story structure, but you do need to understand the minimum requirements if you want to seduce your reader into coming back to your place for the night.
A lot of writing guides explain that stories should have a beginning, middle, and end. I’ve always found this to be a pretty useless way to explain how to shape a story. What’s important is the function of each of these parts. The beginning contains an introduction to your characters, a premise, and a promise. The middle serves to develop the characters, complicate the premise, and build tension. The end is where you deliver the big pay-off, release the tension, and fulfill the promise.
The beginning is the place for setting up everything the reader needs to know. It all starts with an interesting character that compels the reader to want to get to know them better. A mother of two in a sexless marriage who notices her older son developing into a desirable young man. A shy daughter who doesn’t know to deal with her blossoming body and wants to explore her sexuality with someone she has trusted all her life. A horny nephew who lusts after his aunt, but is crippled with guilt because his aunt and his mom are identical twin sisters. Describing characters in this way easily leads to your basic premise. Mom seduces teen son; daughter teases daddy; nephew has sex with aunt as a surrogate for his own mother. Your premise is the spine of your story. This means that every scene, event, and line of dialogue should somehow serve this main idea. Staying true to your premise will keep you on track while writing and prevent you from veering off into areas that confuse or distract the reader. Finally, the premise contains an inherent promise. Mom seduces son makes a promise that mother and son are going to fuck. Daughter teases daddy promises that at some point daddy will break down and give his little girl more than she bargained for in the form of his very hard cock. Nephew has sex with mom’s twin sister promises the readers that he will realize that his desire for his aunt is a misplaced lust for his mother and that they will consummate this taboo relationship (possibly with his aunt joining in). The set up can be as short as a paragraph or as long as a few pages provided each of these elements is included.
The middle is generally the meatiest part of a story. This may not always be true in an erotic story (more specifically, a jerk off story). This really is a case where length doesn’t matter as much as how you use it. This is a good place for you to tell us more about the character in terms of background, attitudes, problems, goals, or whatever is important to this story as far as motivation goes. If our premise is mom seduces teen son, there should be more to it than just her needing a good fuck. What is there in her past or in her mind that allows her to cross the line that holds most other mother’s back. Does she have pleasant memories of consensual incest from when she was a teen? Does a friend of hers confess to fucking her own son and plant the idea in her head? Did her son do something to change her view of him from an innocent boy to a sexually appealing man? This is also where you need to build tension. Notice that I used the word “need”! If mom wants to fuck, and son wants to fuck, and they fuck that’s all well and good, but you’re skipping the literary foreplay. Mom should make a move, then pull back. Or maybe she tries something, and her son rejects her (for now). Perhaps the sparks fly, but before they can get very far they are interrupted. Without building some tension here in the middle, the climax is almost always less satisfying.
Then comes the big finish. This is where the promise of the premise gets paid off. Mom fucks son. Dad chokes daughter with his cum. Nephew slides his cock into mom while aunty licks his ass. This is where all porn stories end up – generally no real surprises for the reader. They know what’s going to happen at the end as soon as they pick up on your promise, but they want to see how the characters get there. If you’ve done a good job of building some tension, by the time they get to the expected end they’re so excited that even though they knew what was coming they’re uncontrollably worked up and masturbating like crazy as the final sex scene plays out in all its graphic glory! Once you deliver on the promise and have drained everyone’s sex fluids, that’s your signal to end the story, and end it quick. Your reader is a mush of post-orgasmic jelly at this point, so put a clever bow on your mini-masterpiece in the form of a few poignant lines and walk away.
So there you go – all you ever need to know about story structure. That wasn’t so difficult, was it? Set up, development, pay off. If you can think in these terms, your stories will be better than half the stuff out there by default – I promise.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, your place or mine…?
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