f/f writing gripe of the night

[sciatrix]

f/f writing gripe of the night:

 

the problem with having been wistfully deterred every time I tried aggressively to dive into femslash writing the first time is that I just have way less to draw on for scene structure than I apparently can pull from for m/m. Which is ridiculous: I’m not even limiting myself to standard human vulva-inclusive genitals, so why the hell is this hitting me so much harder than sex from a male PoV? 

 

like, why is shit like “I would like clothes off, please remove” and “excuse me, please put your hand on my fucking clit now now now” and “I am nervy but I want to make my body feel good please and thank you” suddenly so much trickier from a female PoV than a male one? It’s not like I don’t have a ton of experience with the latter to draw on here. but okay, it’s intimidating, fine; I’m a baby writer, I am still learning this shit, practicing is okay. gotta think on it and chew a bit. 

 

so I go looking for resources and advice. and…. there are none. fuck. 

 

well, okay. that’s not entirely true. but what there is seems to be very focused on either anatomy, mechanics and safe sex (”how do lesbians do it, anyway?”) or on coming up with good words to use for genitalia in your porn writing. and. neither of those are my bloody problem here.

 

first, I am pretty well acquainted with the theoretical ways that you can get up close and personal with a cunt. tribadism and cunnilingus and fingering and fisting are not foreign concepts to me. I am aware of the difficulties with actually pulling off scissoring and frankly tits present all manner of possibilities, and all that assumes your characters have never heard of toys. I don’t need another list of dry descriptions of Possible Activities to do if you have two editions of Slot B. 

 

hisses Scarleteen is a lovely resource but it is not particularly helpful as a guide to writing porn, thank you. 

 

second, the wording thing people complain about is not usually what I’m bothered with. which: c’mon, folds? lips are right there, or rely on texture and sensation to describe things. obviously euphemisms like ‘love tunnel’ are Right Out, but I wouldn’t have been using those anyway. (also I’m gonna be honest: vulva is an appealing, velvety word. fight me. and cunt: also lovely. I can take or leave pussy, but cunt and vulva are buddies to me.) 

 

besides, word choice normally wouldn’t bug me much–after all, I tend to not be someone who writes heavily on the anatomy references anyway, so 

 

that’s stalling me just a bit, but it’s not actually the thing that keeps smacking me in the head as I try to write this scene and derail.

 

no, what I’m scrambling for is descriptions of sensation, of experience, of feeling… from the perspectives of actual people. And scenes with women fucking each other described in an interesting way that illustrates the vulnerability of the characters 

 

and it’s not just me: cursory searches from my trawling through DW comms yields an anon femslash thread wherein the first comment when asked what people would not want to confess to off anon was people complaining about the paucity of anything but fade-to-black. 

 

so is it something about the headspace? my internalized weirdness? what is going on with my head?

 

and gah, is there like a treasure trove of How To Write Good F/F Explicit Sex I’m missing somewhere? I’ll work up a bunch of links to all the best stuff I find in the morning as I trawl Dreamwidth and LJ comms, but I’m regretfully afraid of the possibility that there’s just nothing for it but to go hunting for the best f/f in my favorites lists, reread them, and brood.

 

oh, oh, the horror. 

Comments

Re: F'in the Inf'able

[sciatrix]

Oh, I keep meaning to come back to this, getting distracted, and failing!

One thing that sticks out for me as I go "but I don't want!" for purely idiosyncratic reasons is that... well...

I have exclusively really shitty experiences with penetration, is the thing. (You'd think that it would take less than seven years of dutifully going in for pelvic exams and reliably recoiling in pain to identify an imperforate hymen as a problem, but apparently not.) So I actually hadn't even conceptualized that lack of verbiage and description as a problem right up until last week, when I sat down and worked out all the scenes I've written... and there's exactly one with PIV in it (and none at all with anal), the point of view is from the gentleman doing the penetrating, and he's also pretty uncomfortable most of the time.

I had not actually noticed that before this discussion, so that was a new and exciting food for thought. But yeah--that is one reason that the ability to have nonpenetrative sex in my f/f is apparently rather important to me, at least defining "nonpenetrative" as "no one is inserting anything dicklike into anyone else"--hands are fine, fisting is fine, tongues are fine, but PIV and things resembling it aren't the end all be all, and I think that's weirdly important to my hindbrain to emphasize given how often "sex with vulva" winds up going to "stick a dick in it" in broader sexual culture.

But that isn't to say that your theory is remotely wrong! It reminds me of the discussion we were having over at staranise's about penetration and vocabulary. And even those actively-being-penetrated verbs are, well, verbs and not sensations precisely.