Monday, March 7, 2011

Micromanaging Imagination

A long time ago, I wrote a short story about a sub who serves as a party decoration for her mistress, one of many posed around the room. Her outfit is a fetish Catholic school girl costume, and she envies the other subs on display who wear more exotic clothes. Even worse, she's been placed in a corner, facing the wall as if being punished, so she feels that she's missing everything. All she can do is listen to the party.

In her imagination, what's going on behind her is powerfully erotic. Every sound evokes a new scene in her mind involving one of the other subs around the room and she hopes that her turn will be next. Then a man stands behind her, out of her field of vision, and talks quietly to her. His hand slips between her thighs. He stimulates her through her white cotton panties while quietly scolding her for being so wet.

Her imagination turns to him. The voice is vaguely familiar, but which one of her mistress's friends is he? One Dom after another, she fantasies over who this man standing behind her might be. She hopes he'll spank her bottom. She wishes he'd pinch her nipples. She's aching to be fucked. The only touch he'll give her is those two fingers rubbing her clit. His rare, quiet commands strike her as the sign of a confident, difficult to please but incredibly sexy, Dom. As her imagination runs wild, she comes. It's only after he pulls down her panties and takes them with him that she realizes who he is - a guy the subs simply call the Panty Thief. No one knows much about him, or even his real name. The subs dismiss him as a loser. Certainly, he's not the physically imposing alpha male decked in leather that she'd submitted to in her fantasies.

Unfortunately, that story seems to have been lost in my many computer moves, so I can't post passages from it.

As with Lisabet, I'm not a visual person. I don't do the pictures thing other writers seem to do. Even if I were to describe a character down to each twist of their DNA helix, people would envision someone else. Besides, I don't want to micromanage my readers that way. I trust their imagination to turn them on. And as for myself - I only warm up to people when I've met them and chatted with them a bit. Smarts and a sense of humor trump physical appearance every time. That, I write in great detail, because that's character. Eye color isn't.

6 comments:

  1. Hello, Kathleen,

    In erotica, you can let the description go. But in romance, it seems that the readers crave it.

    I never read the story you're talking about. Maybe you should try to recreate it.

    Hugs,
    Lisabet

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lisabet - funny, I thought I left a reply hours ago.

    The need for a lot of visual cues is one of the reason why I don't write romance or read it. It simply isn't my style of genre.

    I don't see writing this story again. It's fem sub, and like romance, it simply isn't my cuppa.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Katherine,

    I loved the idea of the panty thief. It shows the Dom is mostly in the mind of the submissive.

    I read a lot of crime novels and some of the writers are prone to excessive description. I find myself skimming the text because I can't stomach another man with a pround nose and a crooked smile

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think it depends on the description. Some writers like Garcia-Marquez or Raymond Chandler have a knack for weaving character into description, like Chandlers Phillip Marlowe describing a woman as "she stood out like a tarantula on a birthday cake." What a great line that is.

    Garce

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mike - everyone likes the Panty Thief. I may have to reconsider. Imagination is powerful. Or at least, that's the idea I was aiming for.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Garce -

    A tarantula on a birthday cake is a great description of a person. It doesn't actually say anything specific about her looks, and yet, your imagination fills in a picture- an almost complete picture that goes well beyond the color of her hair or eyes. You can picture the set of her mouth.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.