Pet peeves, things to work on as authors

Shifting the topic slightly, my pet peeve is when the original authors of the story makes a thread for character information, and a writer completely ignores it and tries to reshape a character completely. For example, making a shy virgin into a complete slut after she has only been in the story for two additions and hasn't had time to fuck even one guy, much less the five or six the writer tries to account for from no where.

 

Oh yeah, that'd be pretty annoying I guess.
I've not had that experience yet, though only having started one story, and private at that, it's not surprising.

 

So far only once with me as well. The person was a very good writer, and I welcome more additions, but somehow that slipped by him.

 

Things which are physically hard to believe especially with women. this is probably more common in film that literature. When Buffy, a supernatural being, hits people they rightly go down but when an ordinary 90lb woman, such as any played by Keira Knightley, manages not only to knock men over with a punch but wield heavy weapons which in reality would cause them to fall over if they tried to swing them, it gets a bit much. A special case of this is when the schoolkid confronts the usually much bigger and stronger bully and delivers that lucky punch e.g. George McFly on Biff. When I write sexual scenes I try to make sure that the positions described are indeed possible and on several occasions I have to reject them, although I am less bothered when reading about this from other writers. Thirdly, on the same subject, is when a character who has just come out of an operation, acts as though nothing has happened. Not only from my own experience but also of witnessing others, if you try to get up too early you will most likely feel your legs buckle - I once saw this happen to a tough Rastafarian who had an operation on his nose several hours, if not a day, previously - yet in thrillers characters often wake up from an operation and escape from the hospital usually knocking people over and breaking into a run.

Another device which annoys me about stories is when a character who desperately has to tell someone something vitally important is ignored or told to shut up. If it is a matter of life and death I cannot imagine not ensuring my message gets across and yet this failure to communicate is used as a plot device time and time again. I cannot rule out the possibility that I might have used this myself, but it would annoy me if I have.

 

That's a good point there. You'd think they'd do just about anything to relay the information if it's that important.

 

I gotta say, personally I hate when a story is too close to reality. If I wanted the sense of two real people bumping uglies, I´d just watch a porno.
I mean, if you´ve got the whole canvas of the human imagination available, why just write down a description of what countless coked-up californians have
been filming in their McMansions for decades, with generically hot 20-35 year old blondes/brunettes/redheads having overly noisy sex with some meaty
quarterback...

I prefer the stuff that porno films can´t do due to legal reasons or lack of budget, vision and acting talent, even if it means violating the limits of percieved
reality.

 

I wouldn't call that reality...

 

I guess my only real pet peeve is stories that are linear. The writing may be beautiful, but if it wasn't the author's intention to indulge the reader's choices, why write in this format?

It's not an absolute. Some people delve deep into a single branch and have trouble getting back to past branches. Some lose interest, or get dispirited when reader interest seems to be waning. I get that. But when the preamble starts with a promising premise and then the only route available through the story turns out to be a shallow fan-fic of a character you've never heard of... *sigh*...

 

This tread teaches more about how the vagina works than most high schools in america, bravo

I generally try and leave out most fine details and let the reader fill them in. However I would point out people aren't here to read about reality in general they want a sexier abstraction or sexual fantasy lived out by fictional characters.

 

My main pet peeve is usually when an author gives a woman's breast size and its EE or higher. Typically I don't mention breast size. I just say if they are large. That way the reader can imagine what size they are actually.

Another one is that it can be too quick to sex to allow for build up. I generally like a crescendo where sex is anticipated, but the payoff isn't till later.

Minor one is when a chapter has only one option. This is fine if it's a good place to branch off from, but every one in a while someone puts a "Continue..." And that gets on my nerves as it feels like it's not taking advantage of the media.

 

Maybe I´m just a huge loser, but does anyone actually know what breast sizes actually look like? Like, I know that D is "Big" and DD is "more big" so E, EE stc must be "Sooper fuckin big, yo", but other than that, they tell me nothing...
Also it all feels a bit clinical. Like giving the woman´s exact weight or her skin temperature in Kelvin...

 

Kotaku has a pretty good size comparison chart:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-medi...l_progressive,q_80,w_800/18j254qkhks4fjpg.jpg

This is K which is not on the scale:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/86/65/5d/86655ddb403431bcfbc36ce791a82690.jpg

Abnormally large breast size is possible, but typically you find women to be proportional unless it's plastic surgery. In particular a lot of writers just throw numbers and letters around.

 

Hey, it could be magic, or reality alteration, or something like that -- at least, when I'm writing it.

 

It's mainly a preference of generic language(large, big, gigantic, etc...) over the exact measurements. When ever I see breast size listed over DD I just ignore it and imagine whatever I want.

 

How big breasts actually are, also depends on the band size. The first picture only shows the size on kind of slim bodies.
Maybe this picture can give another clue: http://67.media.tumblr.com/49a31bcfc0615506b60c93ad13590b24/tumblr_n1hkvdqtSN1s2e5eio1_500.jpg

I prefer good graphic descriptions over letters.

 

Describing the world (and especially people) in numbers instead of words is indeed for me often one of the immediate signs if I continue to read a story or if I stop after the first paragraph.

If a story starts with "Susan was 1,60 m tall, weighs 80 pounds and had a breast size of DD", I know that it's not worth to read the story, because the writer has no clue about writing. And indeed, most often, also no clue about breast size, because as gene.sis pointed out, the letters alone don't say anything, they depend on the band size (and if I am not mistaken often even a few other parameters) of the woman. Letters are a way to measure bra size. It's like we would describe a man "His pant size was 192". Totally useless information, and also nothing anybody ever uses in real life (unless they are teenagers, maybe). If I see a woman on the street, I don't think "Oh, she has nice cup size C breasts". I might think that they are nicely round shaped, or that they are big, or small, or hanging down, or whatnot.

I actually often give very spare description of people. This is about imagination, and it's also about erotic imagination. I want to give my readers enough space so that they can imagine whatever floats their boat. I often will mention hair colour, I might mention if a woman has an impressive breast size or is mean to have especially sexy breasts. I might mention details like eyes, tattoos and the like.

 

I think, the third ingredient usually is wrong measuring (resulting in wrong bra size).

Due to different bra size standards, it can also be confusing to use bra sizes.

 

Same thing with dress sizes, women get shit for an actual measuring system. Marilyn Monroe's dress size was 12-16.

To woman today that is a big size.

However when a modern day reporter put on one of her dresses it was revealed the sizes were closer to today's size 4.

 

I think the real take away here is don't get caught up in numbers and letters. It is easy to write DD but harder to write how someone might see them, what they might be thinking, or the other million details. The work is worth it though to the reader.

 

Another factor is measurements aren't consistent between companies. This is true for more than just bras (New Balance has me a whole shoe size smaller than Nike, for one example), but female clothing in general is the worst victim of this disparity. Then there's the factor of multiple fastening points, since few women measure exactly to their particular band size, that prove even if a bra size is supplied, it's not the exact measurement it's presumed to be. And finally, we have to remember human error. It's present in almost everything, but sometimes it isn't abundantly apparent. A simple example is that some garments that are marketed as the same size by the same manufacturer have a slight difference in size due to someone loading the machine slightly off-center, the cutting tool having bent or slipped, or some other extremely minute change. Most times it's irrelevant - the panties suffer for this more often than the bra - but it can be a hassle at any size for any garment. The short version is every bra is about as unique as the breasts they support, but the difference is much more subdued for the former, and therefore useful only as a buying guide. And I've yet to talk about mislabeling.

One additional problem with using a bra measurement is the general ignorance of the subject. One of the most infuriating moments of my interactive fiction career came several years ago when I specifically gave a female character a bra size of 37DD. The reasons for this tiresome effort and why it ended in such a state are:

1.) This woman was tall and fit. I scoured the internet looking for women with the same approximate height and build posting their measurements for some health question, as well as read several for-women magazines just to see what a realistic band size would be for this character. No one cared, and on a few occasions it was ignored completely. As an aside, this was a frequent complaint even without this specific character. My work towards realism went, and continues to go, unappreciated.

2.) The reason I was so particular about this bra size was because everyone knows DD are very big, and my searches revealed bras are always made in even band sizes. By extension of the latter, I found several women with an odd band size (most of whom double checked their measurements to confirm the odd number) complaining about the difficulty of finding a well-fitted bra. I specifically wanted this bra size not just for the realism, but for the hazards. The odd number and large cups were supposed to create room for a small quantity of bras and frequent snapping, thereby generating lots of jiggling, shopping, and laundry. Including the bra size was my way of conveying this detail without explicitly stating it. No one caught on, because I was the only one who invested enough time to learn this, and apparently the only one who would raise an eyebrow at this foreign number and take to the internet before moving forward. One writer did use the "her bra is too tight" idea, but included the plot point of "her breasts have grown since she bought this older bra" instead of building off of her odd size.

If people in general were more informed, I think it would be more useful. If the numbers aren't a horrible mismatch, I know enough to create the picture, but the sheer number of failures from other writers proves I might be alone in this regard. At present, the vast majority of the audience knows only that DD is really big, and C and bigger jiggle when they're not in a bra. Trying to appeal to such an audience with bust, hip, and waist measurements, or any measurement for that matter, doesn't work. The payoff is always the same, no matter the effort behind those numbers.

My suggestion: write the numbers down on a side sheet in order to hammer out the appearance, then substitute them for words as they're transferred to the master copy. Those numbers can be extremely useful for the process, but should be omitted from the product.