Hello CHYOA community, I’ve been casually writing erotica for roughly a year now (mostly on reddit). I’m not the most prolific writer, but I was hoping to expand on some of my ideas and themes from my previous work, so I could potentially post something here. I guess I'm looking for advice to improve my writing and gauge the interest of potential readers. I'm placing a link to the story I was thinking about expanding upon here. If that's not kosher, please let me know. On a separate but equally important note, what is the best strategy you all have for self-editing? I suck at editing. I know this probably not the place to ask this, but any advice is greatly appreciated.
Welcome! Some self-editing tips: Use a free Grammarly account to catch errors and get simple writing feedback. Temporarily changing screen orientation, margins, editing software, font, etc. can change the way your eyes scan the sentences, drawing attention to different details. Plan different editing passes for different purposes. It can help to dedicate one pass for grammar and structure, one for character voices/dialog, perhaps another for style or expressive language. Get some sleep before a fresh edit.
Your writing is of high quality for CHYOA standards. I can offer a few minor criticisms if you'd like, but you have nothing to be concerned about, comparatively speaking. The apparent subject matter of the story wouldn't be out of place here in the slightest. I'm sure you would find little challenge in attracting a readership. One thing I feel obligated to mention: read the rules carefully, particularly rule 1. I've seen subreddits dedicated to things like bestiality, lolicon and guro, so I can't be sure what rules you've previously been accustomed to. Rules 2 and 3 have grey areas, but the way rule 1 is written makes it essentially impossible to work around, which is different to places like Reddit (where subreddit admins don't need to worry about legal consequences per se). For instance, the characters in your story attend a school where discipline exists (not university), so they must be high school seniors both to be of age and for the story to make sense. You don't have to outright state as much, but calling them freshmen in the next chapter would result in your story being declined. Since only Amanda and the boy are involved in the erotic context, this only applies to them.
Thank you for the praise, and thank you for taking the time to read the story. I’d to love to hear any criticisms you have. I’m not expecting perfection, but sometimes I feel like my writing can be a little convoluted, and I don’t want to bore or confuse people. I’ll definitely familiarize myself with the CHYOA guide before I post anything. The rules seem simple enough, and I appreciate the warning, but I have no intention to write about characters younger than 18 in any erotic context. Both those characters are meant to high school seniors (18+). I tried to make that more explicit an later chapter, but maybe I should do that earlier?
Thank you for the welcoming response and for the tips. I use the free version of Grammarly and it is pretty awesome. It haven’t tried any of the sentence scanning techniques you mentioned, but the logic is sound. I’ll definitely be adding that and ‘the editing with a different intention’ trick to my editing routine.
Firstly, your sentence/paragraph structure could use slightly more variety. Of the first nine paragraphs of your story, seven start with the word 'she', and of those all but one follow up with an in-tense verb. Frequent use of a particular sentence layout could be attributed to an author's personal style, but I think deviating a little more often would help you. She walked to her closet suddenly conscious of the slight jiggle and subtle bounce her ass made with each step she a took. could be better expressed as As she walked to her closet, Amelia was suddenly conscious of the slight jiggles and subtle bounces her ass made with each step she took. You also seem to be somewhat shy of using names. Amelia's name only shows up 16 times in 1291 words. This is fairly low before you even consider that basically every sentence references her in some way. Based on your general paragraph length, I would, as a rule of thumb, suggest replacing the first pronoun of hers in each paragraph with her name; it would also be best to use her name whenever you mention her after having referenced another character, though you're already doing this well. Think of it as though you're reminding the reader that her name is Amelia. At least, your current rate of name-dropping wasn't enough for my memory, as you can see in my last post. Finally, I'd pay more attention to dialogue tags. "Jesus— When did my ass get this fat?" She dejected to herself. should be "Jesus— When did my ass get this fat?" she said to herself, dejected. and . . . left her sweaty and uncomfortable, "I shouldn't have to wear any clothes..." should be . . . left her sweaty and uncomfortable. "I shouldn't have to wear any clothes..." etc. Granted, you wrote this a year ago and you would have almost certainly improved since then. Whether this advice is still relevant is up to you to decide. As long as you treat any characters in erotic contexts as 18+, you don't need to actively state that they're seniors. It's more that, in my experience, writers from other sites tend to misunderstand CHYOA's rules - usually surprised to find that we allow non-prosecutable things like non-con and raceplay, but sometimes users from places with even more relaxed rules (like certain subreddits) fail to realise the possible legal consequences of hosting certain content in the USA. Such users are often accustomed to poorly conceived rules that can be easily circumvented, such as stating that a character is 18 years old but 4'3", 35kg, is flat chested, hasn't started menstruating yet, and has no idea what sex is... which is something I see about two or three times a month. You seem like you'll be fine, though.
If you want to make use of the CYOA style, it might be good to break the content up into smaller pieces. Though the cutting points should be at positions where decisions make sense. I haven't read your story but from the number of words, I would suggest 4 to 8 chapters.
I just found a nice self-editing resource: The Writership Podcast’s hosts (both professional editors) accept submitted manuscript samples, read a few pages aloud, then describe the problems they see and suggest improvements. The show format allows you to listen along to the story and guess what the professional advice will be. It is helpful for better understanding what professional editors do, what they see, and how they talk about it. They also post images of the manuscripts with the editors’ comments so you can see what what form their professional services look like.
I didn't even realize how little I referenced the character's name, that should be an easy improvement. All your critiques make sense. I'll make the appropriate edits where I can. Thank you for taking the time to really dive into this. I appreciate your vote of confidence, but unfortunately, I don't get to write as often as I like, so I'm not sure how much my writing has improved. I've wanted to flesh out this story for a while, maybe even create separate branches where the story can diverge. It may be awhile before I actually post it as I'm still spit-balling ideas.
I agree, breaking up the content would probably be a good idea. A wall of text can look rather daunting in any format. Thank you for the advice.
