A Dialog & Writing Lesson
an erotic lecture on erotic writing
MMM

by Felix Lance Falkon
<falkon@netaxs.com>

©01/02/2000 Felix Lance Falkon
<falkon@netaxs.com>

• The author permits any kind of archiving, posting, reposting, and reproduction in fixed form or otherwise, free or for profit, of this story.
• This work is unsuitable for minors. Standard warnings apply: slippery when wet, use no hooks, for external use only, and watch for falling rocks and fallen women whilst reading.

Morganstern looked up at Jon’s lithe body as Jon started his first thrust—but with no more than an inch inside, Jon stopped and held himself perfectly still. Morganstern—the bigger, more heavily muscled of the two naked writers—asked Jon, “What’s the matter?” “Short fuze, real short.” “Afraid you’ll go off too soon?” “Sure am,” said Jon.

“May I make a few suggestions?” asked Morganstern.“Go ahead,” said Jon. He sank another inch deeper into Morganstern. “Suggest away.”

“Don’t put your reply in the same paragraph as my question, the way you did in the first paragraph of this story. Instead, start a new paragraph with every change in who’s talking, as I’m doing now.”

“Uh—why?”

Morganstern felt his abdominal muscles contract into a taut, concave ripple as he curled his hips up to meet the next impaling thrust. He took a deep breath, tightened the layer of muscle that swept across his broad chest, then said, “It makes it lots easier for the reader to tell who’s saying what. It’s like . . . like in that first paragraph, the reader’s not quite sure who said, ‘Afraid I’ll shoot too soon.’ Also, you’ll have shorter paragraphs, which are easier to read than screens or pages full of uninterrupted columns of type. Newspapermen call writing such long paragraphs ‘tombstoning,’ because the results look like grey tombstones.

“Indenting every paragraph also makes a story much easier to read. And since that’s the way almost all printed fiction is done, it’s what the reader expects. Don’t distract the reader from what you and I are doing, here in bed; don’t distract him from what we’re saying to each other Right Now.

“And if you’re preparing a story you’re going to post on a newsgroup or transmit by e-mail, put a blank line after each paragraph, limit line length to about 65 or 70 characters and spaces, and indent each paragraph five spaces instead of using the Tab key. And—do not make the right margin straight—that is, do not ‘right justify’ a text file; leave the right margin ragged the way I’m doing here.” Morganstern felt Jon slide in another inch. He met that thrust with another wiggle and squirm, felt Jon push even harder in response.

“Okay; what else?” asked Jon.

“When you ask a question in dialog, put the question mark or exclamation point at the end, inside the quote marks, without putting a comma there.

“Oh.” Jon took a deep breath, went in even deeper. “And—did you say you had more suggestions?” he asked.

“Yup. When you have a bit of dialog that doesn’t end with a question mark or exclamation point, and is followed by ‘he said’—or ‘he asked’ or ‘he replied’ or a phrase like that—then use a comma—inside the quotation marks—like this,” said Morganstern. “Use a period just before the closing quote marks when you don’t have a ‘he said’—or ’asked’ or the like following the quote marks—like this.” Morganstern squirmed again. “If you begin a sentence with ‘he said’ or the like, put a comma right after the last word before the quote marks, and capitalize the first word after the quote marks.”

Jon cautiously began another thrust. “Oh. I think I understand.”

“Three more things: Don’t feel that you have to reach for substitutes for ‘said’ in speech tags. Using ‘observed’ or ‘expounded’ or ‘intoned’ is far more distracting than the simple ‘he said,’ which is almost invisible to the reader. Any fancy substitutes distract the reader from what’s being said, from what’s inside the quotation marks. Of course, the verb in a speech tag has to be one that makes sense: you can’t ‘smirk’ a sentence; you can’t hiss, ‘Take that!’“With questions, use ‘he asked.’ Use ‘whispered’ or ‘growled’ or verbs like those very sparingly. Use them only when you’re giving the reader additional information that the context doesn’t already make clear.

“An example: ‘“Good morning,” Kurt snarled.’ In this case, the way Kurt said that is entirely at odds with the words Kurt used. So, you have to use ‘snarled’ to make the reader aware that you intend that contrast.

“And the other two things?” Jon asked. He was breathing harder now, and pulling back between strokes.

“One way to break up the monotony of ‘he said’ ‘he said’ ‘he said’ is to leave off the speech tag entirely—but only when it’s perfectly obvious who’s speaking. With just the two of us, and you asking questions and me answering them, we can leave out ‘Jon said’ and ‘Morganstern said’ and go for several paragraphs without confusing the reader. With ordinary conversation and only two speakers, you should identify who’s talking about every third paragraph. And always make it clear which ‘he’ you mean, especially if you have three male speakers going at it.

“And if one of us talks for more than one paragraph at a time—as I’m doing right now—leave off the end-of-paragraph quote marks until the last paragraph of that speech,”

Morganstern said as he tightened his arms around Jon’s chest, locking their naked bodies together. “But you still need opening quotes at the start of every paragraph of a multi-paragraph speech like this one.

“Another way to break up the monotony of ’he said’ is what I’m doing right here.” Morganstern felt Jon’s muscles tighten, felt him go in all the way with his next thrust. “In the same paragraph with a within-quotes speech, end the quoted part and then put in something like my feeling you tighten up as you ram yourself hilt-deep into me. This can advance the plot at the same time that the writer establishes who is saying the words inside the quote marks. But again: readers just don’t notice the ‘he said’ as long as what he’s saying is interesting.”

“Yeah? Hey! I noticed that when you interrupt the quoted part that way, using a verb that is not a synonym or substitute for ‘said,’ you end what’s inside the quotes with a period, and start what follows the quote with a capital letter.” Jon stopped his next stroke in mid-thrust. “And with questions and question marks, like this?” He grinned down at Morganstern.

“Exactly.” Morganstern felt Jon thrust harder with his next stroke, felt a bit of rotary motion as well. “Just like that . . . and like this.” Morganstern grinned back up at Jon.

“And I even noticed how you’re using single quotes inside the double-quote marks without you having to tell me. But—how come you’re using the double open-quote marks—“—and the double close-quote marks—”—instead of just hitting the plain old " key?”

“You can do it either way. The “ and ” are easier for your readers to convert into the typesetting double-quotes. And if a reader is more comfortable with the " symbol, he can easily convert from the “ and the ” to the " mark. Using anything not on a standard keyboard in e-mailed or news-group stories—like using the typesetting double-quote codes—is a real pain for readers whose equipment doesn’t fit yours just right.”

“Well,” said Jon, “I still think this a really weird time to make with a grammar lesson—but yeah, my equipment fits into you real nice and tight.”

Morganstern felt a grin spread across his own face. “Well, the grammar lesson’s keeping you cooled down, isn’t it? Instead of going off too soon, the way a lusty young colt like you almost always does when he’s mounted on a big, hunky muscle-stud like me, you’ve been riding me for—Hey! Slow down; you’re almost there!”

“Yeah—I—noticed. Talk—to me—about—something—else—quick,” Jon panted as he slowed almost to a stop.“Lemme see—you got me going too—there’s, yeah, emphasis: since plain-text e-mail doesn’t have underlining or italics, use ** to begin emphasized words and * to end that emphasis. Do the same for your character’s unspoken thoughts. The reader can convert those asterisks to his own word-processor’s codes for underlining or italics. Watch out for the difference between the dash—which pushes phrases apart—and the well-placed hyphen, which pulls words together into compound words like ‘plain-text’ and ‘e-mail.’

“What about those—what do you call ’em—three dots?”

“They’re called an ellipsis. You can use one instead of a dash. Most readers will see the dash as showing an abrupt change in what you’re saying, or—at the end of a word—that you’ve suddenly stopped. The ellipsis . . .” His voice trailed off, then re-started. “The ellipsis originally meant that something is missing. Some writers use it to imply that you gradually stopped, either in the middle of a sentence . . . or at the end of a complete one. . . .” Others feel that the ellipsis is badly over-used as an all-purpose kind of punctuation.” Morganstern wet his lips. “Note: complete sentences, period plus three dots. Incomplete ones, just . . .

“New subject: some writers have a bad habit of reaching for substitutes for words he’s already used. A very smart science-fiction writer once wrote, ‘English has no synonyms; it has a great many words that mean almost the same thing.’ And as Mark Twain wrote, ‘The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.’ He also wrote, “Use the right word, not its second cousin. To paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ’Good writing is putting down the right words in the right order.’”

“Some writers—present company excepted, of course—will assemble several ways to identify someone in a story, and then use them in rotation. Such a writer would refer to you as ‘Jon,’ in your next appearance as ‘the lithe-bodied youth,’ then ‘the lusty writer,’ next by your last name alone, then as ‘the naked young man mounted on Morganstern’s magnificently muscled physique,’ and then back to ‘Jon’ when you show up in the story again, leaving the reader unsure if you are one character, or five, or some number in between.”

Jon snickered, then said, “ ‘Magnificently muscled’ indeed!”

“Well, I am. And I worked hard to get these muscles.”

“I know, I know. And since muscle-hunks like you happen to turn me on—”

“I noticed that already.”

“—but I don’t know if I like conceited ones —“You wouldn’t want me to lie about my magnificent musculature, would you?”

“—and I can’t tell if you’re kidding when you say things like that, and if we start laughing while we’re doing this—” Jon thrust hard, squirmed, eased back. “So—let’s get back to the writing lesson, before I—you know.”

“Right.” Morganstern took a deep breath, feeling his broad chest expand, remembering, for a few seconds, the smell of the gym down by the beach. He remembered the ache in his muscles after a hard workout, remembered the time he’d stayed behind after the other bodybuilders left for the evening. He and gym’s night manager had stripped down all the way, stiffened up, and then, on a bench in front of the gym’s biggest mirror . . . Morganstern shook away the memory and said, “Just as bad, or worse, is to begin a story with tiresomely detailed physical descriptions, measurements, and biographies of all the principal characters—which is precisely what we did not do here.

Instead, we followed the ancient precept: start in the middle of things. Homer did, some three thousand years ago, with: ‘Sing, Goddess, of the anger of Achilles, . . .’ right smack in the middle of the Trojan War. His words sing to us yet.“Thus, we started this story, quite literally, during your first thrust. Blocks of explanation, like these paragraphs, are all very well to cool someone down. But fiction works better if the writer slips in background details and descriptions of the principal characters a few words at a time, early in the action, and with the lectures, if any, broken up by action and dialog.

“This deep into a story really isn’t the time to stop for a static description of my curly brown hair; my electric-blue eyes; even my youthful, snub-nosed face. The reader might have decided, pages and pages ago, that I have aquiline features and dark eyes and straight, black hair, because I didn’t show the reader otherwise in the first few paragraphs, either by having me remember how I look or by letting the reader see those details through my eyes. And since you don’t have a convenient mirror in this room for me—and the reader—to look at myself in, then . . .

“You’re right, of course: mentioning my ‘magnificently muscled physique’ was overdoing it, especially this far into the story. I can mention how your lean, narrow hips feel, gripped between my powerful thighs, because that’s what’s happening to me right now, and —”

“Now you’ve done it!” Jon thrust faster, harder, faster still.

“Can’t you . . . slow down?”

“Not now. Too hot. Real hot.”

“I . . . noticed,” said Morganstern, trying to meet every impaling thrust.

Jon suddenly gasped aloud, rammed himself all the way in, went rigid, and then slowly, slowly relaxed and started breathing again. “I was going along okay, stretching it out just like you told me to, until you reminded me just what we’re doing. All of a sudden, I couldn’t stop.” He panted for a moment, then said, “I bet you can’t keep this lesson going with you on top.”

“I can so! Where’s my shirt? I always carry a few extra in my pocket, so I can put one on before we . . .”

“Don’t worry—I got a supply in my bureau. Let me see.” Jon straightened his arms, looked down between their still-linked bodies, and said, “Yeah—as long and thick as yours is, an ‘extra large’ oughta fit just right.”

“That was deftly done,” said Morganstern, as they uncoupled, Jon rolled off, and—a moment later—sat up. “Huh?”

“Without stopping to explain or to cite my length and width, you rather neatly established that we’re using protection and that I’m an ’extra large.’ You’re letting the reader decide just how long and thick and wide that might be.”

“Yeah?” Jon, now on his feet, pulled open the bureau’s top drawer and passed a foil-wrapped packet to Morganstern, who stood up, stretched, then opened the packet. “I suppose we could start measuring each other—chest, arms, waist, hips—drop to the calves, work on up to thighs and—you know. That could—that would be more interesting than just saying how tall you are and how big around the chest and, as you put it, how long and how thick where it—it counts.” Jon grabbed a towel, unsheathed himself, and wiped himself dry. “Like—Hey! Like the beginning of this story, where you established—without stopping to say so, that you’re bigger than me—and a real muscle-hunk at that—and that I’m built okay too.“

Another problem.” Morganstern finished putting on the ‘extra large’ contents of the packet, then squirted on a dab of lubricant. “If you write that one of your story-studs has—say—a ten-incher, some readers will think this is excitingly long, but others will think your story is laughably overdone. ’What is all right for B, will quite scandalize C, for C is so very particular.’”

“Again—huh?”

“A quote from Gilbert and Sullivan. From The Yeomen of the Guard, I think.” Morganstern gestured at the bed with a sweep of his right hand. Jon stretched out on his back, and tucked a pillow behind his head. Morganstern knelt between Jon’s thighs, leaned forward, found his target, thrust, and stopped with an inch or so inside.

“One writer likes his characters kind of chubby and well-furred; another likes lean, well-defined studs in their late teens that he picks up at body-building gums.” He eased an inch deeper, felt Jon respond with a squeeze and a squirm.

“Got any Rules for which kind of characters to pick?

“Nope. I don’t have any Rules for the writing game—just lots of suggestions. You can write a story that’s all dialog, with no speech tags at all; you just have to realize that when you do, that format will take some of the reader’s attention away from what’s going on in the story. Some readers want characters that are whipping or otherwise humiliating each other; some readers prefer characters that are calmly doing dreadful things to themselves. Still others are more into the Main Event—what we’re doing now.” Morganstern went a bit deeper, pulled back, thrust again, watching Jon grit his teeth, feeling Jon tense his muscles and then relax with a sigh. Another thrust. Jon’s eyes focused on Morganstern’s and the two men grinned at each other.

Morganstern felt himself begin to tense up inside. He slowed his stroke as he added, “Some get turned on by characters who use all the standard four-letter words, along with a few of the well-chosen five-and six-letter ones. Others—”

“—manage without any dirty words at all—like we’ve been doing here—”

“—which works as a demonstration, but does call attention to how the story’s told, rather than what it’s about. And then there are people really into incest or under-age characters; but most would rather stay away from those areas that, as the old cliché has it, are illegal, immoral, or fattening.

“More suggestions?” asked Jon.

“An important one: although Kipling wrote: ’There are nine and sixty ways, of constructing tribal lays,’ a most effective way to construct a story is to pick exactly the right point of view from which you can best tell that story, and then put your reader firmly into that point-of-view character—seeing what the character sees, feeling what the character feels, thinking and remembering and deciding as the character does those things. In short, make the reader be that chosen character throughout that story.

“The reader,” said Morganstern, “will have the experience of being in the story if you—the author—avoid interrupting the action to address the reader directly, avoid making the reader jump into another character’s head, and avoid making him look down on the scene from a set of disembodied eyes hovering over the action. Also, do not start the story with a lecture, or biographies of the characters, or a descriptive passage told from any point of view other than your chosen character; don’t delay getting the reader into the story’s point-of-view character and into the story itself.”

“Hey,” Jon said, “I thought you said that if a quoted paragraph doesn’t end with a close-quote mark, then the following paragraph is automatically being said by the speaker of the preceding one. So—why did you identify yourself as the speaker again?”

“It’s more important not to confuse the reader than it is to depend on the reader noticing that missing close-quote mark. Now—where was I?”

“About four inches in and counting.” Jon squirmed up against Jon’s next impaling thrust.

“That too. Point of view—a long story may be better told with a few shifts from one character to another—but only if there is a clear break—always marked with extra blank lines in manuscript, screen, or printed page, and sometimes a line of three asterisks as well. The first sentence following the break must put the reader firmly into the next point-of-view

character’s head. I saw one story recently in which the point of view shifted from one of the story’s two characters to the other with every paragraph. That is hard to do well, but it’s a very interesting way to tell a story: the reader is alternating between the two sides of the interaction between those two characters. However, I still think the most effective way to tell a story is almost always to tell it from one point of view, so the reader can really get into that character’s memory, and eyes, and ears—”

“—and other appendages.” Jon grabbed Morganstern’s hips, pulled him deeper. “Then if I wanted the reader to watch us from above, watch your back muscles working, watch your hips pumping, pulling back, thrusting again, then—”

“Well, you really can’t do that and still hold this story together. You could go back and rewrite the beginning so that I look up at the mirror on the ceiling over the bed and watch you pumping away on top of my muscular self, but that’s about it. Having me remember now what I saw then doesn’t work at all—you don’t have a mirror on the ceiling, because if you had, I would have noticed it then—and so would the reader, who is supposed to be me throughout this adventure.

“A minor suggestion—one easy to do, even when rewriting a completed story—is to avoid having characters with names that sound or look too much alike: ‘Joe’ and ‘Moe,’ for example, or even ‘Danny’ and ‘Dennis.’ With our names—‘Morganstern’ has three syllables, ‘Jon’ has one. Our names don’t start with the same letter. And they don’t rhyme . . . there’s no chance for the reader to get confused.” Morganstern eased himself deeper.

“There—all the way in. You still—”

“Billy!” yelped Jon.

“‘Billy’? That would work—two syllables, doesn’t rhyme with either—”

“I don’t mean Billy, a two-syllable name; I mean Billy, my kid brother, who just came in through the hall door I forgot to lock.”

Morganstern jerked his head around, looked back over his shoulder, saw a sturdy young blond stride towards the bureau, shedding clothes as he went.

“Not to worry,” Billy said as he finished stripping and reached into the bureau. “Even though I can’t buy beer yet, I’m old enough to vote, so I’m not jail-bait, in case you’re worried about that when I make this a three-way.”

So that’s why Jon has that size on hand, Morganstern told himself as Billy stiffened up, pulled on an ’extra large,’ and climbed onto the bed.

Jon said, “Billy, this is Morganstern. Morganstern, Billy.”

“And,” Billy added as he knelt astride Morganstern’s thighs and slid himself into place, “with you sandwiched between me and Jon, this doesn’t count as incest either.” He slid half-way into Morganstern, paused for Morganstern to catch his breath, and completed his impaling thrust.

Morganstern felt a beardless chin snuggle against his neck, caught a whiff of something spicy. “Aftershave?” he asked.“Stuff I put on my hair,” Billy said, tightening his grip on Morganstern’s chest.

Morganstern, spitted to the hilt and stretched tight, rammed himself all the way into Jon, who gasped and then said, “Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“He’s using an ‘extra large’ too.”

“He is?” Billy pulled back a couple of inches, thrust again.

“Sure am,” said Morganstern. “Jon’s a nice fit; good and tight, and the way he’s squirming now . . .”

“You’d squirm too,” panted Jon, “if this muscle-stud had rammed himself into your tail end.”

Morganstern felt Billy pull back and then ram himself in all the way, heard Billy eagerly say, “Hey, guy, that sounds great! After we finish this round, let’s swap around; me on the bottom, Jon on top, you in the middle again. I want to find out how tight you’ll fit into me.”

“Before we do that,” Jon panted, “there’s that mirror I bought yesterday. With three of us working together, we can mount it on the ceiling, right over the bed. And Morganstern, if it’ll keep you from going off too soon, you can explain to Billy why we can’t just look down on the scene from near the ceiling.

“You can tell a story that way,” said Morganstern, now comfortably sandwiched between Jon’s and Billy’s warm, naked bodies. “It’s just—usually—more effective to pick one point of view, and then let the reader be that character all the way through a story to the end. I mean, why would anybody want to wiggle out from between you two hunky studs and go flitting, batlike, up amongst the cobwebs? Instead, I’ve got Billy’s chest against my back, and Jon squirming under me, and I’m feeling Billy inside me and me inside Jon, and all three of us—oops!”

Morganstern heard Jon ask, “That turn you on too far?

“Yeah.” Morganstern felt himself fast coming to a boil as he thrust harder, faster, harder still.

As Billy speeded his own stroke, he said into Morganstern’s ear, “I’ll try to catch up.”

Seconds later, Morganstern felt his muscles tense. Another stroke, and he went rigid. Billy thrust a few times more, then went rigid too while he and Morganstern pumped themselves dry.

Still later: long, delicious minutes later, Morganstern slowly relaxed, still catching his breath. “Convinced?“Convinced,” said Jon, from under Morganstern.

“Beats cobwebs any day,” said Billy, a sweat-damp weight relaxing on Morganstern’s back. “You did seem to be laying it on a bit thick—’Morganstern heard this, . . . Morganstern felt that,’ . . . you know.”

“ ‘Merely corroborative detail, . . .’ ” said Morganstern.

Billy’s voice joined Morganstern’s. Together, they said, “ ‘. . . intended to give artistic verisimilitude . . .’ ”

And Billy, alone, finished the quote: “ ‘. . . to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.’ Poo-Bah, The Mikado, words by Sir William Schwenk Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan.”

“If I laid it on thick enough for you to notice, then I laid it on thick enough to distract the reader,” Morganstern said.

“Come on, guy; you had to lay it on to make your point.” Billy sat up. “I’ll get the ladder; you two bring up the mirror. By the time we get that thing up and mounted, we ought to be all reloaded for another round. So: what tools do we need?”