On Silhouettes and OCsSo I posted a bit of story in a forum recently. (”Scene in an abandoned bathro

On Silhouettes and OCsSo I posted a bit of story in a forum recently. (”Scene in an abandoned bathroom,” in case you’re wondering) Since it’s still a draft, I asked for some input. The one response I got said something that struck me: That I lack character descriptions. Well, not completely lack character descriptions, but I describe my characters so little, it’s hard to know what they look like. To be fair, they were right, but I couldn’t really imagine myself describing them in the first place.It got me thinking a lot about what I write in general.I’ve been involved in the 3DX scene in one capacity or another for nearly 7 years now, after being an off/on fan for a few years before that. The bulk of what I’ve written and published are stories using characters created by someone else. I’ve very rarely created characters myself.My first piece on Literotica, The Alleyway, is an original story with original characters. However…I don’t remember much about the lead character’s appearance. I remember her dress. That’s about it. I could remember the way the story played out pretty well despite not having looked at it in years - the actions, the behaviors, the dialogue - but I don’t remember much about what the girl looked like.Whenever I’ve run into artists that I’ve liked, my impulse is less to just follow them. I want to write stories about their characters. The big thing about 3DX and erotic art in general is that most it is just straight-up porn: Focus on the poontang, as it were. While that’s good and all, I feel it’s, well, rather shallow to me. I’m more interested in what got them to that moment, and what happens afterward. The erotic isn’t just about the sex. It’s about what comes before it, what triggers it, and what occurs afterward. An image of a woman in an empty bathroom covered in cum with nobody else around can be just as powerful, if not more so than depicting what got her in this state. The reason for this, of course, is because we want to imagine what got her there. (Ironically, said image is what inspired “Scene in an abandoned bathroom.”) So it’s never that I want to write an erotic story these days, it’s that I want to write about a certain character that somebody else already has made. More often than not, these characters don’t have anything to them other than their visual appearance. I want to spend time developing them into actual people with personalities, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, ambitions/goals, and the like. In other words, the internal aspects of what makes a person a person. That stuff really interests me.By the same token, though, I’ve done very little with creating my own characters on an external level. I don’t know why I can’t be bothered, though, to be honest. It could be a number of reasons: The fact that I’m more concerned about the internal aspects, some elements of perfectionism in terms of defining who these characters are, not being sure or just apathetic as to what my characters should look like, general apathy towards such aspects as visual appearance, worries that spending time defining these characters’ physical appearances is time that could be spent writing stories, recalling certain fans in 3DX being overly obsessed with their OCs’ appearances (down to their belly buttons), and so on. As a result, I’ve only created two OCs throughout all this. One is Tilen, who you see as my avatar. However, Tilen hasn’t been involved in much of anything. She’s been in two 2D commissions (one completed by SpewlingMews, one incomplete by Alice X), a smattering of single 3D images (by The Dude, DBSpencer, gazukull, JimJim, morfium, Cryavision, Dest, and her original visual creator Vaesark), and a mini-set by Vaesark. I once had visions of her going on some big sexual adventure, and recruited morfium to make it. But that fell to the wayside. Since then, she’s really just an avatar and a guest to someone else’s story, nothing more. The other is Leila Mehri, a character set in Madscientist’s 80s story Infested Alley. However, since Madscientist has kind of dropped off of creating art, I’ve lost interest in developing her further.With this in mind, I find it fascinating how people in hentai and 3DX are so capable of creating OCs at the drop of a hat, whereas I struggle with creating them. At the same time, most of these OCs are made for the purpose of specific scenes or ideas, with little thought of them as people. Compare that to me turning characters - Tara, Sayako, Cerene, Sophia, Suzi, a lesser extent Sasha and Sylvia, Kayla, Yelena, Breana - into memorable women by virtue of their personalities and behaviors.  I guess the way one could look at it is that while most people just make their characters are paper cutouts or wax statues, I build silhouettes: Fully functional but featureless.A good writer, I suspect, needs to do both: Create a character that is externally and internally memorable. But that is something I have trouble with. I don’t feel compelled nor interested in describing my characters on a visual level. They could be anyone visually.  Maybe that’s why I latch on to other people’s characters so quickly, because they’ve done that work for me, whereas I could work out the inner details. A quid pro quo, as it were.It’s an unfortunate thing, really, but I don’t know what I could do to fix all that. If I’m not interested in something, I just don’t do it. And to make me do it just fills me with rage and contempt.Just some introspection for the new year. More on stories later. -- source link

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