When Beans Write Fanfic

@favomancer's side blog, this is where I put my fanfic writing advice and articles. Feel free to suggest topics that I should cover!

[askthebeanwizard]

Smut 101: The Verbiage of Filth.

Hello, my fellow fanfic writers. Today’s article is going to be about filth and smut. Yes, folks, this post is going to be full of graphic, graphic language, and so I suspect that you may not want to look at this while you’re at work or in class or on the train. Or you might want to live dangerously and do so anyway! It takes all kinds of folks to write fanfic. 

Since sex is a huge topic, I’m going to break this article into installments. Today I’m going to work on a general topic, which is, how to actually describe smutty things. This will be pairing-agnostic, so be prepared to see graphic descriptions of all kinds of sex. I will follow up later with specific guidelines for writing sex between gay people, lesbian people, het people, and transgender people. 

But first: the verbiage.

One of the things I run into from time to time is someone commenting half-jokingly that they’ve run out of synonyms for “tongue” or “cock” or whatever body part involved. Heh. I don’t usually have that problem. I can’t say I’m like, the porniest of fanwriters, but I seem to manage pretty well. 

My approach to idealized porn (the kind one finds in fanfic) is generally covered in these points, which I will elaborate on further down.

Euphemisms are suboptimal

Specificity is good

Sensations and feelings are good

Purely mechanical descriptions not so good

1: Euphemisms are Suboptimal

Some writers, especially those in the well-worn Mills and Boon or Harlequin romance genre, like to be flowery about their smut. The penis is a “firm stalk”, the vulva a “dewy blossom”, the mons veneris a “downy mound”. This is what I call “gardening manual sex”, where the body parts are so veiled in euphemisms that someone might take it as a gardening manual. 

Don’t do that. 

Why, you may ask. Well, here’s the reasons why I don’t generally employ such terms. Firstly: If you’re writing smut graphic enough to require the naming of genitals, it’s definitely NSFW. And if it’s definitely NSFW, then there are perfectly cromulent terms for genitals that aren’t as clinical as “penis” or “anus”. 

“Cock” and “cunt”, “asshole”, those are perfectly good terms, and if you’re writing graphic sex there really isn’t a point in pulling a veil of euphemism all over what’s going on. Doing so can lead to obscuring of what’s actually going on, and if the writer handling the scene isn’t good with euphemisms you’re going to wind up with horrors like “yoghurt-shooting purple-headed warrior of love”. 

No. There is a point where euphemism crosses from obfuscatory to ridiculous. Best to just avoid the obfuscation and be honest about what your characters are doing: mashing erogenous zones together and having fun. 

2: Specificity is good

When writing about sex, you may feel tempted to just gloss it over. If so, there’s always the handy fade-to-black, which can salvage a fic’s rating from NC-17 to PG-13, depending on how soon you fade. 

But if you’re writing serious smutty filth, then that approach is going to be a bit unsatisfying to readers. At the point where folks are looking for smut fics, they generally have various kinks they want to read about. Those kinks can range from “a little leather” to “being painted with polka dots and spanked with a tassel”. (I’m being purposefully ridiculous here as actual kinks can be triggers for some folks and I want this to be accessible.)

A vague sex scene can leave readers unsatisfied. “But I came here to read about Kylo Ren’s enormous penis!” etc. This is where being verbose and chatty will help. Talk about what they’re doing to each other. How, and when. Talk about the physical end of the acts. How are they positioned? Make sure you keep track of hands and other body parts, lest you have something that doesn’t make entire anatomical sense for the individuals you are writing. 

This is where a very good imagination, or a pair of artist’s dummies or a modest porn habit can come in handy. From there you can figure out position and plausibility for various kinks. Don’t forget foreplay, either! Foreplay is fun, and it helps whet the reader’s appetite for the main course. Besides, sex isn’t always just genital focused. Mouths and hands can do very naughty things even if the loins are otherwise occupied. 

Do they talk to each other? In which case you can turn up the heat with some filthy talk! Maybe they talk to each other about how good it feels. How perfect it is. Maybe they discuss filthy fantasies with each other. All this can add an emotional and psychological aspect to the physical acts, which is an added bonus!

3: Sensations and feelings are good

Sex is supposed to feel good, else your characters wouldn’t be having so much of it, no? This point is very closely related to #2: Specificity is good. When trying to write an act, don’t just describe it as feeling good. There’s a whole list of other things you can describe along with the mind-blowing pleasure of it. 

The texture of their skin (smooth, callused, stubbly, soft)

How their body feels (sleekly muscled, firm, bony, yielding, cuddly)

How a specific act can feel on a sensory level (slick, tight, velvety)

Don’t forget temperature (rapidly cooling breath, shocking blood heat, molten

What kinds of lubricants are they using (oil, water-based, slippery, thick or thin)

Body-feelings (their heartbeat against their lover’s back, pulse ringing in ears, the rising tension of impending climax)

Scent (are they wearing scent? what scent? smells from work or shower? shampoo, soap, musky sweat, spent gunpowder?)

Tastes (salty, sharp, sweetish, oceanic)

Being specific with sensations and feeling helps ground the smut in a character’s mental and emotional world. It’s not just an act, it’s not just something that is happening, but rather, something a character is a participant in. It ups the emotional power of the scene, and it makes it easier for a reader to identify with what’s going on.

Also, in a more writerly sense, descriptions of sensations help pad out a scene so you’re not constantly figuring out euphemisms for “tongue” or “penis”. 

4: Purely mechanical descriptions are not so good

This is related to #1: Euphemisms are suboptimal. In shying away from euphemisms, authors can go too far the other way and wind up writing what I think is “furniture assembly porn”. 

This is where the smut is purely action. Something goes in something else, and it moves in and out and in and out and feels good, but the sensation is not elaborated, not until one of the characters (or both) bust a nut. 

If the sex act is the only thing that’s going on, then one might as well watch a pornographic video or whatnot. The ability of text and prose is its ability to also convey things other than the physicality of the act: how it feels as in #3: Sensations and feelings are good. How it also feels emotionally, which has a great impact to a reader. 

I may be biased against purely mechanistic descriptions of smut because most, if not all of my shagging in fic happens to have emotional reasons to happen. They’re afraid of talking about their emotions, so they try to express it with sex instead. They mistake eroticism for intimacy. They love each other, but can’t admit it so they wind up having sex with proxies instead. They love each other, and enjoy sex with each other, and trust enough to discuss fantasies frankly. Things like that.

It is this added dimension where I like a lot of my fanfic to hang out - smutty but also emotionally authentic, and that’s why I follow the various guidelines I state above. 

How does this come together? Well, here’s a bit from a WIP Kylux fic that might establish how I use sensation and emotion, specificity and just a bit of mechanical description to make a whole smut scene. (It’s from chapter 2 of Attack of the B-Team, if you’re wondering.)

“So tell me,” Hux panted softly as he got up to kneel between Ren’s legs, “tell me how you’d like to see me fucking someone else. Tell me, and I’ll give you what you want.” He grasped at Ren’s hips and crouched low, his plush lips brushing gently over the head of Ren’s cock, and Ren shivered, thrust reflexively upwards against the warm tease of his breath.

“I want -” Ren managed, trying to order his thoughts. “I want to see him undressing you like a present,” he said, gasped and groaned as Hux wrapped that wet willing mouth around the head of his cock, “All those layers you wear.”

“I want him to seize you gently by the necktie to start, almost like a strangle. All those god-damned buttons on your waistcoat,” Ren continued, his stream of consciousness starting to overflow its figurative banks as Hux continued his ministrations. His tongue was like velvet, his teeth sharp and very careful as Ren bucked up against him. “God, to see you choking on someone’s cock. Maybe even someone bigger than me.”

Ren felt Hux pause and shudder before those fingers tightened on his hips, but the bruising pain grounded him against the slick glide of Hux’s mouth, of that perfect wet heat. “Wouldn’t you like to show me how much you can take? Maybe you’d ride him into the mattress like you do me?” Ren was babbling now, trying to stay coherent as his world began to fall to pieces.

“Would you bareback and let him come in you?” Ren gasped, his eyes shut to his room, the walls and ceiling so familiar after these months, and the shelving he had put up to hold his books and comics. It was all too easy to picture, with his rich visual memory, what Hux would look like riding someone else’s cock, the flush of his face and chest, his head thrown back to expose that sweet neck, beads of sweat running down his chest and back and shoulders. A galaxy of freckles traced by someone else’s hands. “If you did - oh, oh - if you did,” Ren’s voice had gone husky with sheer need, “you could let me lick you clean.”

Ren was thrusting helplessly up, fucking Hux’s perfect mouth, and he felt those fingers squeeze hard on his hips again. Continue, they said, or I’m going to stop and leave you here like this. “You won’t even have to untie me,” Ren managed, his teeth chattering as he started to shudder uncontrollably, “you’d just have to back into me until I didn’t have the room, until I had to, until I -” Ren felt Hux’s tonsils click against the head of his cock then, whimpered through his teeth as the fantasy started to tip him over the edge, those lurid thoughts and Hux’s clever mouth. He pulled hard against the cord binding his wrists as he climaxed, felt Hux swallowing around him. It was as though his skull had exploded in a burst of white and silver, his thoughts scattering like shrapnel to bounce lightly and ring against the very boundaries of his self.

Hux kissed him lightly, gently, all the way up his belly and chest, against the dip between his clavicles, let him come back to himself. Ren opened his eyes to find that Hux had loosed the knot and let his hands slip free, and he flexed them a little against the slight numbness that had accumulated.

Note the above: 

I’m very specific about what is going on.  Ren is lying on his back. Hux is crouched between his knees, and he holds Ren’s hips and gives him a blowjob. Ren talks frankly about his fantasies during the act. The bit where Hux ties him down is in a paragraph before this excerpt, but I come back to it and describe Ren pulling against the cord, and the numbness in his hands. We know where the hands, mouths and genitals are, to establish a good, solid mental image for the reader.

There are no euphemisms, but it is not purely physical either. I don’t use euphemisms at all. Instead I use adjectives and descriptions. Plush lips. A tongue like velvet. A slick, wet mouth doing clever things. Leavening the descriptive bits with detail and sensation also helps prevent it from being purely mechanical. The reader is quite clearly informed how Ren is feeling, from the light scratch of Hux’s teeth to the numbness in his hands. 

There’s an emotional aspect to this. This is mostly my specialty - smut with feels - but I balance off the kink (light bondage, dirty talk) with trust. Ren isn’t afraid of being tied up by Hux. He’s comfortable enough to talk about filthy threesome fantasies, too - ones that might endanger a relationship if tried. He trusts Hux not to be jealous. And Hux wants to listen to Ren’s fantasies, encourages him with his actions to keep going. 

This establishes that it isn’t just sex for them, there’s a strong bond of trust and affection and love, and that helps set the scene within the emotional reality of the fic it’s in. 

Aaaaand: that’s a breakdown of how I write smut, on a surface and deeper level, and why I use the verbiage I do. My next installments will cover different configurations of sex for different configurations of partners along the gender spectrum, realism or lack thereof, and the realities of lube, so sit tight and keep writing, y’all. 

[askthebeanwizard]

Worldbuilding 101 for AU fanfiction

I’ve mentioned before that my specialty seems to be AUs. I have an odd fondness for cramming characters from one property into the setting of another, mostly because it’s kind of fun, a bit like chemistry when you add an acid to a base and watch it effervesce.

For the purpose of this article I will literally pull an AU out of my ear. The ship I’m using for this purpose will be Kylux. I like them, and they have nice strong motivations and personalities that can be easily stuck onto different settings. 

The AU idea, on the other hand... let’s be random. Let’s be completely random. Let’s choose. Magical girls. Ho ho ho.

Now, the first thing you need to do about writing an AU is to know about your setting. So here’s some basic genre conventions of magical girl anime and manga. 

Magical girl settings generally revolve around a girl or a team of girls who can transform into magically enhanced warriors who are charged with a mission.

Said mission can be as vague as “defeat the forces of darkness and despair”, to “re-capture every one of the magic Clow cards that has escaped”, to “hunt witches”. 

Examples of magical girl series include Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Out of those three, the first two are standard examples of the genre, and the last is a deconstruction of it. 

Some of the tropes employed in magical girl media include magical transformation sequences, transformation devices and gimmicks, super-cute dresses, an animal mascot for the team that might also serve as mission control.

Magical girls can range from roughly about 10 (Cardcaptor Sakura) to teenage, and sometimes even adults (Nanoha). 

Now, that’s a very brief, cursory look at magical girl tropes and conventions. 

The next thing one needs is to be familiar with the characters you’re going to put in the AU. You don’t exactly have to maintain 100% canon correctness in this - but you do have to maintain at least enough canon or fanon personality to have them still recognizable within the changed setting of the AU. 

Kylo Ren is canonically 29 to 30. He’s a dark-side adept, a Force user. He wears a lot of black, uses a fairly cool looking lightsaber, and demonstrates his capabilities in personal combat. He is also conflicted and passionate, and looks up to his late grandfather, Darth Vader. (Perhaps more than is healthy.) He commands a bodyguard unit known as the Knights of Ren, but that’s all we know about them in canon. He has extensive Daddy Issues.

Fanonically Ren is sometimes a dork under his menacing exterior. He’s sometimes portrayed as awkward with other people, or just wholly unconcerned with their opinions to begin with. His possible asceticism is played up or down in contrast to the potential opulence of his heritage - his grandmother being the late Queen of Naboo. 

Armitage Hux is canonically a young general of the First Order, only 34 at his first appearance. He is tall and slim, played by the gloriously ginger-haired Domhnall Gleeson. He demonstrates a cold intellect and a willingness to employ overwhelming force against opponents - he’s a technocrat and strategist as contrasted with Kylo Ren’s mysticism and Captain Phasma’s tactical acumen. 

Fanonically, Hux owns a lovely ginger cat named Millicent, is assumed to be a smart dresser, and sometimes a bit of a fetishy type. He very often is portrayed with Daddy Issues (which are probably canon at this point).

Now, how do we amplify bits of their canonical and fanonical personalities and descriptions to fit the setting we intend to transplant them into?

How old should they be in the beginning? If we’re aiming to write slash in this AU then they probably should be on the older end of teenagerhood, perhaps 16 to 18. It might make sense if they went to the same school, so let’s do that. Maybe they’re even neighbors, but never really associated much with each other before because of differing interests. That works.

The biggest sticking point, of course, is that our protagonists are dudes, and magical girls are, well, girls. Fortunately, there is precedent of magical girls being dudes in their non-magical life - case in point the Sailor Starlites from Sailor Moon. 

So there we have it. Our poor protagonists are going to transform into magical girls when they’re fighting the forces of darkness. Now we get to apply that to their personalities. Would either of them be pleased to be a girl, even temporarily?

With Ren the matter can be eased by leaning on his fanon characterization as Kylo Amidala, pretty-dress-wearing scion of House Naberrie. Maybe this Ren thinks it’s a nice opportunity to wear impossibly cute and elaborate dresses. So there we go. 

Hux, on the other hand. He’s often written fanonically as a foil to Ren, so having him be a bit put-out and unhappy with transforming into a girl would work just as well. It also gives us something to hang on the plot. Is it possible to alter the transformation so Hux can be a magical boy instead? Why the heck not?

Next, we have to figure out the scope of the setting. Are they hunting down missing Clow cards? Are they hunting Witches for Grief Seeds? Given that the both of them have Daddy Issues, it might make thematic sense for them to be dealing with the forces of darkness and despair. After all, despair and darkness come naturally to the both of them, and having them charged to fight it would mean large amounts of character development as they learn to see the world differently. 

Now, for the nature of their magical girlness. Are magical girls hereditary in this setting? Did they make a wish with a strange animal mascot, that could be Millicent, to gain power? Or did they just randomly wind up becoming chosen out of accident? 

I don’t know if wishing to be a magical girl would have occurred to either of them, given that we’re going with the plot hook that Hux dislikes being a girl when he’s transformed, so let’s go with error. We can keep Millicent as the team mascot, and have her mission to find new warriors of light and love go terribly wrong. 

Perhaps she puts the transformation devices in a capsule machine at a local store, in hopes that the Right Girl will put a couple quarters in the machine. Except of course, she chooses the wrong store, it being a local comic store that is very girl-unfriendly. So no girls show up, but Hux and Ren both go up to pick up their comics, and each of them feeds a couple quarters in the capsule machine on the way out. 

Ooops. So now Millicent is stuck with two boys empowered to fight the forces of despair and darkness in the form of cute teenage girls in adorable dresses. 

Now, what do their transformation forms look like? Obviously if they’re turning into teenage girls then obviously they’d be cute magical girl versions of themselves. 

Ren’s transformed self would wear all kinds of black clothing. Gothic Lolita, perhaps with a bad-boy leather jacket? If we want to derive their magical weaponry from their canonical selves, then it’d be fairly effortless to imagine Magical Girl Ren as a close in combatant with a flaming sword. 

Hux on the other hand, has not actually wielded a weapon personally in canon. Instead he relies on a planet-busting superweapon. That can be easily retextured to be magic. Fanon Hux is often written as a sniper and sharpshooter, too, so maybe Magical Girl Hux has a rifle and a grimoire. There we go. 

Dress-sense wise, Magical Girl Hux would probably be wearing something less frilly than Ren’s, given her alter ego’s dress sense. So maybe she’d be preppy as all hell, or a tomboy in a cadet uniform, with a nice hat. (More callbacks to canon). 

That established, we can then add more detail to the Forces of Darkness and Despair they’re combating. Perhaps they’re not actually Bad Guys per se, as much as the residual unpleasantness that comes out when people are unhappy. That’s a nice one. They fight the things that go bump in the night. 

And, since both of them have such family issues, wouldn’t it be interesting if the first place they had to clear out was the family home? The familiar space changes, and they start to understand the effect negativity is having on the world. 

So there we have it. The bare bones of a Kylux Magical Girl AU, fresh to assemble into a plot, and to be written around. There’s of course more detail one can go into. Are Rey and Phasma also magical girls? How do they react when they find out that the two new magical girls on the block are boys? 

How does Kylo’s little posse (the Knights of Ren) react when he starts taking a cue from his transformed self and starts expressing his gender differently? Is Hux going to have a breakdown from dysphoria after repeated transformations? 

All this is ripe to elaborate on and hang plot hooks on, and this is how I worldbuild for AUs. 

[askthebeanwizard]

First things first.

Hi. I’m Mel. I go by Cyanidebreathmint on Archive of Our Own and @favomancer on Tumblr.  My main online hobby is writing fanfiction. I’ve written for about 20 years now, although much of my early stuff is awful and lost and I’m glad nobody will ever be able to read it again, but one gains some experience over two decades of excited fansquee. 

Therefore this blog is here for me to consolidate writing advice and discuss the methods I use in fanfiction writing.

I currently write for Star Wars: the Force Awakens, and I’m a Kylux shipper although I’m also fairly agnostic as long as the fic is well-written. I also used to write Arthur/Eames, and Arthur/Eames/Ariadne for Inception, although most of my Inception fic is on the back burner presently. 

My specialty in fic-writing is the cracked-out AU. Less outright crack as much as just carefully picking elements from multiple settings and grafting them together into a seamless whole. I’m fond of worldbuilding, which likely explains why I write such out-there AUs. 

I also write trashy, trashy smut, and therefore am also qualified to at least try to give explanations and advice on how I specifically write it. 

None of what I pen here is meant to be taken as absolute edicts writ from the Heavens - they’re just things that I have found handy and useful to consider and do when working on fanfic. I hope that my scribblings will be helpful to you, no matter where you are, which fandom and ship you’re writing for and how you like your fanfic.

There are a few guidelines for what you’re going to expect on this journal, though. 

Firstly, this is an all-ship blog. I will attempt to be respectful of others’ boundaries and tag in-depth discussion of ship dynamics/smut with the specific ship name so they can be filtered out, but I will not leave a ship out because others are uncomfortable. A tag and a Read More cut should be sufficient. 

I do not adhere to the practice of censoring ship names because that would actually obviate the purpose of tagging it for filtering. 

NSFW content will be tagged and stuck under a Read More cut. This is for filtering purposes. In fact most posts will be rather more tagged and categorized than you would expect for my free-for-all personal blog. I don’t want to make my advice inaccessible because of content issues.

Secondly, if you have a personal beef with me, please take it to my main blog. This one isn’t going to be one where I answer asks that don’t quite pertain to the topic of fic writing methodology.  

Please do not take fandom arguments and whatnot into this blog. If you have a beef with someone else, please hash it out with them somewhere else, even if you do not like or are bothered by what they are shipping. 

And lastly, but not least: If you use asks to be a shite to me, or a shite to someone else, I may summarily block you. That is my perogative. 

Beyond that, I hope everyone likes my meditations. I will try to post them once a week, and if I have other content to put in here in-between big serious advice posts, I’ll intersperse them between columns. I may also do some fic clinic work and also get guest authors, if I can dragoon anyone else into writing a column from time to time. 

Cheers. And have fun.