Who is It For

Just recently I finished a story and sent it to a good friend of mine. She liked it, but she pointed out a significant flaw. At the start of the story I raised a question, or perhaps a better way to put it here is, I established my main character's primary goal. So, to the reader, the resolution of that goal became the story's focal point. At the end of the story I answered the question of whether my main character would become comfortable with her sexuality, and I did it nicely. At least, that's what I gathered from her critique. However, the question I asked at the beginning was NOT about my main character's sexuality. I did raise the sexuality question, but not at the start.

So the stories biggest flaw was that it was not bookended. I told the reader that one question was most important, and then didn't treat it as important. Meanwhile, I felt the sexuality question was most important but didn't raise it at the start. This made for a nice, but unfulling, story.

To make the story right I have to stop being so coy about my main character's struggles with whether or not she is a lesbian and put it up front and in plain sight from the start. That way the reader knows what she's reading and can better appreciate the main character's conflict as she seeks to learn who she really is.

It's obvious to me that I took the back door approach to the sexuality question because I'm still embarassed to write about it. The very term 'lesbian' seems to bring up connotations of sex, and I'm still embarassed by sex. I'm sorry, but I was taught I should be, and I learned that lesson too well. You know, I still haven't written that explicit sex scene. And nobody would even know about it but me! I'm not really a prude. I just get embarassed.

That the word 'lesbian' should be a sexual word is wrong, I think. I kind of spoke about this, poorly, I know, in my previous post, where I wondered publically what constitutes being a lesbian. A comment brought up the idea that so much of lesbian fiction is very sexual in nature and is actually geared toward heterosexual men, who get off on the idea of women being together. But lesbian stories shouldn't be written for straight men. They shouldn't be written for men at all. Lesbian stories should be written for women. Lesbians in particular. If men, or straight women, enjoy reading, too, so much the better. But they should not be the target audience.

I got to thinking about that, and I wondered if that wasn't the problem I was having with my story. The idea of straight men reading lesbian stories hadn't really entered my thoughts. But in order to see how others wrote love scenes I had been reading a lot of online examples. I quit because it seemed to me so very few were well written at all that I was only filling my head with how NOT to write them. But when the idea that these stories were written to excite the imaginations of straight men, I realized that I felt the same way about them. They did not seem like stories written for women seeking commonality with someone who shared their love preference. But I think all of that reading distorted my thinking about lesbian stories in general. I think I subconsciously forgot my target audience, and I'm not comfortable writing sex stuff for straight men. Or for anybody for that matter.

My stories are supposed to be about finding acceptance, falling in love - love, not sex, and being free to be who one is. And my target audience is women. I need to remember that and forget about the stereotypes. I need to just let my characters be real people, and not animals which are slaves to passion and sexuality. While there are real people who are, they are not the subject of my writing. My writing is not supposed to be about sex, although I want sex to (sometimes) be a part of my stories.

So, between my friend's critique, and the comment on my post, I think I have what I need to fix up my story and make it something people want to and enjoy reading. Any people.