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Writing simply for yourself and not an audience is a form of prose that shall henceforth be termed as literary masturbation. No I am not talking about fanfic with random smut, I am not talking about people who write stories that include sex, although I suppose all of these could also fall under this category. I am talking about writing anything (with the exception of a diary) without an audience in mind.

When you have sex, you want to please the person you are with, not just please yourself. FACT: When the person you are with enjoys sex, you enjoy it more. When you are writing you want the reader to enjoy your story, and give good reviews for it. You then read these reviews and take pleasure in the fact that other people enjoyed what you wrote.

When you write for school, your audience is the teachers, when you write stories with the intention of having them published, you are writing for the publisher, but also for the people you are trying to sell your book to.

For example, you are writing a mystery novel. Your main characters Bob and Gary are trying to find the motive to the murder of Mary-Sue. Mary-Sue had a boyfriend, Jerry as well as a mother, Ellen and a sister, Anne. If you were writing this simply for yourself, you could throw in as many plot twists as you liked, and make it so that when you reach the end of the story, YOU know exactly how it got there. Now let your friend who also likes mystery novels read it. Your friend is the type who gives honest criticism whether you want it or not, and she complains that the story is both too long, and too confusing. You become very upset and vow never to share your work with her again, since you liked it and it was written for you it doesn't matter what she says.

Your friend has a point. You are guilty of literary masturbation and if you submit this story to the publisher, they are going to reject it with the same comments your friend made.

What I am trying to say, is that you, as the author know everything there is to know about your characters and how their minds work. Your reader does not, and as such you need to take out some of the plot twists and allow the novel some semblance of common sense, or explain a lot of the details that you may have allowed to slip through when you were writing.

Since your friend complained that your story was too long and confusing, she clearly did not enjoy it. You want your friend to like your writing, and you go through and begin editing.

-The long descriptive paragraphs about secondary characters can be condensed into short, concise paragraphs giving the minimum information necessary for these characters to perform their function.
-The scene changes need entry and exit points, you cannot simply jump from being at the ranch to halfway across the globe without any indication that they are travelling or that time has passed.
-Clues must be delivered in some way, either by a secondary character, or having a scene in which your main character finds the clue.
-Pivotal plot points cannot be referenced to later in the story if you did not actually write a scene where they happened. Yes I am talking about flashbacks. You cannot flash back to plot points that did not happen, it just doesn’t make sense.
-If you are including a sex scene in your writing, read this or if you are a virgin this before you write another word.

Ok. Ranting done, this topic is open for discussion.

That's great. I mean when I wrote my story I wrote it so my friends and I would both enjoy it. But when I wrote the biography of Bastet (another random story) only I read it because I know that I love all the two page explinations of some stupid detail and no one else would I love the literary masturbation! blaugh

I find that this often happens when people write about topics that interest them and don't take the time to make them work with the reader.

You can exploit your interests so long as you invest the necessary time and skill to make them also interesting to the audience. Until then, writing something just to be able to write what you like is going to be masturbatory. If you take the time to pull us into your story with things that appeal to every reader-- good characterization, interesting prose, sympathetic characters-- we might start to think that your personal object of adoration is, in fact, cool.

This goes a lot with one of my rants: "how to get away with anything". This isn't something that you can really justify on its own, although liking what you write is a worthwhile endeavour. You just have to realize that you need to gain audience trust and sympathy before you go off on your five-paragraph descriptions of dresses.

The how to get away with anything rant his here: http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19926505

and the points apply.

Don't start off wanking at the beginning of your story, because we won't care enough about the stuff. Take time to develop the story before you slide in that thing you think is SO UTTERLY COOL.

Give us something to read besides you wanking, because if they entire story is you jacking off, we will feel very awkward. So introduce common threads that everyone can relate to.

Make sure that you're really good at all the story, not just the stuff that you think is incredibly cool.

If you're going to include what you think is awesome, make it a part of the story instead of tossing it in just so you can talk about it.

well said. See, I have no problem with people who write something just for themselves, I just don't like reading it when it was clearly not written to please me, or anyone else for that matter.

*this rant was provoked by a particularly annoying piece I was asked to edit by my friend.

I personally feel, in the beginning, that everyone should write for themselves.

When you first begin writing serious stories, I mean.
You just need to gain some bulk to your writing muscle, which means largely getting down what you've been thinking about forever, without hesitantly considering how it's going to look to someone else each time.

But yes, once you do get to a certain level, you should start considering readers more and more.

However, I personally feel I've always written what was required, whether or not it was too little or too much, in the end, because I wanted ideas down on paper. Having them hanging up in my head like "Well duh the character acts like this..." never really crossed my mind.

This is just from my own person experience, of course. I'm not sure whether or not it is what writers think.

It certainly does seem like that though, sometimes, when I read others work. XDDD

And btw, that thread on the virgin seriously settled my own dispute with erotic scenes. XDDDD Yaaae. heart

OH yes, I totally wank in writing. Not as sex, perhaps, but yeah. Last time I handed a story to Veive, it came back with "FAP FAP FAP" written in the margins.

I think it's cool to write a story about something you really really like. Although when it gets to the fapping level, it should be rewritten. Which is my current project, if I'm ever assed enough to get to it again.

But yeah, an intro would be nice before the fapping.

I don't think you should use the word "literary." "Literary masturbation" sounds like it would mean "75% of the academic prose produced by the liberal arts departments of any given university and 99% of that which of it originates from the English department." It should be "prosaic masturbation" (lol pun) or just "textual masturbation."