Left me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping . . .
So I'm having a dilemma, and its name is "explicit slash writing". Because I've never done it before, and while I've written het smut out the wazoo (threesomes, crazy space incest, crazy religious incest, friendship kink) and slight amounts of slash (mainly PG-13ish Brian/Michael from USQAF), this is something that's driving me crazier than anything else.
Okay, so to save your sanity (I'm looking at you, Vorona), I cut this part, because if you don't like wrestling to begin with, you're especially not going to appreciate my rambling about fandom.
To give you the crash course, writing Shawn/Hunter (that's Shawn Michaels and Triple H) involves three things:
1) A willingness to deal seriously with issues like fundamental Christianity (oh, Shawn, you're so much less fun now that you're all Jesus-ified), canonical bisexuality (cause c'mon, how else are you going to take a statement like "I'm bi a lot of things, but -lingual isn't one of them". Thanks, Hunter.), and a twelve-year friendship that nearly got ruined by pills, booze, and the wrestling business.
2) A firm position on exactly how real you want to portray their wrestling careers. Sure, it's largely scripted, but come on, these are the guys that caught hell for hugging their two other best friends goodbye in front of a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden when two were "good guys" and two were "bad guys". Breaking kayfabe is their hobby. Their friendship has worked its way into every angle they've been involved in since the original run of DX in '97, they poke fun at their personal lives on-air for kicks - not to mention the fact that certain dangers have always been associated with wrestling. These guys are legitimately beating themselves up 40-weeks-a-year (or whatever their insane schedule is).
3) A brain that doesn't freak out over borderline-RPF, and the mental capacity to figure out what the hell wrestling pairings are. I mean, you've got your storyline pairs like Carlito/Trish Stratus, who aren't dating in real life, but their characters, who are basically themselves, are. Then you've got your real-life pairs like Hunter/Stephanie McMahon, who are married in real life, but divorced (maybe twice?) in storyline. Slash is even crazier, because sure, some members of tag-teams or factions are friends in real life and onscreen, even when they're supposed to be feuding (Shawn and Hunter wrote the book on it, but Matt Hardy and Greg Helms are going that route right now). Then you have enemy slash (crazy Orton/Batista and Cena/Orton fangirls, I'm looking at you), where they might or might not be friends in real life, but they hate each other in storyline. And that's not even getting into the whole Diva slash catagory.
So while juggling all that and a plot, I now find myself wondering how to approach the slashy parts. And okay, it's not like finding the subtext is hard (all you have to do is look at them - *points to icon*), but it's a completely different animal from het. You constantly need to keep in your head all of these notions of plot, characterization, and grammar that you'd use for any other fic, but because you're writing about a relationship between two men, you need to start a whole new list.
Are they still in character throughout the sexual shenanigans?
What would their reaction be to this idea of a sexual relationship with another man?
Are their reactions those of two presumably-heterosexual men? And in my case - are their reactions of the present day affected by their relationship of nine years ago (because they should be)?
I've written one-half of what will be the first of three explicit chapters, and I'm ridiculously nervous about it. I have no idea if its coming across as an accurate scene (with all body parts and reactions in their normal state), or if it'll read as "hey look, she's totally a newbie slash writer". And while the hardest part was not writing smut from Shawn's born-again POV (not to say it wasn't difficult, tyvm), it turned out to be the mechanics of it. A woman having a man's hands on her ass is going to have a completely different reaction than a man. A woman's going to have to be either really strong or really determined to push a guy against a wall - a man's going to find it easy, especially my characters, who muscle guys around for a living. And specific to my story: touching each other in interesting places isn't a new thing - they do it inadvertantly in the ring all the time (I defy someone to try and bodyslam, powerbomb, or piledrive an opponent without groping them - it can't happen), which translates to completely different dynamics in smut scenes.
I dunno. I'm just yammering right now, seeing as my afternoon class was canceled.
*wanders off to finish reading "The Dream Hunters"*
Okay, so to save your sanity (I'm looking at you, Vorona), I cut this part, because if you don't like wrestling to begin with, you're especially not going to appreciate my rambling about fandom.
To give you the crash course, writing Shawn/Hunter (that's Shawn Michaels and Triple H) involves three things:
1) A willingness to deal seriously with issues like fundamental Christianity (oh, Shawn, you're so much less fun now that you're all Jesus-ified), canonical bisexuality (cause c'mon, how else are you going to take a statement like "I'm bi a lot of things, but -lingual isn't one of them". Thanks, Hunter.), and a twelve-year friendship that nearly got ruined by pills, booze, and the wrestling business.
2) A firm position on exactly how real you want to portray their wrestling careers. Sure, it's largely scripted, but come on, these are the guys that caught hell for hugging their two other best friends goodbye in front of a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden when two were "good guys" and two were "bad guys". Breaking kayfabe is their hobby. Their friendship has worked its way into every angle they've been involved in since the original run of DX in '97, they poke fun at their personal lives on-air for kicks - not to mention the fact that certain dangers have always been associated with wrestling. These guys are legitimately beating themselves up 40-weeks-a-year (or whatever their insane schedule is).
3) A brain that doesn't freak out over borderline-RPF, and the mental capacity to figure out what the hell wrestling pairings are. I mean, you've got your storyline pairs like Carlito/Trish Stratus, who aren't dating in real life, but their characters, who are basically themselves, are. Then you've got your real-life pairs like Hunter/Stephanie McMahon, who are married in real life, but divorced (maybe twice?) in storyline. Slash is even crazier, because sure, some members of tag-teams or factions are friends in real life and onscreen, even when they're supposed to be feuding (Shawn and Hunter wrote the book on it, but Matt Hardy and Greg Helms are going that route right now). Then you have enemy slash (crazy Orton/Batista and Cena/Orton fangirls, I'm looking at you), where they might or might not be friends in real life, but they hate each other in storyline. And that's not even getting into the whole Diva slash catagory.
So while juggling all that and a plot, I now find myself wondering how to approach the slashy parts. And okay, it's not like finding the subtext is hard (all you have to do is look at them - *points to icon*), but it's a completely different animal from het. You constantly need to keep in your head all of these notions of plot, characterization, and grammar that you'd use for any other fic, but because you're writing about a relationship between two men, you need to start a whole new list.
Are they still in character throughout the sexual shenanigans?
What would their reaction be to this idea of a sexual relationship with another man?
Are their reactions those of two presumably-heterosexual men? And in my case - are their reactions of the present day affected by their relationship of nine years ago (because they should be)?
I've written one-half of what will be the first of three explicit chapters, and I'm ridiculously nervous about it. I have no idea if its coming across as an accurate scene (with all body parts and reactions in their normal state), or if it'll read as "hey look, she's totally a newbie slash writer". And while the hardest part was not writing smut from Shawn's born-again POV (not to say it wasn't difficult, tyvm), it turned out to be the mechanics of it. A woman having a man's hands on her ass is going to have a completely different reaction than a man. A woman's going to have to be either really strong or really determined to push a guy against a wall - a man's going to find it easy, especially my characters, who muscle guys around for a living. And specific to my story: touching each other in interesting places isn't a new thing - they do it inadvertantly in the ring all the time (I defy someone to try and bodyslam, powerbomb, or piledrive an opponent without groping them - it can't happen), which translates to completely different dynamics in smut scenes.
I dunno. I'm just yammering right now, seeing as my afternoon class was canceled.
*wanders off to finish reading "The Dream Hunters"*