Love, Hate, Love/Hate Relationships, and Relationships (and possibly also Fapping)
kyellgold made a post not too long ago wherein he talked about the difference between love and lust and the inclusion (and differentiation) of both in erotic stories. There was some interesting discussion in the comments, there, too, and it prompted me to think some more about some things that were already going through my head
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I remember an essay written by Paul Graham about copying; it seems that you're musing as to whether to copy popular genres. Here's the intro to that essay:
"When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for use in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep."
The full essay (which takes less than 10 minutes to read) is here: http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html
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