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About that banner image: implicit storytelling
🕑 Added 2019-10-07 00:21:23 +0000 UTCWhat’s up with the barely chubby chick? Isn’t this thing supposed to be about fatness and weight gain and indulging fantasies? Why lead with something so tame?
I have two answers followed by a lot of words:
(1) I think it’s a sexy photo.
(2) It’s a (pictorial) example of a great but underutilized technique: implicit storytelling.
Implicit storytelling is when you guide your audience via carefully crafted clues to fill gaps of deliberately withheld information in the story by inferring the things you want to suggest without you actually showing or stating any of those things yourself.
Let’s look at the photo.
At a basic level it’s just a photo of a gal exposing her belly.
Look more closely at her belt, though, and you’ll notice some revealing details.
- The notch on our far right, the smallest size for the belt, is heavily worn and stretched. This suggests she used to wear the belt at that size, and did so for a long while.
- Each of the notches to the left of that one also shows signs of wear, but not nearly so much. This suggests she wore the belt on each of these successively looser notches only briefly.
- The belt is currently on its very last, loosest notch. It’s fitting pretty snugly there, too, with her soft lower belly pooching up against the cold, hard metal of the buckle.
What do these details tell us?
This a gal who, until recently, was quite slim. Given her current relative size and how small she used to wear that belt, more than just slim she probably was quite lean and toned. Yet for some reason she’s started gaining weight. Not only has she gotten fatter, what may have started out as a small, slow, and subtle gain has picked up pace. After resisting initially, she’s been forced to surrender one notch on her belt after another with increasing rapidity. Now she’s on her last one. Her pants and t-shirt are already tight. It’s clear she on the verge of porking right out of her whole wardrobe. And yet she’s still wearing the same eye-catching orange belt she favored back when her navel was a tight divot rather than the deep, doughy crater it’s become. This is a mark of hubris, obstinance, vanity, and desperation. She knows she’s getting fat—she’s the one cinching that pitiless strap around her middle each time, after all—but still she refuses to concede the accessory, even though its bold style has been progressively perverted into something “eye-catching” only for all the wrong reasons. Likelier than not, that last and loosest notch will wind up being the most worn and stretched of all, if nowhere near the longest used.
It’s almost a whole story unto itself, left there as a thread for the audience to pull and weave, just from the details of a few notches on a belt.
When writing, you can accomplish implicit storytelling the same way this photograph does—just describe the belt’s details when setting the scene. The audience will infer a suitable backstory for you.
This technique of implicit storytelling can be contrasted with techniques like direct storytelling and expository storytelling. We can talk about those styles more another time, but here’s my truncated oversimplification. Direct storytelling is when you “show” the audience what’s happened—usually by having it play out in front of them more or less in “real time.” Expository storytelling is when you describe what’s happened to the audience by “telling” it to them—kind of like a reporter summarizing events.
Implicit storytelling isn’t necessarily “better” than these other types of storytelling and it can’t always replace them. Those three techniques are tools, each suited to certain tasks and situations.
Storytelling is an art. As an artist, it is important to be aware of the tools available to you and to think about how you can use them. Just because a story is niche erotica—weight gain wank fiction—doesn’t mean it has to be tawdry. There’s nothing shameful in caring about your craft. Quite the opposite, in fact. All else equal, an erotic story is more erotic when well told. That you’ve found your way here to this page and have read all the way to the end of this post suggests there’s a good chance you’ve already reached that conclusion yourself. Good on you! We’re gonna have fun.
Welcome to our Patreon page.
-Riptoryx
Comments
Greg Gasiorowski
I ran the Detroit marathon yesterday & this is most always a plethora of doughy women amongst the more fit ones, on the final mile hill I passed a winded Asian woman, slowed to a walk, who was at least 20lbs + of this picture in a running bra crop top, I couldn't help but flirt back "We're almost to the end" she kinda scowled back disgusted as I passed. I really wished I had noticed her bib # I spend over an hour attempting to find her race pics on the site but came up dry. :-/
Maverick and Riptoryx
Well said, Rip! A picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words, and the one you've selected for our masthead tells a glorious tale. Our job as authors will be to create "mental pictures" rivaling the above. It's a challenge I'm excited for! Maverick
