Fantasy vs Reality

I can enjoy relatively realistic stories or obvious fantasy provided the fantasy doesn't keep popping up with the impossible. There was a discussion on Flaming Cheeks about this a while back and someone pointed out that he could accept a story with time travel, but not one in which the time traveller, going back in time, encountered something obviously unhistorical.

As for my stories, I hope it's fairly obvious that some are relatively realistic - so they could just conceivably happen, like "A School Outing", while others are in the wilder realms of fantasy like "Only Doing her Job" - but still contain elements of the real world.

I enjoy reading stories based or portraiting reality as well as stories set in fantastic scenarios as well as realistic stories with unrealistic spankings.

The only thing those stories have to have in common, is to be well written. Although F/M does nothing for me libidio-wise, I just commented on a F/M story because it was a delight to read.

A good author will make you suspend the disbelief gladly and follow him through his written path be it fantasy or reality.

I agree with Galt 54. I also like those 'good olde days', of the 19th century. The so called Victorian Era, when the man as head of his household, was 'king of the castle so to speak. The man who owned an "Upstairs, Downstairs" manor house, who took the righteous view, that he had the right to corporal discipline all the naughty females in his domain, be it his wife, daughter, maids, or female cooks , etc. Each evening, 7 days a week, those females, who had been naughty during said day, would be accountable to him, for their erring ways. The method being corporal chastisement after supper hours, held in the household's parlor. Starting with the 'downstairs' female's', followed soon thereafter, with the 'upstair's ladies'. Each would have to present their bare bottoms, to him. to either, be birched, caned, or whipped. Yes, one can say it was a 'jolly good show', for this gentleman, and I am sure he had a 'spanking good time'.

I agree with most other members post here, in that most supposedly R/L stories including my own, are embellished with fantasy to make them more interesting for readers, and I also agree with Linda and PinkAngel in the respect I have for not finding the hard spanking of young children in fiction attractive.

For although being a lifelong spanko addict myself from the age of 15, I never once spanked any of my own three children the whole time they were growing up, that is if you don't count the occasional slap on the leg for extreme naughtiness a spanking.

However I do sometimes write accurate accounts of things that really did happen in real life, remembering that when I was at school in England, daily corporal punishment was common and often applied for the most trivial transgressions. In fact I will publish one true story here very shortly entitled 'No Justice in the Classroom." In which every word is true, and in which a whole class of boys and seven girls got caned in public, when most of them were totally innocent of any offence, something that today would be justifiably shocking. And I can vividly picture the events as easily today as when they happened.

And BTW this is not a cheap advertisement for the story but merely a statement of fact, regards Kephren

In writing fiction it's all about getting the reader to suspend disbelief. There are two aspects to this for those of us who publish here. First is getting the reader to accept the setting and basic story line. Sci-fi settings can be challenging, for example, with all the advanced technology and perhaps strange cultures, but if humans in these settings interact the way you imagine they would, a reader will accept the world you've built and go along for the ride.

The more difficult issues deal with the spanking scenarios. Too frequent, too severe, or too contrived scenarios may make readers gape with disbelief instead of suspending it. Now this only applies to fiction. If it's a true account, well, it is what is.

What I try to do is to give a reader enough justification in the plot or the characters to suspend disbelief so they can accept the scene and enjoy it. An example is "Stripes"---my one attempt at an F/m English schoolboy story. The female lead character canes the lead schoolboy character bare. Most would say it's outrageous--would never happen. But if you read the story you'll see why it makes sense (I hope--if it doesn't I failed to do my job).

Another one is Rachael's spanking scene in "Thermopolis Springs" or Anne's birching in "Anne of Wulfsteadt". Why would she do that? I hope the plot and the characters' personalities made these scenes believable.

The thing is, if the reader is drawn into your world and is willing to accept it, you've succeeded, but you have to take pains to make sure people act somewhat logically, at least in terms of their own personalities, and you don't throw things in the readers faces and say "accept this as reality, but I'm not going to justify or explain it." That would be a mistake.

IMHO consistency of attitudes and behavior is important, the characters must be basically the same people--unless the storyline creates a plausible reason for personal change--throughout a given story and moreso for a story series or a group of interrelated stories. Okay, it's a bit of a 'stretch' to have a mother give her daughter a panties-down hairbrush whacking in the handicapped stall of a public ladies' room for being highly disrespectful to her, but my imagination can handle that--IMHO it's unlikely but not highly implausible. OTOH, if in a later part of that story or serial the daughter is similarly disrespectful but the mother simply shrugs it off, I'm going to need a really solid explanation for the woman's dramatically altered response to accept it as believable within the story context.

As I stated once before in a discussion here, AFAIC there's a big difference between unlikely and implausible. In any given babysitting situation, the odds are strongly against the sitter being given unquestioned authority to paddle her charges on their naked buttocks--however, it's not implausible for such authority to be granted in (let's say) one-half of one percent of babysitting situations, which happens to include the one being written about. If a modern/advanced society were shown wherein at least half of babysitting situations involved such disciplinary discretion being given to the sitter, then that would have to be considered science fiction or alternate reality (or even possibly social satire if written as such).

Accepting a 'world' that's created isn't too much of a problem (as long as fantasy elements aren't claimed to be RL realistic), as long as its consistent within itself... --C.K.

I think these days there's a degree of implausibility in most spanking stories unless they're drawn directly from real life experiences. In fact one story I wrote based on real life actually drew some criticism that the spanking was a bit poor . It's a case of writing what is essentially something completely implausible and trying to make it sound as if it isn't. One thing Angie (editrix of Bared Affair) said when she first tried to recruit me as a writer was that The Spank Shop was a totally bogus concept that could not possibly exist in the real world, but it was written as if it did and that was what she was trying to accomplish with the work published in Bared Affair.

I couldn`t agree more about the implausibility of some stories. Some you read and think to yourself, `well it could happen I suppose` and others leave you incredulous and thinking `no, that would never happen in a month of Sundays`. Fantasy or simply too fantastical, there`s a fine line sometimes.

Every last one of my stories is true, down to the smallest detail.

We tend to steer away completely from the spanking of children, for two reasons, the main one being it's just not our thing at all.
The second one is that I feel that it is more of a challenge to find a spanking situation involving adults, and still retain a "plausible" storyline.
As for reality or fantasy, I like to think that we manage to write reasonably realistic fantasies, though that is what they are. Fantasies.