Suspension of disbelief

Another piece of advise:
You get to decide how detailed you want to make your story, but if you're going to include a detail, get it right.

Example:
Many years ago, on a BBS, I read a story that had a long description of how a girl was tied up. Every knot that was used, how long each segment of rope was, where each loop of rope was place - it was all there. Think of it as a written form of oriental bondage. We're talking about over 100 feet of rope involved in tying up one person. When I was reading it, well, I hit page down several times wondering "why didn't he say 'I tied her up' and skip all this?".

But there are people who really like that sort of thing, and several of them posted about the story - and they were angry that he had ruined the mood, teased them, and otherwise exetremely disappointed them. His crime? Somewhere in all that description, in the parts I skipped over, he had made a mistake. One of his knots (out of dozens, or maybe hunderds - I didn't count them) was wrong, and that ruined the story for the rope fans. He gave a detail that was wrong, and that ruined things for a certain type of readers.

I've seen the same thing happen in regards to other kinks. Someone who richly described the stockings that someone was wearing being dinged for using the wrong type of material, but it also happens with non-kink things. Especially in historical fiction when people get major details wrong. Things like a teenaged girl in 1952 being told that she can either be spanked or lose her phone (not her phone privileges, which would make sense, but her smart phone) for a month.

I'm not saying not to include details. Detail can make a story great. Just, well, try to get them right.

I totally endorse alef's comment that a spanking story is not so much about the experience as about finding ways to describe it that seems new, fresh, and authentic. As with sex, it is probably easier to find fresh ways to describe what is happening in the mind than what is happening with the body.

I much prefer spanking stories where the girl getting punished is a basically good, submissive girl because that is the most realistic situation for a girl to have her skirt raised and spanked in a ceremonial manner. It's not at all realistic if the girl is a 16 year old entitled brat who has just pushed her parents too far.

Yes! This is what I try so hard to do with my spanking stories. The descriptions of the punishments themselves eventually get so repetitious ... I want to know what's going on in the minds of the spankees and spankers.

For me, realism is crucial.

Alef''s comment puts it well: "I also like realism - and in a rather stupid way: If I can convince myself that a spanking story is based on a real incident, it has a much greater effect on me. I know it's naive, but it seems to be the way I am built."

Guy's difficulty with workplace spankings also applies to me. Even though I know there are isolated incidents of workplace spankings, they are hard for me to believe because they seem so unlikely.

This can make my "window of preferability" rather narrow. For example, it is crucial to me that the spankee's bottom is bared, but I can't believe that a spankee would hug their spanker without unbaring themselves first, other than with a sexual partner.

We may prefer realism, but a great many spanking stories are not realistic, or at least not historically accurate. For example, spanko fiction is so full of accounts of British schoolgirls being soundly spanked, slippered or caned by strict headmasters, some people probably think that was the reality, but such events were actually quite rare and highly controversial, even going back in time a couple of generations. The vast majority of UK school corporal punishment was of boys by men. At my primary school the headmaster taught a class of ten and eleven year olds, and smacked boys' and girls' bottoms without distinction, but when girls had reached the age of puberty there was a general concensus that they should not be given corporal punishment by men. There was a case in the 60's where a headmaster spanked two female sixth formers on their knickers with a hairbrush, and ended up in court over it.

I'm as guilty as anyone of writing "unrealistic" stories, but I do like the challenge of taking some rather implausible situation and trying to persuade the reader that it might just possibly have happened.

One thing is the "physical" realism Alan is talking about above, another thing is "psychological" realism. Aren't we all guilty of misrepresenting the way spankings actually work? The head of a spanko is an ideal world were fair spankings lead to improved behavior from reformed sinners who now realize their mistakes and are grateful for having been corrected. But it isn't really like that, is it? And still for many of us this ideal world seems almost as real as the real one. So why worry about the ways schools actually work when the whole tradition of wholesome spanking stories is based on a faulty premise?

And don't forget all the stories where, after just one spanking, two strangers fall into bed, love, and marriage, pretty much in that order. They are lovely fantasies, but hardly realistic.

I agree to the extent that much real world corporal punishment was/is brutal or abusive and left people feeling resentful or traumatized. But I wouldn't say the idea of a "wholesome" spanking is a complete myth. Would the idea be so deeply embedded if there wasn't a grain of truth in it? It doesn't seem totally impossible that a spanking could resolve tension, ease a guilty conscience and make the two parties feel closer. Many adults choose to be spanked, after all, and not always or exclusively for erotic reasons.

I think this is a very good point, and one I definitely would have made myself if I had wanted to be a little less provocative. I am sure what is described here goes on all the time between consenting adults who both believe in the spanking mythology I described above. And it is not even that strange; it just seems to be a corporal implementation of the theme sin, repentance, punishment, redemption that most religions are full of, and hence a representation of a common human theme. But still: when I asked in another thread some time ago if anybody could come up with a real example of a "wholesome" punishment spanking between, say, a parent and a teenager, the results were rather depressing.

Merely as a reader i see it as what is the author trying to put across, so if they are suggesting that a sixth former gets shall we say a 100 stroke caning in a story, that is a fiction but with supposed realistic basis, then no it just ruins it for me, but put that 100 stroke caning in a total fantasy then maybe it will fit.