The Library of Spanking Fiction: Wellred Weekly


Wellred Weekly
Volume 1, Number 6 : March 23, 2012
 
Articles
Items of interest regarding all things spanking

One Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures
by Dr Keate

I want to write a little about the vital touch that can turn a strong spanking story into a great story you can't get out of your mind because it nails a particular situation or feeling for ever. That touch is perfectly chosen dialogue.

This is how Hilaire Belloc describes, or rather doesn't describe, the feelings of Jim, who was eaten by a lion:
"Now, just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels,
And then by gradual degrees
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees,
Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.
No wonder Jim detested it!"

Now swap the teeth and claws of a lion for a hairbrush or a cane, and keep the 'gradual degrees' but have them refer to the punishment queue, then the scolding, then the baring, the increasing intensity of punishment, and so on, and what Belloc is conveying is essentially the same as we try to convey using the core ingredients of most spanking stories, particularly of the crushing, usually highly non-consensual kind I like to write. I'll leave that wonderful word 'detested' for later.

I don't want to be invidious, or single out particular authors, but it's quickest to give just one clear outstanding example of what I mean by using dialogue to nail a feeling or situation. There's a story in the library (Back To School) in which DJ Black describes a punishment queue outside a master's study. Girl after girl goes in to be caned, the tension mounts, one of the girls isn't who she appears to be, etc blah blah. It's well written, the characters are (very) well developed, but that's true of many, many stories in this fantastic library.

Then the study door opens, and the most recently caned girl comes out. "That was beastly!" she says. That's all she says, and off she goes. (I'm deliberately writing from memory, to stay with the deep impression the story left on me). It's barely dialogue at all; she's saying it to herself, as an expression of her feelings, as much as to her comrades awaiting their turns to be on intimate terms with Mr Rattan.

But those three simple words, for me, illuminate the whole story like a flash of lightning. They represent an emotional and human truth that makes the story great, and they do it with the least possible expenditure of words used for descriptions for the maximum payoff. And here's how it works, for me.

It's that word 'beastly'. This may only work if you're British (I'll come to that) but 'beastly' immediately opens a door into who this young woman is: an upper middle class girl at a girls' public school, somewhere (emotionally) before the late 60s. Heroines from Angela Brazil's, Enid Blyton's or Philip Larkin's school stories would instantly recognise her as one of their own. And being who she is, her code of honour is already implied: stiff upper lip, don't peach (US: fink/rat?) on another girl, take your medicine when you've earned it. And that code of honour will very definitely include British understatement.

Back to Belloc. 'Detested' is such a great word to describe the feelings of a boy having one of the worst experiences you can imagine a human being, let alone a child, suffering because we normally use it to say things like: "I detest blue cheese, it tastes like soap," or, "I detest that Paris Hilton, who does she think she is, she ought to have her-" etc. Because it's almost comically inappropriate, it only shows the more just how unspeakably awful and vile it is to be eaten alive. And I've already used too many words there, this isn't easy! It forces us to do the work, and we grasp at the edges of horrors we can't bear to contemplate and shudder. Just as we (or at least I) do when we contemplate having to wait in line to be caned...

So when she tells her comrades that it was beastly, she means, and they know, that it was horrible beyond words. The reader is given an idea to ferment inside her or his head, while the other girls are given something rather more pressing to think about, particularly the next one in line. So it is dialogue, because a message has been passed about just what it's going to be like on the other side of that door. And it's been passed in just three words. No raised crimson welts, no uncontrollable sobbing, no lengthy scolding or threats. That's why I admire this use of dialogue so much. If - and it's a big if - I have a fault, it's that I do go on a bit. I wish I could do this.

And it tells us yet more about her character, and how she's placed. She's admirably brave. 'Beastly' - a young woman's word. She's a schoolgirl, yes, but she's on the very cusp of young womanhood, with a developed sense of who she is and where she's going and all the wonders life has in store, and suddenly, there she is, despite all that, nothing but a schoolgirl under the authority of the cane. Now she's in great pain, she's been humiliated by, and in front of, male authority, she has to come out to face her fellow miscreants, and all she says is: That was beastly. You can hear the tremor of tearful disgust in her voice, which nonetheless remains under control. The reader is taken back to the turmoil of their own teens, when they were neither one thing nor the other, and many of the major humiliations of their lives are likely to have happened then.

One downside of dialogue as focussed as this is that it's very culturally specific. But frankly, who cares? There are going to be, for instance, American examples of brilliant dialogue that I'm not going to get because I don't get the references or the context, but then by the same token there are going to be great scenes that suddenly lose some of their power for me because the lady is made to take her knickers off rather than taking her knickers down. (Fetishists picky? Who knew?) I'm not going to complain about that (very often) because I'm not expecting anyone else to have a telepathic hotline to what turns me on, and I think it's the same with this.

I'm sorry if this reads just as an extended comment but I think what this one example illustrates is the power of simple speech, perfectly chosen, to reveal character and make a situation come alive. Because it's not telling, it's showing. And that's the key. You set the scene, you put the people into it, you wind them up, and off they go down some version of the grooves we like; but if they suddenly find words that reveal their emotional reality to the reader, you've got something special. Instead of: "She flushed scarlet with shame" etc, she shows you her shame in what she says. It's like the crucial brushstroke that animates a painting, gives it energy and truth. This is what it must really be like to be a schoolgirl in trouble!



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