How slow is too slow for a slow burn?

[LessThanSavory]

So, I'm trying to get back into writing after... way too long, and am currently working on an outline for a story I want to post here. The problem being that while the story does end up revolving around ABDL themes (diapers, dependence, caring, etc.), it takes a while to build up to that... like "tens of thousands of words in the outline" kind of a while, and I'm not sure if that's a sign that I should either majorly rework things, or just look at rewriting it as a non-abdl story in the first place.

I want to write it as a slow progression kind of story since that's what I enjoy, but I'm kind of running into the problem of not being sure if it works as is since it feels like it takes way too long to get to the diaper stuff for someone who wants to read it because they are interested in that, but the fact that it gets to diapers at all is probably a deal breaker for people who aren't into it.

So, how long do you think is too long to get to the juicy bits? Am I just overthinking it, or is writing a story around a niche topic that takes too long to get to the niche a losing game?

[spark]

3 hours ago, LessThanSavory said:

So, I'm trying to get back into writing after... way too long, and am currently working on an outline for a story I want to post here. The problem being that while the story does end up revolving around ABDL themes (diapers, dependence, caring, etc.), it takes a while to build up to that... like "tens of thousands of words in the outline" kind of a while, and I'm not sure if that's a sign that I should either majorly rework things, or just look at rewriting it as a non-abdl story in the first place.

I want to write it as a slow progression kind of story since that's what I enjoy, but I'm kind of running into the problem of not being sure if it works as is since it feels like it takes way too long to get to the diaper stuff for someone who wants to read it because they are interested in that, but the fact that it gets to diapers at all is probably a deal breaker for people who aren't into it.

So, how long do you think is too long to get to the juicy bits? Am I just overthinking it, or is writing a story around a niche topic that takes too long to get to the niche a losing game?

A lot of stories that try to slow-burn regression end up going way too long before the protagonist gets put in diapers.   I'd say you need to have some regression dynamic set up in the first thousand words.   If you keep the story engaging, you can push out the diaper element for quite a while, but eventually, you have to get there.

[Babypants]

Fiction is normally centered on character first, plot second, and devices a far distant third.  Thus, James Bond slays the man with the golden gun with his Walther PPK.  Doesn't work too well if we center the story on the gun, kill the villain with it, and only find out as a mere aside that Bond pulled the trigger.  Ah, but this is a fetish porn site, and Spark is quite right: for a lot of the people who come here to read stories, it is the diaper that trumps the other structural elements, so you have to get to it pretty fast.  I'd say in the first chapter if this is going to run several thousand words. 

To stretch this out, a lot would depend on the theme.  For example, one of the most popular here revolves around having a parental figure use diapers to humiliate a child.  In this instance, you could reach beyond the first chapter by inserting a bed wetting episode at the opening.  Foreshadowing can buy you some time, but not to the tune of "tens of thousands of words." 

[spark]

53 minutes ago, Babypants said:

To stretch this out, a lot would depend on the theme.  For example, one of the most popular here revolves around having a parental figure use diapers to humiliate a child.  In this instance, you could reach beyond the first chapter by inserting a bed wetting episode at the opening.  Foreshadowing can buy you some time, but not to the tune of "tens of thousands of words." 

In a lot of stories, I literally search for the word before I engage in the story.   I probably err on the other side, and get to the diapers in just a few words.  It's why I write the stories.

That being said, you need to have good characters to keep a story engaging.   In All My Mother's Rules, it took a few chapters before Sarah finally peed her pants twice and ended up in diapers for the day, but by that point, there were several references to accidents, potty training, and she wore diapers at night.   Emilia's potty training struggles were brought up very quickly in the story.

The best way to show a slow regression is through time jumps.  You go through in detail about an incident that begins the process, but then jumped to another time period (months, weeks, or days)  and show how the regression has grown.

[BabySofia]

6 hours ago, LessThanSavory said:

So, how long do you think is too long to get to the juicy bits?

Have you read Personalias's Unfair? That was one of the longest leadups to diaper demotion of any tale I'd ever read. To be perfectly honest I took that as a bit of a challenge with In-Between and had the main character avoid a diapered fate until after he'd held off. I believe it can be a long while before you introduce diapers as long as there is a good story! 

I think that's one of the biggest keys to some of the better abdl works out there, they're all great stories first, and while they do include diapers as a main element, the story itself isn't just wham, bam, baby powder, poopy diapee! If you think you have a good story, you might warn readers it is going to be a long haul, but if it's got a good storyline you should still find plenty of readers. What I would advise you is to be patient if you don't receive tons of comments/likes right away. Stay the course and it'll likely come over time. 

Good luck! 🙂

[Guilend]

I'm not an author, but I am an avid reader, specially I pretty much only read diaper porn lol.

While BabySofia is right, those two stories she mentioned was also set in the diaper dimension sandbox  which included diapers and had high expectations of the protagonist ending up in diapers from the get go.

For me, personally, if it's well written, the storyline is good and I'm enjoying the storyline I'll probably read the whole thing before realizing diapers was only in the last 5 chapters out of 40 or 50 lol. 

My best advice is let everyone know from the start and keep posting chapters and eventually your audience will find you. 

[Babypants]

23 minutes ago, Guilend said:

While BabySofia is right, those two stories she mentioned was also set in the diaper dimension sandbox  which included diapers and had high expectations of the protagonist ending up in diapers from the get go.

A very good point.  If you situate your story in something like the diaper dimension, everybody knows what's coming.  In this kind of setting, a good writer can probably tease the readership a bit and get away with it.  

[Babypants]

27 minutes ago, Guilend said:

My best advice is let everyone know from the start and keep posting chapters and eventually your audience will find you. 

Patience is indeed the key.  If you go against the grain, not just here but on any fetish site featuring stories, you have to have faith that good writing will slowly attract an audience.  Build characters that are memorable because you give them depth.  Insert them in a plot that is credible, and make a real effort to get the details right.  The ultimate challenge on a site like this is to construct a story that doesn't need to lean on the fetish to pass muster.  

[Elfy]

Honestly, in some cases the longer you hold off the better. Anyone can write a story where, within a few thousand words, the protag is in diapers... but then where does the story go from there? And why rush to the main event?

To really have regression, domination, diapers and/or whatever else really count for something you have to establish the world the characters are in, the chracters themselves and the relationships between them. Nearly every story on here and other places will have diapers and everything that goes with them, there is no new places to explore there, so what yuo can do is make people fall i love with your world/characters so that whe the diapers come along they are the cherry on top of the cake.

[PeculiarChangeling]

Using the examples presented above, I think I have some thoughts here:

The issue is not "It takes too long to get the protagonist into diapers", but, "Too much of the story is spent in a different genre."

IMO, kink writing often has quite a bit in common with horror, especially noncon/dubcon kink, with the difference being that horror is meant to frighten rather than tittilate. However, it makes a good example here, because we can contrast different styles:

Imagine a story about a family going on vacation in the mountains, to a private retreat. The dad is working on his novel, the mom is enjoying time away from the hustle and bustle of daily life, they play with their son, they explore the nearby garden, there's some marital strife and the kid has a few quirks, and then wham the dad snaps and begins hunting down his family with an axe and they have to escape before he kills them-

Okay, you might have guessed what I was doing here. I basically just described 'The Shining' (with a few details altered), but with all of the foreshadowing and suspense cut out. The first two thirds of the film don't have anything directly dangerous - Jack Torrence isn't swinging his axe - but we still know what's coming and are left in suspense. If it were presented without all of the paranormal elements, the psychic warnings, the premonitions of danger and the hints that Jack was losing his mind, the first two thirds of the movie would not work.

Now, imagine you're writing an AB/DL story, and worried that the pacing is too slow burn. Ask yourself:

What is the slow burn doing to set up the kink content?

[ValentinesStuff]

On 2/10/2024 at 3:11 PM, LessThanSavory said:

So, I'm trying to get back into writing after... way too long, and am currently working on an outline for a story I want to post here. The problem being that while the story does end up revolving around ABDL themes (diapers, dependence, caring, etc.), it takes a while to build up to that... like "tens of thousands of words in the outline" kind of a while, and I'm not sure if that's a sign that I should either majorly rework things, or just look at rewriting it as a non-abdl story in the first place.

I want to write it as a slow progression kind of story since that's what I enjoy, but I'm kind of running into the problem of not being sure if it works as is since it feels like it takes way too long to get to the diaper stuff for someone who wants to read it because they are interested in that, but the fact that it gets to diapers at all is probably a deal breaker for people who aren't into it.

So, how long do you think is too long to get to the juicy bits? Am I just overthinking it, or is writing a story around a niche topic that takes too long to get to the niche a losing game?

can you work in hints during the lead up? The antagonist imagining diapering the protagonist, or something similar, so the reader know what's coming up?

 

I do disagree with @Elfy, building up to and basically ending the story with the diapering and babying, is a waste. I want to read about the protagonist being babied. While I want to know the how and why the protagonist ends up being babied, I am more interested in what happens afterward. 

[Babypants]

13 minutes ago, ValentinesStuff said:

can you work in hints during the lead up? The antagonist imagining diapering the protagonist, or something similar, so the reader know what's coming up?

 

The element of foreshadowing is key.  In film, the director uses the musical score to hint at what lies just ahead, but we don't have the audio tool, just the visual in the form of the written word.  The written word has to carry all of the weight, so you have to use it to hint at what lies ahead to engage the fetish reader, or you risk losing said reader early on. 

[Elfy]

23 minutes ago, ValentinesStuff said:

I do disagree with @Elfy, building up to and basically ending the story with the diapering and babying, is a waste. I want to read about the protagonist being babied. While I want to know the how and why the protagonist ends up being babied, I am more interested in what happens afterward. 

I didn't mean to suggest you end with the diapering, just that having a a long build up is fine.

[ValentinesStuff]

1 hour ago, Elfy said:

I didn't mean to suggest you end with the diapering, just that having a a long build up is fine.

My misunderstanding. I've read too many Kindle stories that do just that. A little build up, sex scene, some more build up, another sex scene, a diapering, an undiapering and a final sex scene, the end.

 

There is just a lot that can be done once the babying begins, and so many stories make that the end.

[LessThanSavory]

Many thanks for all of the advice!

So, the core idea of the story is that the main protagonist has begun exploring an unknown abyss (based heavily off of the CYOA by Stellinearized, and the adaptation by Floricspacer, if anyone knows them), and finds that as he continues to go deeper into the abyss he begins to run into curses and circumstances that push him further and further into being babied by another character, and how that creates conflict with his goals and image of himself, the satisfaction he gets from the situation, how it plays into him wanting to be an explorer, etcetera.

Part of the issue, at least from my perspective, is that a lot of the word count is on the exploration part, especially at the beginning before it really gets to how that ties into anything ABDL related, which I personally find fun as a thing to write about, but which means that everything takes longer to get to.

Since posting this (and between a couple of awful work shifts), I've gone back into the outline to try to line it up with some of the advice given here. For example, I do think I could probably make use of dream sequences to both have diaper content earlier and maybe push things along a bit, and I am taking another look at how the things in it actually foreshadow and lead into the kink content.

I also want to point out that when I say "it takes a while to get into", that's in terms of just the absolute number of words to get from zero through all of the progression and into diapers, in terms of the proportion of the currently planned story, that's still way closer to the start than the finish, so it isn't planned to be like a "the protagonist gets put in a diaper and we fade to black" situation. It's just turned into a really long project with a lot of things I want to do, but the majority of the story overall would still revolve around the main character being babied in some form or another.

[spark]

1 hour ago, LessThanSavory said:

Many thanks for all of the advice!

So, the core idea of the story is that the main protagonist has begun exploring an unknown abyss (based heavily off of the CYOA by Stellinearized, and the adaptation by Floricspacer, if anyone knows them), and finds that as he continues to go deeper into the abyss he begins to run into curses and circumstances that push him further and further into being babied by another character, and how that creates conflict with his goals and image of himself, the satisfaction he gets from the situation, how it plays into him wanting to be an explorer, etcetera.

Part of the issue, at least from my perspective, is that a lot of the word count is on the exploration part, especially at the beginning before it really gets to how that ties into anything ABDL related, which I personally find fun as a thing to write about, but which means that everything takes longer to get to.

Since posting this (and between a couple of awful work shifts), I've gone back into the outline to try to line it up with some of the advice given here. For example, I do think I could probably make use of dream sequences to both have diaper content earlier and maybe push things along a bit, and I am taking another look at how the things in it actually foreshadow and lead into the kink content.

I also want to point out that when I say "it takes a while to get into", that's in terms of just the absolute number of words to get from zero through all of the progression and into diapers, in terms of the proportion of the currently planned story, that's still way closer to the start than the finish, so it isn't planned to be like a "the protagonist gets put in a diaper and we fade to black" situation. It's just turned into a really long project with a lot of things I want to do, but the majority of the story overall would still revolve around the main character being babied in some form or another.

You have a delicate balance, especially in ABDL fiction, but I think it comes back to the characters.  One of the best trilogies I've read on Amazon wasn't even a diaper story- it was more of a spanking story.   The only diaper-related content was the 'bad baby weekend' where the protagonist spends a whole weekend in a crib with a diaper and then the alpha takes her out to the woods to find a switch.   It's two strange stories that I found very disturbing, but the characters were complex.

Let's use the extremes (and I've read both of these).  In one case- the girl pees her pants, takes a shower and her parents transform his room into a nursery by the time she gets out (it's on Amazon somewhere- the story sucks).  The second case- the author rights about characters I have no reason to care about- spends way too many words on BS that doesn't advance the plot and I start wondering when does the good part come.

The best story we have going on right now is All my Mother's Rules.   It took a long time until Sarah was diapered by her mother, and almost 4 years until it became this long-term thing  She is now recovering from it- which is the only story I know that has done that.  But, Sarah was a complex and believable character from the beginning.   All the other characters were genuine.

 

[LittleFenny]

I'd say that for me a large part of what determines how slow burn a story can be is whether I can tell that there's something burning. With the diaper dimension stories you know it is near inevitable that a protagonist is going to end up in diapers and you will probably see it happening to other characters. So it is like the old TV program 24 or any number of suspense shows or scenes: even if you can't see it you know there is a clock counting down to when the bomb blows upcharacter is in diapers. So there should be something that at least hints that something is going to happen. Maybe the character is wetting the bed. Or someone more dominant than them is showing signs that they aren't happy with how the character is acting. Or a change in social norms is happening and the character is having to deal with changing that come before the diapers show up. Maybe we can just see that the protagonist is more and more desiring a change in their life (and since this is Daily Diapers we know what that will end up involving).

So I would sum it up as you need: Either a setting that tells the reader the diapers are coming, or possibly a history as an author that makes the reader comfortable that the diapers are coming, or events that hint that the diapers are coming. On the last one I would also say that they should ideally be different hints each time. If the character wakes up in a wet bed in chapter one, there should be more than simply waking up in another wet bed in chapter two. Perhaps they wake up in a wet bed and discover they fell asleep while reading a borrowed book and now it's soaked and will have to be replaced. And as Spark and others have mentioned in the thread, make sure there's actually something for us to enjoy during the slow burn. If it's nothing but the clock counting down then there's no story taking place and you should cut the words and start closer to the actual story. If there 10,000 or more words before reaching the diapers then we should have events taking place that make us care about the characters and set things in place so we believe it when the diapers come into play.

I have a story idea that I've occasionally been taking out and examining which is not the same sort of slow burn, but has some slow burn to it. It is set in a world that starts as a cyberpunk like scifi dystopia where the punks are fewer and fewer in number to a more hard science fiction version of a diaper dimension setting. The protagonist is actually wearing pull-on training pants style diapers from the beginning due to bed wetting and wants out of them because of teasing and the fear that they will cost him any chance of a future. Part of what I need to do with this is work out the details of what happens so that when thousands, probably a few tens of thousands of words later they say, "What if we put everyone in diapers? Would that fix everything that's wrong with the world?" you don't wonder why the character who wanted out of diapers is now embracing them and you don't read it and say, "Yeah, the only reason they are suggesting that is because the author put that down as a plot point in the outline."

[LessThanSavory]

31 minutes ago, LittleFenny said:

"Yeah, the only reason they are suggesting that is because the author put that down as a plot point in the outline."

Lol. That's kind of one of my big fears here. It makes sense as a progression in my head since I know the characters, the world, etc. but actually writing that connection between "Big adventure story" and "Diaper story" feels way more tricky than I originally thought it would be, and I can't help but worry about whether I'll do the story justice.

 

34 minutes ago, LittleFenny said:

or possibly a history as an author that makes the reader comfortable that the diapers are coming,

I was also thinking about this after posting here. I have another story I kind of abandoned when life circumstances stopped me from writing which was a much more straightforward diaper story while still having a plan for (what I considered) a decent surrounding plot. I also have  a much more straightforward story that I have a couple of chapters written for where the protag starts as A DL and is into the diaper portion of the event by chapter 2.

I'm thinking of slowing my roll on the slow one and working a bit on the shorter and more straightforward stories first. 1. Because holy mackerel, the scope of the story is way bigger than I thought, and I really want to start with a smaller project than one that already looks like it's going to go on for like a hundred chapters. and 2. It might help to get my bearings as a writer and put out a couple of things that do exactly as you say above. I know that I definitely give more benefit of the doubt to writers I know when the start of the story seems slower or more confusing or just less diapery than I do people I've never seen before, at least.

Thank you for the advice!