What makes naturist fiction great… isn’t the naturism!

As a naturist writer, the biggest problem is the feeling that everyone in the story becomes a naturist. Don’t pretend otherwise.

When we read superhero stories, we dream of being powerful. When a naturist reads naturist stories, they dream of everyone they care about accepting their lifestyle and starting to share it with them.

Most of the naturist authors I connect with try to add non-naturist-based plot lines. In the excellent Crooke and Loch books, Ted Bun has Sam, a woman police officer, and Mick, a software pioneer in the early to mid-70s, solve mysteries with Sam’s police training and Mick’s courage and database skills.

In the mysterious Propagation by D.H. Jonathan, the main character needs to find ways to survive a space exploration mission gone wrong, all while not having any clothes.

Marcel Lamothe’s thrilling Big Bare Island takes place on a naturist tropical island full of magic and mystery.

In my own sci-fi book Bared Connections, Earnest has to solve technical problems while trying to get closer to the woman he loves, his best friend.

All four of these stories would work on their own without the naturist angle, and that’s a credit to all the authors. I, personally, think that the naturist angle elevates each story, but it’s not as required as we might think.

A good naturist story should still have a plot if you take away the naturism, even though taking away the naturism would fundamentally change the story.

So when Mel, my son’s girlfriend, approached me with a story idea, I was interested because her story would work… even without any naturism.

Here was her idea:

Have you ever had to fight to keep your job? Did you ever have a nothing job, where you basically are paid to almost pretend to be working?

Well, my daughter-in-law feels like she has such a job. She is an office manager for the local office of a multinational company.

Workers for that company work 3 days per week on location, and someone has to be there every day to water the plants, handle keycard issues, take attendance, put paper in the copier and printers, and clean the coffee maker.

For Mel, that’s her job. She needs to be in the office 35 hours a week. She is, in a way, the receptionist for an office that doesn’t receive visitors other than the postman once per day, and her phone never rings other than when a worker is locked out of his computer so he can’t use Slack to contact her.

Don’t laugh, it happens… about 3 times per year.

Mel loves her job because she likes the human contact with her co-workers and because she gets a paycheck for basically “hanging out and helping around”.

But Mel doesn’t have a mortgage to pay and doesn’t have kids (yet).

When she approached me to inspire me with a story based on her office “but in which on Fridays, people are nude in the office because they are naturists”, I decided not to center it on her character but on a mother of two teenagers who does have a mortgage.

This is where Joan and her husband Matthew came from, from my recently released Kindle book “Not Business Casual“

In short, Joan is a scrum master. Her job, in software development, is to be a sort of assistant organizer for the developers. She used to manage a licensing system, and now, she claims it takes her the time that her scrum master role doesn’t take.

Joan’s situation is worse than Mel’s due to her family obligations. She can’t lose this job.

So, she has two responsibilities that conveniently provide an excuse for why she isn’t doing much of either, avoiding questions.

When the story starts, on a Friday morning. Her son was sick on the previous day, when she was supposed to come into the office, so instead, she comes on a Friday.

You see, despite lying about how much work she does, Joan is rather a stickler for rules, and so she comes in on the next day and finds all of her co-workers… working nude!

She isn’t stupid. She knows there are plenty of naturist resorts in her (fictional) Florida town; she counted them. Her kids had naturist friends growing up. She knew of the concept, but in the abstract.

Still, she connects with her star coder, who lives at the naturist resort near Joan’s house, and the two become unlikely friends. This makes Joan realize there are a lot more naturists around her than she thought, and soon enough, when her job is being threatened, she reconsiders her lifestyle choices.

Her original premise doesn’t require naturism. It’s simple: an employee discovers her low-workload career may disappear and has to make herself valuable. That’s already a story. However, making Fridays naturist days changes how Joan experiences that story.

But I won’t lie. Like the others I mentioned above, this is a naturist story; of course, Joan and Matthew become naturists.

And that’s the trope, isn’t it? I am not the only naturist writer. I don’t even pretend to be one of the best ones. But all of us follow the same pattern.

A sort of “naturism is contagious” idea.

Check my other stories! In My Life So Far, co-written with my daughter, all the friends of the main character (Julie) became naturists. In Overcoming Trauma, Elena’s family becomes naturists too.

And it’s the same for most of us writers, and it’s a trope that, I think, mostly works when it’s not just assumed.

Joan doesn’t just undress on the first occasion. She slowly warms up to it. The same is true of Elena from Overcoming Trauma. We can feel their internal turmoil and interrogation.

And yet, Joan isn’t Elena. One is a disillusioned office drone who clings to a job purely for financial reasons in a massive corporation that isn’t quite sure who she is. She wasn’t even hired for her current role. She essentially came with the software whose licenses she manages when her former employer was acquired. On the other hand, Elena is a badass trauma nurse who is the first to climb on a patient to pinch an exposed artery because she loves her job.

But when faced with their kids and friends pushing on them to join them in a freeing lifestyle, they each cope in their own way.

And that, I think, is the joy of being an author. Telling similar stories, with different characters reacting differently and still ending at the same destination.

Joan is insecure about her job; Elena is secure about hers. The nurse’s problems are strictly personal, and her job issues are transient, like a patient to save.

It’s not the case for Joan, who needs to work on saving her fake career to keep her family together. The journey feels similar, but the stakes aren’t the same at all.

Elena needs to help her husband John deal with his own trauma while facing hers. Joan, on the other hand, mainly fears losing the employment she has because she feels like a fraud. Matthew, her husband, is her rock.

That shapes an entirely different emotional journey, and that’s something readers of Overcoming Trauma and Not Business Casual will notice.

She goes into technical meetings with her colleagues, but the point of those chapters isn’t about the technical journey. It’s about her own empowerment as an employee.

It’s about her reigniting her career by being proactive and taking part in building something, not just in pretending to be busy by maintaining an outdated system.

In fact, it’s about taking life by the horns and taking her place in the office instead of being a wallflower.

And most of Joan’s office efforts and Elena’s personal journey require naturism. They would both work without naturism in their book. But naturism changes the nature of their journeys.

That’s what I mean when I claim that what made a good naturist story great… isn’t the naturism.

So, if you’d like to see how Joan handles that journey, Not Business Casual is available now on Kindle. And apparently I wasn’t finished with her: while the first book was being edited, I realized there was enough left in Joan’s new life for a sequel. I’ve begun outlining it.

Overcoming Trauma Volume 1: Nadia is also available, but so are the books I mentioned by the other authors. If you care about naturism, support the wonderful authors who try to entertain you. I certainly bought and read all of those excellent books.

About the Author of this blog: You can find the author at Ericfounder.com and find his writings on his website naturist-fiction.com. He also created Naturist-books.com to list other naturist books to read.