Just to show either my dedication to this column, or my complete lack of sanity, I’m writing this on my laptop while sitting in the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s car as she drives us back from a Thanksgiving visit to my mom’s house. Ain’t technology wonderful?
One of my favorite things when teaching erotic writing is to talk about how it basically isn’t any different than any other form of writing. You still need, after all, a plot, characterization, description, a sense of place, suspension of disbelief, etc. Thinking otherwise will only put training wheels on your writing, which - believe me - readers and editors can easily pick up on. If you sit down and try to write a damned good story, that happens to be about sex or sexuality, the result will generally be much finer artistically than an attempt that’s just tossed off. The instant you approach a story as “just” anything (horror, romance, science fiction, erotica, etc.) you’ll demean yourself and the reader. The bottom line is that there really isn’t much of a difference between a great erotic story and any other genre’s great story.
With that in mind I agree with most everyone’s advice towards writing short stories (or longer works): polish your writer’s voice, give the story a sense of place and time, flesh out the characters, construct an interesting plot, create evocative descriptions (show don’t tell), etc. One way I tell people to approach erotic writing is to remember that erotica doesn’t blink. In just about every other genre, when sex steps on stage the ‘camera’ swings to burning fireplace logs, trains entering tunnels, and the like - in other words, it blinks away from the sexual scene. In erotica you don’t blink, you don’t avoid sexuality - you integrate it into the story. But the story you’re telling isn’t just the sex scene(s), it’s why the sex IS the story. Something with a bad plot, poor characterization, lousy setting, or lazy writing and a good sex scene is always much worse than a damned good story full of interesting characters, a great sense of place, sparkling writing and a lousy sex scene. The sex scene(s) can be fixed, but if the rest - the meat of the story itself - doesn’t work you’re only polishing the saddle on a dead horse.
So there really isn’t much I believe that separates good writing in any other genre from good smut writing. But like all so-called ‘rules’ of writing, there’s an exception. As you might know, a lot of people preach that it’s poor writing to use the same descriptive word too many times in the same section of writing. In other words:
“The sun blasted across the desert, scorching scrub and weed into burnt yellow, turning soft skin to lizard flesh, and metal to rust. Outside LAST CHANCE FOR GAS, the radiation of the explosion had turned once gleaming signs for COCA-COLA and DIESEL into rust-pimpled ghosts of their former selves.
“Parked outside LAST CHANCE, was a rusted pickup collapsed onto four flat tired, windshield a sparkling spider web under the hard white light of the sun’s explosion.”
Okay that wasn’t terrific, but I am sitting in the passenger seat of a old Toyota while barreling up California highway 101, for goodness sake. The point is - aside from the poor metaphor of the sun as an explosion - the word “rust” springs up a bit too much in that off-the-cuff description. It’s not ‘that’ bad a description, but having the same word pop up repeatedly (especially if it’s tied to the same image, such as ‘rusted metal’ the writing will come of as lazy, unimaginative, or simply dull. To keep this from happening, many writing teachers and guides recommend varying the descriptive vocabulary. Now you don’t need to change rust to ‘corrosion’ or ‘decay’ or ‘encrustation’ once you’ve used it once in a story, but if you need to use the same kind of description in the same paragraph or section you might want to slip in some other, perhaps equally evocative, words as well.
Onto that exception for erotica. In smut, we have a certain list of words that are required for a well-written erotic scene: the vocabulary of genitalia and sex. If you follow the ‘don’t ever repeat’ rule in a sex scene the results are often more hysterical than stimulating.
“Bob’s cock was so hard it was tenting his jeans. He desperately wanted to touch it, but didn’t want to rush. Still, as he sat there, the world boiled down to him, what he was watching, and his penis. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. Carefully, slowly, he lowered his zipper and carefully pulled his dick out. Unlike a lot of his friends, Bob was happy with his member. It was long, but not too long, and had a nice, fat head. Unlike the rods his friend’s rarely described, his pole didn’t bend - but was nice and straight.”
- another bit of less-than-brilliance as my girlfriend ducks in and out of traffic. But hopefully, you’ll get the idea: if you follow the ‘non-repeat’ commandment, you’ll quickly run out of words to describe what the hell’s going on in your story. With women’s anatomy it gets even worse - I’ve read a lot of amateur stories that go from cunt to pussy to quim to hole to sex ... somehow getting a down-and-dirty contemporary piece to a story that should be titled Lady Rebecca and the Highwayman.
It’s more than perfectly okay to repeat certain words in a story - especially an erotic one - if other words just won’t work, or will give the wrong impression (if there anything less sexy than using ‘hole’ or ‘shaft’?). My advice is to stick to two or three words that fit the time and style of the story, then rotate them: cock to dick, pussy to cunt, etc. Some words can also be used if you feel the story is getting a bit too thin on descriptions: penis, crotch, groin, etc. - but only if kept to a very dull roar.
One of the best ways to avoid this problem is to describe parts of the character’s anatomy rather than using a simple, general word. For example, lips, clit, glans, balls, shaft (when specific, it’s fine, but not as a general word for cock), mons, etc. Not only does this give you more flexibility, but it can be wonderfully evocative, creating a complex image rather than a fuzzy impression of the party going on in your characters’ pants.
The bottom line is what while there is a core similarity between a good erotic story and any other genre, there are a few important stylistic differences - and, as the old saying goes: viva la difference!
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