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Essay: Explaining the Obvious; or, On Writing Erotic Fiction
17 years ago
Writing erotic fiction is hard.
Let’s brush aside Beavis and Butthead snickering at the masterful double entendre and exclamations of “duh!” at the penetrating insight, and examine this proposition more closely.
I’m not talking about churning out “he verbed her with his adjective noun” rotgut porn, of which there is so much to be found on Fur Affinity and many other venues. Romance novels don’t count either—they’re stiflingly formulaic, precisely so they can be cranked out like sausage.
What I mean is high-quality professional-level publishable storytelling involving explicit sex, the kind that actually could find its way to shelves somewhere awaiting paying customers willing to shell out hard-earned cash. I know, the current state of fiction publishing in the English-speaking world looks pretty dismal, but let’s pretend for a while.
The first requirement, of course, is to be literate. A thorough understanding of spelling, punctuation, and grammar is the foundation of good writing—any writing. Get a copy of The Chicago Manual and use it, early and often. If you can’t string together words and sentences correctly and coherently, you might as well be stabbing your readers in the eyes with awls. Yes, it matters.
The second requirement is to understand structure. What is a paragraph and how does it work? What is a chapter? Can you diagram your plot? A synopsis, perhaps? How about climax—no pun intended—and epilog? All that is a little more difficult, because it’s more abstract and all too often isn’t taught in school any more. Still, it’s utterly necessary for any writer with aspirations beyond half-readable train wrecks scattered across pages.
The third is a willingness to submit to the tender mercies of editing—and I’m not talking just about proofreading. One definition of the difference between an amateur and a professional is that the amateur will not subject his precious brainchild to such a brutal process, while a professional knows it is utterly necessary. Oh, and you can’t edit your own work; someone else has to do it. Best if it’s a professional editor, but failing that—as with self-publishers—getting a group of readers who are willing and qualified to tear into your work will do in a pinch.
Okay, so far this could be about any form of fiction—but what about erotic fiction in particular?
Sex is about sensation and emotion rather than intellect. It is preverbal and atavistic, bypassing the higher levels of the brain in favor of lighting up the monkey brain or even the reptile brain. By its very nature it is repetitive on several levels. Almost anything else in human experience that shares one or more of those characteristics generally gets glossed over in narrative, because it’s boring to read about.
For that matter, unless the point of the writing is the sex, even that gets glossed over. Yes, often it’s to make the story more acceptable to a broad audience, but it’s also to skip over an interlude that probably would contribute little or nothing to the plot.
If your story includes a scene of a nineteenth-century farmer plowing a field, you’ll probably boil it down to an abstract paragraph or two, skimming through the most evocative sensations and processes—sweat, muscle aches, staying alert so the furrows remain straight, and so on. Going into excruciating detail about every moment and every action would bore most readers to tears, or to skipping over that section, particularly if those readers don’t happen to share your fetish about plowing. (Okay, I couldn’t resist that time.)
English in particular suffers another problem. Thanks to the Victorian era, nearly all vocabulary having anything to do with sex has been loaded with baggage and classified as blandly clinical, gutter-level vulgar, or poetically vague. There isn’t much in between. Moreover, that vocabulary is limited. How many different ways can you describe him verbing her with his adjective noun before it becomes tiresomely repetitious? You’ve already used that word a dozen times in four pages. Find another. You can’t? Yeah, well . . .
Writing erotic fiction is hard.
Let’s brush aside Beavis and Butthead snickering at the masterful double entendre and exclamations of “duh!” at the penetrating insight, and examine this proposition more closely.
I’m not talking about churning out “he verbed her with his adjective noun” rotgut porn, of which there is so much to be found on Fur Affinity and many other venues. Romance novels don’t count either—they’re stiflingly formulaic, precisely so they can be cranked out like sausage.
What I mean is high-quality professional-level publishable storytelling involving explicit sex, the kind that actually could find its way to shelves somewhere awaiting paying customers willing to shell out hard-earned cash. I know, the current state of fiction publishing in the English-speaking world looks pretty dismal, but let’s pretend for a while.
The first requirement, of course, is to be literate. A thorough understanding of spelling, punctuation, and grammar is the foundation of good writing—any writing. Get a copy of The Chicago Manual and use it, early and often. If you can’t string together words and sentences correctly and coherently, you might as well be stabbing your readers in the eyes with awls. Yes, it matters.
The second requirement is to understand structure. What is a paragraph and how does it work? What is a chapter? Can you diagram your plot? A synopsis, perhaps? How about climax—no pun intended—and epilog? All that is a little more difficult, because it’s more abstract and all too often isn’t taught in school any more. Still, it’s utterly necessary for any writer with aspirations beyond half-readable train wrecks scattered across pages.
The third is a willingness to submit to the tender mercies of editing—and I’m not talking just about proofreading. One definition of the difference between an amateur and a professional is that the amateur will not subject his precious brainchild to such a brutal process, while a professional knows it is utterly necessary. Oh, and you can’t edit your own work; someone else has to do it. Best if it’s a professional editor, but failing that—as with self-publishers—getting a group of readers who are willing and qualified to tear into your work will do in a pinch.
Okay, so far this could be about any form of fiction—but what about erotic fiction in particular?
Sex is about sensation and emotion rather than intellect. It is preverbal and atavistic, bypassing the higher levels of the brain in favor of lighting up the monkey brain or even the reptile brain. By its very nature it is repetitive on several levels. Almost anything else in human experience that shares one or more of those characteristics generally gets glossed over in narrative, because it’s boring to read about.
For that matter, unless the point of the writing is the sex, even that gets glossed over. Yes, often it’s to make the story more acceptable to a broad audience, but it’s also to skip over an interlude that probably would contribute little or nothing to the plot.
If your story includes a scene of a nineteenth-century farmer plowing a field, you’ll probably boil it down to an abstract paragraph or two, skimming through the most evocative sensations and processes—sweat, muscle aches, staying alert so the furrows remain straight, and so on. Going into excruciating detail about every moment and every action would bore most readers to tears, or to skipping over that section, particularly if those readers don’t happen to share your fetish about plowing. (Okay, I couldn’t resist that time.)
English in particular suffers another problem. Thanks to the Victorian era, nearly all vocabulary having anything to do with sex has been loaded with baggage and classified as blandly clinical, gutter-level vulgar, or poetically vague. There isn’t much in between. Moreover, that vocabulary is limited. How many different ways can you describe him verbing her with his adjective noun before it becomes tiresomely repetitious? You’ve already used that word a dozen times in four pages. Find another. You can’t? Yeah, well . . .
Writing erotic fiction is hard.
Also, along with The Chicago Manual, grab a copy of Elements of Style. That little tome has saved me many a headache.
But yes, writing good Eros is damned hard.
It has occurred to me in the past that people look at graphic art of whatever sort and think “gosh that person’s talented; I could never do that!” Yet everyone thinks he’s a good writer—even though most people actually are dreadful at it. Why? My opinion is that most people, at least in the modern industrialized world, are taught basic literacy, while most people are not taught art. Then, of course, they assume that this basic literacy qualifies them to write The Iliad when in fact it does nothing of the sort.
I'll see about uploading the file someplace for you to look at. It's not available at your local Borders. =};-3