I finally finished my latest story but now I have to go away
and ignore it for a week or so. Let it mature, like homemade wine. Then rewrite
it. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few tips on how I produce erotica
from the viewpoint of someone who edits as well as writes (I work for a
newspaper). It’s by no means an exhaustive list and is about what works for me.
If you’ve got a great tip of your own, please share it in the comments.
1. Speak up
Dialogue keeps up the pace and makes your
characters seem real. It’s a ball-ache to write. All those quotation marks and a
new line every time you switch person. And deciding when it’s obvious who’s
talking and when you need to add a ‘he said’, ‘she said’. But it will get a
story cracking along and balance out passages of description that slow things down. You can weave description within and between the dialogue rather than having long passages of it stalling the action.
2. Indulge in some foreplay
In essence, all erotica boils down to this
ultra-flash-fiction two-word story: ‘People fuck.’ Fortunately for writers,
there are a million and one ways to get to that point and a fair few ways of
actually doing the deed. The trick is to build anticipation without losing the
reader’s interest. You need just the right amount of foreplay, but you also
need to remember it’s a sex story. If it takes forever to get to the sex, your reader is going to give up and watch some porn instead.
3. Call a cock a cock
Where I live, folk like to call a spade a bloody
shovel. I’m not really sure what that means, but I like to call a cock a cock
and a cunt a cunt. There’s a fine balance to be had between varying your nouns
so as to avoid repetition and ending up using increasingly preposterous words.
Surely no-one really uses the word ‘schlong’? I pick two or three, maximum, and
keep to familiar words that you would actually use if you were on a drunken
night out with your mates. If you end up with repetition, find another way
round it. For example, you can refer to different parts of a cock – the shaft,
the head etc.
4. Study logistics
So you’ve got your hero naked and
handcuffed to the bed. Hurrah, best place for him, I say. But in the moment of
passion, he leaps up and goes on top. Then he leaves the house and heads back
to work. Oops. Did anyone unlock those handcuffs? And what’s the boss going to
say when he turns up naked? Bondage, in particular, is a logistical nightmare. People
who are tied down can’t get up. People who are gagged can’t talk. People who
are blindfolded can’t see. It need only take a few words: ‘She freed him,’ but
without them it’s just darned confusing.
5. Sharpen your axe
You’ve reached the magic word count. You
breathe a sigh of relief and pop a cork. But you’re only halfway there. Now you
have to chop it to shreds and start again. You’ve got simple typos, repetition,
jarring descriptions, lack of flow, plot holes and instances of the word ‘cheeks’
where you don’t make it clear whether you’re talking faces or arses. Straight
after you’ve finished, you can tighten up your prose and spot straightforward
errors. Then I find it best to ignore the work for a while. A week for a short
story, a month for a longer work. Once you’ve got some distance between you and
your baby, it will be easier to assess it objectively and fix any problems.
Happy writing!
