Five quick tips for writing sexier erotica

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!