Erotic Writing Essay
The Zen of Erotic Fiction Writing and Engine Maintenance According to Dudley
By Benjamin Smith
For me, it all started with sentences.
When I was in seventh grade, I was failing English grammar abysmally.
Why?
The activity, known affectionately as “sentence diagramming,” to me, was completely stupid and overly complicated.
I remember one assignment in particular.
The teacher had given us the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
We had to diagram it properly with the knowledge that one point would be detracted for each word improperly identified.
The end result looked something like this if you’d done it correctly:
Confused?
Yeah, so was I.
My dad, of course, knew I was failing English because he had to sign off on my report cards.
“They’re making it harder than it should be,” I said, as he looked at me with disappointment.
“You’re right,” he said, surprising me. “You’ve been speaking English all your life and you know what sounds right and what doesn’t.”
He then handed me a book of short stories. Really, really short stories.
Each was 55 words long. It was shorter than short it was “microfiction.”
Now, my father was not an English professor. In fact, he was an engineer. But Dad knew something my seventh grade English teacher didn’t; schematics confused the hell out of me.
It went back to when I was first helping him and my granddad rebuild an old Ford Falcon in-line-six engine. I was eight years old and the first thing they did was they took out the manual and showed me the picture of the engine “reverse engineered” with all the parts numbered in order.
It looked like something like this:
Intimidating image for an eight-year-old, huh? I suddenly didn’t want to work on this complicated equation of tri-generational male bonding.
Grandpa and Dad saw my confusion and sat me down at the work bench to show me what each part was and what it did for the engine. As they showed me, they put it together piece by piece until a six-cylinder 170 cubic inch engine was ready to be mounted in place under the hood of the car.
Over the years I learned all about the sounds of engines. If something didn’t sound right to my ear I could usually guess where the malfunctioning part was in that engine and, under supervision, fix it.
What Dad said in response to my confusion with sentences was, “think of it (the sentence) as an engine. It has parts you know and if one of them sounds like it’s out of position, fix it.”
He sent me off to read the book of “shorties” and, I must say, I learned an awful lot about word economy, proper usage, and the sounds of sentences. Every word in a microfiction story is necessary, otherwise it wouldn’t be used.
Want to read a shortie? Here’s one I’ve written especially for you:
Summer heat in the alley and the smell of ripe fruit on Angela’s skin mixes with the sound of the market as my hand pushes up her skirt. Her voice at my ear pants as my fingers enter her. The basket overturns, the fruit rolls along the gutters, as the stolen moment becomes our frenzy.
Go ahead. Count them. I didn’t cheat.
The sentences are full of imagery, motion, description... With just 55 words I painted you a highly erotic moment between two characters in an alleyway outside a market on a hot summers day.
Nothing is redundant or erroneous. There are no false modifiers, no dangling participles. It’s simple, concise language and it’s just as fun to write as it is to read.
You don’t believe me? Try it. Try writing five microstories. And, of those five, pick the one that sounds the most intriguing to you.
Go on! Go write your stories. You can’t come back and read the next paragraph unless you’ve got five stories, one of which you know in your heart is really good.
...
Okay, you’re back. So you’ve got your top five and you’ve got your number one out of those five.
Okay, punk, now you just got to ask yourself one question... Well, three questions…
Why did I pick this one shortie out off all the rest? What images pop out at me as I re-read it? What phrases made me go all gooey inside?
Think it over. Make lists if you like of all the things that really struck you.
Now, write five or ten questions you find yourself asking about your 55 word story.
Here are mine:
1. Who is the narrator?
2. Should this be a first person narrative?
3. How long has he (or she?) been thinking about doing this with Angela?
4. Why does he (or she?) choose her?
5. Why does Angela give in?
6. Can anybody see them in the alley way?
7. Is this their first time?
8. Why haven’t they done this before?
By typing these questions I’ve begun considering details, back story, elements of character development. I’ve opened a door to allow perhaps other characters to come into the story. In my 55 word version I am not explicit as to the sex of my narrator. Perhaps the narrator is female?
I’ve begun thinking about injecting conflict, obstacles and connotations that I couldn’t inject on a 55 word budget. And all these additional things are important aspects in any story.
Motivations in particular lend meaning to action in a story.
In a murder/suspense story, for instance, nobody kills anybody without some form of motive.
To quote John Travolta’s character in The General’s Daughter, “possible motives for murder are profit, revenge, jealousy, to conceal a crime, to avoid humiliation and disgrace, or plain old homicidal mania.”
Well, the same is true in erotica; only instead of killing people we’re sexing them to nirvana.
The motives for sex include profit, revenge, jealousy, to conceal a crime, to cause or avoid humiliation and disgrace, out of love, out of lust, reaffirmation of beauty or youth, proof of self worth, the conception of a child, to feed an addiction, to kill time or cause distraction, plain old sexual mania, and the list just keeps going on into the furthest reaches of your imagination.
I’m rambling on a bit. But my point is, now that I’ve begun considering the questions I’ve written out above, I can begin giving more depth to my story.
Once you begin investigating, you can increase the number of words and expand the story.
Let’s try writing my story again at 500 words and see what crops up:
“Good morning, Delores.”
I look up from the magazine. I’d been reading idly, waiting for the croissants to proof.
Angela leans on the counter, her pale pink lips and green eyes smiling through a mask of little freckles.
“Hey, Angie,” I say, looking down again.
“Sorry to bother. Are you busy?”
I shrug. Wednesday mornings the bakery department rush ebbs after nine. “I ‘spose not. Whatcha want?”
She stands, perky and clean. “I could use a hand in produce, if it wouldn’t kill your buzz.”
I sigh but stand, tossing my mag aside and telling the counter guy to watch the timer on the box.
Angie skips off in the direction of the loading dock and I trudge along behind, not looking up at her trim backside which is the center of my intense lesbian fantasy world.
“Here we are,” she says out back, pointing to eight crates of fresh fruit sitting in the hot morning sun. “My stock boy is out sick.”
I nod and grab one side of a crate of pears. She grabs the other side and together we heft it inside to the walk-in cooler.
“Thanks for helping,” she smiles, walking with me back out to get the next crate—this one full of naval oranges.
“Surprised you didn’t ask one of the other boys,” I say.
She touches my shoulder. “Just, thought you could use a diversion.”
Her hand lingers. Electricity charges my senses. “Always glad to help.”
We take the fruit crates in one by one until only a smaller crate of figs remains. I move lift it but she catches me.
“I got this one,” she say. “Figs aren’t too heavy.”
I smirk and watch her lift with her knees, admiring the way her thin pale arms tighten up as she hefts and expels a small breath. She turns to find me blocking her path, my eyes dipping down to look at her small breasts clad in a plain green smock. Her skirt flares a bit, the fabric catching the hot wind in the alley.
I look up into her eyes to find her looking, too.
Heat in the alley and the smell of ripe fruit draw me close to her. I can smell things on Angela’s skin and hear the sound of the market behind me as I push aside the crate, overturning it and grabbing her to me, pressing my lips to her throat as my hand pushes against the mound under her skirt. Her voice at my ear pants as I move the hand lower, under the hem and after a moment my fingers enter her. The fruit rolls along the gutters, as the stolen moment becomes our frenzy.
We finish quick, her eyes darting behind me to the propped open metal door leading into the back room, mine making sure no trucks are pulling into the alley.
Afterward we gather up the figs. My hand smells like her cunt. We smile. Take up the busted crate together and walk in, flushed.
And there you have it; a perfectly simple erotic short story that would make anybody proud. I often use this method whenever I find myself stalled or having trouble filling pages with prose. It’s useful for beginning writers to learn the dynamics of tight sentence structure and for veterans to keep good grammar in practice.
I hope you find this helpful in your erotic fiction endeavors. And understand that your stories can be as long or as short as you like. The most important thing is not the length of a story. A story should captivate its audience with great characters, a good plot, brief but insightful dialogue, and—above all else—simple and direct language.
Originally published July 2010