How I Write Porn: The Blowfish Blog

(FYI: This post contains a certain amount of information, not about my sex life exactly but about my sexual fantasies, which family members and others may not want to know about.)

Underwoodkeyboard
If you’re interested in knowing how I write porn — either because you’re a porn writer yourself or you’re just curious — then check out my latest piece for the Blowfish Blog. The piece is all about my nuts-and-bolts process of writing erotic fiction — and, not coincidentally, my analysis of what makes erotic fiction work. Here’s the teaser:

I usually start with the physical actions. What the characters are doing, what they’re saying, which body part is going where.

“He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back.”

It’s what I call “the skeleton.” And the problem with most bad porn fiction is that it stops there. Too many porn writers think that a description of sex acts is all a porn story needs.

I have more sympathy with these writers than you might imagine. When I’m writing a first draft, I get very excited about these things, too. After all, when I’m having a sex fantasy, these are the things I fixate on: the breasts spilling out of a low-cut blouse, the cock pushing into a tight asshole, the hand smacking down on the bare bottom again and again. I know how those sex acts make me feel. Vividly.

And it’s easy to forget that conveying the sex acts doesn’t convey the feeling.

But it doesn’t.

So then I move on…

To find out what I move on to, read the rest of the piece on the Blowfish Blog. Enjoy!

{advertisement}
How I Write Porn: The Blowfish Blog
{advertisement}

2 thoughts on “How I Write Porn: The Blowfish Blog

  1. 1

    “It has to convey what the sex means.
    Why the people are having it. Whether it’s giving them what they’d hoped for. What about it is surprising. Whether anything is going to be different now because of this sex.”
    That describes the kind of work that goes into literature. I don’t read porn for the same reasons I read literature, and a lot of so-called erotica fails for me as porn because too much attention is paid to that.
    I hasten to add that the porn of yours I’ve read, including the passage you quoted, didn’t have that problem for me. So if that’s what you’re doing, there’s yet a fourth thing going on, in which you mask the thoughtfulness in what you call skeleton, not letting it get in the way of the piece’s purpose (in my estimation).

  2. 2

    I do know what you’re talking about, jraoul. While the literary/ deeper meaning qualities are important to make porn really sucessful for me (both as literature *and* as porn), I’ve also read plenty of erotica that spent WAAAAY too much time on them. It’s like the writers were trying so hard to be high quality and literary that they forgot to turn the reader on.
    I think the fourth element you’re talking about may just be the balance between the other three elements (physical acts, emotions/ sensations, and meaning). If a piece I’m writing seems like it’s losing sexual heat and momentum, that probably means that I need to scale back on the deeper meaning stuff, and rev up the physical acts and sensations.
    And the elements need to be woven together gracefully. Too much erotica tries to be literary by alternating “plot, sex scene, plot, sex scene,” instead of making the sex an integral part of the plot and vice versa.
    If that makes sense.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *