How I Got Into Writing Sex Stories

Can I dampen your panties from Down Under?

I was browsing through a pirate torrent site last year. I was probably looking for a Game of Thrones episode, but as usual, I also checked to see what had recently been uploaded into e-books, being a voracious reader of all things, especially if I can borrow them from — ahem — an online library.

Well, nobody ever called me a good girl, except perhaps in an ironic sense after the lights went down, and I demonstrated this when my eyes lit upon a collection of five erotic stories.

I downloaded the files, wedged myself into a comfy chair and began to read them. The first one was about a “nerdy white teen and an Indian aunty” and it was the most appalling drivel. The writing was wooden, the sex was laughable, the setting poorly drawn and things like grammar had not been taught to the writer in a lasting fashion.

I checked, and this thing was actually on sale for a few dollars. You can read a few pages for free and get a feel for it, but trust me, it’s bad.

Anything you can do, I can do better

Crikey, people paid actual money for this crap? If this was the case, then maybe I could write some of this erotica and really clean up. Anything to help pay for my travel habit, and me with a trip to Germany next month.

I lifted the characters and the setting — a coding camp — and yes, the main characters had sex with each other, but that was about as much as I wanted to borrow.

And, oh my goodness, did I have fun! I took a lot more care with the characters and the setting, and instead of these people just diving behind the nearest bush and having at it, I made the encounters more romantic, more sensual, more teasingly drawn out.

As any writer will be aware, a few pages into the writing process, characters tend to come alive and go do their own thing. Mine did, and before I knew it I had a love triangle set in a computer camp in the Australian bush, complete with kangaroos and midnight hacking sessions and massage by candlelight.

Write what you know, they say, and I’d recently completed a part-time massage for couples course. There were a lot of technical terms for the various ways of stroking and kneading your partner, but what I enjoyed most was the final stretch of a private full body massage, with almost every bit of me caressed and oiled up and as the loving hands worked their way up my final limb I’d spread my knees a little wider to indicate where, precisely, I wanted the last bit of attention paid to my needs.

So I had a lot of fun — and a fair bit of pleasure — writing this filth. I figured that if it got me reasonably damp and needy, my readers would feel the same way and oh how the money would roll in.

Still waiting for my first million

I went through about a thousand drafts proofreading, sometimes with one hand busy elsewhere, and I cracked it into shape for uploading using the Kindle Direct Publishing tools. I found a cover image, paying good money for a license of a photograph which I thought was fairly sultry, though with not a real lot of computing going on in the visible image.

I cannot say that the money came tumbling in. A little, and people are still buying copies, but not in their golden hordes, and the movie rights remain up for grabs.

Still, I enjoyed writing it, a few enjoyed reading it, and some were kind enough to leave good reviews.

I have a link to my Amazon author page at the end of this story, and there are free peeks available.

Wow, I’m an author!

Yes, that’s right. I have an actual author page at Amazon. And at Goodreads.

In fact, I now have three titles available and I’m working on more.

One of the first things I learnt was that erotica isn’t all crappy cardboard sex. There are some amazingly talented writers out there, as I discovered in my research into the competition, and on social media I hooked up with a few. We trade ideas, feedback, leave reviews, and just hang out together.

Not a social circle to invite Aunt Jessica to, but a lot of fun and giggles.

I wish I had more time to read more of the excellent erotica that these ladies produce, but I do what I can. And learn from their work.

Perhaps the second thing I found was that there is a wide world of sex fiction out there. You name it, someone has written about it. Fetishes, kinks, dinosaur sex…

Yes, dinosaur sex. Apparently you can’t write about sex with animals and have Amazon publish it, but extinct species are okay. Go figure.

Incest is another taboo — and rightly so — but you would not believe the number of stepparents having it on with their stepchildren. Or stepsiblings. Makes me want to rewrite The Brady Bunch, you know?

If I can do it, anybody can

Every person I know has an interest in sex. That’s because our ancestors are the ones who got their DNA shared, and until recently, there was only one way of doing that.

Not quite true. Women can produce children without being willing participants, and far too much sex writing and definitely far too much pornography focuses on the male experience.

Women can tell some marvellous sex stories. Some of the best evenings of my life have been in the company of a few friends, a few glasses of something nice, and no male audience.

Sex can be full of giggles, awkwardness, embarrassment, and adventure, and these make for the best stories. If there are a few entertaining tales in your past, make up a pseudonym, change the names and places, and see what you can do.

Maybe not the Amazon author route I took, but Literotica, Smashwords, and many other places offer ways to submit smutty stories without revealing any personal information to the readers.

What I learnt from reading bad sex

I might have published a few stories, made a website and so on, but I’m not making a living out of this stuff. Obviously I can do better.

But I think I have found a few things not to do.

First off, my characters don’t get down and dirty from the first page. A bit of teasing and foreplay sets the scene. I’ve read any number of stories where the hunky tradesman comes to the door, the housewife answers the bell in her nightie and next page sees them rooting like rabbits with all the pink bits described in detail and gushing out unlikely amounts of bodily fluids. Yuk! Where’s the romance in that?

Just like the real thing, I begin with the flirting, the stolen glances at the bulge in the jeans, the muscles under the shirt, the double entendres. That’s half the fun of sex right there in the build-up and anticipation. And half the fun in writing it, to be honest.

I’ll drag it on for a bit, maybe make it seem like it’s not going to happen, but trust me, erotica is all about the happening, and when the clothes finally come off, I’m hoping my readers are at least a little damp.

One thing that really irritates me is writers going coy. It’s erotica, we’ve already crossed the bridge that says “sex happens” and burnt it behind us. God knows there are enough words for the best bits of our anatomy and what people do with them that we don’t need to be too worried about repeating ourselves.

Best to describe what’s happening and don’t muck about. If he rubs his cock between her tits, I say so, I don’t say he stroked his love shaft into her intermammary sulcus.

Whack it in, whip it out, and wipe it

I try to make it a little bit different. Or, better yet, a lot different. Nobody wants to read a description of two old marriedies having their routine weekly missionary. It doesn’t have to involve spurs and chains and rainbow glitter lube, but it does need to be a bit out of the ordinary.

The sex in my stories above involves interracial encounters, losing virginity, odd places (locker room, airline bathroom, under a highway bridge), multiple climaxes, nude photography, champagne, caviar, and fork handles.

Um, sorry, that should be four candles. Where is my mind?

And I’m not even scratching the surface of some of the erotica I’ve read. It gets a little hard to keep track of the action when there are four people playing, but it can be done.

Most of all it has to be entertaining. And fun. My characters banter with each other as they are interlicking their bodies. Wisecracking, teasing, role-playing, it’s all good. Breaks up the mechanical description a bit as well. And I enjoy writing that stuff.

I involve all the senses. Writering 101 advice, I know, but with erotica, there’s a great deal more scope for engaging all the senses. I try not to overdo it, but this is where smell and taste aren’t confined to the foodie porn genre.

So that’s my story. Learn the basics, do the research, write whenever there’s a spare moment, aim to make the reader satisfied.

Perhaps I might leave out the description of the awkward moment on the flight to Frankfurt where I was pounding away on my iPad cranking out the words and the lady beside me gasped in horror.

Britni

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Britni Pepper writes for Kindle Direct Publishing. She runs a blog where she reviews erotica, and rambles on about this and that. She may be reached on Twitter and Facebook.