Writing Erotica Made Me a Better Lover

It taught me to pay attention to all the little details

My libido was low when I decided to write erotica.

At that point in my life, sex had become something I did, not something I really wanted.

On rare occasions, I’d get slightly aroused and I would fuck my husband. But I wasn’t super into it the way I used to be. It was enjoyable and gave me a bit of physical release, but it wasn’t much more than that.

It helped me feel connected to my husband, but so did cuddling and watching a movie.

I had sex without gusto. I didn’t starfish my way through it, but I kind of just went through the motions. Sex had become mechanical and predictable. I had fallen into such a routine that I knew exactly how long it would take from foreplay to finish.

That was really convenient for making sure I didn’t stay up too late, but it didn’t make for a lot of excitement.

Maybe that made me an unusual candidate for writing erotica, but it made perfect sense to me.

I didn’t take up writing erotica because I was inspired and horny (I decidedly wasn’t). I took it up because I wanted to write and try to make money from my writing.

Erotica seemed like the best option. I wasn’t very confident in my writing abilities, but I had read plenty of terribly written smut that seemed to sell well, so the bar for quality was low.

I also thought I might be good at it because I’ve been told I have a knack for describing things well.

And even though I wasn’t interested in having sex, I was still very interested in sex as a topic. I may not have been horny, but my mental sexual energy was high.

So, I read up on it, figured out how to self-publish on Kindle, and started typing out my first draft.

I worried that having really let myself go when it comes to sex would make it harder to write vivid and alluring sex scenes. What I didn’t realize, though, is that writing those sex scenes would make me a better lover than I ever was before.

Writing Smut Gave Me Back My Mojo

If I was going to write erotica, I was going to have to do more than just mirror my own sex life. What was going on in my bedroom wasn’t amazingly sexy and I needed something more to captivate a reader.

I didn’t have much experience writing fiction, but I still wanted whoever looked through the pages of my books to feel submerged in what they were reading. I wanted them to feel what the characters were feeling, not just think about what they were doing.

I had to find a way to describe the mechanics of sex in a way that didn’t make them feel mechanical.

To do that, I had to try to give my characters some kind of inner life. My goal was to write sex scenes that had as many — if not more — descriptions of thoughts and sensations as it had descriptions of all the physical stuff.

And dirty talk, too. Lots and lots of dirty dialogue.

I don’t know how successful I was, but I can say that it at least worked on one person. I was getting lost in the writing, typing out sentences in rapid succession, feeling myself channeling the experiences of these imaginary characters.

I’d type out thousands of words every morning and early afternoon. By the time I was done, I was horny as hell.

Writing about the intense anticipation when you’re on the verge of having some unpredictable sex, the way the muscles spasm and the mind focuses like nothing else during a climax, and the delirious high when you’re coming down from it all made me want to experience all of it.

It didn’t just make me aroused enough to have sex. It made me horny with a capital H.

It made me want the kind of great sex I hadn’t had since my sex drive slowed down — the kind of sex that makes you wonder why you even bother having other hobbies.

And all I had to do to keep that desire burning was to keep writing smut.

I Learned to Be Attentive

There were a few times in my early drafts where I’d hit on a blank. I was struggling to write a sex scene because I was missing some important details.

How does a guy look when he’s really enjoying a blowjob?

What’s the best way to describe a woman’s body when she’s the one on top?

Are there little tell-tale physical signs that someone’s about to come?

I honestly didn’t know — not enough to fill out page after page of details, anyway.

So, I had to do some research, and lots of it.

Of course, I read other erotica authors to see what sorts of details they zoomed in on.

I also watched plenty of porn and paid really close attention. I wanted to see what kind of technique the performers used. I also wanted to see just how their bodies bent and moved. And I watched very closely for the way they reacted to being pleasured.

And even though I’ve had plenty of sex with men, I had to really focus on how men react to being on the receiving end. There are so many little details that are easy to miss even when you’re in the middle of having sex. Especially if you keep your eyes closed and the lights off, like I normally did.

All that time spent watching and studying the way people look and act when they’re getting down made me so much more attentive when I was having sex.

I started noticing the little ways my husband reacted to the way I touched him. I looked for signs that I was giving him more intense pleasure and tried to repeat what I was doing.

I got experimental, trying different positions and doing different things to him to see how he would react to them.

Over time, I got much better at knowing what worked really well for him and I started breaking our routine or slipping in new things, in part to see how different his reactions would be.

My Whole Attitude Changed

Writing erotica made every sex act seem ten times sexier, even some of the ones I didn’t do.

For years, I had lost interest in giving head, so when we had sex it was strictly blowjob-free.

Writing about them in a lot of careful detail — not just the actual act of sucking and running your tongue against a cock, but also explaining the appeal of doing it — made me interested in reintroducing them into our sex life.

But writing erotica also changed the sex acts I was already doing.

I gave manual sex, but it was always for some reason other than actually wanting to do the act itself. I did it to motivate my husband to keep giving me manual and oral sex. I did it to make sure he’d stay hard through the whole thing. I did it to get us both ready for penetrative sex.

Because my libido was low, I felt like just having sex was my contribution. Getting to the point of wanting to receive pleasure was hard enough — wanting to give it was always just out of my reach.

Writing X-rated stories changed that.

I had to depict someone giving pleasure in a way that would make it appealing. In a way that would make you wish you were the one giving, not just the one receiving. “I stroked his dick because I felt like I owed it to him” is a whole lot less arousing than “I smiled to myself as I listened to the way he moaned deeply every time my spit-slicked fingers rubbed the head of his cock.”

Having to describe the joy a character experienced in giving pleasure got me into giving pleasure, too.

I stopped the half-hearted dick stroking and started giving real honest to goodness handjobs. The kind you give when you want to make someone feel good and you want to see them enjoying themselves.

And it happened with penetrative sex, too. I stopped focusing only on how I was getting off from it and started paying attention to the ways I was pleasuring my husband with my body.

I started giving pleasure just for the sake of giving pleasure. And that change in attitude completely changed the way I fucked.

Writing erotica reminded me of just how fun sex could be. And it showed me that even with a middling libido, I could find my way back to really appreciating my partner physically, noticing him more during sex, and getting excited at the idea of giving him pleasure.

It did a lot for my sex life. It changed how often I have sex and what kinds of sex acts I take part in. But maybe the most important thing was just making me really love it again. Because when it comes down to it, a little enthusiasm goes a long way.

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