How I Write Porn
Disclaimer: I’m aware of the pitfalls of writing a “how to write porn” piece using your own porn writing as an example. So if you don’t like my porn writing — the passage I wrote for this piece, or any of the rest of it — please feel free to ignore this advice
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 how the sex feels: the emotions, the sensations.
It’s what I call the flesh of the story. How does it feel to be this person, or these people, having sex? How do these sex acts feel physically — soft, tight, sharp, gentle, smooth, cold? And how do they feel emotionally – nervous, urgent, giddy, relieved, beloved, dirty?
So not just, “He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back,” but:
“He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back; his nails dug sharply into her skin, and she felt a rush of excitement, followed immediately by a flush of shame.”
And that’s better.
But it’s still not enough. Not for me. I’ve read plenty of porn that stopped there, and if it pushes my personal erotic buttons, it’ll be enough to get me off. But it’s not enough to make a story linger in my mind after I come; to shift the way I look at sex; to make me jerk off to the story again and again. For me to be happy with a sex scene, it’s definitely not enough to just describe the sex acts that are happening — but it’s also not enough to convey how the sex feels physically, or even how it feels emotionally.
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’s the nerves of the story. And the nerves are what gives a story life.
So not just, “He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back; his nails dug sharply into her skin, and she felt a rush of excitement, followed immediately by a flush of shame,” but:
“He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back; his nails dug sharply into her skin, and she felt a rush of excitement, followed immediately by a flush of shame. She had specifically asked for this, had spelled out the fantasy in some detail. And now that it was here, digging into her flesh and forcing her face-down onto the floor, it was too much: not just the helplessness, but how exciting the helplessness felt. She didn’t want to be that person, that cliche, the powerful woman who deep down just wants to be mastered by a more powerful man. Her safeword bubbled up in her throat, but she gritted her teeth and choked it back down. She had asked for this, by God, and by God she was going to see it through.
“He forced his knee between her thighs and fumbled with his zipper, and she whimpered, in something resembling real panic, as she felt a flash of wetness inside her pussy. I don’t want this, she thought. I don’t want this, I can’t do this, please stop. The words in her head made her pussy wetter, and the sharp fingers forcing her cunt lips apart made it wetter still, and she moaned in humiliation and rage at her treacherous pussy that was begging for his cock to force itself inside her against her will, and that was getting off on her shame and fear.”
You may notice that this passage suddenly got a lot longer. And it’s not just the “why” stuff that made it longer — there’s more “what” and “how” as well, more skeleton and flesh.
Here’s why. It’s usually the skeleton of a porn story that gets me started — some fantasy image of some physical act. But it’s the nerves that drive it. Once I find the meaning of a story, once I know who these people are that I’m jerking off to and why they’re having the sex that they’re having… that’s what tells me what happens next.
And when I’m rewriting and polishing a story (if the acts and feelings and meaning of a porn story are the skeleton and flesh and nerves, then the rewrites and polishes are the skin), a lot of what I’m checking for is the balance between the three. Does a section feel tedious? There’s probably too much physical description: I need to sink into the character’s bodies and get at what they’re feeling. Does it seem cliched? I need to remember what makes these characters unique, why they’re there and what they’re getting out of it. Is it starting to lose momentum and sexual heat? Maybe there’s too much deeper meaning stuff, and I need more strong visual images of what’s physically taking place.
So if I can get all three of these things in balance — clear descriptions of sex acts, vivid evocations of emotions and sensations, and unique characters and motivations — there’s a good chance that this will be a story I’m happy with.
This entry was posted on Thursday, 5 July 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday, 6 July 2007 at 10:57 am jraoul wrote:
“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).
on Friday, 6 July 2007 at 11:28 am Greta Christina wrote:
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.
on Friday, 6 July 2007 at 9:35 pm Wintermute wrote:
Damn your good Greta. I really liked that little story fragement. On top of that it really
illustrated what your point.
on Saturday, 7 July 2007 at 7:27 pm Laura D. wrote:
The great thing about the way you write porn, is that the “nerves” allow the reader to be turned on by scenes that are not about activities that would normally excite them. I remember a scene in “Bending” that takes place in a bathroom. The “skeleton” of that scene would have left me as dry as a bone nothing anyone was doing in that scene is anything that I would be interested in doing or watching or thinking about. But the way you wrote it put me in the head of the protagonist to the point that because *she* was turned on by what was happening, *I* was too.