The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] My First Porno

It’s “Erotica” to some, “Smut” to others, also “Porn” or “Pornography” or “Porno.” I’m referring to dirty writing, that is to say, prose, and I favor whichever term fits the sentence, but I’ll admit I’m partial to “porn.” The reason is that the word is simple and carries a wretched connotation to so many people who have otherwise positive feelings about the written word. Say “erotica” and you’re inviting the discussion of how at least you don’t write pornography. I prefer to tell it like it is.

But there’s actually quite a difference. I might get drummed out of the sleaze writer’s club because of this, but I do find something of a gap between written “erotica” and “pornography,” though the line’s far from clear when something becomes one and not the other.

My first experiences with professional writing were writing porn, no question about it — the word “erotica” wouldn’t enter my lexicon until later. I began writing porn novels because I used to read them in the back aisles of Tower Books, a bookstore stuffed so full of crappy old paperbacks that I suspect nobody really knew what was there. It seemed like a place that hadn’t done inventory since the 1970s, and there was a small shelf over in Psychology with books titled “Mom’s Hot Vacation” and “Sex Police,” with lime green cover text and garish pictures of women in swimsuits on the cover. The bylines were things like “John Steele” and “Mike Banks” and “Jessi Taylor.” The women inside were named “Julie” and “Jenny” and “Missy” and they did things women were not, I felt quite sure, supposed to do. I decided almost immediately that I very badly wanted to be a “John Steele.” If I’d any doubts, they disintegrated under my first reading of that fateful listing in Writer’s Market. Six hundred freakin’ bucks??? Sign me up!

I should add that $600 was a lot of money in those days. Back then, a quart of milk cost a penny, a Model T was about a thousand bucks depending on whether or not you traded in your mule, and an audience with William Howard Taft would cost you four chickens and a harmonica. It really was a long time ago.

I had been struggling to write science fiction, turning out six or eight stories a week, sending them off to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and other publications with lengthy titles. I had assembled a stack of rejection slips that quickly put me in the realm of all the people in writers’ magazines who said they’d gotten “a lot,” like dozens, of rejection slips before they sold their first stories. It was weird. I was a genius, so I wasn’t entirely sure what the fuck was the problem.

On the other hand, I sold the first porn novel I ever wrote, though not to the first publisher I sent it to. It was 40,000 words, took me about five days to write, and did not have much of a plot. It had to do with a farmer’s daughter going to Kansas City and getting seriously fucked in a variety of positions by a variety of guys and oh, look! It turns out she’s kinda bisexual too! Plus, if you screw girls as well as guys then you get to fuck all their boyfriends, too! Wow, Candi, this is a GREAT vacation! I can’t wait to go back to West Bakerton and show all the farm hands what fun three-way buttsex is!!

In those days, though I was already kinky I could not find markets that sought kinky porn; I wanted nothing more than to write about whips-and-chains but all the publishers wanted were books about girls in bikinis banging frat boys on spring break. In real life that was just about anathema to everything I stood for, but for six hundred bucks? Who gave a fuck! Besides, the ciphers that served as my characters were in many ways hotter for being cheesy stereotypes. Everything was simple, easy, concise. Everyone in a porn novel wants exactly one thing. That’s what makes it porn. Remember when I said there was a difference between erotica and pornography? That’s probably it, for me. If the characters want something other than sex, it’s probably erotica, no matter how filthy.

I was hooked, and it wasn’t just the $600. Writing that first porn novel was oodles easier than writing science fiction. When I was eighteen, it was not a challenge for me to spend 5,000 words obsessing over the shape of a woman’s ass in a very snug pair of boy briefs. Still isn’t, really, but back then it was super easy. Where before I had fought my way through a few thousand words of plot, here all I had to do was get a couple of people (or three or twelve or really just one) into the bedroom (or hot tub or shower or laundry room or kitchen or rooftop garden or the back seat of a ‘57 Chevy) and the scenes practically wrote themselves. Seriously — start me off with a “He slowly unbuttoned her shirt” or a “She wriggled out of her jeans” or a “Naked skydiving was fun!” and next thing you know, the heroine had come to know in a Biblical sense more men than she or I could keep track of, I had 20,000 words in the can and the dude at the reference desk was looking at me with distaste and wishing I would just go home.

The restrictions of that first publisher I wrote for really helped me. Because in my artsy arrogance I didn’t give a fuck about frat boys or sorority girls or farmer’s daughters or naught nurses, I found it fantastically easy to take liberties with simplistic characters — the simpler the better. The physical descriptions became the point — and believe me, I could blather on for gazillions of words about body parts getting all slicked up and sliding together all nasty-like. After years of fighting for pages, this was like falling off a log, and it was oodles of fun, too.

My point in telling you all this? If you are an aspiring writer, I encourage you to sit down and write a porn novel without delay. You will probably not sell it, but if you are an aspiring writer you are probably getting used to that concept. I have no idea if you’ll prove to be as big a perv as I did, but if you’re reading this, chances are good. Give it a try and you might find yourself with 20,000 words about travelling salesmen and horny stewardesses — and who doesn’t love a good yarn about a horny stewardess?

Thomas Roche blogs about bullfighting, Alaskan con men and the mystery reptiles of Fremont, California at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 15 July 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Industry. 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.