I’ve started this weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.
4/2/23
No Skin
RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL’S BOOK, How to Write Erotica, is filled with great tips on how to write erotic scenes. She includes examples and exercises, writing prompts and testimonials. And if you are an experienced author looking to move into the genre of erotica, that’s really all you need.
What I was missing in the early part of her book was also missing in many of the stories I read online. Erotica of any length needs to have a story as well as erotic scenes. Most importantly, it needs characters that people care about. I’m frequently told by vocal readers that they just skim over the sex parts so they can get on with the story. I think many of them go back to read just the sex scenes later. Other vocal readers complain that there is no “real” sex in my story until late in the book. Bussel’s book gets to that important ingredient later (chapter 12, I believe). For me, the most important thing in an erotic story is the characters. If you don’t care about them, they are just wooden mannequins acting out a masturbatory fantasy.
I started writing and posting my second major story, “Model Student,” on StoriesOnline, thinking that it was just a placeholder so people wouldn’t forget about me while I was writing a more serious work. I realized by the end of the first chapter that it was really ready for a second chapter, so I wrote that. By then, the email started flooding my inbox. “Please keep going!” “Don’t end this story yet!”
At the end of the fifth chapter, I realized I was going to be working on this story for a long time. It ended up being a six-book series that posted two chapters a week online for over a year and a half. Nearly 650,000 words! Said one reader:
My God. I have just read [chapters] 5 and 6. Now I understand your blog and the forum when you talk about the feedback you've been getting. Your work is amazing! You have a gift. You really don’t need hints on where the story should go next, because these characters inside you will tell you exactly what you need to do, and which step to take next. That they are so alive on paper (well, on the screen), means they are living and breathing inside you, and there is no skin between them and the words you write. Oh my god. Thank you for daring to do this, to open your heart like this. I don't know whether these people exist in real life or not, but they for sure exist inside you, and now they live for us. Incredible, and thank you.
The key here was in the characters. They were so real that people began to consider them as friends and neighbors they cared about. They became real in this fantasy world by facing real problems of everyday life, no matter how over the top their sexual relations were. Over the years of writing erotica, I have discovered that once I develop characters that are real enough, they will insist on telling their own story, and it will not just be about the phenomenal sex they had.
A common meme among writers says, “If you hear voices in your head and they are ignoring you, you are probably a writer. If they are talking to you, you have a different problem.”
My characters talked. A lot. They were most vocal when I was driving my truck from one campsite to another and couldn’t defend myself from them. When I made camp, I simply had to write down what they’d said.
I built the “Model Student” series around a depressed freshman art student who hated school and believed he’d made a huge mistake in coming 1500 miles from his Nebraska home to Seattle where he felt like a fraud and an amateur compared to all the real artists in the school. (A feeling I fought in my own profession for forty years.) He was determined to leave school after the first semester ended.
To combat his depression, at his father’s advice, Tony played racquetball at the local gym at least three times a week. He was a good racquetball player and for a while he forgot about his depression—especially when he was playing against the women’s defending national champion, who happened also to be a very sexy model.
There were the four main themes of this entire series, driven by Tony’s narration: Art, Depression, Racquetball, and Romance. During the course of the six-book story, new problems are also introduced, as I dealt with polyamory, homelessness, abuse, a submissive, death in the family, and a conflict triggered by the competition between two of the artist/lovers in the story. I explored various artforms, including watercolor, oil, murals, fresco, mosaic, and textile. And to heat up the situation a little further, Tony’s interpretation of various parables he was painting in a new church was at odds with his nemesis, the local archbishop.
I didn’t have all that planned out in advance. In fact, I was posting the story almost as fast as I could write it and my two volunteer editors could clean it up.
And the most amazing thing happened. Living alone in a tiny travel trailer as I wandered aimlessly across the country, I discovered my own dark gloom had lifted. I owed it to the response and encouragement of my readers.
I intended to find a way to repay them. And what better way than with a story?
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
