The End of Innocence
by Lisabet Sarai

My first erotic stories were explicit fantasies written to please a lover. The characters were idealized versions of our selves. The only plot dynamic was the inexorable building of sexual tension leading to our mutual release. These tales had an intensity that still melts me to a puddle of lust whenever I reread them.

My first novel was a compendium of all my favorite BDSM fantasies. The heroine was younger, prettier, more athletic and more sexually adventurous than I was, but otherwise we had a lot in common. She had red hair, which I've always craved. She was a software engineer, like me. How many of those do you find in erotic novels, after all?

The exotic setting was assembled from my own experiences. The male protagonist was as tall and commanding as my own Master, but thinner, more mysterious and more extreme. The overarching theme was the main character's awakening to her submissive desires, mirroring (emotionally at least) my own personal awakening. The plot rushed forward at breakneck pace from one overwhelming sexual encounter to the next, and resolved itself by having the heroine choose a life of permanent submission—a concept that I've toyed with in imagination many times.

I suspect that many writers of erotica began, like me, by exposing and exploring their own favorite scenarios of desire. The resulting writing often is often searingly sexy. The author has poured his or her personal libidinous imaginings into the story, with all the accompanying emotions. Readers pick up on the emotional truth, and react to it.

There's a kind of innocence to this type of confessional erotica. The author is far more concerned with self-expression than with craft. Self-disclosive stories usually have little suspense, few complexities. The focus is on the fantasy. These stories are direct and intense. They hit you in the gut, or perhaps more appropriately, in the groin.

After a while, though, those of us who keep writing come to realize that sophisticated readers of erotica (whatever that means) want more. More than just the same fantasies, however exciting, recycled over and over. More varied characters, beyond the embellished images of the writer and his or her real or ideal lovers. More varied and ambitious plots, with the sort of obstacles and conflicts that build narrative (as opposed to sexual) tension.

If we're concerned with satisfying this kind of reader (and some writers are not), we try to take more conscious control of the writing process. We push the id into the back seat. We read how-to books on plot and characterization and self-editing. We join workshops and take writing classes.

The result is often a far more skillful and elegant story: more challenging, more suspenseful, more complex. All too often, though, these new stories are less arousing than our original naive fantasies. Somehow, we've lost the spark.

How can we move beyond our own personal turn-ons and still write erotica that makes our readers hot and bothered? This is a question I've been wrestling with myself for the last few years.  I've come to believe that to write convincing and exciting erotica, I somehow still have to tap into my personal fetishes and fantasies. At the same time I have to twist or transform them enough that that I am not writing the same story over and over again.

One trick that I've used is to swap the point of view.  If most of your stories are from the perspective of the man in a heterosexual duo, try viewing your story through the woman's eyes.  If you're personally turned on by the notion of a man going down on you, imagine, and describe, what his thoughts, feelings and sensations might be. Write his experiences, as you imagine them. If, like me, your core fantasies revolve around submission, consider writing the dominant role. The emotional dynamics and the physical activities are still there to excite you, but the revised point of view can result in surprising and arousing situations and reactions. For example, when working on my story "Incurable Romantic" (in Confessions: Admissions of Sexual Guilt), I realized suddenly that a dom could be as frightened by the total devotion and trust of his slave as he was aroused.

A second strategy I can suggest: extract the emotional essence of your fantasy, and transfer it to a different environment or scenario. What do I mean by this? The arousal that comes from a fantasy may be a physical reaction, but it derives from the emotions that your fantasy evokes. Why is notion of anal sex exciting? For me, there are two arousing elements: the violation of taboos, and the perfection of trust in allowing penetration in such a delicate region. So, to avoid boring my readers with yet another surrender of anal virginity to a dominant but caring master, I'll try to take those emotional components and work them into another story, with different physical activities but the same emotional dynamics. As a reviewer recently commented, my story "Perception" (in Hot Women's Erotica) incorporates the essential emotions of a BDSM scene (fear, trust, and surrender) without including a single whip, handcuff, or groveling honorific.

My third strategy is to use analogy. Think about some fetish article or activity that excites you. Imagine how you react to the presence of that item or exposure to that activity. Then try and transfer those emotions to a completely different item or scenario. In "Fire" (from the collection Fire), I tried to describe the guilty pleasure, the compulsion for secrecy, and the obsessive need for escalating intensity that I experience, but transferred to a character whose fetish is burning buildings.

These strategies are successful in varying degrees. Sometimes, I try too hard. I think too hard, instead of letting my subconscious speak its truths. My first novel, burning with my personal lusts, is still my most popular, even though when I read it now, I cringe at the clichés.

I suspect that the most skilled writers of erotica are those who can arouse themselves by imagining by a wild variety of circumstances and activities. The more broad our sexual imagination, the more convincing our erotic writing will be.

Last month, I wrote a fantasy story as a gift for my Master's birthday.  It included the standard elements that turn me (and I hope, him) on: the charismatic, insightful, sexually outrageous dom; the reluctant, fascinated sub with the plump nipples; the sub's gradual realization that submission to the dom is her true path to pleasure and even enlightenment. It used newly extreme toys and implements that I'd never attempted to write about before. It included (I'm embarrassed to say!) actual quotes from our past interactions. It was, in some sense, pure pulp, intended to arouse.

At the same time, the story was more than just a sex scene. It had a plot, a timeline, major and minor characters. It even included literary allusions to amplify the theme.

Once you've lost your innocence as a writer, you can never go back.

My Master loved it.

Lisabet Sarai
February 2006

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© 2006 Lisabet Sarai. All rights reserved.

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