By Corvidae (Guest Blogger)

A few months ago I attended a local
science fiction and fantasy writing conference, FOGcon, held here in
the Bay Area on the first weekend of March. Although it is a
conference primarily about

speculative fiction, all sorts of
avenues within that genre come up, including erotica. I was attending
a panel whose discussion drifted toward themes in erotic writing when
someone made an interesting

point:

Why isn’t there more bad sex in
erotica?

Some people chuckled, of course, but
the speaker was serious. Her argument came primarily from a
sex-positive standpoint: she pointed out how many people build
expectations of normal sexual behavior on the erotic material they
consume, so for the sake of healthy development, it would be fair for
erotica to include “bad sex” sometimes.

But no one wants to have bad sex, the
audience murmured, so who would want to read about bad sex?

The conversation moved on, but that
question has stuck with me. The more I’ve thought about it, the
more I’ve come around to an intriguing idea: not only could bad sex
be abstractly beneficial, but it might actively improve the story.

How? Well consider the following.

Take, for example, the science fiction
and fantasy genres. We enjoy these stories for their hero/ines
overcoming larger-than-life challenges in worlds beyond our
imagination; in other words, achievements we yearn for. But how many
of these stories have everything happening magically-perfect all the
time? Where every battle is fought with top-score perfection and
every villain brought immediately to their knees?

You can write such a story, sure, but
odds are the reader won’t be as engaged as you’d like them to be.
The reason for that is so simple it’s stressed in every book on
writing-theory: Conflict = Plot. Without any conflict or build-up of
tension, there isn’t really a plot.

I just learned recently (better late
than never, really) about the old writers’ trick of adding conflict
by Making Things Go Wrong. Don’t just have your characters jump
from Point A to Point B, give them progressively larger obstacles to
overcome along the way. A fun practice technique is to take a
character and make her situation progressively worse and worse and
see how she deals with things to keep moving forward. These obstacles
make the story interesting, but they also help define your
characters, in that your reader will get a deeper sense of who the
character is based on how she deals with the challenge presented to
her.

How does this apply to erotica? Well,
quite simply, “bad sex” could be an interesting tool to Make
Things Go Wrong. Don’t just have your characters jump straight to
putting Tab A in Slot B. Instead, try incorporating unusual
occurrences–physical challenges, emotional blocks, sudden
introspection, maybe even things as prosaic people barging into fix
the cable–and see how that affects not only the details of the
sexual encounter, but the internal facets of the characters
themselves.

For example: the other day I was
reading a story by a friend of mine, Reyna Todd. Her upcoming
novella, Ghuulden Girls, is an erotic fantasy novella that plays
around with issues of gender identification in a few scenes. Though
it is an erotic story, one of the highlights for me was a scene where
two of the characters were engaged in much-lusted-for sex but decided
halfway through that it just…wasn’t…working. The aftermath of
this “bad sex” scene was some deeper introspection that led to
them both evolving as characters, as well as playing a major role in
advancing the overall plot.

Now, one could argue that these
characters could have gotten hot and heavy in that scene and also
developed through other, clothes-on methods. There’s nothing wrong
with that approach in and of itself, but I argue that, as erotica
writers, we can do better. Erotica already shows the scenes other
stories don’t, so why not take things even further and show how
those scenes–good, bad, and yes even

ugly–are inexorably tied up in the
stories of normal human lives?

***

About the Author

Corvidae is a biologist, a writer, and
a near-lifelong fan of scandalous storytelling. She is an active
proponent of sex-positivity, polyamory, and BDSM, both in her work
and in real life. When not writing, what spare time she has is
usually filled with yoga, dancing, and table-top gaming. Her first
published work can be found in the Big Book of Submission  coming out this July from Cleis Press.

Visit her blog at
http://corvidaedream.wordpress.com

She tweets at @CorvidaeDream