Years ago, when I first became an editor on Medium, one of my fellow volunteers let slip on our private chat channel that he wrote erotic stories under a pen name. As I knew certain things about them and I had a very good map of Amazon’s erotica maze, I soon found their pen-name and had a private read of their work.
I was a little confused. On our editor workspace, they presented as a man but here they wrote from a woman’s point of view.
It’s hard difficult to get a good grip on what divides erotica from pornography, but this writer was firmly on the porn side. Still a bit of literary merit but I felt that they were sketching out the story for the sake of the sex - which they described in full detail - rather than the feelings about it.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s one story about a woman craving a burger delivery boy that builds the anticipation up very nicely but if you are getting down to it, it’s about sex rather than sensuality.
So “Raven Hard” was in that grey area. I didn’t feel at all elegant or refined as I read through their stories with one hand, but hey, this was hot stuff and did the job.
They also reported a good income from their stories and I could see that as well as following a classic model - selling individual stories regularly, collecting them into books and selling the lot at a discount - they were writing in German and translating into English to get a second income stream.
As literature, maybe not so hot. Topic aside, this was one author unlikely to be set as a class read.
Nevertheless, a regular person earning a good sideline income from telling stories about sexual fantasies. I think most of us could sign up for that job, so long as we used a nom-de-plum.
So what is erotica?
Is it just telling a story about sex?
Let’s ask around:
Erotica is art, literature or photography that deals substantively with subject matter that is erotic, sexually stimulating or sexually arousing. — Wikipedia
Wikipedia also includes some interesting imagery in their erotica article, Just sayin’.
Erotica is a genre of literature, art, or media that focuses on themes of romantic and sexual expression. It is designed to evoke emotional and sensual responses, often exploring intimate relationships and human desires in a tasteful and creative manner. While erotica can vary in tone and content, it typically emphasises the aesthetic and emotional aspects of sexuality. —Gemini AI
Pornography is crack for the addict, Erotica is morphine for the sensuous.
Erotica is brunettes in silk, pornography is blondes in nylon.
There is no difference. It's simply a rebranding to make pornography socially acceptable. —Quora
In the popular imagination, usually, pornography is ‘stronger’ than erotica, in that it contains more direct imagery. It is often simply a direct description of sexual activity, in graphic and realistic terms, whereas erotica tends to use inference, images and even symbols to depict sexual actions or to imply them.
I once read a definition of pornography as ‘anything you fast forward through to get to the best bits’. —Clarendon House
Erotica has plot with a bit of softcore porn sprinkled here and there. Smut has hardcore porn with a bit of plot sprinkled here and there. —Reddit
You get the idea. As one Redditor said, it’s “Mindless smut vs storytelling with smutty elements.”
So it’s all about storytelling, eh?
Storytelling is a topic I know something about, thanks to my close involvement with Storyteller Tactics.
We all know - or can at least recognise - the basic shapes of stories. Boy Meets Girl, Man in a Hole, Happy Ever After and so on. Kurt Vonnegut has a classic video on this theme and it’s always worth a watch and a rewatch; he’s so very good at it.
Stories are more than plot. They have settings and characters and at its simplest level a story is a description of what actions a character performs in a setting. You need all three elements for a story to work.
Characters draw us into a story and keep us there. The writer might use the most beautiful prose in their descriptions of the landscape or the weather or the progress of shadows across a flower bed but we’re not going to stick around for long.
We want to find out what the characters are doing, what’s coming next, and how they will deal with the situation. We put ourselves into the shoes of the characters and walk along with them, often sharing their thoughts and feelings.
It is sometimes said that erotica is a story where if you remove the sex from it, it’s still a good story. You’d read it without a climax, in other words. You’d be there for the character development. Right.
That’s true, up to a point. We can all think of great stories without sex. Vonnegut describes Cinderella in his video chat and Walt Disney did a great job with that one. We can also imagine the same Cinderella with sex. Oh my!
I like to think of erotica as a story where sex is a character.
Not necessarily one that performs all sorts of heroic actions - getting the man into a hole rather than out of it, perhaps - but one that grows and develops, sucking the reader into the tale to see what comes next.
Let me suggest a different definition of erotica, as distinct from pornography. Pornography is a story where sex is a one-dimensional character, never in doubt, never developing. From the moment the housewife opens the door to the hunky plumber, there is no doubt in the reader’s mind. Might as well skip all the plot and get to the good bits.
Erotica is one where the sex is a well-rounded character. As Australian poet Judith Wright put it,
The eyeless labourer in the night,
the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
…
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.
Sex is the intriguing, often unspoken, aspect of a relationship. Every story with more than one character must hold at least one relationship and in a good story, that relationship develops along with the characters.
In The Bridges of Madison County, a rare example of a movie adaptation improving on the book, we could imagine the same story working without sex - the two leads take landscape photographs together, perhaps - but that sexual relationship develops from a tiny seed even before we meet Francesca and Robert and grows with every glance and touch until Francesca in anguish at the thought of losing the best lover she’s ever had cries in despair at breakfast after their final night together,
So, do you want more eggs or should we just fuck on the linoleum one last time?
—via IMDB
Incidentally, if you want to write good sex, don’t follow the example of the book’s author, Robert James Waller. His descriptions of Francesca and Robert in bed - or wherever - are a low point in what is otherwise an enthralling story.
In the story, the physical sex ends when the two characters part forever but enjoys a kind of afterlife in their memories and fantasies until it emerges, postmortem, in the imaginings of Francesca’s adult children in the very first scenes of the movie as they sort through their mother’s effects and read a letter where she “puts her affairs in order”.
This intimate relationship grows from a shared thought to a grand passion and dwindles away, ending up exactly where it began. It is a clever narrative trick.
This sex-as-a-character aspect is, to my mind at least, what distinguishes erotica from pornography. Like any good character, it is one step ahead of the second-guessing reader, always surprising, always delighting.
It doesn’t even have to be explicit in description - the equivalent of that always-awkward scene in a written story where the protagonist stands in front of a mirror and describes their physical appearance for the sake of the reader - just a hint or a sketch will do.
But it has to be there and it has to be distinct from the physical characters, surprising and teasing, and enthralling the characters every bit as much as it does the reader you are teasing along in a slow dance that is sure to get a lot hotter if they just keep reading the next page, and the next.
Nor does this character have to be human. A raging bull consumed by passion. A mouse, quietly enjoying forbidden fruit. An abstract theme of taste or connection or weaving. It doesn’t have to be in any physical form but it has to be there and the reader must be able to connect and enjoy the delicious thoughts waltzing through their mind.
But you promised it would taste good!
Good taste, I said. If we are talking sensuous pleasures, erotica should tease and tickle and stimulate the mind, whetting the appetite and possibly serving up a feast.
A meal to be savoured and enjoyed and remembered, as opposed to the salt-fat-and sugar hit of fast food.
When all is said and done, the last morsel savoured, that feeling of mellow happiness descending on reader and diner alike, the story has to have done more than tick all the checkboxes in some erotica handbook.
The reader must have enjoyed the sex in the story and have been under no illusions that this was the point of it all. Sex, after all, is something special in the way our brains are held together. We react to it in a way we don’t to dogs or flowers or trains.
Sex is primal, sex - for most of us, anyway - feels good, sex is its own positive feedback, sex bypasses the logic and reason most of us use to make decisions.
Sex sells, as any advertising text will tell you.
This is where an average writer - like me - can shine. An average story about good sex will have the secret sauce to sell. With books sold online, a taste for erotica can be indulged without the chance of the priest seeing you in that corner of the bookshop.
I mentioned the classic sales model at the start. Write a few good erotic stories under a pen name, promote them online, gain a small following, and when you have enough for a collection, sell them as a bundled edition for a discount on the individual titles.
Ten stories at $4.95 each is $49.50, but a collection of ten stories for $29.95 is a bargain. You’ll get a second wave of buyers and readers and your numbers will rise and so long as you can keep up with the demand, who knows?
Not your priest. Not your friends and family. Just you and your bank.
I make thousands of dollars writing, and I’m never going to win a writing prize. That’s okay.
I’m satisfied.
Erotica is a story where sexual desire is one of the characters, developing and progressing along with the plot. —Britni Pepper
A happy ending
If you can craft a story with credible characters and settings, and you have a working knowledge of sexual intimacy, make desire the protagonist, growing along with the human characters in the shape of their ever-closer relationship.
Use this device to tease and enchant your reader. They will read the story to see what the human characters are doing, but on every page, the intimate desire and yearning for fulfilment will be in their mind, tickling their fancy.
I’d love to read and enjoy your work. Privately and anonymously, if you prefer, After all, that’s the way I read erotica.
Britni
Informative
What a great way to look at this!! As someone who's written for years, but never shared a thing until being inspired to do so by a Substack author- honestly I've never really analyzed what I wrote. I just...wrote. But, you've absolutely made some great points, and set some goalposts and bars that I'll now be conscious of, and strive to conquer in the future!!
Fantastic Post!!!