There is a pleasing irony to my career as an erotic writer. When you think “adult literature expert” I doubt you picture 23-year-old me working from my parents’ shed in my pajamas, using Pornhub as source material and with only a handful of orgasms notched on my bedpost. But so it was during the summer of lockdown, when writing erotica became my main stream of income and was putting me through a creative writing master’s at Cambridge (which I was doing to write serious poetry, not smut).
It was an acquaintance from high school who had recommended the gig after she had completed a piece for an erotic library. But, she told me, she only had one story in her (a threesome with a CEO and his analyst — she was an accountant), and thought I may have more. This in itself was mystifying — where we grew up, the luxury of a shower head between your legs and intimate knowledge of the clitoris was essentially a trade secret. But I applied to the site anyway and was commissioned immediately — $211 for “1,000 words focused on her pleasure, a hidden kink and an intense (and orgasm-filled) experience”.
Ah. Like many twentysomething women you could whittle down my sexual highlights to a number of casual encounters and evenings that were less orgasm-filled and more orgasm-adjacent, and when it came to kinks I had nothing clutch-your-pearls outrageous.
So I researched. I scoured the (private browser) web, discovered porn-scrolling (doom-scrolling of adult material), fan-fic and chick lit, feminist X-rated films and audio erotica apps such as Quinn, which counts Andrew Scott among its narrators. I titled my first story Meeting à Trois. I was met with a request for a nom de plume (I proffered Iona Whip and was promptly refused — an injustice that still rankles) and further commissions.
Soon I was churning out a couple of stories a week, often based on sex positions that sounded to me like appetizers (the “pretzel dip”, anyone?). Erotica uses the language of soft porn with multi-rolling perspectives that invites the reader to insert themselves into any point of the story. Many erotic libraries have explicitness ratings, kink tags and trigger warnings, while the higher-brow sites accompany pieces with bespoke artwork or photoshoots.
In visual porn, exposition tends to be badly lit with questionable dialogue. In erotic literature, context is everything. The set-up itself needs to drip with sensuality and possibility. Picture a dark bar with plush cushions, tassel lamps emitting a golden glow, murmured propositions in shadowy corners. Or else a naturally enticing setting — a spring evening, dusted in the sweet smell of flowers, the air warm and buttery. You are setting a scene not just for sex but for pleasure, wonder and freedom.
Next, draw attention to physical sensations. Imagine a character sucking on the plump, juicy rump of a maraschino cherry, the fruit a splash of red against glossy lips, the juice dripping down an exposed throat and disappearing into cleavage.
Euphemisms, I find, are fiddly and easily overdone. I spent some time editing translated erotica for a Swedish women-first company. The narrative would be rich with phrases that were probably provocative in their native tongue but in English sounded as if the target market was a particularly randy cow. “Her furry mountains gushed,” read one. “His woodpecker gnawed relentlessly at her hollow tree,” read another.
I also partnered with an adult store to write stories that would accompany their products. Unfortunately the company didn’t send me the merchandise so I spent hours googling things like “what does tingle vibrating jelly do” (exactly what it says on the tin) or asking friends if they had experience with a twisted glass nine-inch dildo and how would they describe it (“like an intense smear test,” one friend told me. I still wonder if that was the intended sensation).
Imagine a character sucking on the plump, juicy rump of a maraschino cherry.
Projects like these were pitched in specific, oddly hilarious one-liners, such as “The Magneto Burrower: A trendy couple’s toy. Story where foreplay starts long before hitting the sheets.” I’d turn the piece around in a couple of hours between lectures, and would receive notes such as “the material is only compatible with water-based lube” and “the wand isn’t really that bendable (as I recall)”. One of the most humbling moments was a response to a story I’d spent hours on, which simply read: “You find this sexy?” More often than not, though, the feedback would be: “Sex comes too fast!”
This is the golden rule of erotica: you’ve got to eke it out. Stats show that most people prefer foreplay to last twice as long as intercourse and that prolonged tension heats up the sexual barometer. We thrive off the will-we won’t-we tug of war, like a whodunnit for the sexually active. The whole story should be a slow dance of touch that quickens to a two-step and twirls away into flirtation before the big move. Combine the first meeting with a sensual kiss, tongues playing tango, hands creeping up seams; introduce drawn-out touches, hot breath and murmured instructions.
Most erotica needs to be an eight-minute read, which is the average time it takes a woman to climax from self-pleasure (probably why male-centered erotica would be a much faster return on investment), so you don’t have the luxury of a rom-com novel and Colleen Hoover-length courtship to get your reader off.
By the time I submitted my thesis I was out of debt and the lockdowns were lifting. I found myself approaching sex with a professional curiosity I hadn’t had before, asking about sexual appetites on first dates — one man revealed to me that he didn’t “get” the point of sex in any position but missionary (intriguing), while another revealed that he liked to choose safe words based on Sylvia Plath poems (such as Daddy, I asked. No, he said, such as Doom of Exiles.)
I have discovered that erotica promotes an awareness of the tactile, intimate and taboo parts of sex, and can serve as inspiration, self-indulgence or foreplay. I like that underneath the guise of being a cheeky young adult writing about threesomes in my parents’ shed, there’s a provocative, confident side to me now — one that knows at least 15 ways to describe the cowgirl position. Journalism and fiction writing has meant that I’ve been less able to meet the demanding deadlines and liberal inspiration the job requires but, you never know, perhaps it’s time to recover my whip and cock my pen.
Tyler Bennett is a U.K.-based writer
