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How To Write Porn For Me
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
For one reason or another, more text-based porn than usual has made it across my radar in the last few weeks. (Thank you for the links, gentlemen, you are very sweet.) And it’s gotten me thinking. (And other things as well.)
Most pornographic stories are bad; a vast and sweeping generalization, I know, but I’ll let it slide for the moment. However, more often they are not so much bad as they are off target. They make me feel like ringing the author to say “Great effort, but the judges just couldn’t relate to your performance.”
And it occurs to me that while many, many, many resources exist to enable better writing, not many resources exist that are specifically designed to teach a writer how to target their audience. In fact, I would venture that most of us can’t really manage to write for audiences unlike ourselves, even when we actually try to (and, let’s face it, most of us don’t even try.) Especially regarding this particular subject matter.
And look, I’m not talking about great literature here. I’m talking wank material. Brown paper wrappings. Not safe for work. Porn. Which can still be great literature; the two are not mutually exclusive, although they do entail different perspectives and skills. It’s a bit of an alien experiment for most of us, the writing of porn. I don’t often write it, and you readers never see it when I do.
So, in my half helpful, half rantish mood, I thought I’d give a little Cliff Notes version of how to target porn for an audience I might relate to. Namely, dominant women. (Solipsism? On a blog? Impossible.)
This is how to write porn for me. Not that I expect you to, and not that I’m anticipating that any of you actually will. But many people try, and the success rate is just too low to ignore. So if you’ve ever been curious how to write pornography that a dominant woman would enjoy, here’s my side of the story. (I highly encourage each of you to write your own list for your orientation as well. I’m tempted to meme that suggestion, but I don’t think the world really needs more memes.)
Onward, and leaving aside the obvious things like “write about kinky sex” and “yes, women read porn too” and “yes, male bottoms are sexy” and “yes, as a matter of fact I am queer,” here is the not-so-secret list of hints and tricks.
1. Get out of my head.
Many of the stories I read are entirely made up of long, complicated inner monologues about arousal and angst and the contemplation of dominance. I give this tactic a great big failing mark in bright red pen. Remember the purpose of the piece. If you’re writing academic prose or fiction, go ahead and explore the psyche of your dominant character. Interesting? Definitely interesting. Sexy? Not sexy. Pornography is not contemplation. Pornography is action.
One of the questions we keep asking about pornography is how the reader relates to the characters, i.e. what character will I choose to inhabit? As I have mentioned before, I usually resist “inhabiting” dominant characters, because they annoy me. Instead I will eroticise a third-person perspective of a story, or inhabit the character of the submissive in order to better translate their reactions into wankable material. I would rather not have to do this, but inevitably I find dominant women in pornography alienating and annoying, not because they’re behaving stupidly or doing something I don’t relate to, but because they just won’t shut up.
1a, related: Skip my orgasm.
Unless it advances the plot or is necessary to complete the story, you can leave out all of the bits about the shock waves and juiciness the me-character is feeling. Usually when I get to this part I skim over the lines, usually while thinking, “Been there. Done that. Trying to get there again. Don’t need a guidebook.”
2. Focus on the bottom.
Following very obviously from the above points is this; I don’t want the focus of my pornography to be on the character I’m supposed to be inhabiting, but on the character I find attractive. Or, as other women have said before me, omigod hot slaves! Get the view off the dominant and onto the submissive. I want the bottom’s monologue, the bottom’s reactions, the bottom’s screams, the bottom’s emotions. I want to read the side of the story that I find sexy. Shocker: that’s not me.
3. Write my kinks.
Obviously I would love it if every pornographic story I read was about the things I love. Wouldn’t we all? Give me harem slaves, give me cages and heavy metal, whips and chains, tenderness and flinching, slapping and strengths and service. Give me fantasy and living artwork and quirky details. Give me rituals, love, slavery, fear. Give me characters who are joyful, who are confident, genderqueer, beautiful, funny, sexy, smart, skilled. And especially, give me great long strings of language and all of those searing, desperate words I love.
4. Write your kinks.
My kinks aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and as far as I’m concerned that’s fine. If none of the things I like get you off, then write about something that does get you off. Showcase your specific enthusiasm and passion, and the arousal will translate.
5. Write well.
I know that as you’ve been reading this you’ve been mentally gearing up for my (hopefully witty, you cross your fingers) contribution to the titanic outpouring of hatred against improper grammar, spelling, and punctuation that already floats about online. You can stop bracing yourself; you won’t get it. Two points on this:
Point the first: It’s porn, for fuckssake.
When it’s porn I really don’t care. I will not be brought back from the brink of orgasm by a misplaced apostrophe. (Honestly, if you’re brought back from the brink of orgasm by something so minor, I would suggest that you examine your grammatical hang-ups with a more critical eye.) In literature these things are important. In porn, frankly, not so much. I spoke out strongly against the Kushiel series recently not because they aren’t good pornography (they contain, in fact, some scattered moments of very good pornography) but because they aren’t good literature.
And point the second: Of course I would prefer proper grammar, proper spelling, proper punctuation, but good writing is not the same as these things. I suspect that many potentially good writers (pornographic and otherwise) don’t write because they fear being vilified over these aspects of their craft. And, of course, because on the internet there are no full time copy editors.
When I say “write well,” I mean to present developed characters, engaging scenarios, powerful interactions, and emotional growth. That sounds more complex than I could rightly ask for in pornography, but it’s actually a deceptive set of very simple ideas. A character can grow emotionally by simply moving from pain to acceptance. Our erotic imaginations have scenarios and interactions galore. As I said, pornography is about action. And as for character, which seems to stump so many people, hell, there are characters everywhere. Write slash if you don’t want to make your own. Appropriate your friends. Appropriate people you see on the street or meet in shopping centers. Appropriate your blogroll. I’ve been appropriated in pornography a few times in the past, and it always seems to turn out remarkably well.
And that’s it. It’s not a very long list, being the Cliff Notes version. But as May said last night when I was ranting the baby beginnings of this post at him, “Sex just isn’t that complicated.” And in the end, he’s right.
Now that I’ve written all of this down, I think I might just go write some pornography of my own. Who am I writing for? What’s on your how-to list?
Friday Night And Sweet White Wine
Friday, May 16, 2008
I wouldn’t usually allow myself the indulgence of posting in this blog while completely knackered on wine and Friday night promises. But I am just drunk enough that I’ll let it slide. Just this once.
Here’s what I wanted to say, the thing I probably wouldn’t say without that sweet white wine:
I also have an oral fixation.
May is siting across from me right now in a leather armchair, with his leg stretched out along the beige carpet, and when I look at him I think, “Fuck dominance, fuck dignity, all I want to do is lick my way up the skin of his legs, his hips, his stomach and neck, and sate myself in the texture of his hair. All I want to do is lay him down on our bed and let my mouth go roaming.” My mouth tingles with the thought, his soft, butter-smooth skin catching on my lips, opening to me, offering to me.
His skin is like vanilla ice cream. I look at him and want to eat him up with relish, like a delicacy. Earlier he brought me my wine in a tall water glass, and I pulled him up against the rough fabric of the couch, scraped my teeth over the fleshy head of his cock and tried like hell to ignore how much I wanted to just bite down.
There is a weird fucked up paradox that places want and need in submissive spaces. The part of me that is a drunken, dominant, desperate connoisseur is here to tell you: that is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I want May so badly it hurts to look at him. My mouth aches for him. My fingers tingle when I think of touching his velvety, amazing skin.
I want him. Fuck all the shit that says I shouldn’t want, that says I have distance and control. I have no distance. I barely have control. My lips pulse at him, the urgent need to just push him to the floor and devour, to pick him up and curl him in my arms and eat him whole.
The Pen Is The Tongue Of The Mind
Monday, May 12, 2008
I’ve joined FetLife, a curious experience simultaneously stimulating my interest in social dynamics and making me want to stab unwitting stuffed animals with forks. I should begin by saying that despite my intermittent screeching noises, it really is a good site and a sound premise, and hopefully it grows into something of a real community.
The stabbing, you ask? Ah yes. The site is simply a little microcosm of kink, and as such occasionally prompts me to sharpen forks.
The well shot, well proportioned, laughably stereotypical picture on the home page of an older, greying man holding the throat of a young, beautiful, bound woman is thankfully no longer getting under my skin, because Maymay is a computer genius. I asked him to make sure that picture never shows when I load the home page, he fiddled a bit, wrote some code doohicky, and voila. Customized log in, Eileen-annoyance free.
And since changing my orientation from “Dominant” to “Top,” I am no longer identified under a gendered abbreviation. Unless some shockingly clever person manages to push “toppe” through as the new label-du-jour, I suppose.
And I admit, I refused to friend the three young men from New South Wales who each requested foot worship sessions with me.
But these things? They are just my little nitpicks. They are not really problems, per say. Just a friendly confirmation that the quirks of our subculture are alive and kicking. And yet, I am beginning to reconsider my membership. This may be part of a massive shift in my life which has pushed my kink awareness under in favor of work and domesticity.
The thing about a microcosm of kink is that no matter how hard I try, it’s only a matter of time before something crosses my radar that just inflames me. And no, I’m not talking about the big issues here. Oh no, I’m perfectly capable of becoming inflamed over tiny things that people less prone to passionate annoyance will shrug off, or simply fail to notice.
I joined The Kinky Intellectual’s Book Club FetLife group. And as I did so, I made a tiny internal bet with myself. “What do you bet, Eileen, that this group will go three days without mentioning Kushiel’s Dart?”
“I bet nothing. I refuse to throw perfectly good money away.”
Good thing I didn’t bet. But oh, the annoyance.
As I have previously mentioned, I have read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series. At the time, I was ambivalent toward them. They are not staggering works of literary genius. They are passable fantasy that occasionally wanders into “decent” territory. (Yes, you may dispute this. I have high standards. We know this by now.) I am no longer ambivalent. I feel now, toward these books, an annoyance that momentarily lingers on inflamed irrational rage.
I have had these books recommended to me on a rate of about four times a year for the past six years. I am sick of being told I should read these fucking books, so sick, in fact, that I will now sometimes, in very snippy moods, head off sentences that begin with “Have you ever read…” by interrupting, “Carey? Yes, I have.” They do not deserve this overflow of effusive praise. They are simply not that good.
The Kushiel series, along with a very few other titles that compose the core (and only) BDSM fiction reading list for those of us not inclined to get our wanks from online erotica, operate within a starvation economy that skyrockets their value far beyond anything my tastes will allow. We are so desperate for kinky material that’s been proofread and couched in narrative that we will devour, praise and pimp the passable. And since I’ve written here before about my utterly devastating erotic obsession with artistic skill, one can imagine how this makes me feel.
From here I veer off in two directions, both writerly in nature. Starvation economy of words? Duh. Create more words.
There is the little tickle in the back of my brain, the one that moans of how unfair it is that to find kink content I like I’m best off creating it myself. But that little tickle is the remenant of an indignation that has long since fizzled down; it is, after all, not unfair for me to produce content if I genuinely love producing content.
On the one hand, there is that distinct temptation: “Eileen, how about you write a nice juicy kink/fantasy crossover novel? You’d be rich! Rich, I say!” I’ve gone far enough down this road to have sketched a setting, a plot, some subplots. I’ve done character profiles, even toyed with the first few pages. I have, essentially, a half-decent, passable working novel idea. But I’m still feeling my way through fantasy genre writing, and I don’t know how I feel about writing passable novels.
And then, there is the hand that wants to write the real story down. The story that’s on this blog and all the natty details in between, all blended up in a realist half-fiction that’s more worth the time it would take to write and the time it would take to read. I want to write kink and love the way Stephen Elliot writes kink and love. I want to squash Mistress Nan off the market and completely redefine the “real experiences of a dominant woman” in all their intricate, clumsy, laughable, joyful ache and glory.
A telling insight on my ego: I desire to possess skill and desire to possess the skilled. I keep falling flat on my face for artists and writers, the body as a metaphor for the intellect, the intellect as a metaphor for the body. Or, to put it bluntly: the better I craft, the hotter I get. The better you craft, the hotter you get.
