We sit for a while, and he reads bits of my story, and we talk about the relationship of character and action. He becomes interested in a character: a boy who stands against a wall with his shirt off, his eyes closed and mouth open, completely silent as a girl with a grin presses a knife to his face, and then hits him in the shoulder. He’s a character I based off the Boston Boy, except I’ve changed his name and re-imaged his life, and kept his face, his body, and his nuances of sound.

How does this character’s silence betray his personality? My older friend asks me these and other questions. He calls my writing “acceptable” and I laugh at him, a little.

We talk, and I think aloud, and then he apologizes for kicking me out so soon. A famous author is coming to see him, and I just don’t rank. That’s all right, I assure him, I understand. And as I say it, the famous author is at the door of his office. We are both caught by surprise.

My friend introduces him to me. “Nice to meet you,” I say as I shake his hand and smile.

“Nice to meet you too,” he replies. He is very short, and round, and I like him. I have heard his books are terrible.

My friend then introduces me to him. “This is Eileen,” he says. “She’s a pornographer.”

I smile again. “Well, aspiring.” I amaze myself with my own suaveness.

The famous author looks between the two of us, and then everyone chuckles. “I’ll be one of your best customers someday,” he jokes, although I wonder if he’s really joking.

“Great,” I respond, “someone’s got to read it.” And I smile one more time, and say goodbye. As I walk out of the office, down the stairs and into the light rain, I think how proud I am that I caught that curveball and threw it back. And I wonder when I became content with my pornography. And I wonder how many times I’ll have to catch that ball again.

I go to a library and find a desk by a window. I curl up in the chair, and then I write about sex.

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 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?

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(Sidenote: Commonly when people are frustrated or put off they become angry, or any number of other emotions. I become annoyed. My ability to be annoyed is epic, intense, and entirely more serious in nature than the mild word “annoy” can really convey sometimes. This is not to say that I reach this intense level of annoyance every time, say, my waiter doesn’t refill my water glass quickly enough, but I do have a very low tolerance for being annoyed. I felt that deserved a sidenote, because it’s one of those wacky insights into my character that just screams dominant.)

Usually eroticising a portion of a film for me means pulling out a tiny snippet, somewhere between a few minutes and a few seconds, in which something entirely kinky and sexy goes on, and pouring over it. Of course the movie generally continues blithely on as though it has no idea I’ve just gotten myself all twisted up in instantaneous knots. This sometimes makes my theater-going experiences hilariously disjointed. For example, at the end of Pirates of the Carribean 3 Will and Elizabeth spend a bit of quality time on a beach together. During this period of sexy fun time, all of a sudden comes a weirdly random moment of boot and leg worship as Will kisses his way up Elizabeth’s thigh. The result was my internal monologue getting suddenly turned around and stuck, i.e. “Okay, plot, plot, character interaction, yes, this is all well and good, I see where this is – What the fuck? So HOT! No wait, go back! Shit!”

The invention of the DV drive in personal computers is really where eroticising fifteen-second movie clips began to take a dark turn for me. I will occasionally, when the mood strikes me, pop in a favorite movie, skip to a favorite scene, and watch literally 20 seconds of this scene over and over. And over again.

You think I’m joking. I am so not joking.

Why do I do this? Of course it helps that generally the actors in movies are twelve thousand times more attractive than real life people, and at least fifteen thousand times more attractive than most film porn stars. It helps that these moments are on demand, at least to the extent of my DVD collection. But most of all I think it’s a combination of personal connection and absence of guilt. I have a personal connection with the character of Superman because I have known who Superman was possibly since before I could read. (I read at the age of three, so there’s a good geeky insight for you.) So having this character I know so well get beat up by a crowd of roughnecks is appealing, and sexy. But I also know that in the end, Superman’s an actor, he didn’t actually get stabbed with a kryptonite spear in the new movie, and it’s really and truly okay if I want to play that moment of him falling to his knees six times in a row.

(Sidenote: I know, lots of sidenotes today. This should be another post entirely, but the reason I like eroticizing film media generally more than written media is because of the sound. You will see ample proof of this in my list of eroticized moments, coming up below.)

Scene folks ask other scene folks all the time when they first knew they were kinky. Some people have crazy stores about having their fathers tie them up in bathtubs at the age of four. *cough* No one I know. I have crazy stories about dressing my younger brother and his best friend up as my dogs and leading them around the house while pretending I was a princess. But the best, the truest proof that I have been kinky since before I knew what words like “sex” meant are these eroticised moments. I have been doing this for as long as I can remember, all the way back to Planet of the Apes and Star Wars when I was still in elementary school. And I knew there was a reason I always had to watch The Ten Commandments on Easter, every year.
Presented with a fascination as a child that I simply couldn’t articulate, and growing up in a house where opinions on sex were liberal but conversations about sex incredibly rare, it seems that I learned to draw what I wanted from the best available sources even when those sources were esoteric, or entirely banal. In doing so I created a way of thinking that means that even today my ability to follow intricate plotlines can be thrown off by one submissive moment from a romantic lead.

Because I know you’re all just aching to hear them, here follows a very few examples of erotic moments within mainstream (or not so mainstream) film media that I have, over the years, possibly watched more than once. There are only a few, because I will not delude myself into thinking that anyone wants to read the full list.

-Big Fish: During the scene when that guy (Billy Price?) beats up Ewan MacGregor in the daffodil field, there is one shot where Ewan is pulled upwards and attempting very weakly to put his hands in front of his face to defend himself, while trying to say something that sounds suspiciously like, “No, no.” Of course the entire scene is enjoyable, but that one three second clip is my favorite.

-Logan’s Run: Okay, talk about super contained; this is literally a one-second clip. Logan is being threatened by these funny sticks that spray some sort of hurtful gas, and is standing inside a ring on them with his hands over his head while being agressively questioned. He says something in an upset voice, a stick sprays him, and he gasps and flinches. That’s it. That’s all he does. Makes a little whining noise in the back of his throat and closes his eyes. And yet, so hot.

-Superman Returns: Within the larger sexy scene of Superman being beaten up when he finds himself accidently on an island made of kryptonite, there is a shot of Lex Luthor leaning over his while he lays on his back on the ground holding only his head up. Lex leans in a bit, and they have a beautiful little moment of confrontation as Superman struggles to just keep his head from sinking back down into the muck. Lex, the remarkable Kevin Spacey, smiles just a tiny bit. Hot.

XMen 1: Hugh Jackman has woken up from the middle of a nightmare to find that he has accidentally stabbed Rogue through the chest. He calls for help and starts freaking out. Rouge struggles to lift her hand to his face, and as she does so his gaze shifts from her hand to her face and back, possibly from fear of her touching him combined with panicked concern for her welfare. His eyes get bigger and he trembles rapidly. Hot.

Curiously, in writing these down I have discovered a couple of themes. For example, all of these moments take place within longer scenes with eroticizable (it’s a word if I say so) themes. Also, clearly I kink hard on sound, and masculinity, and fear. But then, I knew those things.

And now, I’m off to blissfully browse my DVDs.