Despite being in an erotic writing group, I haven't written much in a while. Why this is the case is a complicated story. My inability to write naughtily is due to a confluence of a few things and the final element came to me yesterday as I was driving home from work.
The first reason is pretty simple: I have too many orgasms. Between liaisons with my girlfriend and indulging in every man's favorite hobby, my reservoir of sexual energy is often tapped out when I sit down to write erotica. But it only takes a couple days of abstinence to recharge the batteries, so to speak. Related to this is a sub-confluence of two things. One is the fact that I've got several writing irons in the fire. There are a few writing projects that require research as well as reviews of CDs and a book that have occupied my mind recently so I just never seem to find the energy to be creative erotically. Concomitant to this is my latest place of employment. Being a high tech outfit, it is male-dominated. And there are all off four (4) hotties there. I miss working in a place where I have regular contact with women whom I find attractive. Being able to admire physical beauty and engage in flirtatious conversation has always been salubrious for my creativity. Plus, unlike the situation when I worked downtown, I can't walk outside the building and get caught up in a mass of humanity. I work in a business park so everyone is in a car. Whereas Wednesdays during the warmer months used to mean wandering the farmers' market and eyeing more than cheese curds, everyday here is the same with its bland, solitary ritual of walking out the door and jumping into my car. Interacting with people face-to-face is more a necessary evil than basic human need out here.
That this is having an effect on me was really driven home last week when I made small talk with a barista. Once a quotidian activity that seemed as normal as breathing, it actually felt odd to me last week – foreign yet strangely familiar. The situation is thrown into sharp relief when I attend our bi-weekly meetings. I am there with like-minded folks, a few of which happen to be beautiful women. The air crackles with energy that is a mix of creativity and sexuality and I naturally tune into it. I hear some wonderful stories and this gives me ideas and inspiration but, by the time I step into work the next day, it's all gone.
The last thing hit me, as I mentioned above, as I was driving home from work yesterday afternoon. It occurred to me that what I'd written since joining the group and most of what my fellow writers have done was more pornography than erotica. Now, when I use the word "pornography" here, I don't mean to conjure up letters to the Penthouse Forum or cheaply made sex videos from Los Angeles. Instead I use it in a more neutral, generic sense as contrasted against erotica. I think that there's a difference between the two even if it is a massive gray area and perhaps it falls into the I-know-it-when-I-see-it arena. I'll also note that, just because I've labeled most of our group's output as pornographic as opposed to erotic, this doesn't mean the stories have been bad. On the contrary, some fantastic fiction has been generated by the members of the group.
When I think of pornography, I think of something that has the single-minded goal of sexual arousal. Depictions of the human body and various actions are the means to that end. Erotica, on the other hand, uses sexual arousal as a means to a different end. It's difficult to put into words just what that end is but one way that isn't too bad is to say that erotica's goal is to explore and enjoy one's sexuality. And sexuality shouldn't be thought of as a mere laundry list of things that get you off because I feel that it's more than that. Sex is a physical act but sexuality is an aggregate of feelings, preferences, and attitudes. I tend to think of sexuality as letting the libido be free to roam as opposed to keeping it locked away only to be taken out at certain times like fine china.
Yeah, I'm being deliberately vague here. But if I accept my own definitions here, if I proceed under the mindset that porn has a narrow focus (sexual arousal) while erotica explores sexuality which is some kind of look at a big picture, then how do I write erotica? When we critique each other's work, it seems like the main thing that we focus on is how to adjust the story to that it induces more arousal. If a scene doesn't make us horny, then we explain to the author that it didn't and suggest possible changes. To me, this is a process of making better pornography. There's nothing wrong with this and the stories that our little group comes up with are a million miles away and a million times better than letters to the Penthouse Forum. But, at the end of the day, we're judging each other's writing by how much it turns us on as opposed to how it, for fear of sounding all high falutin' here, comments on larger elements of our common humanity. I personally feel that a story can be written which both sexually arouses and reaches out to feelings shared by most people on this planet.
Last week I. read a story that she was working on which involved a group of friends going camping. Someone remarked that the setup of the story was too long, i.e. – get to the sex quicker. There was a part in the story in which the heroine expressed some unease with her less-than fashion model-like body and another person in our group said that this should be stricken from the story. (At least that's how I remember it.) Again, the criticism was that time was being wasted by giving the character depth when this could be supplanted by descriptions of her being tied up and having a cock put into her mouth. I didn't say anything at the time but I felt strongly that these elements made the story erotic as opposed to pornographic because it fleshed out the characters instead of just making them 2-D agents of pleasures of the flesh. The author, I., is a very beautiful woman but her body does not conform to the ideals of the runway model nor Hollywood starlet. I thought it great that she included in the story a bit of her own unease with her body image. That anxiety is part of her sexuality and is one shared by lots of other people and so I appreciated that she had put this into the story along side steamy scenes of naughtiness. I.'s story attracted me because it recognized that being sexual is something that goes beyond simple prurience.
A couple meetings ago one of my fellow writers said that he'd submitted a story to a website that publishes erotica and that it had been rejected. It was rejected on the grounds that the editors wanted more of a story and less of a vignette. And when he uttered the word "vignette" I had an idea for a short series of them that started with one inspired by a recent advice column. I realized shortly thereafter that it would probably be best to not share it with the group because it seems like my ideas of erotic writing are diverging from most of the folks in the group. At least not now. The mood of the group as a whole is one of interest in stories about the mechanics of a sexual encounter and not the issues surrounding it. Perhaps this will change. No doubt the situation is me as well. I seem to be in this mood where I'm less interested in the mechanics and more interested in portraying a playful mood. Plus I'm in the frame of mind that comes every so often where I find myself interested in more experimental writing. During these times I think about writing stories that are less straightforward and use the fact that they are written with words to some end. I feel the tug of James Joyce and John Dos Passos and want to respond to that.
We'll see what I come up with. Three quarters of the battle seems to be just clearing my head and dedicating some time to writing a story.
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