Most of the time writing erotica is fun. I get to daydream about attractive and appealing characters who fall in love or fall in lust, then have hot sex. What's not to love?
But writing about sex, even when writing about a character – someone outside myself – who is doing things and saying things I wouldn't or couldn't, is very intimate. Maybe it's because sex itself is such an intimate act. Maybe it's because in order to make a scene work I have to put myself in the characters place, even if only for a few minutes.
That's when writing erotica becomes less fun.
That little voice in the back of my head starts muttering how someone I know will read this and even if strangers read it they'll judge me and think I'm a whore or a tramp or repressed and projecting unnatural appetites into the fictional world as some means of achieving vicarious satisfaction for an unhappy sex life in the real world.
It whispers that I don't have the experience to write about this kind of thing.
It tells me I'm vanilla.
It tells me I'm perverse.
It tells me I suck.
It's difficult to separate what I write from myself, sometimes. Because no matter how different my characters are from me, no matter how far removed their world is from mine, if I'm writing their story well there are a few seconds where I feel what they feel as if it is me. That's scary. That's what makes it difficult to ignore the voice that wants me to censor what I write.
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I cut things out or change the way a character acts or what they want because it quiets that prude sitting in the back of my head judging every word I write.
Then, my writing suffers.
The only way to write anything – erotica, horror, fantasy, chick-lit, mystery, whatever – is to do it honestly. Even when it is uncomfortable. Even when it is personal.
Otherwise it's just words.
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