Stupid Sexy Scarlet Blogs 2: Prose is the Queen · 8:08pm Dec 14th, 2017
Erotica is the ultimate genre of escapism. It surpasses and destroys all others. Action, romance, fantasy, and mystery all lend themselves well to escapism and power fantasy, but consider the fact that with all of those genres it's generally accepted that your story will have at bare minimum a semblance of a plot. Meanwhile, long-form erotic stories that have basic storytelling features like a dramatic arc and development of the central protagonist are often qualified with the description "porn with plot". You have to let the potential audience know that there will, in fact, be a story in your porn story.
Erotic storytelling is driven deeply by the reader's imagination, and depends heavily on your ability to suspend disbelief and become immersed in its details. It's not enough to have a detached enjoyment. For pornographic storytelling to succeed you have to completely conquer the mind of the reader, and your best tool and ally for doing that is prose.
Today we're going to discuss what good prose does and does not look like, and why you should pay extra attention to the prose of a porn story.
The power of prose in erotica may seem contradictory at first. After all, even a poor porn story can usually serve as spank material. The key difference is timing. If you're already worked up and you start searching for something to push you over the edge, almost any story will do so long as it serves as a jumping off point for your imagination. This is why even bad erotic artwork is often popular. By contrast, a good erotic story is capable of working you up without requiring you to be particularly horny going in, and reads even better when your own lust collides with the storyteller's attempts to excite it.
Controlling for all else, it's prose that forms the dividing line between stories that work only when your audience is already insatiably hungry for what you're selling, and stories that convert people to a new audience. A porn story with bad prose is like going to McDonalds for lunch. It's not ideal, but it's cheap, convenient, and it'll do in a pinch if you're starving. A porn story with good prose is like a really good local burger place: when you think about it, you just begin insatiably craving their food and wondering if you can get in there for lunch today, whether you were hungry or not.
So what kind of prose should you prioritize in your porn to get that kind of extra impact? Well, that's where the writing advice you've heard off and on since high school is going to come back for us: say more with less.
Well, actually, I'm going to elaborate because saying more with less is the simplified version of what's going on with good prose advice. It's the thing you say to the new writer to get them on board with the basics of evaluating their own prose before they develop a more nuanced understanding of what writing is and how to do it. Good prose isn't just about staying compact, though it is. It's about saying the most you can with the words you use. Good prose makes each word count for as much as it possibly can, and trims away extraneous elements.
Chuck has already brought up George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" as an example of how to learn to write better porn, and I'm not going to argue with the reigning king of sexy words. Aside from being an example of legendary literary dunking on par with Mark Twain's vicious takedown of the Deerslayer novels, "Politics and the English Language" is an excellent source for prose advice because of Orwell's focus.
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
Your prose can't just be words, it has to be intentions. The best wordsmiths aren't people who write with the intent of showing off how clever they are or indulging in the intellectual superiority of themselves or their audience, they're people who understand that writing a story is telling a story. They sculpt their words to create a specific effect on their audience.
I feel bad for poor Seraphem since this is the second time I'll be using him as an example of how not to compose an erotic story, but he's 1) relatively popular, 2) prolific, and 3) very bad at holding back when it comes to prose. A key detail of every Seraphem story is that every word he ever thinks of makes it to the page, whether it belongs there or not. The end result is a confused jumble of prose which will likely skim right past you if you're reading it because your brain actually stops focusing after a while and starts actively tuning out of the story. Not the effect you want from your erotic pros.
Let's look at Luna Visits a Tentacle Pit for examples of trainwreck bad composition. I could write an entire essay on how badly the scenes are placed in relation to each other in this story, but for now I want to restrain myself to pointing out a particularly bad instance of prose:
Deeper and deeper it forced itself, Luna was sure she could see the bulge in her stomach as it filled her breeding tunnel, claiming every last inch of it as its own. The copious sap-cum and her own arousal provided plenty of lubrication as it pushed closer and closer to its prize. It finally stopped as she felt the seed-carrying tentacle collide with her deepest barrier, pressing against her cervix. It pushed, fought, tried to force it’s way in, making Luna groan and cry out, the plant heedless of any discomfort on her part.
If you are anything like me, your immersion in this sex scene made it to the words "copious sap-cum" and you immediately lost your shit. These three words completely destroy the mood and flow of the rest of the passage. It's an oddly whimsical and silly collection of words to throw into a passage where the general mood is supposed to be focused on the arousal of the character and the discomfort she's enduring. You can't get lost in what the character is feeling because you're too busy thinking that sap is really sticky.
It's not fair to Seraphem to double down on my comparisons here, though, when he's hardly alone. I'm not much of a fan of MythrilMoth. I hate his porn. I hate it with a burning vengeance. And "Sunset Shimmer's Victory Lap" drives home why. Despite being an erotic story, the prose has as much sense of foreplay as a fifteen year old who's just learned what a penis is. The dialogue is mostly inane, the sexual attraction of the characters treated as something to tell rather than something to show, and the dialogue characterized by exchanges like this:
As Sunset reached for her second slice of pizza, she asked casually, "So, Flash...who has the best tits in Canterlot, in your opinion?"
"GAH!"
"Sunset, stop that!" Twilight said.
"What? I'm just curious," Sunset said. She looked at Flash. "Well?"
Flash broke out in a nervous sweat. "Uhh..." He looked between the two girls and gulped loudly. "Geez, what...what is this..."
If your idea of "sexy" is entirely defined by jokes that would be right at home in an episode of Love Hina, this story is highly reccommended. If you grew out of Love Hina in high school, I highly recommend you forget I ever mentioned it. The time you spend retaining information about this story is finite, and you will never get it back.
For contrast, here's a passage from ChuckFinley's "Cuckoo Wasp" (Content Warning, this is a non-con fic):
The pain blazed as the first stroke cut down across her inner thigh, the shock of it making her choke on her spit as her whole body arched. Not agonizing, but intense, like the kind of hard slap to the face that knocks rational thought from the mind and oozes adrenaline from every pore. She coughed, breathed through her nose, and concentrated on pushing her mind out of her body, reducing pain to an acknowledgement of sensation.
Can't you just feel that sensation in the back of your mind as you read? Each detail is meant to sink you deeper into the experience of the character, not to relate to her as a detached observer. The story wants you to feel everything Chrysalis feels. And given that porn stories consist mostly of conveying feelings, that's absolutely integral.
Or how about Letterhead's "Tied Up in a Neat Little Bow"?
There was another pause, a little longer, while Rainbow seemed to wonder... something. Then a wingtip reached out and trailed down along Twilight’s spine just at the waist, from the small of her back to the tip of her tail and back again, even as she nipped at Twilight’s neck. “We don’t have to, you know. We could stay right here, where anybody could see us...”
Letterhead's prose is less dense with sensation than Chuck's, but in the context of the full story it's deeply immersive, pulling you into the fantasy slowly and then forcing you under. It's also just really good. Seriously, I love this story.
As a final point before wrapping up, I want to address a common contrarian comeback to advice like "say more with less" - about about good authors who are wordy? Ramblers like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams? How do you explain them? The answer is that neither of those authors is particularly wordy. Adams and Pratchett don't tend to waste words at all. The reason people think of Adams or Pratchett as being wordy is their tendency to use tangents and layered humor in their writing. Both men have a tendency to break away from their main story to suddenly divert into a self-contained humorous sketch for a paragraph or so before returning to the main story in ways that connect well.
They're also perceived as being wordy or dense or "tell-y" mostly because they're impossible to speed-read and still have an idea of what's going on. Adams tends to vanish into his particularly humorous jokes - I can remember more about the prose of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy than I can about the personality of the characters. Pratchett, meanwhile, is so densely constructed that in some of his books you literally can't miss a sentence and still understand what's going on further down the page.
Remember: prose is the queen of porn, and she's a harsh mistress. Your story can succeed with very bad prose, but it will be succeeding despite its qualities, not because of them. If you at all care about giving an audience something they'll come back to again and again, something that'll be a story they return to and not simply a disposable thing they consume and forget about, you'll pay extra attention not just to what kind of story you're telling, but how you're telling it.
Copious sap-cum.
And a very merry copious sap-cum to you, too.
This is an interesting blog post that, while I feel I have the basic thrust down, I could stand to improve on always.
And hey, I always appreciate a reminder to try to do better whenever I write.
"copious sap-cum" is right up there with "prolific baby-batter" on my Phrases To Avoid At All Costs list.
Another excellent journal post that I am thankful not to be the butt of. You tell it how it is, and it's always a great read.
Excellent blog post, and it's the kind of advice that will definitely help me when it comes to writing for almost any genre, even if they're devoid of erotic scenes. And as others have mentioned, stuff like "copious sap-cum" and similar phrases are definitely things I'll remember to avoid.
Disagree. I think this sentence:
I think the combination of the length of the sentence mixed with the specific motion of trailing, the way that a single feather 'pops' as a sensation because the feeling of one against your skin is so distinctive, the shortness of 'from the small of her back to the tip of her tail and back again' working because they're describing a short length of the body, I think that gives it a physicality of sensation that mine doesn't match.
I definitely agree with this RE Pratchett and Adams and the like, but then... there might actually be writers who are wordy and also very good, and I wouldn't be able to tell because my ADD would shut my brain off after three paragraphs of Dickensian filibuster.
Understanding this was my personal "The rest is commentary" realization about writing.
Very helpful blog Scarlet. I've still been needing to get started on my own erotic story (yes, I will shamefully admit it on here), but your blog posts about smexy prose has brought me motivation to work on it more.
I dunno, I made it to 'breeding-tunnel' and started cracking up. Another lovely piece. Nice choice of good examples too.
For extra fun, every time you run into one of those immersion breaking phrases, imagine it's a pony.
Copious Sap-Cum is the scion of an up and coming Vanhoover syrup empire. His mother was a big believer in using thesauruses rather than traditional baby name books (though to be fair, in Equestria, there's not much difference.)
Excellent things to say on the subject of prose in general, and I'm pretty well always up for bringing in some Orwell. But what had me thinking most was the distinction between exploiting an already existing state of mind and actually building one up from scratch. It's not something I'd consciously thought about before, but definitely recognize in retrospect.
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One of the interesting things there is that "breeding tunnel" is overly technical/stilted, but not in the way that Luna can be. Which adds to the detachment.
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"Copious" is hard to work anywhere without support, but for me an extra problem besides the rest (silliness, stickiness) is that it's not sequentially appropriate: the action being described doesn't match "cum," it's way earlier in the process (especially with the related implications of the quotation).
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That's as far as I got as well. I mean, it's not the best example of 'Wait how does someone think this is sexy' I have ever seen. That goes to a particular slice of RP that was shared with me that I stared at in incredulous awe and wondered how anyone could write that and maintain a straight face.
4749323 Exactly.
I actually lost it at "breeding tunnel".
Like, seriously? It's presumptuous of me, but generally having babies is not on my mind when having sex, and comparing a vagina to a tunnel is...
I'm guilty of weird word combinations when I'm trying to write porn and having fun. It's... kinda difficult not to. It's like an inner Pinkie Pie taking over.
I would imagine Pinkie couldn't write very good porn. But, well, I just might enjoy it anyway.
I'm here because another blog linked this one. And on some level, I'm glad. I would like to agree with a lot of what has been said. It sounds sensible, reasonable. It sounds like it was written by someone who knows what she's talking about. And at the same time, that exact thing scares the shit out of me.
Because I'm nothing if not insecure. A couple of weeks ago, I commented on a good story with a topic that would obviously polarize opinions (suizide/self-harm), and I did so honestly - with a controversial opinion. I did not mean any harm. I just wanted to share my point of view. But as it quickly turned out, that point of view is inherently harmful. I hurt someone, or at least riled them up. In response, I apologized, explained myself in a PM and deleted the comment. It seemed sensible and no one has complained about that, so I guess that's alright. But in those past weeks, I found it difficult to comment on stories I read, even those that don't seem controversial or polarizing in nature. Because I can't stop thinking: What if I offend someone else again? What if I hurt someone else again?
Then I read MrNumber's blog. Sensible. Reasonable. And an utterly insane comment section. It was scary. Intimidating. I almost did not dare comment at all, and my comment isn't exactly anything to write home about. It contributes basically nothing.
It led me here and I read this and... it's sensible, and reasonable, and scary. I can't tell if I'm 'guilty' of any of this. And because I am who and how I am: If I can't tell, I assume the worst. So I am. Guilty, that is. And I don't even know why it bothers me so much. I needed months to muster enough courage to even publish that story and my intention never had been to write for an audience in the first place. I don't want the attention, I don't want the followers, I am still thinking about disabling the voting system (and comments as well, maybe). I'm not trying to be a world-class author. I never will be. And that's fine.
And yet, I'm utterly intimidated by this series of blog posts. To the point that, for a couple of seconds, I pondered if I should just... delete this story. Scrape it from existence and pretend that never happened. 'Just to be sure'. And while I disregarded that thought quickly enough, I can't help but feel rather apprehensive about continuing to write. Because at the end of the day, I am a person ruled by his fears, and they are plenty and easy to come by.
Nothing of this is your problem, of course. It isn't and it shouldn't be and I am not entirely certain why I am even writing this. I really would like to agree with you. You seem like someone who knows what she's talking about.
And that scares me, for some reason.
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First of all, thank you for taking the time to leave a comment here. I've been very spotty in my interaction with Fimfic for a while now, and it's always nice to see that people are still getting something out of things I wrote three or four or - wow, 2017? That's almost five years ago now. I've learned so much as a person and a writer in the intervening years that I wish I could bring back and share with people from back when I was at the actual height of my readership, but that ship sailed a while ago. I appreciate the kind words you've left for me personally as well.
I'm about to say something that I hope will give you something to hold onto, because my intention with writing this blog - with all the blogs I've written - has never been to intimidate other people or imply that writing is something you should be scared of. I wrote these blogs because there was a dearth of the kind of erotica I wanted to read at the time out there in the world, and I hoped that by explaining what draws me as a reader to stories and what kinds of writing technique enhance them, I could encourage more people to take that advice on board and write something they could feel proud of. I never wanted anyone to feel too scared to touch their own stories.
At the time I was writing this, I can't remember if I'd written Safety Bell yet, or done anything in the larger CTS-sphere, which I'm no longer connected to but made some dear friends in whom I still love and appreciate to this day. Back when I was writing that, I also remember feeling deeply afraid, both to have my own work scrutinized and because, as silly as it sounds, I put a lot of myself and my own interests into that story in such an uncomfortably raw way that it intimidated me. Today I'm proud enough to look back and it and say that while I agree with many of the criticisms that were leveled at it, and I kind of wish I hadn't gotten cute and instead written a smut story and a mystery instead of trying to write both at once, it holds up enough that I'm not ashamed of it.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that as an artist, looking back on your old work is always going to be a somewhat mortifying experience, and mistakes are an unavoidable part of the creative process. Rather than be too afraid to make them, I encourage you - and every aspiring writer - to understand you should proceed with caution when on dangerous ground, but to sally forth boldly anyway. Think of this advice as "Here There Be Dragons", not as "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here".
While most mistakes are harmless, there are mistakes that can hurt people. The best way to avoid those - and this is advice I wish I had written at the time - is to show your story to other people and ask advice before putting it out there in front of the world. While you probably don't need to hire a sensitivity reader for your fanfic, there are people who do exactly this kind of work for a small fee (including me), and also people who'll do it for free if you (understandably) don't want your hobby fiction to have a budget attached. If you're delving into a subject you don't know much about personally, asking someone else for help is always a great first step.
The last thing I'll say is that the decision to delete an old story is yours and yours alone, but if you feel you made mistakes, confronting them, taking ownership, and then moving forward with whatever new things you make is in some ways an even more powerful gesture. I have multiple older blogs and stories out there on the internet, some of which are still under my name. Every so often I look back at them and, well, I cringe. I've made many points clumsily that should've been made elegantly, been excessively mean at times when I should've been academic, and made simple errors I should've corrected before posting. While I'm embarrassed now, I like to leave them available to look at - both for the sake of anyone who found them helpful, but also because they give me a benchmark I can look back on as I grow as a writer and a person and strive to do better.
At the end of the day, worrying if you're "guilty" is not the final goal of any of my instructional writing. If you are worried you're screwing up, you are already self-aware enough to recognize your flaws and improve, and that's the most important step. I cannot tell you what to do, but I sincerely hope you find it in you to look at this blog and any others I write not as an opportunity to be cruel to yourself, but a chance to confront any mistakes you've made in the past boldly and declare your intention to surpass them. All I've ever wanted from myself and from others is a desire to improve. If you have that, you already have the most important tool you will ever need as a writer. Take constructive criticism to heart, but do not ever be afraid to receive it. When you realize you have hurt someone, apologize and make restitution as best you can. Live well, write boldly, and take pride in what you make, no matter how silly it is.
I hope these words give you something more than I was able to with this blog alone. I hope you are well. Thank you for reading.
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It's sad to see the fandom diminish more and more with each passing year. Natural progression, I suppose, but still sad.
Doesn't sound silly at all. Quite the contrary, that's something I feel like I can emphasize a lot.
I am grateful for your kind words. Curiosity led me in here, but the vague hope of maybe learning something, maybe improving something, kept me going.
Thank you for writing/answering.
And being nice.