Standing up: lying down. Bound and gagged: free and loud. Safely-first; safety-last. Fully-clothed: disrobed. Face to face: sixty-nine. Anally: vaginally. Manually: orally. Angelically: demonically. Yes, there are many ways to have sex, maybe more than one can possibly number. Similarly, there are myriad ways one can write about it.
However, that has not always been the case. Several writers - D.H Lawrence and Henry Miller to name but two - became notorious simply by writing about it at all. They were famous for nothing more than inserting a little sauciness between their relatively puritanical pages. For years, their books were deemed too subversive for dissemination, were dubbed obscene by straitlaced, well-meaning censors. They were smuggled and seized, sought by statesmen and schoolboys alike, who furtively fingered the offending passages, often inadvertently sticking those well-worn pages together.
But that was then, when knees were never seen and when the contraceptive pill was but a twinkle in the pharmaceutical industry's eye. These days, a little sauciness gets you nowhere; it barely raises an eyebrow, let alone anything meatier.
In this Internet age, the Interneposcene, when all manner of visual and aural abominations are available at the click of a virtual button, we require our erotic reading matter to contain more than the odd expletive, more than the occasional tit, cock or cunt. In these decadent days of extreme excess, the discerning reader demands debauchery of every conceivable kind. There we are then, in a nutshell. The erotic writer's quandary. How the fuck do you keep someone engaged enough to keep turning your pervy pages, when a plethora of pussy-pounding cum-spraying porn is a mere click away?
I, for one, am not sure a writer can. And that's not me being defeatist. It's me being honest. Look around you! Instant rewards are everywhere. Online porn. Online gambling. TV box sets. Sky Movies. Sky Sports. X Box and Playstation. GTA (steal a car, snort some drugs, shag then kill a hooker - and all before breakfast!), COD, and enough addictive all-action gameplay to last a hundred lifetimes. What's that you say? People will always need a good read, a nifty nip of quiet escapism from their humdrum lives? You may be right. You may indeed. Yes. Let's cling to that hope and indulge ourselves. Let's see what we can do to bind our reader to our bed of words, to tease and titillate till they squirt their cerebral loads onto our pristine printed sheets.
Assuming I have not already lost you to some virtual slots, and assuming you've not been distracted by that too-loud advert on that too-big TV, bear with me. And, while you're at it, bare with me, for that is but one idea I have up my latex sleeve.
I, for two, can only write erotica when I'm horny. And it often involves some state of undress. And some type of ingress. I'm trying to be subtle here, but I can tell by your perplexed expression I'm not quite hitting the hole. Let me try again. When writing erotica, I am always horny, often naked, and often wanking. If female masturbation can be called wanking. Which I think it can. I am certain that being actively horny helps the creative process. There's many a naughty passage I can look back on and say, 'Writing that paragraph induced a wonderful orgasm! A stomach clenching, nipple-numbing, full-body cumming that sated me for hours...' Try it! The next time you're suffering from writer's block or whatever else they call a lack of imagination these days, loosen that clothing, slide in that hand and pummel whatever parts you have. Hormones will flow. The mind will open. And out will pour scenarios beyond your wildest.
But before you drown in the juicy stuff, a word or two about the basics. Personal grooming. Sharp fingernails. Dirty fingernails. Chewed fingernails. Fuck, how I hate them! Don't you? Of course! Literature also has its fingernails. And they need to be perfectly manicured to enter a reader's mind. It goes without saying that erotica demands even more smoothness and cleanliness, as those fingers are heading for even more intimate zones. And the fingernails in question? They are spelling, punctuation and grammar, or SPAG, as an English teacher boyfriend of mine used to call them. Now his fingers were always perfectly manicured. Soft, smooth and impeccably clean. Nimble too. Mmm. Sorry. Where was I?
Like perfect nails, perfect spelling is essential. Spellcheckers are literary nail files. Thankfully, they are computer-ubiquitous, so you have no excuse. But don't just run the spellchecker: read your work back. Over and over. As I am doing now to this. Ah! Found one! Just a moment... Look for homophones, those words that sound the same but mean something totally different. Knob and nob. Knew and new. Watt and what and wot. And those that, depending on regional accent, can sound so similar as to be almost identical. Your and you're. To and too. You know the ones. Fix 'em! From experience let me assure you of this: a jagged nail that snags on lacy knickers is ne'er going further. Similarly, one misspelled word and the reader's literary legs will snap closed. Mark my words!
Bad punctuation is surely literature's equivalent of dirty fingernails. And it's not always easy to get right. Because - in many cases - there is no right. Or wrong. There is, however, a general consensus. A consensus that says 'however' should never follow a comma, 'and' should never begin a sentence. And nor should 'because'. So I'll fix those later. Or maybe I'll leave them to the editor. Yes. I will leave it to him. Anything wrong with this piece is his fault. It was perfectly perfect when I emailed it. While I'm on the subject, beware of editors. Editors will nit-pick. And they may well have a 'house style' to fall back on when common sense rails against them. Best to leave them to it. I had a boyfriend who was an editor. Pain in the arse doesn't describe him. Well, once a month it did, but that was more about friction than fiction. So don't go ballistic over an ellipsis! Don't give a shit for that colon! It's not worth it. But timely full stops and capital letters are a must. Commas demand consistency. Exclamation marks and question marks answer for themselves. Get them in there!
And then there's grammar. I've chewed that down to the cuticles on many an occasion and often simply had to give up. Because it's not art: it's science. I'm an artist, for fuck's sake, not fucking Isaac Newton. Yes, there are laws of grammar, just like there are laws of motion, but they are far too numerous to learn and far too exotic to even begin to understand. So don't bother. Simply read a lot then read some more and some more and then some more and more. Keep doing that. Eventually, you'll soak it up. Like an osmotic sponge. Then all you'll have to do is to say, 'Does that sound right?' And if it does, it is. For grammar, much like punctuation, is one person's opinion over another. Language changes. These days, drowned by a tsunami of popular culture, it's changing faster than ever. What was wrong yesterday (If I was) sounds right today. What resigned you to the working class (It was me) no longer negatively affects your social climb. Go on! Trust yourself! I trust you already, would allow your dancing digits into my every orifice. And I don't let just anybody do that, despite what they say about me.
So here we are. What you've been waiting for. The nitty-gritty. But wait! Would you believe it! I ran out of words! And I never got round to the bad breath and body odour, never mentioned the questionable dress-sense, the socks and sandals of a writer's metaphorical wardrobe. But I will. And soon!
Till next time,
Alexandra xxx
Image taken from the illustrated 'Once concealed: now revealed. A nifty nip of naughty poetry' by Alexandra Amalova.
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