I wish I could remember the name of the French director who defended his art film as erotica rather than porn when he said “porn has no suspense.”

If you’re a writer who cares about sales (I know that you don’t, and I have ambiguous feelings about it) you write the cardboard characters because that’s what the largest percentage of readers are looking for. They don’t want a conflicted dom with self doubts and personal issues who makes mistakes. They want perfection. They want, in essence, a fantasy, not a person. However, if you’re a literary writer, the character as a person is your focus, and you don’t want perfection. Far from it. You want messy. You want flawed. You don’t want easy answers, and sometimes, you don’t want answers at all. And if you find that sliver of readers who want that too, then you have a story as a dialog.

Keep me posted about your results. You know I’m interested.

It will be interesting to see the results of this study!!!! Thank-you for your words!

I might disagree with you Papi, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t acknowledge that the rationale behind your approach to erotica is as legitimate and valid as mine. Probably more so, since I think that most people will agree with you. I don’t accept that bodily reactions during sex count as dramatic tension. But hey, that’s just me.

I’ve taken a while to reply here because I wanted to read some of your longer works from Amazon as work points from which to think about our topic. As with the short pieces I’ve read here, I find your writing to be complex, intriguing and, in spite of what you’ve said here, wank-worthy.

But I would ask that you consider the distinction I’m pushing for here. If you want to distinguish between erotica and porn, okay by me; but I think the idea that it is necessarily not literary or is lower to write “just sex” or having “just sex” is, first, wrong, and, second, an idea that degrades the complexity and challenge of sex writing. My argument here is that “just sex” has plenty of conflict in it — muscle walls conflict with the fluids passing through tubes; tension builds, is relieved; comes back again to fill us with need, aggression, rage; the meaning of all this is felt in the moment. Sex is what drives erotic writing; sex is enough. I’m not sure how there is less tension or conflict in Fleur’s desire to have unprotected sex with all the men in the club to see if she can feel their individual come inside them, and Sophie fucking Mok after having an orgasm getting her ears cleaned. I think there is transgression and a compelling story, and that it is pretty much the same one, in both of these places.

All genres have their limited vocab and bell words: when John Milton has Raphael tell Adam about the War in Heaven he opens the book (Bk VI of Paradise Lost) with “the rosy-fingered dawn” because he wants to throw the reference to Homer. I think the limits of this genre, like all genres, are the challenge and are what makes it great.

Lastly, here’s John Updike’s “Love Poem.”

In Love’s rubber armor I come to you;
b
oo
b.
c,
d
c
d:
e
f–
e
f.
g
g.
Does this poem call us to reflect on the predictability and banality of the sex act? Does it mock fucking and the attempt to write about it? Or are the lines left blank because fucking, just plain fucking, unfolds a mystery that Updike wants us to think is ineffable and profound, like Dante going blank when he tries to describe what it was like to look at God. Like Ronald Wallace’s “You Can’t Write a Poem About MacDonalds,” does this poem say that fucking is too small or too big to be a literary genre of its own.

I understand your point here completely. And read your work with real admiration, and now also with affection and in collegiality. I hope you’ll consider that I have an idea what my writing is trying to do and that, win or lose, I’m doing it for reasons that make sense to me and I hope also to you.

In friendship,

P50