Other Orifices: New Ways In to the Erotic Moment

When you first start writing erotic fiction, most of us come to it with years of imagery built up in our brains. Stories we’ve honed through multiple self-tellings, over and over, with our hands between our thighs. At first you may stall a few times, but then the courage comes and with it words flood across the page.

I don’t know what it is like for other writers, but I definitely reached a point where, although I loved developing the characters, the setting, the twists and turns of their circumstances, I started to get very bored with writing the sex. Or rather, I started to bore myself. It seemed I had found all the ways it was possible to describe the act. But this is an arrogance. Our language is far, far too rich for one person to exhaust, in a lifetime, all the ways of telling that are possible.  The problem is, our understanding of how to write it becomes too calcified. That’s when you need Kristina Lloyd‘s Sex Machine (which she featured in her wonderful session on creative writing at Eroticon 2013):

Yeah, it’s just a spreadsheet. Admit it, you thought it would be phallic, right?

It works by forcing you to think about imagery and language in a non-linear way. It makes you form associations –  things, actions, feelings and sensations –  which  you would not normally make. The green parts are, for the most part, bodyparts applied to sex. Pretty straight-forward. The red areas are sexual verbs, the purple parts metaphors, adjectives, descriptives, types. For example, #1 ended up being, a type of animal for a lover. I chose ‘scorpion’ but had no idea how that would apply to everything else. But just chosing the animal without initially associating it with a person meant that, when I did so, I had the makings of a character I might never have thought up if I had sat down and approached his creation in a rational, linear way.

Similarly, for the purple block on the far right, the prompt was – you push your face into the lush moss of a forest floor – what’s it like? Later, it’s used to think about proximity to another body: damp, decaying, nourishing, ancient. Wow.

Under #4, the prompt was: things that are white: vapour, sand ice, marble… for ejaculate.

I’m sorry to say I can’t remember exactly how she managed to elicit all the responses to fill in the blanks, but you get the idea. This is really a metaphor machine that will produce original, fresh, vibrant metaphors for erotic events. It prohibits you from relying on the same old ones. It doesn’t write anything for you, and of course, there are going to be things that clearly aren’t going to work, but it does rescue you from the trap of relying on cliche.

At some point in your erotic fiction writing life, you are going to need something like this. If you’ve been writing a while and haven’t arrived at it yet, ask yourself if you are pushing yourself enough. It could be that you’re a creative genius who never revisits the same way of writing something twice, but that would make you a rare bird. The rest of us mortals need help.

This strategy, of using lateral prompts to engender creativity, is not new. I have used Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on several occasions, to get me started, especially with plots. There’s a random Oblique Strategy generator online here.

There are also some great resources at the Seventh Sanctum site.

Good luck with your creative endeavors. I’m going to retire to think about my scorpion lover, and how his poisoned orgasms are like opium vapours.

*shiver*