The Truth about my Erotic Stories

“So like… are they true stories?”

I find it laughable how many people believe the stories I write, the stories that any erotica author writes, to be true. As if they’re all accurate accounts of things we’ve experienced.

First of all, it’s more than a little insulting to insinuate that we aren’t capable of crafting stories like any other author. That what we write is merely a regurgitation of real life, and that imagination and skill has nothing to do with it.

While some people do write about their experiences, that is not a universal truth of erotic fiction. Like any story, however, there are elements of truth that will arise. For no author can truly dissociate from themselves and write something disconnected from their lived experiences and observations. But erotica is just as much a genre with potential for artful scene setting, complex character development, appropriate pacing, room for prosaic poetry and (some other literary elements here) as any other thankyouverymuch.

But I’m not here to rant about that today.

Are my stories true? Short answer: no.

Long answer: the stories that I write which come closest to “true accounts” are gratuitous rewrites of how I would have liked the scene to go. It could be built on the bones of a real encounter, but with the tension or plot points or characters exaggerated to a point that would be entertaining for an audience. I have frankensteined scenes, including a love interest who is (to me) a freakish glom of 2 or 3 or 4 past lovers whom I’ve drawn some thematic thread through in order to jam them into a single vessel, a setting with which I’m intimately familiar (probably a bar that once signed my paychecks), and a situation that breeds unease in a dramatically familiar way.

Take The Slap Bet for example. The narrator, Meg, is not me, but she’s not not me either. She has something of the tone of a Jayne with a couple of shots of cheap rye whiskey and sore feet about working 60+ hours at a restaurant in dilapidated black flats. The protagonist’s colleague, Erin, who provides the conflict in the story is not a former colleague of mine, but she’s not not some combination of people I knew — I really did have a coworker who wanted to slap someone and got someone roped into a slap bet so she could justify it, but the stakes didn’t involved anyone having a threesome in the building. And that building in the story is 100% a restaurant I once worked in, but I never once had sex in it — big bucket list fail there.

All that to say: the sex scene in that story, despite all the realness that surrounds it, is 1000% fabricated. Meg has a boldness that I did not possess – definitely not then, and I’m not sure I do even now. And I’ve very – very… – regretfully never had my threesome with two eager and willing bisexual boys.

I don’t write true stories because they don’t have anything to offer me. I might be able to capture the beauty in the mundane in a way that would snare the reader, but it brings absolutely nothing to me to do it. I feel nothing when I put the words on the page. Nothing close to what I feel when I create a scene that didn’t exist before I imagine it.

Besides, to try and capture what was already as potent in real life as it was going to be is like chasing a high when you’re already developed a tolerance. It’s just never going to be the same. And the harder you try to replicate it, the more likely you’re going to end up disappointed or hurt.

To be honest, I don’t think I could though – capture the power of those perfectly potent, beautifully mundane moments, I mean.

Take for example…

You’re wrapped in a lover’s arms in the dead of night. Not naked – it’s too cold for that. You’re not quite asleep, and they’re drifting away faster than you. They twitch; it startles you too. With the sudden uptick of your sympathetic nervous system, you become acutely aware that you’re both still alive – something you’d nearly lost track of as you flirted with the dreamscape. The realization carves a shiver through you, followed by prickling heat that melts that frosty trench. The combined effect makes your head spin, but for a moment, and sends a throb to your groin. You might get a second thump if you concentrate your focus to the area long enough to savour it a bit longer and will your pelvic floor muscles to squeeze again, though it’s not as powerful as the spontaneous one was.

You snuggle in a little closer to your slumbering beloved — they didn’t even notice their own death prevention twitch, never mind the entire journey you went on in the seconds that followed.

There is no sense of urgency then. No desire to disturb your sleepy state, nor your partner’s. You simply relish in a few surprise seconds of concentrated life while you straddle the veil between consciousness and sleep. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, the echoes with reverberate through to the next morning.

While it makes for a lovely snippet, it’s not much of a story. It lacks everything that makes a tale read-worthy to someone who hasn’t yet experience it.

So no. My erotic tales, while truths may be peppered in to varying degrees, are not true stories. When the real thing is good, it’s too good to be retold.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash