Chapter Text
Starting out
- Play around in your drafts. Leave them incomplete. Skip over parts that don't spark joy. At first, you just have to power through the awkwardness until you're desensitized. Try to think of yourself as playing with your toys right now and don’t get in your head about posting. You don’t have to post anything until you’re happy with it. Writing badly is GOOD, it means you’re learning!
- If you’re embarrassed, try writing with transparent text/windings so you don't have to read what you're writing...until later.
- Try out weird AUs, crackships, strange premises. Anything to help you take yourself less seriously. Fantasy biology takes away the anxiety about "getting it right", too...
- Listen to sexy music.
- Make sure you have your grammar basics in order. Correct SPAG will go a long way to making your smut seem competent.
- Focus on what excites you. Do you love writing dialogue? Porn can be 90% dialogue! Maybe you're excited to write for a rare pair, or you want better representation of butch bottoms, or you want to challenge a fandom's interpretation of a character. My motivations are mostly feminism and spite. Likewise, at first, ignore whatever scares you or puts you off.
- Don’t forget that fiction is mostly about conveying information. Especially when it comes to explicit fic, people are going to do most of the imagining themselves. You’re just giving them something to work with. That takes the pressure off you to come up with those big fancy sentences. (Unless you want to. Which you totally do, don't you? Stick around.)
- I'm going to proceed to advise you to write like yourself & say stuff like "a sex scene is just a scene where people have sex". BUT switching up tense or POV character or style can help you unlock a different side of yourself and take your Serious Writer Hat off. I usually write in past, but I love present tense for PwPs; it feels viscerally in-the-moment, yet almost dreamlike.
Basics
- Don’t be scared to use proper words for things. Say clit, not ‘pearl’. Say pussy, not ‘flower’. They may feel weird to you as you write, but the reader will find the euphemisms more jarring. You will get desensitized to them as you write - if you’re really embarrassed, try using euphemisms and then find+replace before you post.
For more neutrality you can often get away with using just pronouns (she pressed inside her) or vaguer terms like ‘entrance’ ‘chest’ etc, and even just ‘it’ when it’s obvious what you’re referring to. You can occasionally substitute a coarser word like tit or cunt but be aware of how it will change the tone. And don’t be afraid to call a strap a cock, or a cock a strap.Fuck it, call a clit a cock.
"I can’t actually…” He looked strained, like he might bolt. “I have stuff upstairs, wouldn’t you rather…”
She tilted her head in innocent confusion. “But I want to suck your cock.”
He shuddered. “It’s upstairs. Wait for m–”
Holding his gaze intently, she got to her knees, leaned forward, and mouthed at the faint bulge in his soaked boxers. He had to rest his hand on her head so he didn’t fall over; she could see his poor, tiny brain whirring. The sharp, sour scent of alpha receded from her senses as she focused on the way he worried his lip with his teeth, and the wet heat in front of her face.
With a sigh, she forced herself to sit back on her heels. “Whatever you have upstairs, I can suck that too if you prefer. But since you have such a cute cock of your own, I thought…”
- There are very few words for the basic noises and movements of sex. Make peace with that. In real life, people will probably be gasping the whole time, but if your fic says 'she gasped' every paragraph, it becomes jarring. The solution is NOT to swap in more experimental verbs. Less is more. In fact, the simpler a word is, the less a reader will notice how often you use it. Some words, especially more extreme reactions, like 'growl' and and 'scream' and 'slam' feel very booktok-romance-y, which will put off some readers.
Instead, see yourself as rationing the sighs/gasps/thrusts/trembles for those key moments. If a character trembles in three places, which one is the least important - or where does some dialogue or introspection already show their feelings? Once you set the scene, readers will naturally imagine these basics continuing throughout. The good thing is, this means smut is only 10% thrusting and moaning, and 90% stuff you know how to write already. - Don’t be afraid of plain language! Smut has a bigger chance of tipping over into comedic or even gross (in the not-fun way) if your wordcraft experiments go awry. Put away the word gyrated. Tread lightly with metaphors and similes. The interest will come from specific sensory details and character insights (more on that later) not from saying ‘her cock furiously erupted like a volcano’. Make clarity your first goal, and avoiding unintentional ick your second; everything fancy comes after.
As you get more confident, one well-chosen metaphor/simile in the right place can pack a punch, but less is more! As a general rule, keep your experiments away from the ‘risky’ parts: use that wacky metaphor to describe how someone’s heart feels inside their chest, not how the strap feels inside their pussy. - Don't overuse orgasms. Real-life sex can be very goal-oriented but in fic, it’s the most expected thing: it's often necessary, but it's not the part that will make readers swoon. There really are only so many ways to say ‘pleasure rushed through her like a wave’. Orgasms often function more like punctuation, indicating a resolution, transition, or pause, than really conveying information. And ‘show don’t tell’ really applies here. Writing the character having five mind-blowing orgasms in a row is not a substitute for showing that pleasurable sex is occuring.
But also. Write scenes where not everyone orgasms! Challenge the idea that an orgasm is the end goal at all! In general, one well-earned and built-up orgasm that punctuates a key moment is much better than an overload of screaming and eye-rolling.