Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Writing Contest Erotica

Writing contest Erotica

As I mentioned yesterday I have been writing contest erotica for about a year and a half. I read a lot of elegantly written material that is what I call “Bloodless Prose.” This is writing that looks good but is lacking in passion and does not connect viscerally with the reader…It reminds me in a lot of ways of technical writing that is not supposed to contain any passion…that’s only purpose is to convey instructions. It’s prose that has been cooked in an autoclave.

When I write romance fiction…it has to connect with the reader in a way that excites the spirit within us. I have also been writing about the muse and spirit and will not belabor the point here except to say that I believe the spirit inside us can weave its power into the structure of the prose we write and preserve for posterity, not just a set of instructions but also a feeling and spirit

Going a step further I think the spirit expresses itself in our work using sexual energy…That to animate a piece of literature we need to use that sexual energy…It is volatile and hard to control and too little fizzles and too much offends the sensibilities…you need enough to ignite and sustain a work but not so much as it goes over the top and makes the reader uncomfortable.

To better learn to use this powerful tool requires hard work and practice and that is why I do contest erotica…Now be advised that the form of this type of literature is different from the form of others and what it takes to publish a novel and what it takes to win a contest are two entirely different things.

What Contest Erotica does for a writer is that it can make them better writers. It doesn’t always because there are two approaches to writing it. The first approach is to try and win contests. Here the focus is knowing what the judge's tastes are in erotica. To determine this you go to their port and read a sample of their work…Their work will show what they find exciting and that’s the type of erotica you need to write….”Excite” is the operative word. You can call it pandering to the judges if you like but it’s no secret and clearly set forth in most contest instructions that this is the primary criteria on which your submission will be judged. Now there usually some other criteria that are thrown in like story line, and attention to detail (i.e. grammar, spelling and punctuation) but the biggie is “Excitability.”

The problem is, that if there is a single judge, you are going to see the contestants slanting their writing in the direction of that judge's preferences…If the judge is a straight hetero…then a gay lesbian submission is not going to excite the judge….as a consequence having “Excitability” as the main criteria has a serious shortcoming. Another problem is that even though a judge tries hard to be objective there are support groups which have been around for a long time and human nature being what it is, judges are inclined to look favorably on the work of their fair haired guys and gals. For these two major reasons I do not think a writer does themselves any favor trying to game these contests with a goal of improving their chances of winning.

The value in the contest is to see how other writers approach the same prompt and developing your skills as a writer. If this is your intent you take another approach entirely….In this school of thought you look at the prompt, then the word count and blaze away to write the best possible story regardless of who the judge is and what it takes to win. In the Weekly Quickie, run by one of the most open minded and principled of judges, the word count is 869 words…A writer blazes along for about 1100 words and then stops…Going back they get a clear sens e for the story line and then strip out all the adjectives, adverbs and redundant thoughts and phrases….Hopefully this puts you down into the 600 range and you use the remaining word count to spread the grease where it does the most good.

The ability to parr back a work in this manner is a great edit tool for your other work and takes a second edit to a whole new level...I do "Bad Cop" reviews (Via E-Mail) for my friends which are essentiall one of these edits on their contest smbmissions.

For more specificity you can see my folder “Classwork on Erotica.” And file “Rules of Thumb for Writing Erotica.”I have tried to include most of what I have learned in this file and found that this approach has done a great deal to improve not just my erotica writing but my writing in general.