Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Sizzle Quickie

Sizzle Quickie

I have just concluded the Sizzle class and pulled it together into a final assignment. For those not familiar with the Sizzle class it is a module from the House of Sensual Prose (HSP) taught by SoCalScribe. The teaching point of the class is to develop the ability to spread sensual writing throughout a manuscript and not wait for an intimate scene and then start from scratch…At least that is my interpretation.

I have an interest in the subject because I’m convinced that erotica when done tastefully takes a genre story to the next level and thus is something that that all writers should try and improve at. It is much more difficult than one might think and writers here at Writing.com ought to take advantage of the opportunities provided by HSP.

Anyway having completed the 5 week course the last requirement was the final where the 5 episodes needed to be integrated into a whole. This created an insurmountable problem for me to overcome because each of the parts were essentially stand alone vignettes which were also entered into the Weekly Quickie Contest. Despite the fact that they had the same characters and each assignment contained a different objective, they all were expected to build on the proceeding assignment, satisfy the teaching point, and culminate in a full-blown act of intercourse.

Let me say before going on that I applaud the stand-alone erotica vignette both as a learning vehicle and a unique form of Erotic literature…Anything that will help writers make their genres more than a bloodless piece of prose that is too timid or ashamed to look beyond the bedroom door, is an effort that has my enthusiastic support. However, the concentration of erotica in the Stand Alone Vignette, is much too rich to fly in a traditional literary genre.

I say this because just as sex is of short duration in the overall life experience so should it be in a larger and more traditional work of literature. Here at writing.com I have read some marathon examples in concentrated and prolonged sexuality and while some of these are well written they begins to wear thin the longer they continue. My rule of thumb is something in the range of 2-5 percent of a larger work is reasonable for the main course independent of any sexual tension which is another matter altogether.

The analogy I like to use is the cooking one…Erotica is the spice and the genre story is the main course….You don’t want to make chili that is forty-percent peppers and spices.

Thus in trying to integrate the 5 vignettes from their local form into a traditional sounding Short Story was an overwhelming task for me. Some of the other writers that did not fully commit in each of the assignments to the intercourse requirement will no doubt succeed in a more convincing fashion than I did…and I must say that the quality of the erotica that has emerged from this class is some of the best erotica I have seen written on this site.