Writing erotica is a lot of fun. It’s sexy and hot and I love letting my imagination wander. It also comes with its own set of challenges though, and in this blog post I would like to take a look at one of these challenges.
One of my favourite erotica books (or series of books) is the Baumgartner series by Selena Kitt, mostly because the books feature very hot FFM threesomes. But one of the problems I have with it is something I like to call tangled limbs. With that I mean that sometimes it is hard to figure out the various configurations in a sex scene. It really irked me, but it wasn’t until I started writing erotica myself that I realised how hard it is to keep track of everyone.
Generally when a sex scene features two people only it is relatively easy to keep track of all the limbs. I still have to visualise the scene in my head so as not to introduce a third arm or have my characters perform impossible acrobatics, but it’s not impossible. When you start introducing more people, however, it becomes a lot more challenging.
Imagine the scene: you have a woman, let’s call her Carly, enthusiastically going down on another woman, let’s call her Joan. Joan fingers Carly’s pussy, so as a writer and reader, it is clear that the women are in the 69 position. So far so good. Now we introduce Henry, who also wants to get involved. Henry grabs Joan from behind and roughly enters her. But wait…wasn’t Carly on top? So Henry should either fuck Carly from behind or Joan missionary style.
This is just one moment in one sex scene. Joan, Carly and Henry will change positions, otherwise things will get boring, and you want to make sure that they all get an equal amount of interaction. To make matters more complicated (but fun and exciting), we add another man – or woman – to the mix. So we have another set of genitals and four more limbs to keep track of. More tangled limbs, more potential confusion.
So, while it seems a lot of fun to write sexy stories (and it is!) you do need to be careful to keep track of everyone. Otherwise the whole affair becomes a mess of tangled limbs and implausible positions and the reader will be more distracted with figuring out how everyone is positioned than getting off on a steamy sex scene.