Mills & Boon - How To Write Erotica - A Mills and Boon Guide

Selection of Erotica Available from Mills & Boon

The Original Sinners series by Tiffany Reisz

THE SIREN

THE ANGEL

THE PRINCE

THE MISTRESS FILES

THE MISTRESS (coming soon)

By Megan Hart

TEMPTED

BROKEN

DIRTY

DEEPER

SWITCH

COLLIDE

THE SPACE BETWEEN US

By Portia Da Costa

IN THE FLESH

DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH

By Saskia Walker

THE HARLOT

THE LIBERTINE

THE JEZEBEL

By Eden Bradley

THE LOVERS

Collections

12 SHADES OF SURRENDER:

BOUND

UNDONE

10 SHADES OF SEDUCTION

All available in eBook

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Contents

So You Want to Write Erotica?

Porn vs Erotica

Your Kink or Mine?

Characters

Plot

Technique

How Not to Write Erotica

So Go and Write Some Erotica

Excerpt

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE EROTICA?

The tall, dark, handsome publisher sat down on the corner of his polished desk in his big office and smiled at the shy girl who had just been shown in, bearing a big manuscript of an as-yet-unpublished but (she hoped!) publishable book, which this good-looking publisher might want to publish if he liked it and thought it would make a lot of money for them both.

‘So you want to write erotica?’ he asked in his deep, masculine voice.

‘Yes, I do,’ she managed to squeak through her tightly constricted throat.

‘What are you like?’ he asked, curiously.

‘I know, I’m awful, aren’t I?’ The would-be author blushed. ‘If my mother knew what I had been doing all these weeks up in my room where I live with my parents after spending three years at college studying English Language and Literature, she would swoon terribly!’

‘I meant,’ the publisher said, twinkling his green-amber eyes with a devilish grin from his strong, square jaw, ‘why does a sweet, innocent little thing like you want to write erotica in particular?’

‘There is a lot of it about now, isn’t there?’ the girl replied earnestly. ‘And I was always very interested in writing at college so I thought I would try my hand at this.’

‘This pretty little hand here?’ demanded the publisher wickedly, taking her delicate right hand and stroking it between his big manly ones. Her womb went all funny and she got a hot feeling in between her legs where they met at the top, or nearly met because her lady parts were in the way of course.

‘I used this one too,’ she whispered huskily, holding up the other hand. ‘I typed.’

He took her other hand and rubbed it up and down his thigh like a cricket ball.

‘Would you care to have dinner with me tonight?’ he invited her politely. ‘I would like to get to know you better—’ he checked the name written on her manuscript ‘—Chablise?’

‘I would love to—’ her eyes searched desperately around on his desk for a name plate or something so she could call him by his first name, but there wasn’t one, but then after what seemed an eternity she finally glimpsed a letter addressed to him from a firm offering water cooler refills at discount prices, which happily had his first name on it, which she was able to read upside down ‘—Burke.’

So they went out to dinner and later on he published her book, which was a great success, and they slept together.

That’s not how you write erotica.

The language is bland, the exposition clunking, the characters are two-dimensional and unoriginal, there is no plot development or conflict, the author knows nothing about the environment in which she has set her scene, the descriptions are banal and the ending weak, with no sense of surprise. Any of these faults on their own would be enough to cripple any piece of writing, but most damaging of all for a potential piece of erotica is this: there is no sex.

The market for erotic literature—and any self-respecting writer of erotica should at least be aspiring to write literature rather than simple pulp—has never been greater. Erotic literature, primarily written by and mainly aimed at women, has become one of the biggest publishing success stories of recent years. New writers are coming on to the scene all the time, so if you’ve already dipped your toe in the water by reading stuff that has intrigued and excited you, or maybe already tried your hand at writing a few erotic stories yourself, then this is the guide for you. We shall share with you the secrets of success and the pitfalls to avoid. Whether you want to get into it for fun only or with a serious financial purpose in mind, your chances of success can only increase if you know what you’re doing and how to go about it.

Technique can be learned. What you need to bring to the mix are imagination, industry and a unique voice. Nobody can predict what the next big thing will be and we can’t tell you what to write—that must be between you and your Muse—but, if you can bring discipline and confidence to the work, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be the one to produce the next big franchise.

So good luck. Be bold. Be brazen. Begin.

PORN VS EROTICA

‘There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.’

—Oscar Wilde

Tell someone you are a writer of erotica and they are likely to be intrigued. Tell them you write pornography and they may suddenly go quiet. Some will even take a step away from you. The words themselves come with their own overtones, justified or not, and, while there is no question that erotic literature has become a lot more mainstream over the last few decades, the debate continues as to what the fundamental difference is between pornography and erotica. At best it’s a grey area—no need to count up how many shades exactly—and this is not the place to attempt a definitive prescription of what constitutes one or the other. But the following is a brief round-up of the current consensus, which may focus your thinking and help you produce the kind of work you can be proud of.

The word pornography comes from the Greek words for harlot and writing, so porn is literally ‘that which a harlot may write’ (based on her own experiences, presumably—’write what you know’ could well have been as popular a mantra among ancient Greek literary agents as it is in writing manuals today). It therefore implies that the sex described is nothing more than a business transaction, a loveless act where one party buys services in an encounter devoid of any kind of passion or mutual desire to get to know the other more deeply. Erotica is equally all about the sex in that its ultimate aim is to stimulate and excite, but it seeks to do this by other, less obvious means. Erotica is as much about the process as the end result and concentrates at least as much on the way the people feel about each other as it does on how those feelings are manifested. Interestingly, those feelings may not always be demonstrated in the most standard, straightforward, or even dignified way. The spectrum can extend from the simple act of holding hands at one end, all the way down to anything from handcuffs and beyond at the other. But its focus is always primarily on the essential relationship and not merely the physical act of intercourse...or fellatio or cunnilingus. (Get used to these words, you’ll be seeing more of them and their like as we go on and, if they make you uncomfortable now, you might like to rethink why you started reading this guide in the first place!)