Plato and Porn

**Edited Dec 27, 2014: I've decided to just be myself and not hide behind a fictional character. I'm taking my name back. She'll come back under another name, I'm sure, because her story is rather interesting.**

One of the biggest mistakes an author of erotica can make is giving a complete and detailed description of a character within the first few paragraphs of a story. It is so boring. Truly. Of course some of my earlier stories contain that error. I'm not ashamed. It's part of learning about the craft of making a reader horny as hell.

These days I like to leave out physical descriptions unless they have something to do with the moment.

That doesn't mean I'm excused from having a clear idea in my head of what a character looks like. In order for the story to stay consistent, I'll need to know their physical as well as mental and emotional attributes.

What does Ms Myrrh look like? I'm still working on it. I'd say she looks like what I think I look like, then I look in a mirror and am surprised that I don't really look like that.

She's not conventionally beautiful. You wouldn't find her in porn. But she's pretty in a realistic way.

She's got dark, chocolate-brown hair cut in a cute bob, blue eyes, breasts big enough to overflow one's hands, curvy curves, long legs in proportion to her torso, pale skin with a few freckles.

What I imagine is a woman most women can relate to without comparing themselves negatively to her. I think it's important to bring body positivity into erotica. Not because that would make porn & erotica more socially-acceptable, but because we, as consumers, already have enough negativity about ourselves being thrown at us from all corners: shampoo ads, that "not so fresh" feeling, whiter teeth!

All stories are stories -- they reach into that idealized space Plato spoke of and bring out idealized people, actions, words. But ideal female and male forms change over space and time to reflect a culture and its values. Unlike, say, a right triangle, the idealized human form is mutable.

So, when we get too specific in our stories, we never know if we're drawing a reader in more deeply or pushing them away. What is known, however, is that taking too much time to present the description in a block of text, we tend to pull the reader out of the story and, particularly in erotica, that can throw cold water over the reader. That's truly the last thing I want when I'm writing something hot.

Warmly,
The Author