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Harlan Ellison Says Writers Should Be Paid…But Not Always With Money

By
Ralph Greco
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I just caught a documentary about Harlan Ellison on Amazon Prime. Called, “Dreams with Sharp Teeth,” this is one of the best in-depth looks at this amazing writer’s career, with some great interviews with him, as well as Neil Gaiman, and other writers, plus some hilarious interplay with Robin Williams. There is no way you can watch this and not feel how important Ellison thinks the written word is, and how much writers should value (and get paid for) what they do.

This fantastic fantasist–writer for “Star Trek,” “The Outer Limits,” and scores of short stories–makes an interesting point about how writers who work for free devalue the art. On the surface, he’s correct. All the publicity of just ‘being seen,’ usually doesn’t matter much for future sales, but there is something to be considered here for the beginning writer. Coming from the high-end of the scale where he was, and having enjoyed his beginnings as a writer when writers could indeed make enough to live on, Ellison is not taking into account the times we live in (not that he could, this documentary was made in 2008) nor the fact that, in some cases, one needs to write for free to build one’s muscle and credits. Professional that I am, I still write for free for plenty of outlets. Why? Well, these places ‘pay’ me in ways that matter to me, while technically not surrendering coin of the realm. So, you will find these instances, be you acquiring product, prestige, or satisfaction working for someone you like and respect and maybe wholly enjoy the work.

From- Star Trek: Sexiest Aliens

The point is, you can be paid in many different ways.

For fiction writers and certainly for fiction writers of niche content (which erotica writing is folks, sorry to say), you will probably have to log some time ‘putting your stuff up’ on websites or into periodicals that simply do not have the cash to pay you. Ellison’s point to a filmmaker who wanted to use an interview he did, but balked when he asked to be paid for it, was that, hey, we go into a store and pay for milk, we can’t go down to the mechanic and get our car fixed without releasing some legal tender, so too do writers provide a product (in this case Ellison’s words about the subject he had been interviewed about) that should be valued.

Again, a great idea in theory, but in the real world, see how well it flies. Hell, if the great Harlan Ellison, arguably one of the greatest writers of the last century, had to fight for coin, where do you think you will end up if won’t ever write unless it is for a monetary payment?
But this is another one of those subjective calls. Only you can determine why one free instance is worth pursuing over another.

When payment does come into it, you will be on the next step up the ladder (and once you get paid for your writing, no matter how little the amount might be, you are then a professional writer, don’t ever forget this!!) you’ll then come to many instances where you will need to determine if the money being offered is worth your labor.

Ironic, isn’t it? We spend so much of our time and worry over hoping to be paid as writers that when the opportunity arises that we might be paid we then worry if it will be enough. Just because you are suddenly at the stage where you can bleed some bucks, don’t suddenly think all your calculations and concerns are over. In fact, they might just be starting…

For instance…

I generally take revision jobs well below what I would usually charge for my original writing (I am not sure if the best way to price a job is hourly, but sometimes I can do this, other times I can’t; another rule here is that you need to be flexible in how you calculate). Anyway, the point I am making here is, although I am getting paid in this instance, I usually come in with a lower price to do the job than I usually would because I know a revision (all things being equal) is generally easier for me than writing something original.

Photo by Mickael Gresset on Unsplash

Another example, from my fiction writing…

I came across a call from an editor looking for 8000 + word short stories. I knew I could deliver and get published in the two anthologies she was creating, as I had an excellent relationship with this editor, and in fact, she had reached out to me hoping to get something, which is always a good sign. Plus, the subject matter of each book fit perfectly with the stuff I like to write. As a side note here, I would end up placing a story in each book (although when the books came out, I had yet to be paid as promised, so a word of caution to even those editors and houses you know well, stuff—certainly payments—can slip through the cracks. Don’t worry; I got paid). 

Now, normally, I would have had to calculate the time it would take me to write whole new 8000-word stories (that’s 16 thousand words or more if anybody here is using their abacus) to what this editor was paying. But in this instance, I was lucky that I had a bunch of stuff already written or near finished that fit each book (I told you I write this stuff all the time), so retro-fitting something already written or just adding another 1000 words or so was not a big deal. Therefore, the money offered was undoubtedly worth it. But sometimes you will have to calculate if the time it might take you to do the work is worth what you will be paid for that work, or might take away from other work you could be doing that pays more.

Even if you have an agent out there looking for the best deals for you both, it will always come down to you deciding what’s best for you in each instance.

As I have been advising throughout each installment of this wise and oh-so-Earth-shattering-important column, most of this stuff is subjective. You need to do you best you can.

I don’t like to disagree with dearly departed Mr. Ellison, but sometimes you just ain’t gonna get paid, but sometimes that’s perfectly ok.

Featured Image by maitree rimthong from Pexels

Sometimes You Do Get A Check, And Sometimes You Don’t Know Why

By
Ralph Greco
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Photo by Nadi Lindsay from Pexels

Freelance writers usually know when their payments are coming in, spend an inordinate amount of time chasing those that are supposed to come in, and worry insistently about trying to get them to come in. Although I am terrible with anything that has to do with numbers, rest assured I try to keep up on those numbers that mean cash in my pocket. So, you can assume I was damn surprised today when I received a check from a rather reputable publication that I was not expecting for a piece of writing I can’t recall.

Yes, I do write a lot of erotica. I’d say more than half of my output is naughty writing, either article, blogs, or fiction. But I also write for mainstream clients and attempt to get fiction or little humor essays into those inoffensive old mags that have been around forever. It was from one of these magazines, that the check came from, for… well… for whatever it was.

I went on the magazine’s website to search, to no avail, and just emailed a letter to their editor, thanking him and asking, ‘Hey, by the way, can you tell me what this is for?’ I’d at least like to grab a couple of copies of the magazine to throw around as I don’t get to do this all that often when I get some piece of erotica published. Old aunt Tessie is a sweet lady, but she won’t take well to logging onto some porn site to read my latest on the best positions for spanking.

Don’t think for a minute I’m complaining! I love getting money, and I love that it seems a venerable old magazine has published me. I just have no idea what the piece was! But you might find this happening to you a time or two. Lots of places have online templates to plug your writing into. In the case of what I am assuming was published here, I probably scribbled off a little humor piece of 100 words and sent it off. I’m sure I didn’t even save the few paragraphs, figuring, hey, if they can use it, great, if not, no skin off my apple.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is, just keep sending stuff, throw your writing out and about, even if it’s little quips or a short-short. You never know who might publish you, and when you might see a check, you were not expecting.

Sex Writing: When Does The Rewriting Stop?

By
Ralph Greco
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Although Hemingway is quoted as having said: “The only kind of writing is rewriting,” there does come a time when you need to say enough, push yourself away from the Smith-Corona and declare the thing done. Surely, very few of us (even Papa H. it seems) can write straight on through from our heads to the page and not make nips and tucks (it was said old Isaac Asimov had this ability) but there comes a time when doing more gets in the way of doing any more… good.

How do you know when you reach this point? Hell, if I know. Ok, thanks for reading me this time. See you in a few weeks…

Ok, I’m joking. I’m not shuffling off that easy. It’s just that what you do or don’t do to your work, is not anybody else’s call but your own. All I can do is maybe point you at some sure signs that what you have been toiling over might be baked to well-done.

1.) You are growing bored with it. For the sake of what I am on about here, let’s assume you have already done some deep-dive rewriting on your piece. You have put it aside, come back to it a few days later, gave it repeated floggings (and really, what one of us doesn’t like a repeated flogging?). But on the fourth, fifth or seventy-eighth time back if you find you are more than bored with the thing, it might be time to say it’s finished and send it out or at least let somebody else read it. (And let me tell you if you don’t grow aroused any longer over a piece of erotica that came sluicing out your head, but you once did, you are as much done reading it as you are done writing it!)

2.) Whoever you let read it, reacts favorably. This is a sticky wicket to be sure (“Eww, your wicket is all sticky!”). In the end, what we most (not always) but mostly are hoping for is for someone to, at the very least, read our scribbles. Take your reader’s opinions with a grain of salt, though (and this is what I meant by the ‘sticky wicket’ remark). Akin to movie studios passing out comment cards at test screenings, each person’s opinion is simply…each person’s opinion. But if you trust somebody you happen to give your piece to, agree with their sensibilities, if they happen to react positively and indeed think the writing is ‘done,’ then maybe you can consider it done as well. (And again, if it’s a piece of erotica and your reader has to beg off for a quick one-handed tickle, this should be all the proof you need that you’ve done your job).

3.) Go on to something else. Nothing clears out the old writing cobwebs better than seeking a new love interest; in this case, creating or working on another piece of writing. Even if you do end up going back to revise the first piece, at least you’ll get away from it for a while, and you might just find that something new brings you to a point where you forget, or at least, let go the old.

Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

4.) Meet That Deadline. This one lets you off the hook…or adds pressure; take your pick. But for those of us writing for a deadline, especially one we have to meet to get paid, means we are only going to get a finite amount of rewriting.

5.) It begins to morph into something else. Again, this a hard one to navigate as sometimes we are as much unaware this might be happening, as unconsciously resistant to it happening. But it’s not so bad actually if your short story starts to unfurl itself into a novelette or that poem prompts you to pluck its wry rhyming meat and start a one-act play from its lines. The very fine point here is that: A.) if something wants to become something else, let it. B.) if in becoming something else, it might stop you rewriting it in the form it was, that’s ok and C.) you might end up with two (or more things) if the first thing (ok, follow me here, it gets a little bumpy) feels like it might want to be something else and you can stay patient enough not to completely trash that first thing for the new thing it seems to have become. In fact, I’d advise you to keep as much of your ‘things,’ as you can (hoarding anyone?)… Just open a file titled ‘Things-I-was-revising-that-became-something-new-but-because-of-Ralph’s-sage-advice-I-have-not-wholly-jettisoned-even-though-in-this-form-I-have-stopped-revising-it-for-the-present.’

I could bore you with writing about the many many many items of writing, short stories, articles, novels, and songs I have that are incomplete. I am still on the fence over whether this is a good thing—I am always flittering about, never bored and never suffer from writer’s block (as I mentioned in another article here) because I always have so much that needs finishing—or it’s a bad thing because it’s difficult for me to stay the course with one thing at a time (nowhere else but in my work though do I suffer this ADD. Or is it BLT? It might just be ELP or BTO, I’m not sure.) So, I am a rewriting addict, and I really do enjoy it more than I do writing (and I love writing). I guess the idea of never finishing a thing could give rise to the question if you indeed want the thing ‘out there’ even. But in lots of cases of lots of writers I know, we just want to get the thing as perfect as we can.

But alas, we ain’t perfect kids, and nothing we ever create will be. I’m not sure if that’s a comforting thought, but I do believe there comes a time when things are done. Just try and lookout for it.

Featured Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

 

Figuring What You Are Worth, and Sticking To It

By
Ralph Greco
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In quite a few of these sex writing columns, I’ve either skirted past what a writer should charge for his or her time and work, tried to wax poetic while giving salient advice, or have skipped over the subject entirely. And while you can find plenty of formulas for calculating your time, what this or that website advises this or that kind of writing might be worth in the marketplace presently, knowing what to charge and sticking with what you charge, needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Not just from one writer to another but even from the same writer considering one job over another.

Let me give you a recent example of something that was proposed to me:

An agent I had worked with a while ago, somebody who hits me up across Skype every so often or I’ll send a “Hey, how you doin’?” to every couple of months, left me a message that he has a new job for which he thinks I might be suitable. I had worked about a year-and-a half on a massive project for this guy where I had to employ six other writers to handle the workload. I made some good money, got to spread a little cash around to some writers I knew who could use it, and had some fun traveling a bit for the job. It also made me crazy in that I was locked at the computer all the time and, quite frankly, was scrambling to produce more content than was probably healthy for me to do, all because I was being paid so little I had to make it up in volume.

Hey, I had signed up. I knew what I was getting myself into, and at the time, I needed the dough badly.

The new job the guy is presenting? Well, the price for the work is, again, way too low. But these days, ten years on from the last job I did for this dude, my circumstances are a bit better (or maybe I just give less of a shit and really don’t want to aggravate myself now). These days I can choose to be slightly more picky with the work I may take (slightly) and once again, the price the agent quoted me is so low I can’t see clear to expending the time and energy on this job. I countered with a ‘family-and-friends,’ rate but I doubt the client will come up as much as I need them to… and believe me, I’m being very reasonable. I really would like to help the agent and a few more jingles in my old coin purse would not hurt, but I can’t take steps backwards.

But even when you are desperate for work, or know what you’ll be doing might be kinda fun (this new job would be writing dirty evergreen articles, a job that’s right up my back alley, so to speak) there are just some jobs that are not going to be right for you.

Working as hard as I have over these years I have found what I feel I am worth and generally I try and stick to this price quote. Assuredly this calculation wasn’t easily come by and making it for yourself will be one of the harder aspects of the freelance writing life you’ll come to. Like I mentioned, you can rely on formulas and calculations, or even simply assume what you’re worth, but you could come to price yourself out of jobs well before you have the skills or experience to handle them. Or you could quote yourself too low.

I’ve done both.

Consider how long you have been at this, what your unique skills are, and what the job will entail. Think hard on the job presented, will it require you to bend to a learning curve, or is it something you could jump right into? Has the time come now for you to up your quote? Have you just completed a bunch of work that you feel has really increased your skills and even your reputation? Or are you feeling the bite of a tough personal economy and think it might be prudent to adjust your quote, at least for a little while?

Get what you think what you are worth my dear fellow writers but always think hard on what that might be.

+++

Featured Image by Photo by maitree rimthong from Pexels

Sex Writing: How to Write Naughty Dialogue

By
Ralph Greco
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sexy dialogue

The Art of Writing Dirty Dialogue for Erotica Writers

What somebody says can be just as interesting and downright disgustingly perverted (in a good way) as what they do. Or so I try to write in my fiction. Sure, there are those scenes where I have two or more people baring their pink parts for various tickles, touches, and teasing, in complete silence… save a moan or two. But lots of times, my characters talk a good bunch of the naughty before they get down, especially when one character is doming another and might want to mentally tease and taunt well before they do so physically.

So, writing naughty dialogue is very important to bring your characters to life and add a bit of sizzling foreplay to your scenes.

How to Write Naughty Dialogue

How do you do it then?

IDF-ingK!

Ok, that’s not true. I do know. But as with everything else I have imparted so far in this series, how you write a few lines of back-and-forth banter or a long single-character diatribe should come organically from the scene you set up and how you believe your characters might sound.

Sure, there are those instances where somebody might be enacting a little role-play and therefore speaking in a manner they usually don’t (baby talk, stern master or mistress, maybe even with an accent they don’t actually have). But, as you do with all of your erotica, you should be searching for truth in your words, be they dialogue or description.

When a character opens their mouth, they should sound like themselves or the selves you have established along the way. Unless they are possessed or schizophrenic… or again, playing a role.

Masters of Written Word

One of the masters of the written word, Steven King (no slouch in the old writing department) makes a mention in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft that he’s as cautious of the overuse of adjectives as he is with the ‘he said,’ ‘she moaned,’ ‘he admitted,’ kind of dialogue descriptors. He does have a point. That extra stuff added at the end of some dialogue can slow it down. I think once you have established who is speaking to who, then you can probably let go of the ‘he/she said’ stuff unless a character is doing something specific when speaking that you want to have your audience ‘hear.’

“So, you admit you’ve been a bad boy,” Juanita said, giving Tom’s tight testicles another flick with her belt.

That kind of a thing.

Dialoging Sounds

I have gone whole pages with just dialogue written, nothing else. I am also fond of letting loose with a “SMACK” or a “TITPAT” to describe the sounds a paddle makes on a pair of bare buttocks or just the drumming of fingers across the inside of a thigh. So, you might come to want to create dialogue as much as sound, and we all know, with erotica, there are many options for sound.

I mentioned the fantastic writer Roger Zelazny a few columns back and his masterful ability for writing dialogue so economically, but at the same time so chock-full of a character’s voice, I came to know the men and women who populate Zelazny’s infamous Amber Chronicles as much by their actions as from their repartee.

You can aspire to be as good as Zelazny, but good luck getting to his level… or Steven King, for that matter. These dudes are masters of the craft.

Do What You Do Best

Lastly, you don’t have to write dialogue at all. What you scribble forth is your baby, birth and nurture it the way you see fit. Or your dialogue could just be to get you from one heavy humping scene to another and not be all that interesting or informative.

It is all up to you. I am just saying if you feel dialogue is right for a particular story you are writing, stay true to the characters. Try to listen to how they speak (you can even read the dialogue out loud if you want, sometimes hearing it helps to determine its authenticity to your ears) and don’t get mired in having to hold your reader’s hand every step of the way with who is saying what when.

EROTICA OR PORN: THAT IS THE QUESTION…OR IS IT?

By
Ralph Greco
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picture capture credit: from the 2015 film Fifty Shades of Grey

You say tomato, I say, shut the hell up about tomatoes already. Really, when it comes down to the oft considered distinction between erotica and porn, I have no idea what the difference is, and what’s more, I’m not even sure that there is a difference.

I have always felt that porn is more A-into-slot-B kind of stuff, where erotica fills in the gaps between those slots. Still, I can’t offer a definitive consideration of the differences; to me, it’s a subjective eye-of-the-beholder kind of a thing (and as Woody Allen said, “If the beholder is blind, just ask the guy next to you”).

Unless a publication you are trying to sell a story to sets a hard and fast distinction with their guidelines, or you know well from past readings of their stuff how intense/detailed downright dirty your story can get, I wouldn’t be too worried about what it is you are scribbling. As I told you in my first installment, write it, then worry about what it is later. I see all too often writers trying to fit their latest opus into a specific category, metaphorically battering round pegs into square holes of their prose trying to keep things in line with what they think they are creating. This worry puts unnecessary, and an all-too-early restriction on your writing.

Porn, erotica, a mix, and matching of a few genres, let it fly, I say, and who cares, really, in the end, what it turns out to be?

Let me tell you a little story…

E.L. James, the writer of the super-popular Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, began that saga as fan fiction. She simply let fly her fevered imaginings across a “Twilight” series fan fiction page online but was told right quickly, that she couldn’t be appropriating the characters from that popular vampire/werewolf series in the way she was (if she ever hoped to do more with her scribbling in a professional manner). So, she excised the “Twilight” peeps and tropes, recreating an original tale and soon…well, the rest is history. The point here is that E.L. did not worry so much about what she was creating. However, she was metaphorically spanked over it later (and given what she writes about, one could assume she likes a good spanking, real or otherwise), and her further tweaking led to unimagined success.

I don’t think she ever much cared what it was she was typing, be it erotica or porn, let alone even if it was completely original, at least at first (and to be sure, this writing in the style of or even using characters and settings from an author you love is an ok way of beginning to build your writing muscles; just don’t try and pass these efforts off as original).

In the end, defining words like porn and erotica is akin to using a word like ‘kinky.’ A spanking between one couple might be the high-water mark of the wildest action either person has ever managed in their sex play. To others, it is a mere usual Tuesday night after-dinner activity. So, really, can we settle on a specific definition of what kinky means, when it seems the word would mean something different for each person? And as with what you might think is kinky as opposed to what I might, I can’t very well tell you what you will think is erotica. 

I’m not trying to be obtuse. I realize that I can’t sell a hot and heavy story (and even there, our definitions of ‘hot’ and ‘heavy’ are probably different) to The Saturday Evening Post when that particular publication’s readership is pretty much G-rated for families. What I am on about here is the consideration, first and foremost, if what you are creating is erotica or porn, what actually is erotica vs. porn, and should any of us care about the difference when creating erotica or porn?

The world needs both, as far as I’m concerned.

Porn or erotica, let’s call the whole thing off. Just write.

 

Please don’t hate me, Grammarly, but I really don’t give a f***

By
Ralph Greco
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Image by AxxLC from Pixabay

I just hit a “Centenary Superhero” milestone with Grammarly (don’t worry, I didn’t know what it was either). In using the basic grammar program, which I do indeed recommend, I get reports on my writing from the company all the time. In addition to this new milestone, I am presently 82% more productive, 29% more accurate, and use 93% more unique words than the rest of Grammarly’s users.

Well, whoopie for me, huh?

Actually, between you and I, I don’t rightly give a rat’s dingus. If I could stop Grammarly’s insidious checking in and reporting on me, I would. I don’t need their tickling of my taint. I don’t rightly care how I measure up against others. I don’t even want to keep score on what I’ve managed to do.

This writing thing, penning naughty words, and mainstream stuff, is my livelihood. I am not in a competition or along for the ride of social media approbation. Sure, I want an audience. Sure, I love it when people connect with a story or come back to me and tell me how something they read of mine gave them a nice warm feeling (just as long as I don’t have to help them wipe up). And I especially like when I give forth on a class of would-be writers, as my buddy and fellow writer M. Christian and I have done on a few occasions at the kink conventions we have presented at… and hopefully will present at again with all this COVID b.s. is over. But I don’t care a whit about the opinion of some algorithm.

This Grammarly update speaks to a more significant dilemma of our modern world, and one I shan’t really dive into here. But generally, because of social media infecting our lives as it has (or more precisely how we have infected ourselves with it), people find it very hard to do anything without a response. People sign-up for exercise programs and eat well campaigns, enjoy Zoom instructions, pretty much get together across digital platforms consistently.

Sure, I’ll give you the pandemic. I know that has pushed us into isolation more than anything we have ever experienced on the planet. But why do we need confirmation so bad, the return tweet, and the ‘like,’ the fellow dieters? And why would Grammarly think I’d give a… well… a rat’s dingus, that I surpassed one of their milestones?

I’m too busy writing, which you should be too!

To journal or not to journal? What’s Your Preference?

By
Ralph Greco
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pexels by pixabay

Here we fall onto another one of those areas I can’t rightly advise you on from any true personal experience. I don’t journal. I don’t on a plane. In the rain. In a house with a mouse. I just don’t.

Do you? Have you never but have been thinking of starting? Have you heard your fellow writers espouse its virtues, friends prompting you, teachers assigning you to get to it for this semester? Maybe, you want to dip your toe into writing for the first time and feel this is a good way to begin?

Sure, get to it, I say.

Why don’t I Journal?

First of all, despite some high-school, and college creative writing teachers indeed assigning journaling to me, non-writers assuming I do it all the time, and plenty of well-intentioned folks giving me journals as gifts (and I’ve received some very nice ones, over the years) I’ve always felt that the writing I do pretty much during most of my day, is all the writing I want to do. I’m not talking about keeping a pad and pen handy at my bedside table, or in the car; I am constantly scribbling down ideas, turns of phrases, snippets of conversations I know might lead me into interesting territories for stories, etc. (and this practice of having pen and paper handy is one I can and do advise).

But the self-reflective ruminations that journals are supposed to pull from you (don’t get on my ass here, I know one can write anything they like into a diary, and I talking about diary-like scribbling here), I feel I’m already slipping that into my fiction, blogs, poems, plays and songs, especially my songs). I’ve always worried that, for me, journaling would lessen the vitality of my ideas or see me puking forth so often in a diary that I’d be too exhausted to write any of these thoughts in my ‘real’ writing.

Pretty much what I have against blogging for oneself or tweeting all day long.

Yes, I know the argument could be made that prompting a steady flow of stream-of-conscience writing keeps one better in touch with one’s emotions. That all writing keeps one’s writing muscles in shape. I can’t argue either point, but none of this is true for me, or more precisely, I am not going to start journaling now when I have never done it, and certainly have enough writing to keep me busy during the hours of the day when I am trying to earn my bread-and-butter money.

For some people, the only writing they ever get to, is what they manage when they journal. And being an old curmudgeon eschewing technology as often as I do, I certainly like the idea of putting pen to paper for whatever reason (I love how it so often shocks people to see me sitting in a Starbucks or some other over-priced too-cool-for-school coffee spot, working furiously on the papers of a manuscript, or actually reading an honest-to-goodness book!)

Really, it’s not for me to tell you to journal or not; if you have read any of this column before, you know by now I would never demand that a writer has to do this or that. Whatever gets you there, short of smoking crack or going out chopping up city sanitary workers, burying them in your basement and then writing what you feel is authentic serial killer short stories, is fine by me. (Actually, if you are smoking crack, that’s fine by me, but leave those city workers alone ok?)

To journal or not to journal, that’s up to you.

Naughty Memoirs; Erring On The Side Of Discretion

By
Ralph Greco
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Photo by Ekaterina Belinskaya from Pexels

The subject I am tackling in this installment can add up to quite the sticky wicket when it comes to erotic writing (and God knows, not everybody likes their wicket all that sticky). In one’s naughty scribbling, especially in the adult fiction one creates, one (be one lucky enough to have had some fun or have shelled out an inordinate amount of cash over the years) often plucks ideas from that which they have experienced as much as from what one fantasizes about.

But what happens when one takes their pen or flying fingers to an erotic memoir? How discreet should you be in making your real past into a story?

If you cover your shapely, possibly blushed posterior enough by changing names, places, and even tweaking action here and there, you can pretty much get away with masking real stories/memoirs. I’d recommend this, at least a little. Your exes usually don’t want to be outed, would probably rather there wasn’t a hint of them in your reiteration; discretion really is the better part of valor here.

But lots of writers want to stay as true to their experiences as they can, and charge full speed ahead by writing real names, specific places, and step-by-step saucy action into their memoirs. 

I’m talking less compromise here and more maturity.

Have you a care for an ex sex partner, a smidgen of good taste, and seeing as we are presently in the throes of rabid connections through social media, you might want to err on the side of not telling tales out of school even when you are telling ‘those’ kinds of tales.

I have been working on a memoir for a while now, a full account of some of my wild and woolly years of singledom, specifically as this time in my life relates to the kinks I have enjoyed with some wonderful ladies. But I’ve changed names, places, and shifted times, as well as also writing this book under a pseudonym. I don’t feel I’m compromising myself in any way and truly feel in my heart that the only way I can get this story told (and I do want to tell it) is to do all I can to hide identities.

As I always say here, you do you.

Proceed as you feel best. In fiction, you’ll certainly have more opportunities to distract your reader off the scent of a real person, place, or time. And while you can do the same in a memoir, I feel the trick when spinning as true an account as you want to (or dare) is to try and stay as close to the truth as you can while still maintaining discretion.

Remember, there are lots of naughty stories to read, write, tell, and Jill and Jack-off to in this great big world of ours. If you are contributing in any way to the erotica of the world, no matter what it is you are writing, please consider discretion.

The ass you keep from getting kicked could be your own. 

 

How Do You Create Naughty Characters?

By
Ralph Greco
-
Photo by Vickie Intili from Pexels

My answer to the question I asked in the title here is simple: damned if I know! The people who come to populate my fiction, plays, poems and lyrics, be they naughty men, women, robots or alien lifeforms (or not) are as much amalgamations of the wide range of folks near and dear to me as they create themselves whole cloth. Where they come from, if they have been hiding out in my brain for some time, or if the action of my story births them, I have no idea. But without my characters, I know there wouldn’t be much reason to read my work.

 

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, among other wonderful works, claims that her characters come to her, reveal themselves as she writes. The equally wonderful writer Ursula K. Le Guin pretty much said the same about her fictional people; they came and told her their story, she simply reported it. Notice neither lady says to just wait around for inspiration to strike; their characters came and told them who they were and what they were about as Walker and Le Guin set about writing, a crucial point, I feel. These fantastic writers (and they are both fantastic) saw their characters, with their story, settings, and themes come flowing out of their brains as they did their work. 

 

As I have been saying all along: to write, you have to, well, um…get to writing!

 

I have an inkling that erotica might just be slightly different than other forms of writing when it comes to character creation (actually, in my opinion, erotica is different in very many ways from other forms of writing). Sometimes we naughty scribblers create folks we really wish we could meet or rabidly fantasize about. Sometimes they are created to invest other (naughtier) qualities into the folks we might be fucking in real life.

 

Given the nature of what it is, the more extremes of particular human qualities sometimes play across erotica characters, and not everybody we know has these extremes. Then again, some of the very best erotica I have ever read, even written, has featured characters who display their motivations and emotions in very subtle ways. I’d venture to say that a story where characters move through space and time in a socially acceptable down-to-earth manner can be just as steamy as those where we get characters revealing their highly kinky needs in a pornographic-like interplay.

 

From fantasizing, mix-and-matching real character studies or Willy Wonka’s favorite, ‘pure imagination’, the creating of the folks who populate our worlds can be as magical as Walker and LeGuin allude to (while doing the work!) You might find somebody forming across your page or screen via dialogue and action that you’ve never considered before. (And to alert you to some great work on this score, have a peek at Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles for the very best example I have ever read of an author fleshing out characters via dialogue… fuck it, read Zelazny anyway, he is a GOD!). The people of your fictions, plays, narrator’s of your lyrics, wise old sages of your prose poems come upon you when you least expect them, and it’s your job as a writer to make them count.

 

From a Hannibal Lecter to a Huck Finn to Little Women’s Jo March, characters drive story because of how close, or sometimes how far away, from the reader and writer they happen to be. And while I can’t rightly tell you how to create yours (other than to sit down and start writing), I can say you really can’t have worthwhile readable stuff, dirty stuff or clean, without good characters.

 

+++

Check Our Ralph Greco’s new book:

No Whip, No Problem

Ralph Greco, Jr.Jan 2021

Pink Flamingo Media

 

A rousing spanking sets things straight between this couple in, After, the Coffee, then in John’s Very Last Hurdle he’s already had his cock-caged for who weeks, now she wants him to what? Suck another man’s cock! In Packing, a group of 30-something ladies out for the night sport secret strap-ons under their clothes looking for willing male recipients to take it in the ass. And What Cindy Might See turns into a whole new sexual world for her, while watching the writhing Bruce being dominated by his playful girlfriend. It’s good clean consensual fun when a woman takes charge and plays the Dominant to men willing to submit to their naughty sex games. The woman in question doesn’t even need to wield a whip to make her intention plain.

 

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