Get My Blood Boiling With Some Foreplay

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

My part two of this three-part article of the essential parts of erotica, this time foreplay, again sees us traipsing down very personal considerations. As much as I can’t tell you how to set up a seduction—where it should take place, how long it should be, etc.—I can’t give you the specifics on the foreplay scene or scenes you might create.

I am sure you and I could find some common ground on what turns us both on. But beyond these, there is a cornucopia of stuff that gets you going in the bedroom that doesn’t mean anything to me and vice versa. That’s the fun thing about us humans; we all like different things for different occasions with different people. Finding out what gets a new lover all squiggly is one of the best parts of getting to know somebody. With this in mind, you need to include or at least consider this variety in what you write in how you approach your fiction’s foreplay.

If you are especially creative, you might have your characters engage in foreplay you would never attempt. It’s fun to stretch yourself this way. Or you might have two (or more) people involved in your story who might not be your gender. Or even human. Again, all this keeps your creative juices flowing and might bring you to some conclusions about what is lacking in your sex life you might want to try next time you get into some foreplay.

I also feel it’s essential to make seduction and foreplay separate parts of the action. They don’t have to be; as I mention in almost every one of my pieces for this column, the way you write your tale is up to you. But if you can manage some delineation between when your characters meet and first sniff each other out, then get their hands on one another and manage some fumbling around one another’s erogenous zones, your reader will benefit greatly. Following this, a foreplay scene does not always have to get your characters into exchanging body fluids and orgasm.

Then again, it might.

Again, how long or short it takes you to get your reader from seduction to foreplay, how much distance you cover in paragraphs and pages, as well as in how much time passes in your story between these two points, is up to you. You might not even write something that employs a linear narrative, jumping around with flashbacks, or even with time travel. I can’t say that when your reader first comes to your seduction and foreplay that these two happen in the logical progression, we usually know these to happen.

If we assume your characters are getting closer as they step from seduction to foreplay, then most likely, these scenes and all the rest of the stuff you are writing are building a deeper, hotter reading experience for your reader, which is exactly what you want.

But watch out, you know what’s coming (and I do use the word ‘coming’ specifically here!) next.