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.

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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.