I write a lot of smut, in case you haven’t noticed. If I were to be slightly cruel to Simon and dump my entire backlog of stories onto him to post, I would wind up with a whopping 246 stories at the EMCSA. Now, that’s not an entirely fair measurement of quantity–some writers have spent years working on a single 77-chapter magnum opus, whereas the majority of my stuff clocks in at six or seven pages–but I think it’s clear at this point that I’m pretty prolific. I must have some reason for that. And despite all of the lovely readers who have shelled out for my ebooks out there, it’s not financial. 🙂 So why?
In the end, I think it’s because I’m good at it. Not just writing smut in particular, but writing in general. I am, not to toot my own horn overmuch, a pretty talented author…and I have chosen to write smut because nobody does. Sex is a huge part of the human experience; it’s where we all start, it’s a major part of our adult experience, it’s a driver of politics and economics and relationships and the human condition. But somehow, when it comes time to actually talk about it, we have been trained to draw a genteel curtain over the event and say, “No, no. These things should not be spoken of. They are acts to be ashamed of.”
The same thing does not happen in war stories. We never have people detail the entire training process, explain how they get shipped out to the battlefield, and then have the soldier say, “And then, Gentle Reader, I must leave the rest to your imagination.” Horror movies don’t cut away from the gore; in fact, they’re frequently adored in direct relation to the amount of gore they have. But romances always skip the sex. Even the thought of showing the sex is anathema; “respectable” actresses don’t work in the nude. Violence is okay. Sex is not.
I don’t think about that very often when I’m writing these stories; any truly honest writer will admit that the process is a lot more mechanistic and less driven by the wellsprings of inspiration than we want to pretend. (“So and so has to do this at this time in order to make this moment later on seem plausible. And it’ll be a cool scene, too.”) But when I do think about it, I think that it’s important to redress that balance just a little. It’s important to have something that is well-written, says things about life and the people who live it…and is also full of hot sex. Because people have hot sex every day, and it’d be nice if they didn’t think they were the only ones.