[Apologies if this was discussed elsewhere - I looked through all of the posts here and didn't see it, but might have missed it]
I recently started writing my first erotic story (working on settling a bet - I argued I would be a better lesbian than my female friend would be as a gay man) and realized that I was struggling significantly with terminology. I watch some porn but don't read much of it and found myself somewhat befuddled by word choice.
Does "pussy" have a vulgar connotation vs. "vagina"? Is labia too medical? How about "clitoral hood", or just "hood"?
I find description of the smell of "pussy juice" to be overly graphic personally, but is that considered fairly mainstream?
I suppose my ultimate goal is to write explicit erotica that is generally accessible to, perhaps, the Game of Thrones-watching crowd. The question then is: is there any sort of guidelines or even rough classification of words by their "hardness"? For example, this is pretty well-established in movies visually:
G:
- Shirtless men in swim trunks
- Women in bikini swimsuits
- Kiss on lips
PG:
- Men in small underwear or thong
- Lingerie
- French kissing
PG-13:
- Bare breasts
- Bare butts (M/F)
R:
- Non-close-up vagina
- Flaccid penis
- Sucking on nipples
- Simulated sex
NC-17:
- Close up vagina
- Erect penis
- Low-detail oral sex
- Non-simulated intercourse
XXX:
- Graphic / close-up sex
- Ejaculation
- Rule 34
- The rest of the internet
Thanks so much for the help!
I don't mind vulgar words being used to express and paint visually what you've written.
It definitely depends how you want to set the mood.
For Example:
•Is it a first timer w/ an experience sexual partner?
•Kinksters being playful in sex shop trying out whips?
It all depends where you want to take the reader with your writing.
All in all have fun and of course, there's lush writers who will give more insight on how they go about verbally setting the view.
You are overthinking this just a bit. You have a target audience (see: "Game of Thrones watching crowd") and that's fantastic, but there's no magic formula, no certain combination of words, that will guarantee you readers. A word or phrase that works well in one setting may be jarring in another. Writing, specifically writing well, is not something that can be done by following a recipe.
Watching porn--watching television or film--will not help you learn what works with words, and by your own admission, you've not read much literary erotica, if any. I would strongly recommend first reading more and watching less, and read not just erotica but a wide range of genres, with a healthy mix of writers and writing styles. In my own case, I do not watch, and have never watched or seen, visual porn. I might be missing something, or it might just not be relevant to writing porn.
Feel free to peruse my profile and take note of my very partial list of favourite writers--each has influenced, in some way, how I choose the words used to describe a given situation in a given story. Feel free also to reach out to the moderator/story verification team here at Lush; we love to help new contributors to the site. Good luck.
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Thanks so much! That makes a lot of sense, that it's contextual and something you'll start to intuit as you read and write more.
Say what feels natural. I like the basics: cock and cockhead and shaft, pussy and pussy lips and clit. I try to mix it up to avoid too much repitition, but stories going way out of their way to do so (his hard desire, her soft flower) get silly fast. Leave the serious filth--fuckhole, cumslut--in the dialogue. It's hotter that way.
You'll have to experiment to find what your comfortable with. Using the same words over and over can get boring though.
I'm a big Game of Thrones fan and l enjoy vulgar nasty hardcore erotica, and l use as many dirty words as l can when l write. But mostly contain that in dialogue, however, the text sometimes begs for vulgarity.