All Comments on 'The Complete Rules of Erotica'

It's good that you've done so well with your erotic writing that you can make this believable, just like it works, or something along those lines.

That was sarcasm. Maybe you posted this to try to convince anyone but yourself you're a writer and have a clue about it. You're not, and you don't.

Ha! I know, I know. I'm still figuring things out. I was just having fun when I wrote this.

Written from a careful reader's perspective

Thoughtful observations, all these rules can be broken successfully, but it takes skill and a confident hand to do so (and all rules are interesting, to a point.) But you have identified some important patterns and qualities of successful erotica. An intriguing new coinage, the 'OB' - not a goal of all writers here, but certainly a concept to consider. Thanks for this.

Well, your rules may be the rules of some subgenre of erotica, but they are most definitely not the rules of erotica per se. Indeed, I think the subgenre you are trying to rule on here could quite conceivably be called “epic strokers,” being characterized above all by a multitude of fuckable characters for the POV character to bed in the course of a notably protracted and sex-centered action. This interpretation of mine is corroborated further by your statement that “the driving force behind reading erotica isn't the urge to cum, but the urge to masturbate to a good-ass story and eventually cum,” which makes it abundantly clear that erotica means nothing more than wanking material to you. I do not subscribe to this view—and many other readers and writers probably do not either.

Hence, your supposedly complete rules of erotica are neither complete nor even rules of erotica at all. They are thus of no real use to erotica writers (apart from providing a negative against which to examine, develop, a/o refine one’s own approach).

Still, I’d like to know what makes you think that writing erotica would basically amount to nothing more than the more or less skillful stringing together of sex scenes? I mean, has it never occurred to you that the erotic could be a legitimate subject of literature?

—AJ