How I Come Up with Ideas for Erotica from My Experiences
I got started writing erotica last year when my mistress, Queen Nazz, took me into a spare room she was planning on renting out, threw me on the bed, and dominated me with her feet and ass. Afterwards, she told me to write about it. She liked what I had written so much that she told me to expand it into a book and publish it. The ultimate result was Real Life Femdom: Learning to Love My Leash.
Many of my first couple of books were inspired by my relationship with Nazz. Worshipping My Goddess’s Pussy in Real Time was just a straight-up recollection of one single (particularly good) cunnilingus session.
I was writing the first draft of The Haunted Highway, my femdom road trip travelogue, on my phone while I was in the passenger seat as Nazz was driving the car towards Laos. While driving through Loei in Isan (Eastern Thailand), I saw the Phi Ta Khon ghost masks. I read about ghosts and talked with Nazz about violent massacres in Thai history, accidents on the dangerous road, and finally passed by a former U.S. Air Force base from which America launched strikes on Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I put it all together in narrative form, framing the trip around a ghost story role play, when I got back to Chiang Mai.
But trying to write about your own experiences has its challenges. A story must have a narrative framework. For a story to be interesting, there must be a journey, and there must be stakes. It must generally comport with the three-act narrative structure. For a story that comes from your life experience, you are going to have to mold the events into a narrative framework. You will be deciding what events to include, whittling and chiseling it down, until it looks like a story, like a block of granite being turned into a statue.
It’s not always easy to find a classic story in our real lives. Life isn’t like always poetics. Maybe it is, but the story might come out after more twists and turns over a longer period that isn’t easy to fit into a novel, let alone a novella. You might like to write a Wang Kar-wai/Leos Carax/Andy Warhol-style piece of art that follows its own twisted path for your own amusement, but it’s not a recipe for commercial success.
It’s easier to start with a premise. A premise is the basic underlying idea of what a story is about. It can be framed as a “what-if” question. In his book The Anatomy of Story, John Truby cites Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) as one of the best writers at coming up with a gripping premise.
Crichton’s story might have come from this designated principle: ‘What if you took the two greatest heavyweights of evolution — dinosaurs and humans — and forced them to fight to the death in the same ring?’ Now that’s a story I want to see.
You can even take inspiration from your own life experiences to develop a premise. Think of something interesting you saw or experienced and then expand it into a story. I started on my latest novella, A Wild and Wet Water Party: The Songkran Slave, after celebrating Songkran, the Thai New Year, with Nazz a couple of weeks ago. When I saw the pickup trucks driving around the canal street full of revelers with water guns and buckets, I thought: Wouldn’t it be fun if there were a truck of dominant women, and they grabbed me and pulled me into the truck to be their slave as they drove around?
That’s the basic idea of the story. It was very fun to write, and I hope it’s fun to read.
When it comes to erotica, the plot might be less important than in other genres of literature. But I believe I good plot can distinguish an erotic novella from many others. The author shouldn’t get too focused on the plot; after all, most readers mostly want the hot and kinky scenes to arouse them. Even if many erotic novellas include a lot of similar storylines (and tropes), there is a way to write the same story in your own way.
Steven King spoke about how he “pours new wine from old bottles” in his 1983 Playboy interview:
I’ve never considered myself a blazingly original writer in the sense of conceiving totally new and fresh plot ideas. Of course, in both genre and mainstream fiction, there aren’t really too many of those left, anyway, and most writers are essentially reworking a few basic themes, whether it’s the angst-ridden introspection and tiresome identity crises of the aesthetes, the sexual and domestic problems of the John Updike school of cock contemplators or the traditional formulas of mystery and horror and science fiction. What I try to do — and on occasion, I hope, I succeed — is to pour new wine from old bottles.
In femdom erotica, you have a lot of common themes.
What would the world be like if it were a female supremacist gynarchy?
It’s one of the themes in Giles English’s Bradley Jones’s Chastity, M.L. Paige’s Welcome to the Fempire, and CL Northbridge’s The Ladies of Hera, not to mention the classic Yapoo, the Human Cattle by Shozo Numa — the book which lent its name to one of the most beautifully extreme Japanese AV producers. But each author has their own ideas about how gynarchy might come about and what sex would be like (and which fetishes would be emphasized) under gynarchy.
What would it be like to be the sorority’s male slave?
The sorority girls in M.L. Paige’s Interviewing You to Be a Sorority Slave were exquisitely sadistic. Jesse Sinclair made her girls take on foot slave in Sorority Foot Slave. In my story The Femdom Sorority, the domme-sisters were most interested in how well the slaves would function as human furniture.
One good way to think of a premise is to take something and twist it or pull it to its furthest possible extreme. You can go back to Jurassic Park for an example of how one might stretch reality to its furthest extreme. At the time Crichton conceived of and wrote the story, sheep and mice were being cloned. Jurassic Park takes the largest, longest-extinct, and most epic creature and cloned it. I might argue that John Truby’s idea of the premise as ‘man versus monstrous lizard’ is misses the point. Jurassic Park was really about an even bigger monster — greed — versus scientific humility.
Brian Garfield wrote the novel Death Wish during a time of high crime in the United States. The novel imagines what might happen if a law-abiding New York City liberal was driven to radicalism and vigilantism by the murder of his wife.
I enjoyed the novel, and I gave it a twist in my erotica Punished by the Vigilante Dominatrix. What would happen if the dominatrix was driven to the extreme by unchecked acts of sexual harassment and assault? What would the vigilante be like as a feminist fighting for freedom and safety in public spaces? What if women gave PUAs what they really deserved? What if she used her whip — not a gun — and did it in the middle of the most crowded subway station in Seoul?
In that way, you can take something happening in the news, art, or your life, and make a new and unique story by changing a couple of things about the characters, the setting, or the stakes and rules of the story world. That doesn’t mean writing the same story but changing the names. When one variable changes in a dynamic story world, that is going to lead to other variables changing.
For example, in my story Maria and the Mad Dog: A Femdom Football Romance, the dominatrix diva Maria dates the defensive lineman Mike “Mad Dog” Maddox. Her reputation as a sexually explicit dominant woman makes her controversial in a way that Taylor Swift wasn’t (she was “controversial” for other (fake) reasons) — and makes Maddox the subject of ridicule from his rivals. That creates some of the drama they must overcome as a couple.
