How to Write a Terrible Sex Story

For those who don’t know me, I was active about a year ago, and amassed a decent following for my own story, Being More Social, before I was forced to take it down. While in the process of writing a second series, one which could actually be displayed by this website given its rules, I’ve looked into how other people write smut and come across a lot of guides. Almost universally they bear the title ‘how to write a good porn story,’ and they usually boil down to opinion (like, ‘you should always include the guy doing this to the girl’ or ‘the characters should be dressed like this’). QED, they don’t help at all. Frankly, especially when it comes to smut if you ask me, a better guide would be ‘how to write a bad one,’ since badness in stories involving sex seem to revolve around tropes that should be removed, not a lack of tropes that should have been added. For this reason, I’ve decided amidst my new series to write this short, incredibly informal essay, ‘How to write a terrible sex story.’ (This is also going to contain a lot of opinion, but I hope more of this is universal opinion, ergo helpful.) Some of you may think I’m being a prick for outlining tropes in stories other writers have used, and frankly, yeah, I’m probably being quite the prick. Nevertheless, my works in the past have earned me an incredibly valuable resource – readers so dedicated they would read my content on other sites. For that reason, I’m gonna toot my own horn enough to presume I have the right to say what makes a terrible sex story, and proceed. If you wanna downvote me due to how arrogant I’m being, you know where the button is.

Let’s start off with an elementary point you’d assume everyone knows – the look of the story. A surprising number of writers across all websites don’t really care how their story looks, assuming that content would make up for it. Yeah, sorry, no. I Don’t Know About You, But This Makes A Story Hard To Read. THIS MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I CAN’T TAKE THE STORY SERIOUSLY. I CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL LIKE THE STORY WAS WRITTEN BY AN OVER-ENTHUSED 12-YEAR-OLD. When a story has unnecessary breaks… It makes it seem to have a stutter… and it disrupts how a reader reads your story. Styles like that take a reader out of a story. Suddenly the story isn’t about its content – readers are too focussed on how it’s written, not what is written, and that’s not something you want. Over-excessive punctuation in dialogue is another big one. ‘ “Really?!?!!!” she asked. ‘ This makes a story sillier on a whole, especially if it’s used constantly. Grammar, spelling, and overall flow counts too, but I imagine it’s something everyone already looks for. Ultimately, things you need to watch out for are writing tropes wherein people notice more how you write instead of what you did. When in doubt, have an editor. I know having an editor seriously helped me, and I’m only human – I’ve made a lot of stylistic mistakes. For example, I used to repeat an existing noun or verb in sentences. Example: ‘ “Do you think we should grill up some burgers?” Asked Sean. “First I think we should find Jordan, then we should grill up some burgers.” Jean concluded.’ ” This can be forgiven in moderation. Nevertheless, the fact that they both used the exact same wording stuck out, didn’t it? I’ve seen stories do this repetitively and it stuck out just as much as an all-caps story. Ultimately, I fixed it through practice by treating dialogue in writing not as extra writing, but as a play waiting to happen. If it didn’t sound like a realistic discussion two actual human beings would have, I would then modify it.

And that brings us to realism. I honestly have no clue where to begin here. I lied, actually I do: Not every girl in the world is a slut waiting to happen. I don’t find pride in people telling me that my story is one of the more believable of its kind – the guy has casual sex with three different girls at his school. By all means, brag about how that was your freshman year (or maybe ‘brag’ about it while secretly trying to reaffirm your masculinity and hide the fact that you actually lost your virginity at 22+ like a surprisingly high number of people) but this doesn’t happen to anybody but a very low number of people, even lower in freshman year. Human beings aren’t built that way. They’re primarily emotional creatures. We can poo-poo this theory all you want, but the older I get and the more sex I experience, the more I realize that the old saying “sex takes place between the ears” is true. As a result, when you write a story about a guy who gets approached by the head cheerleader despite never knowing her beforehand and getting a blowjob from her then finding out the other cheerleaders dared her to, THEN banging another cheerleader and the first girl’s mother, the whole story tends to stink. Yes, fbailey, that was me calling you out. I swear, the only thing more unrealistic and baffling than the events in those stories are the people in the comments claiming that this exact thing happened to them last Tuesday. (These are the people who I think are compensating for something, since they see that the males in the story are treated like kings in the school for whatever reason once they bang a few cheerleaders and instead of wish they were like them, lie to themselves about becoming them so they can feel like they should be treated better too.) “But Bashful,” a voice protests, “I found that story more sexy than anything you ever wrote.” Not only is that fine, in many cases that’s probably true. Perhaps I should have clarified at the beginning, but let me make clear that I’m not suggesting that fbailey, blueheatt or any of the other quick-to-the-sex writers are bad. I’m sure they make good porn for their audiences. They, however, make terrible porn stories. I’m not instructing you on how to write about something primal. That would be dumb. I’m suggesting that there’s a difference between a quick sex-centric saga and a porn legend. I’m not using those words willy-nilly – a saga is a story that focuses on events. That’s what saga means. Ergo, stroke stories, which focuses on the events of sex so much that the people in the story may as well be cardboard cutouts, are sagas. The best porn stories are legends. Legends are not just amazing stories, contrary to what many believe – a legend is a story that focuses on the character. Need an example? Romeo and Juliet would be a legend. Events happen but the focus is on the characters. The Day After Tomorrow would be more a saga, since there are arguably no characters that encompass the whole story, and the story is all about the events that happen in the weather disaster.