The Benefits of Writing Porn
sorry dudes, this isn’t salacious
I’m here today to talk about how writing porn (erotica, romance, whatever you call writing that readers derive sexual pleasure from) enhances and improves other writing. It does this in multiple ways, if you have the ovaries or cajones to really go for it. I can hear the Pollyannas clutching their pearls from here, see the shocked, judgmental looks aimed like lasers at me for daring to put romance as a parenthetical of porn (which is where it belongs).
Why do I consider romance a parenthetical of porn? In short, because it is. A cock by any other name is still the same. I actually have less respect for people who diddle themselves to euphemisms than I do for fans of hardcore. But let’s leave the reader perspective out of this. From a writer’s perspective, it’s much easier to employ Victorian euphemisms than it is to avoid being repetitive with vocabulary that’s more base because of the sheer volume of them, so for me, it’s a cop-out out of the gate. And don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of romance novel fans who allege a moral problem with porn. That’s a false argument—the objection is aesthetically, not morally grounded. A pirate sliding his sword into the maiden’s sheath is fucking, no matter how floral the euphemism, so for fans of this nonsense to claim high moral ground is absurd, and I flatly reject it.
Have a reader in mind, and write for that person, whether or not they ever see a single word of it. The more you know about your reader, the better the writing will be.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s take a look at what we expect from literary porn, and first and foremost, sensory description is what we crave. You can’t write good, engaging porn without tons of sensory detail, the more senses engaged the better. You also have to avoid using the same terms or imagery—repetition annoys readers. Writing porn exercises your sensory detail usage while forcing you to find new ways to present the same, or exceedingly similar, tension-building and climax scenes. You can’t take this honed skill straight to your other writing.
Speaking of building tension and creating climax, timing and pacing are extremely important to porn. You can’t rush to the climax, or you’ll find yourself there alone with unsatisfied readers. I tend to build tension to climax at least three times in erotic stories—some readers are slow burners, and reader enjoyment is the point, so porn writing also teaches writers to actively think about the reader—otherwise, it’s just jism on the page, and nobody wants that. Porn writing is the mist straightforward reader-centered writing there is.
There’s one more benefit to writing porn, and that’s liberation. This is an arena that encourages tearing down taboos, delights in it. Give it a try and tear a few down. Have some characters enjoy things thay aren’t supposed to be doing—public sex, inappropriate social dynamics, etc. I have a few ethical standards that I won’t abandon: only adults on my pages, ever, full stop, no exceptions is the first one. The second one is that if aggression is involved, so is explicit consent/desire for the aggression. No rape or pseudorape—that’s violence, not sex. Those are a couple of standards I’ll never abandon, among others.
Write porn. Write it well, break taboos, be true to yourself and work on sensory detail, pacing, and fresh language. Here, more than anywhere else, stereotypes, redundancy, and triteness stand out like. . . well, you know. Just don’t skip the last step of taking the benefits back to your other writing. Free your mind and your pen will follow.
About the Creator
Harper Lewis
I'm a weirdo nerd who’s extremely subversive. I like rocks, incense, and witchy stuff. Intrusive rhyme bothers me. Some of my fiction might have provoked divorce proceedings in another state.😈
MA English literature, College of Charleston
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Comments (3)
Your article approaches a subject that many prefer to hide behind irony or silence. What makes it interesting is not the theme itself, but the honesty with which it is addressed. You treat writing in this genre less as provocation and more as a craft — a strange workshop where language confronts one of the most instinctive parts of the human condition. Yet I must confess that I do not see it as a literary challenge in the way it is often presented. For me, the degree of its craftsmanship seems tied less to artistic mastery and more to the depth of deviation or repression that a writer may carry within the literary world itself. In that sense, this kind of writing feels less like an exploration of language and more like a symptom — a mirror reflecting a certain fracture within the human condition. I also find it difficult to believe that truly sensory sexual experiences can be transmitted to a reader through language. What belongs to instinct and desire is not something to be read; it is something lived. It exists as a phase of human experience, a biological layer first, and only later something shaped by the tension between our instinctual nature and our rational consciousness. From that perspective, such writing appears less as an artistic frontier and more as a sign of how far the human condition can descend when instinct attempts to imitate meaning through language. Still, your piece provokes reflection, and perhaps that alone is the quiet function of writing: to reveal the hidden assumptions behind what we choose to call literature.
The line about porn being the most straightforward kind of reader-centered writing actually made me stop for a second, because I’d never really thought about it that way. The part where you talk about building tension multiple times before the climax felt weirdly relatable from a craft perspective—like it’s basically the same muscle good storytelling uses, just in a more… explicit training environment. I also appreciated the bit where you draw a hard line around consent and adults only; it made the whole argument feel less like shock value and more like you genuinely thinking about the ethics and mechanics of writing. I’m curious though—was there a moment when writing something like this actually changed how you approached a completely non-erotic scene in another piece?
Girl, I was just talking to someone the other day about how erotica or smut has become less and less refined over the years. Relegated to cheap porn scripts that make people cringe. I appreciate you for this piece. Thank you!