I have a confession. I’ve been writing erotic fiction for years. I even have a website where I publish these stories. But I’m not telling you where. In fact I doubt I have any readers. It’s just a random website out there in the vast sea of the internet, but that’s ok. I do it mostly for myself.

I’ve always generally enjoyed writing. I remember writing my first story back in English class in eighth grade. It was a fantasy story, the kind with swords in it.
As an indie filmmaker, writing and telling stories is kinda what I do. The problem is that most of the time I sit down to write a story I have an idea in mind as to what I want to do with that story. A goal. Usually that’s a screenplay or an attempt at writing a novel. In both situations there are limitations. With a novel, it’s knowing you have to write so many pages for it to be a published book. Sure there are some shorter novels and novellas, but when you set out to write a novel you have it in your head that you may want to get it published and thus it should be a certain length. I’ve always had trouble completing something of that length. My stories just aren’t that long or at least they haven’t been in the past.

Screenplays are even more limited. They’re mostly dialog driven and the idea with a screenplay is not to explain too much, that’s the job of the director when they put it on screen. So a screenplay is more like a framework or a blueprint than a fleshed out story with a bunch of character detail and explaination.
My other limitation is that I tend to write screenplays that I myself intend to direct. That means they have to be even more limited because I know I’ll be shooting them on a shoestring budget. I know they aren’t going to be a two hundred million dollar Hollywood blockbuster.

It’s said that such limitations can foster creativity, but let’s be honest, that’s not always true. There are just certain things you can’t do. You’re not going to write some giant space opera screenplay knowing you only have a $4000 filmmaking budget. You know the result would turn out like crap. So you end up picking stories that are more local. It limits your creativity if what you really want to tell is a giant space opera.

What I love about writing erotic fiction is that it’s so free of these limitations. I can write them to any length I wish and I know they’ll never be made into films so I can just go wild with ideas, locations and scale. Since it’s erotic fiction there is already this expectation that anything goes. It’s not like writing a novel intended for a preteen audience or even a general conservative audience where you have to watch what you tell and how you tell it. There is an expectation that things will be steamy, maybe even taboo. Though it doesn’t have to be and that’s where I’m at right now.

I’m sure there is some expectation by readers of erotia that it should be mostly erotic. But I’m finding that with my latest story (a longer piece) that it’s turning out to be more of a science fiction story in general with some erotic stuff thrown in here and there. It’s a departure from a lot of my pieces that are mostly erotic. What I like about still classifying this as erotic fiction is that when I get to those erotic parts, I don’t need to hold back. I don’t need to be suggestive like a general novel might be, in order not to alienate readers who are there mostly for the sci-fi. I can go explicit. I can describe in detail the actions that are happening in the same way that typical erotic fiction does. It’s a very free feeling as a writer.

I write erotic fiction without any real intentions. It acts mostly as a creative output for me and even a form of therapy in some ways. The same way you might tell your therapist anything and everything, that’s what I can tell with erotic fiction. I can let the extremes of my imagination go wild. I don’t need to hold anything back. I don’t need to shape the story to appeal to a certain audience or fit a certain number of pages or craft it in a way that could be translated to screen. Sure there are times I’ve thought to myself “man I would love to see these as films.” But then I consider that there are probably no actors out there that would be willing to play these roles. Maybe porns stars, but they probably can’t act worth a damn during the dramatic scenes that don’t involve their pants being around their ankles. You generally get people who are either one or the other but not both.

Then again I look at where film and television is going these days, “It’s not porn it’s HBO” lol. It’s getting more extreme in some ways. Although there have always been some films like what we’re currently seeing. Mostly from outside the US. So maybe I’m just early to the game. Maybe in ten or twenty years my erotic fiction might have a place in cinema as the mainstream grows more accustom to being less puritanical with their entertainment. It might be just what they’re looking for at that time. But I can’t think like that. Right now I have to continue to look at these as just stories I tell for my own sake. A way to express a fantasy side of my personality that I would never bring to real life;  not all fantasy needs to be made flesh and probably shouldn’t be. Also something separate from the life I lead outside them in terms of who I would allow to read them. Hence the reason you’re not getting a link to them here. ;)