Passionate Ink

Critics love to accuse EroRom of being pornography, but anybody who's ever read porn knows there's definitely a difference.

Men read porn as a masturbation aid, but it takes them only about half the time it does us to reach a climax. You're not going to get into a whole lot of plot and characterization in fifteen minutes, so there doesn't tend to be much of either in most male porn. Thus you have co-eds seducing the pizza delivery man.

Another factor is that male sexual arousal tends to be a bit simpler than ours, being based around sight and sensation more than anything else. We need more emotional involvement to become aroused, and it takes us much longer to come to a good roiling boil.

Why is there such a difference? I think women are hardwired for romance. Even when women have casual sex, more often than not, somewhere in the back of their minds, they're still wondering if this guy is the guy.

Scientists think we evolved to look for love, not because of some girly hearts-and-flowers ideal, but out of cold-eyed practical necessity. Our primitive foremothers discovered the task of raising children alone in the wild was virtually impossible. Children require too much care to allow you to go off in pursuit of high-protein game. Basically, those mothers needed some guy to go out and bash the woolly mammoth over the head and drag it home for the kiddies.

Love and romance evolved, science tells us, to ensure bigger, stronger males hung around to assist in child rearing. True, the guy who spread his genetic material to as many women as possible stood some chance of siring kids that survived. But if he found one partner and stuck with her, that improved his offspring's chances even more.

So romance serves an evolutionary purpose, and that makes it incredibly powerful. Feminists may not like it, literary critics may sneer, but that's the way it is. And that's why women look for romance even when they're reading for arousal.

I certainly do. When I read male-oriented porn back in college -- nobody was writing the female version back then -- I often found it hot, but ultimately unsatisfying. Most of the female characters functioned as sexual props more than people, while the heroes were self-absorbed and abusive. I wanted something more.

I conducted an informal survey of my Angela Knight Yahoo group that suggests my readers share that view. Several of them had indeed sampled male porn, and found it just as unsatisfying as I had.

"The stories had no plot," one wrote in response to my questionnaire. "It was just sex. For me, if there is sex in a book, it's better when you know what brought the people together and what's going on with them."

Another agreed. "While it got me aroused, it also left me flat, ya know? Nothing to the story except getting off."

At the same time, though, many of the readers weren't completely satisfied with conventional romance, either, at least not when it came to love scenes.

"I HATE when a romance novel is full of life and color and sensual descriptions of fine food and great wine and starry nights on tropical islands -- and then the hero and heroine go to bed and suddenly I'm meant to cope with the most unintelligible euphemisms and strange descriptions of sex as some kind of mystical voyage to another dimension, hot waves lapping on distant shores, stars exploding in the abyss between two overlapping souls &ldots; Please! I read a category romance once where I had no idea that penetration had not occurred until it was mentioned in dialogue chapters and chapters on. I just assumed from all the fountains and waves and ripples of ecstasy that it must have done! It's just so phony, when otherwise competent authors do that."

"In most real relationships sex is a factor. Let's face it, no matter what we say or hope, we feel attraction to another before we ever feel love. Attraction, unfortunately is often physical, which is desire/lust. Nothing wrong with that. It's a perfectly normal human reaction."

"In real life sexuality and sex are a big thing in relationships (or in most of them), and romances that eliminate that factor just seem stagnant. Erotic writers seem to understand the hungers/needs of readers. They don't shy away from it."

Another reader explained why she found EroRom so powerful. "I had forgotten the edge, the raw emotion that first-time lovers feel for and with each other. Then I was introduced to erotic romance. This type of literature shows need and want, longing and desire without the flowered words that make me feel uncomfortable."

But though sex is important to the readers who answered the survey, they still want the same strong storytelling they find in mainstream romance.

"Characterization and plot are very important; without it the sex is just bad porn. Erotic compared to romantic means the characters let nature take its course and sex was involved. Which is more realistic. So some sex is important, very important, but it's not THE most important thing."

"Sex and sexual tension are integral parts of erotic romance. It has to forward the plot, always. A character has to be believable. The people involved in an erotic romance are no different in motivation, thought processes, or needs than the characters involved in 'real life,' as long as the writer does it correctly."

What can we conclude from reading these comments? EroRom readers like vivid sexual storytelling, yes, but they also want believable, well-developed characters and strong plots. They're not just reading these stories as stroke material. They want the whole story, not just the sex. They also see the love scenes as a natural part of the romance that deserves just as much attention as any other part of the story.

In the coming chapters, I will examine how to structure a strong erotic romance in terms of plot, characterization, and dialogue. Other lessons will include the hero, the heroine, and the villain, as well as the nuts and bolts of actually writing a love scene. I'll dissect several of my own erotic scenes, and I'll explain why I structured them the way I did.

I'll also tackle language -- the F words, the C words, and which ones you should avoid. As with this introduction, I'll include extensive quotes from my readers on what they do and don't like, and why.

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