You don't ACT like someone who writes erotica

Closely linked to the discussion of what erotica writers look like is the discussion of what erotica writers act like. Most of us don’t mind so much when people say we don’t look like erotica writers. What really bothers us is when people just assumed that we have DONE all the things we write about.

No one assumes Thomas Harris is a cannibalistic serial killer. No one assumes Anne Rice drinks blood and sleeps in a coffin. No one assumes Tom Clancy spent time being a terrorist. And yet, there are those who assume erotica writers have done everything we write about. For people who make that assumption, I have just one question; what part of the concept of FICTION don’t they get?

Fiction writers don’t have to experience what they write in order to write about it. In fact, that’s why it’s fiction. IT DIDN’T HAPPEN! At least not anywhere outside the fertile mind of the writer. Erotic fiction is no different.

Fiction allows the reader and the writer to experience safely situations and worlds that in reality would not be safe or even possible. In a world where safe sex has become a battle cry, even its own form of bondage, this is especially true with erotica. The erotica writer allows the reader to participate safely in a world that can be both very wonderful and very dangerous. It is no more necessary for erotica writers to have an orgy so they can write about one than it was for Thomas Harris to kill and eat a few folk before he could create Hannibal Lector.

Imagining an erotica writer who must experience firsthand her orgy, bondage, or sex in a bus before she writes about it adds another layer to the psycho-sexual fantasy. The fantasy may be very sexy indeed. But in reality, IT’S FICTION!