The Most Erotic Thing I Ever Read

Why do we write in the genre that we chose? Especially in our case, because romance writing and erotica – romance’s slutty sister – are not much respected. Among the literary world, writers like us are hardly regarded as writers at all. We are the infinite number of chimpanzees pecking at infinite typewriters who may accidently turn out the script of Hamlet in the next million years. And if they put your stuff on electronic books rather than paper, sometimes you’re regarded as even more of a loser. Why would anybody choose to do this?


When I walk through a used bookstore, anywhere I go, bookcases, whole walls and aisles are packed with forlorn romance novels who had their moment, now begging to be loved again, like walking through the desperate kennels of the Humane society. I look at them and think – how do you compete with all that? How do you get an audience when people are turning out these books like hamburgers? Roughly 50% of the books sold in the US are romance novels. Whole Canadian forests just massacred to produce romance paperbacks, with cover paintings of shirtless handsome beefcakes oddly devoid of body hair, and chesty maidens with half closed eyes, all “rape and adverbs”, that are here and gone as brief as mayflies.


I don't believe we chose the genre we write in. I think the genre chooses us.


That’s my experience. It’s a calling, like being a country western singer or a Jesuit. It requires a certain kind of horny nature, plus an inner lonesomeness, and a love of words, not necessarily in that order. The question I often wonder about is why most erotica writers appear to be baby boomers like me, rather than horny twenty somethings. My guess is that it takes time to find your voice or for the hormones to settle down long enough to put words to paper, until like Hamlet’s mum “the heyday in the blood is tame and waits upon the judgment”. Why write about it when you could be doing it?


In craft books, they often say write what you know. The problem with most of us is we don’t know very much. So what happens is, we usually write what we read and what we grew up reading as teenagers.


Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a huge fan of the penny dreadful true crime magazines in the Russia of his day and read them avidly. At some point he decided to try his hand at writing them, but he’s not just anybody, he’s Dostoyevsky, so his attempts at hitting it rich with popular John Grisham crime thrillers turned out to be “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Crime and Punishment”. He couldn't help it.


For the apprentice writer, genre serves a useful purpose, it tells someone like me what I should be studying. I study the masters in my genres. This is true for any art. The Beatles became the Beatles by playing Buddy Holly and Little Richard covers in violent German strip joints night after night for 8 hour long sets where if the crowd didn’t like your sound they threw wooden chairs at you. Ray Bradbury was a fan of carnivals, Flash Gordon Sunday funnies, and whiz-bang science fiction pulps and it was in those magazines he first made his name by imitating his heroes. Me, I study Bradbury, Nikos Kazanzakis, Richard Matheson, Stephen King and a pile of others, old school and new school. I’ve studied Lisabet’s sex scenes meticulously. I study Elmore Leonard’s dialogue. When I find a passage in a story of my chosen genre that knocks me out I hand copy out the passage in a notebook, word for word – note for note – to try to get a feelfor how that person uses language and imagination. I want to get in that writer’s skin when that paragraph was being formed in their head.


One of the most powerful things I ever read was several years ago in an Internet chat room when a young man posted a bewildered story that tonight he’d just had his first sex. It was with an old family friend he’d known all his life, a woman older than his mother. I think the most erotic thing is that thing you never see coming, the thing that just happens all by itself. They were watching TV alone on her living room sofa which they often did; the show wasn’t very interesting and they started talking about birthmarks. I have a birthmark here says the young man. I have one like that over here, says the woman. I’ve got one down here, but its hard to see says the boy. I have one inside here says the woman, lifting up her old bath robe - but you have to look close. A little more mutual showing and looking and that bath robe is getting pretty loose and she says to him “I think we had better stop this now. Unless. Do you think you might like to go in the other room?”


After it was over and he was washing up, the woman - a little panicked herself now - had called out to him from the bed “How do you feel?” He says he said to her “I feel like I just fucked my grandmother.” That knocked the breath out of me. What the hell just happened to us? Are we in trouble? The sense of guilt and awesome wonder mixed together in his written voice surpassed anything I’ve ever read or written. It wasn’t eloquent writing at all. It was bad clumsy writing, something no editor would ever publish. But it was poetry. You felt the freaky truth of it get under your skin. This kid’s life had changed tonight. If in a deadly moment his life ever passes in front of his eyes, that mature woman on the sofa with her bath robe spread open, and her hungry fearful eyes, will surely be in there somewhere.


That was erotica.


C. Sanchez-Garcia



Fiction By C. Sanchez-Garcia
Fiction By C. Sanchez-Garcia
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