Today, please welcome a special guest to KindleVixen – a man who totally makes me blush on a regular basis on Twitter. Sascha…. take it away

Each story, be it short and simple, or of novel length has the same basic qualities. Great conflict, strong plot, memorable characters, and a decent ending.

Let’s start with the characters. We need real people. We need active people, boring people, sexy people, devious people. You name it, we need it. Even moreso with sex writing, because without memorable characters, our work is nothing more than stroke fiction.

The best resource I have for creating characters come from my mentor, Morgan Hawke.

She uses a very straightforward character creation sheet.

Designation: Action Driven/Emotionally Driven/Motive Driven
Motive (Emotional need): This is what the character NEEDS
Goal (Physical need): This is what the character thinks they WANT
External Conflict (physical):
Internal Conflict (emotional):
Positive Trait:
Negative Trait:
Fatal Flaw:
Secret:
Epiphany (what will they learn; how will they change?):

The only other thing you’ll really need to start with is a physical description. This is short and simple for a reason: In most of our stories, we’re only dealing with the character growth so a back story is nice but should be kept to a minimum and used to flesh out the story in the appropriate areas.

Conflict. What is it? What does it do? Why do we need it? This word is the crux of all of our problems as erotica writers. The conflict here in erotica is HOW to get A and B together to bed. In Erotic Romance, the conflict is driven by their needs/goals AND sex is an integral part of that.

This gives our characters depth.

There are two types of conflict, and when used properly, they can make your story come jump off the page. Internal conflict deals with the character and the choices s/he makes as well as dealing with the consequences. Imagine our hero having watched their lover get murdered. Never mind the reason why, but we see our hero with nothing to live for, until someone new shows up in their life. Does the hero react openly? Are they friends? Can our hero get past the fact that if he takes a new lover that she might end up dead? That’s internal conflict. Our hero has to battle inner demons. We’ve all been there.

Now, external conflict has to do with things on the outside. We spot this easily in many contemporary romance novels today. Rich guy, poor girl, he’s educated, she’s busting her ass to put herself through school, etc.

Keep plenty of both conflicts in our work and we’ll have work that shines, IF our plots can hold them. That’s an entirely different article. In fact, slews of books have been written just on the subject of plot alone. For now, I’m only touching the basics.

Plot is essential to any erotic story because without it, again we have a flat story about two characters we care less about who may have sex. Plot answers the basic questions of who, what, when, why and how. In erotica, this is more important in my opinion than in standard fiction, because without strong plot, even for short stories, we tend to get labeled as writing smut. Nothing wrong with that, but smut is boring, unless you’re looking for stroke fiction which can be purchased a dime a dozen. No real money there.

Obviously, I could go into more extensive methods of creating plot but there’s really no need.

www.writesex.net – A blog defining erotica for authors of all genres. We’ve covered tips, technique, mediums of publication, the business end of things, all with specialized knowledge shared by M. Christian, Jean Marie Stine, Oceania, Thomas Roche and myself. Updated every Thursday.

www.FictionAddiction.net – Fiction Addiction.NET is a great resource for general writers, and I even have a few articles there which we’ll cover in upcoming sessions.

www.erotica-readers.com – The Erotica Writers and Readers Association. A great resource for erotica writers, with market listings, writing articles, book reviews and more!

www.absolutewrite.com – Absolute Write. Look for Katy Terrega’s specialized column on writing pornography. She also maintains a few how to websites and an impressive newsletter for the struggling writer.

I’m adding my own blog: http://whitewolfwriting.blogspot.com here because I often share tips and resources for writing/plotting on my personal blog.

Those three links should get you started. I also use Google for a search engine, it’s fast, easy to use and is the most efficient search engine I’ve found so far. And again, these are just the basics. These articles are intended for beginning writers or pornographers. Keep that in mind and use them as springboards for your crafty, erotic stories. And good luck!

Sascha Illyvich

http://www.saschaillyvich.com – I write stories so hot they must be whispered
http://www.radiodentata.com – Listen Mondays at 1 PM for the UnNamed Romance Show – discussing the latest in the industry

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