Elf Sternberg

In one of my other lives I write erotica and am part of the Erotica Readers & Writers Association, and after reading way too many stories involving characters with throbbing 9-inch cocks or smooth bubblegum-pink pussies, bouncing firm breasts, red hair, flawless alabaster skin, etc. etc., I went on a huge rant about creating characters that readers could see themselves in. The counter-argument I got back was: people want a fantasy, not someone like themselves; old/fat/flawed people are gross in sex scenes, and so on. (Not everyone felt this way, and plenty of people write real characters, that was just the pushback I got from some writers.)

In retaliation I wrote a fable about a man with a cock so crooked that it hurt most of his lovers to have sex with them, and he was very lonely, and on the day he went to go have it surgically corrected he met a girl in the waiting room with a similar interior problem; they go home and see if they fit together, and they do. It was fun to write, even though the rest of my erotica is filled with reasonably human-looking people with scars and flaws and whatever else.

Another approach is to under-describe the characters and sex activity, and just be specific on the other details of scene and story.

My tendency is to write a pretty solid story that HAPPENS to have a major sexual element. Unfortunately, I wind up writing stories that don't have QUITE enough sex in them for some of the erotica publications, and too much explicit sex for the non-erotica world. Sigh.