I am doing some writing after a rather lengthy pause and discovered that I feel... bored when writing sex. The mechanical part - poses, A going into B, orgasm descriptions, tempo and angles. It does not feel like a creative, exciting activity but like a monotonous task. It feels like I am adding nothing new and merely rehashing and rewriting scenes I have already written in one way or another. I still like writing erotica. I like writing a story. I like building up to sex. I like the aftermath scenes. But when it reaches the point of writing a sex scene, it feels like "here we go again" not like something I enjoy doing. Have you experienced this? Have you fixed it in some way? Perhaps it was just a phase that went away?
I'm still at the stage where I don't even feel confident writing sex scenes in the first place, but I can already see how it could be difficult to keep coming up with fresh ways to put them together. And at a certain point, if you try too hard to write something new and original, you could easily go too far and just make something weird that takes the reader out of the action. Is part of the trick that, even in an erotic story, not every sex scene has to be written in detail? I can certainly imagine situations where I'd leave the physical parts mostly up to the reader's imagination and focus on (as you say) the buildup, the scenario, the relationship, how the characters feel about what happened. The detailed stuff would feel a bit more special if used sparingly sometimes.
Sex isn't doing it for me, so most of my stories have very little actual sex in them. I don't think you need sex per se, as long as you make up for that with plenty of otherwise erotic scenes. This of course depends on the type of story you want to write. Something in ENF works perfectly fine without a single sex scene in it.
I've had the same issue in my writing, and my preliminary conclusion is that it can get boring to write because at its most fundamental level sex is a mechanical, monotonous task. There's only so many ways you can eat someone out or give a blowjob. To get over it, I've tried to do 2 things. One, write less of it, as lady-lux also alluded to. At one point, I was writing sex scenes that topped out at 10,000 words or more. At a stiff (ha) 500 words per hour, that was 20 hours for 1 sex scene. That's ridiculous! I really didn't need to (and frankly shouldn't have!) dedicate 2 paragraphs of prose to "she inserted a finger", 2 more to "she added another finger", and then another 2 for the third finger. No wonder I got bored of it. I like quantifying goals as concretely as possible, so my current target is at least one orgasm every 1000 words (and preferably half that). Two, focus less on the mechanics and more on the emotions. The thing about sex is that it feels good, and even if you do the same thing this week as you did last week and the week before, it feels just as good... on a physical level. But cocks and pussies are not our main sexual organs; our main sexual organ is the brain. Engage that and you'll have a sheer endless variety of sexual nuance to choose from. Have your characters talk to each other. Have them make jokes. Consider how they would turn each other on. Dive into their psyches. The piv is not the interesting part of sex. It's everything else.
I don't get a lot of feedback on the sexy scenes, so I have no idea how I'm doing. Some of them are definitely more mechanical and perfunctory than others; I do like it when sex goes somewhere else, when I can try and do something different with it, when I can use it to explore sensations and emotions that wouldn't otherwise be accessible.
I get this a lot, which is a bit of a problem when you're writing erotica. I suppose it's a very niche form of writers block. I cope with it a few different ways. I either just leave the sex scene and carry on writing, then come back to it later on when I'm in the mood. Or simply plough on through and write it quickly, then come back and edit it properly. Or, starve myself of sex/masturbation and reading erotica for while and write it when I'm super horny!
I get hung up by the feeling that my descriptions of the mechanics of sex are getting repetitive. There are only so many words to describe what's happening, and a good number of them I don't find appealing or don't fit the mood I'm going for. As a result, rather than using the same descriptions over and over, I find my sex scene getting shorter and more to the point. One partial solution I try to use is finding different settings, contexts, environmental elements, etc. that can be described and used. Another approach is to focus more on the emotional and intellectual reactions of the characters to what is happening, rather then the physical actions.
Sex is like video games. It involves a lot of repetitive action which may be very enjoyable in real life, but writing about it in detail can be duller than dirt. I find that in order to make it interesting at all, one has to build up to it, give the players some personality, and include some atmosphere. It might be romantic, dangerous, awkward... just make it so there's SOME kind of emotion in the scene outside of sexual pleasure. If you have a sex scene it needs to be written very differently depending on circumstances; the reader should be able to tell by the descriptive action, dialogue, and general atmosphere whether this is a husband and wife of thirty years enjoying a second honeymoon, or a college student giving his landlady sex instead of rent money. In other words, the sex can't just be about the mechanics of sex! A good scene will include emotional responses, character idiosyncrasies, and perhaps even a bit of humor. Because I never miss a chance to self-promote, I offer this example from my story It's Good to be the King, where the protagonist ("You") is about to have sex with a young woman who is not only virginal, but also somewhat naive about what sex even is. Her invitation is phrased as, "Will you... will you be with me now, as a man with a woman?" She doesn't know quite how to put it, only that she wants to do what she's seen men and women do from a distance. As the scene progresses, her actions and what she says continuously drives home the idea that she doesn't really know what she's doing; she's offering trust and looking for guidance, and when she feels her first orgasm she's completely overwhelmed. Everything about the scene is driven by her character, and thus it is very different from scenes elsewhere in the story where the women involved are more experienced and confident. And that, I think, is what can make such scenes more interesting to write AND to read. That having been said, I agree that the rest of the story is much more interesting for me to write. One other thing I like to do with my sex scenes (and this is controversial around here) is to use illustrations. I do try to make it so the scene works entirely without them; the pictures are there to supplement the story, not to tell it. But I think if it's done right, a picture can say a thousand words.
