How much erotica should do into a story?

JohnTitor45

JohnTitor45

Experienced
The one I'm doing is kinda a slow burn and I don't wanna force a scene unnaturally. I'm thinking of just bringing one in if I haven't got one ten chapters deep.

How much of a story will people read before they give up before getting to the good stuff?
 
My first sex scene was in Chapter 14. I have gaps in my story of 24 chapters where no sex scene happened, and another one where about 30 chapters no sex scene happened. Granted, I've noticed a few people lose interest during those long gaps so I wouldn't recommend doing them too often. Still, if your story is engaging, people will keep reading.
 
I've read whole books without sex scenes in them. Whole series of books, in fact! j/k

I get more invested in stories with good characters, and if you are using that time to set them up well with solid character beats - I'm hooked. I personally tend to lose interest if its a lot of world building or "rules." Just my opinion. It's an erotica site so I can't deny you'll lose some readers if you keep them waiting, however.
 
It depends on the type of story, but if it's going to be on this site at all, I think that you're really going to want to have at least some erotic or sexual content every 5000 words, and at least one full-featured sex scene for every 10-15 thousand words, depending on how verbose your scenes are. This is my personal opinion, but if these are 2000+ word chapters, I do think that 10 chapters is too many without any explicit sexual material.

Unfortunately, I think slow burn stories can be unsatisfying to the reader, or at least most of them. Bear in mind that this is not a site specifically for romance novellas or the kind of "classy erotica" that would be for sale on kindle. I think one potential way around this is to front-load with some content that goes about as far as a writer is willing to go, but, make it in the form of a prelude or teaser rather than involving the viewpoint character(s) directly. It doesn't need to be natural or realistic. And it doesn't have to detract from the plot: by stumbling across someone else getting laid or 'accidentally' winding up in bed with someone the protagonist will come to reckon with what kind of territory they're getting into.
 
It's like jacking off. If you're going to cum in a five seconds you're not going to enjoy it. If you edge it longer and hold it in before the release you will enjoy the coming much more.
That said, this site has both kinds of smut - Quick sex scenes that force a particular fantasy that can assist a quick jack off or longer elaborate stories that build up a lot of teasing and make you know a character enough to want them in your head before the payoff of a sex scene.

There's a place for both - If you're writing the latter you might feel burnt out and unappreciated after a while once the initial high wears off and you notice your work is going unnoticed, or you might just write for yourself and nobody else. Forcing a sex scene is counter intuitive to a story and damages it if you aren't planning on doing it in the first place. The reader who will not read more than ten chapters of teasing and character to get to the one page of sex won't suddenly read your work just because there is a sex scene every 10 pages. The reader who would would rather a slow burn as long as the story moves at a decent pace.
 
I mostly agree the above posters. There's room on the site for both kinds of stories, for plots that slow build up, for nearly plot-free stroke stories, and anything in between. There is no fast-and-loose rule of "one sex scene per X words or Y chapters."

Forcing sex scenes is a bad idea. Forcing anything just makes stories worse, in my opinion. On the other hand, this is a site for stories that are at least erotic, if not outright pornographic, so your readers will expect your stories to feature sex with some regularity, and you should shape your stories in a way that naturally leads to it.

That applies just as much to stories that feature practically nothing but sex as it does to stories that spend a lot of time building a plot, characters, and world. The whole point of slow building plots, after all, is that they build towards something. In fantasy, you build towards an epic battle with the orcs. In thrillers, towards the final confrontation with the bad guys. In comedies, you have your punchline(s). And for erotic stories, the thing you should generally (but not necessarily always) build towards is sex.
 
It also depends if you want to incorporate a level of believability to a story, or just want a fantasy to play out quickly.

I mean if you have characters that know each other for a lifetime like a brother/sister in an incest story then it would be pretty unbelievable if they were normal siblings for many years and suddenly they start having sex because the brother fell on the sister once accidentally or something. Of course you can't hope to realistically built towards sex in the timeframe of a story on this site. These are also unrealistic situations. I cannot ever imagine myself having sex with my real sister in ANY situation. Its just, nope all the way through. But a fantasy is a fantasy, and one of the reason we write these kinds of taboo stuff in our fake characters is because writing is also a form of exploration and expression. Sex isn't always the end goal, rather sometimes you might prefer to explore the passion between two or three or four people.

If you are writing fanfic (Which I glanced your profile and you are) follow the rules of the universe you are adhering to. Nobody who is a huge fan of a particular fandom will enjoy it if you rush and force your way in a lore-breaking manner. There are some smut works that do that and an audience for it, but it becomes amateurish and usually only serves as a quick jack-off session and dump story, not something you would want to stick with. You can write about Ash in Pokemon walking into the clinic one day and ramming his cock into Nurse Joy and have your entire story about that, but while it serves to create a scene it doesn't make a story.

How do you view sex? Is sex a physical activity or is it a cathartic release and breaking of a veil between two characters who finally open a completely new chapter of their lives?
 
My story is an adaptation of Persona with more erotic content which is why it ended up being a slow burn.

So far I have a rape scene (Shido was trying to rape that woman so it's not too outta character), a consensual sex scene (the set up isn't great, Joker just says "you wanna have sex with me until the rain stop?" and Ann just says "okay") and a spanking scene (which might have been a bit outta character for Kawakami).

I also have an unpublished sex scene with Kamoshida's cognition of Ann that is at least better set up.
 
Well then in that case does making the Persona canon sexualized add to it in a way that you envision being useful? Does it achieve any goals that the original story does not already achieve without smut? If you find yourself writing for too long and realizing 15 chapters in that you have no need naturally for any sex or teasing then is it really needed to be a smut fiction? You could write a non-smut version of Persona Fanfic on wattpad where arguably you might have a larger audience. Maybe you just wanted to write Persona fanfic to achieve something that does not require smut?

I understand the burnout of writing a story with an initial high for too long and realizing that the smut aspect was being forced in and added nothing to the original goals I wanted to achieve in older works. When I was writing on Wattpad back in the day I would often force myself to write stuff that didn't fit into my desire of just doing worldbuilding. You have to think about the goals you want to achieve writing whatever.

I recently started a new story here on CHYOA about a brother/sister relationship and my goals weren't really focused on making them fuck over and over. The story was designed as an exploration of a character I projected my early life insecurities on coupled with the fantasies of having appreciation from the world around him, and being in a position of having the wealth to achieve things. The sisters he interacts with aren't there to fulfill a fantasy to fuck siblings, rather they serve as a vehicle for me to explore the difference between a familial interaction and one of a stranger in other characters.

I come back almost every day or two to add a chapter because not only do these goals drive me to write, I find myself exploring the world that I create myself, and finding out as much as the readers who do not know what goes in my head. It is a form of mutual exploration and discovery. The thing is I haven't enough clues how far and where this story goes myself, unlike many I did not envision the end points of the story before I set out to write, I just write, and like the character himself I as the writer am equally unknowing of what is going to happen tomorrow in the story.

Those sex scenes you wrote, the rape, the spanking and the consensual sex scene. When you wrote them, did you feel like there was a longing for them, a build up, a reason for the characters to do so, or was it shoved in there just is? It might be hard if your story isn't serving motivation for you to write and you feel less energy for it, sometimes its okay to scrap and move on and write something entirely new with the lessons you learnt.
 
It's why I try to have breaks between the smug. For example one chapter I considered having Kasumi thank Joker by having sex with him but it was two chapters after Ann got spanked. I also knew there would be other opportunities for Joker to have sex with Kasumi so it wasn't necessary here.

I also considered having Kamoshida rape Ann in the following chapter if I had too many chapters without erotic content. However, I found that I could get Joker to have sex with the cognitive Ann soon enough so it was unnecessary.

The rape is basically what happened in canon taken further. Maybe I should rewrite it to make clearer that Joker hesitated to help.

With Ann, I kinda just shoved it in there because I didn't wanna go ten chapters without erotic. Weirdly I think that scene gave a better build up for the sex with cognitive Ann. I plan to write a scene that better explains Ann's motives. The fact that it's told from Joker's perspective makes it a bit to tell how other characters are thinking and feeling.

The spanking scene was partly for the same reason as the earlier sex scene and partly because it's a personal turn on for me. The thing is that I think if I have too many spanking scenes, it'll all blur together so I don't wanna overdo it.

I think I set up the sex with cognitive Ann scene up (I've published it now) better as Joker admitted to Kamoshida that he fucked Ann so his cognition of her would change. I also had them escape the Palace with the fake Ann and go to the beef bowl place before having sex. Originally, I was going to have Joker use Arsene to rape the fake Ann when she first appeared, reasoning she's not real, with Joker feeling what Arsene felt.
 
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