Why I Write Erotica /Romantica [or How “Thelma and Louise” Validated Me]

Neale Sourna’s Writing Naked 101 – 2005, Jan 26

Why I Write Erotica /Romantica
[or How “Thelma and Louise” Validated Me]

I’d written a damn good non-love sex scene for my screenplay “FRAMES” [www.Neale-Sourna.com\FRAMESintro.htm] between not so ex-lover and bad girl witch, FRAN, and bad boy hero, reluctant psychic, and inadvertent reality transformer, CAMPBELL.

It is a scene which has not changed much in the three major incarnations of restructurings, script renamings, and several smaller top to bottom rewrites.

However, the major love and sex scene between Campbell and his cautious but dangerous telepathic dream girl, MALOY, was another matter. I wrote and entirely rewrote and rewrote it; changing locations, time of day, and how they’d mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically gotten there [natural teleportation via a perilous alternate plain of existence, made by him].

And even how reckless Campbell gets to the true knowledge [mundane and supernatural] that Maloy is not what his eyes, his fears, and Fran’s lies have made her.

Great stuff, but I floundered with my true lovers’ sex scenes, by self-censoring [“My god, I can’t write that.” Or “They’ll edit this all away, anyway, so why put it in there.”] , a la PG-13 versus R or NC-17, and the sillies who make up those wandering rules.

Do you know why I floundered so?

I was uncomfortable and squeamish; thinking it might seem “inappropriate” or “too racy”, and, more importantly, because as I write I normally feel what my characters feel. Which is fine, if I’m not over-filtering their needs and fears through my own, and therefore drowning or smothering their true reality out of existence.

Which says something about me at the time I was writing “TRIADS: The Perfect Mistress,” or “The Perfect Mistress,” which became “FRAMES,” finally, with the help of a few useful [many are not, so choose carefully, AND pray] professional comments from a Hollywood ex-development exec, helping me focus on the story I wanted to write, but had feared to go naked in public, and had hidden from myself, and you.

Which meant I had to get me out of the way.

Because I could write the sexy, antagonistic, clothes-tearing, witchcraft-induced rape of a hero’s body and mind, but not the cozy, intimately erotic “I am you and you are me” deal.

Solution?

Write out a few storylines as self-prescribed short stories and lay on the sex, UNCENSORED, often with a committed couple of some gender in the mix. I repeat -- UNCENSORED, without holding back.

If it scared me or surprised me, I wrote it; and kept it, if that character’s reality.

And as Thelma said to Louise about robbery and freedom in Callie Khouri’s “Thelma and Louise”, “I think I have a knack for this shit.”

Thus, an Erotica / Romantica Writer was born. Or self-made. And finally gave me something to do with all that so-called pornographic content that’d been cycling through my head, in diverse scenarios, since puberty struck with a vengeance at age ten, but now it’s channeled, focused, fun, useful, and a Hell of a conversation starter. Ω