Weird Erotic Fiction

A smack is just a noise without its sting

There's something important many writers discover quite late. And some may never discover it at all. You are allowed to break the rules.

We were all new writers once. We all hesitated, agonised, then finally crossed the rubicon, allowing others to see our precious words at last. We all began by painting within the lines, anxious about how our fragile work would be received, acutely conscious that painting across the lines would somehow expose our amateurishness.

Even now, no matter how much we’ve written, the expectations of our readers still loom like the shadow of an eclipsing moon over our creative minds.

In those early years, we think we know our readers' expectations, after all, we too were readers once. This experience makes us wary of violating the seemingly sacred narrative pact we've internalised from decades of reading our own favourite stories. So when we write, we worry our readers won't like what we have to say, and by implication, they won’t like us.

Ostracism has always been a primal human fear.

As writers gain more confidence, we begin to realise the power of strategic shocks. Though it still takes skilful crafting to subvert readers' imaginations, and make them tingle without reverting to cheap tricks like thirsty lewdness or hacky jump-scares.

In time, we appreciate how the same story can disturb a reader's expectations as well as arouse them. We cease worrying we'll offend the guests to whom we offer our words, and realise our visitors are more sophisticated than we thought. Readers want to be challenged. They want the most sumptuous banquet. Who really spends their precious time reading only to consume the blandest and most inoffensive gruel?

For sexy stories, being unexpected means - paradoxically - writing about more than sex, and going beyond the familiar tropes of seduction, temptation, hedonism, and horniness.

Is the pursuit of pleasure all there is to sexuality? What about its shadow side — all those themes that might secretly turn us on, but which most folk would never ever discuss out loud?

Imagine having two erotic stories, one of which you could read aloud to your friends with a laugh and a smirk, and another where just saying the words aloud made you blush and squirm with inexplicable awkwardness. Which of those two stories do you think would be hotter, and more intriguing to read?

Consider for example, a story containing sexual objectification, like my recent tale The Other Side. To non-kinky folk this scenario might appear vulgar, even distastefully disrespectful. Some might even read it as a theft of others’ dignity.

But I think innately kinky folk would find this story much hotter, as they’ve internalised the notion of an erotic play world, with quite separate rules to the everyday world they normally inhabit. In their minds objectification becomes an act of attention-giving, and even worship.

I believe this disparity, and the assumptions a writer can challenge about what's "right", is why violations of social expectations provide such fertile ground when writing erotic stories.

But kinky writers can go much further. Why shouldn't stories explore more psychological themes like trepidation and anxiety, transgression and taboo, suspense and uncertainty, peril and pursuit, and capture and violation?

It’s common to hear those who aren’t kinky wonder why anyone would ever choose the awfulness of pain over the bliss of pleasure. But the attraction of pain has never been the experience of agony, it's the uncommon opportunity to safely feel intense sensations that are indisputably real.

Imagine how underwhelming a mimed spanking of touchless pats would be. What’s the point of a smack if never imparts a sting?

A meek writer ends up miming their erotica, playing it safe, going through the motions by describing the same familiar sexy shenanigans. Their stories may be mildly titillating, but they’re never memorable.

Bolder writers understand the human mind, and know how it eroticises what disturbs and frightens us. They mix in darker spices like denial, vulnerability, and shame. But the boldest dare to be subversively weird, and write about sex in strange new ways that barely look like erotica at all.

So let’s talk about weirdness in storytelling.

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Why I Love Weird Fiction

I had written and posted several quite conventional spanking stories before I was brave enough to break my own readers’ expectations. At the time, Halloween happened to be approaching, and that gave me the excuse I needed to attempt something darker.

So I began work on Glimpse, a strange nightmarish ghost story in the gothic style. Writing this summoned ideas that had lain hidden in the shadow corners of my mind since childhood. I still remember the almost dreamy state of flow I inhabited as I wrote it, as if I was channelling a mysterious narrative power. It was the first story that I ever read back and thought: wow, where did all those words come from, I can't believe that imagery came from me.

Yet Glimpse isn’t really erotic fiction, it’s more like weird fiction. You may not have heard of this term, but it’s a sub-genre in its own right. H. P. Lovecraft popularised the concept of weirdness in his seminal essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", when he wrote:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Weird fiction is sometimes also known as the Fantastique, as it combines elements of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. There might also be aspects of the supernatural, or magic realism, where extraordinary phenomena are accepted as normal.

I’ve never attempted to write high or hard fantasy, mythos-heavy stories where magic is an accepted part of the fabric of reality. I prefer to write about familiar contemporary environments with hidden dimensions. This reflects how I see eroticism, as a hidden dimension overlaid on our everyday world. I see kink as an awareness that alternate realities exist for those willing to perceive them.

The fantastic is a liminal space - mirroring that stage in life when we thought we knew it all, and then discover really, we know nothing at all. This is especially true when it comes to sex. Only those who’ve lived a full human life ever come close to understanding the deeper mysteries of human sexuality.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover just how well kinky ideas blended into weird fiction stories. I could still write arousing scenes, but it gave the fantasies a gloomier tone, tinted with a developing sense of precariousness or dread. I liked that mood, I felt it mirrored how many feel anxious about the things that turn them on.

Weird fiction allowed me to write dark fantasies which were unsettling rather than unnerving. I had no interest in creating horror stories, as I didn’t see anything arousing in murders and massacres, or brutality and gore. I wanted to write tales that were thought-provoking rather than stomach-churning. Horror may make the spine tingle, but I wanted to write erotic fantasies where the tingles were felt first in the head, and then between the legs.

Even so, you may be reading this thinking: hmm, I can’t really imagine myself getting turned on by darkly gothic fantasies — and that’s precisely the point. Remember I began this essay talking about rule-breaking, and subverting readers’ expectations. What better way to do that than take them into imaginative territory where they were never expecting to go?

Gothic authors like Edgar Allan Poe used the symbolism of haunted castles and gloomy crypts to reflect the instability and turmoil within their characters' minds. But I prefer to use the familiar tropes of ghost stories and fairytales as ciphers for other mysteries, such as why pain and punishment can both repel and entice us. How we can crave liberty and freedom, yet willingly surrender ourselves to the authority of someone strict who’ll smack our bottoms.

I write weird fiction because I love to go treading through virgin snow. Poe may have written about obsession and madness, but he never wrote about the erotic realm that surrounds us. Poe and his peers wrote stories that were gloomy, even bloody, yet still self-censored by Victorian morality. Their writing was always profoundly chaste.

My literary heroes, like Borges, wrote visionary reality-breaking stories, but they never wrote about spankings and kinky discipline. It’s as if the writers who resonated with me pointed subtly towards an unexplored territory, and I’m the first to venture into that wilderness.

Cynics may mutter there’s nothing truly original any more, but that’s clearly not the case. You can take any familiar trope, and give it a uniquely personal twist no else has ever dared to try.

Not everything I write is Weird Erotic Fiction, of course, but it’s a territory I relish returning to explore. I love the unsettling nature of macabre stories where the rules of reality seem subtly wrong. What better challenge of a writer's craft than making the taboo and the disturbing feel actually arousing?

If this sounds intriguing and you’d like to read some examples, linked below are my three latest weird fictions:

All Must Travel

Tumbledown

Climax in Purgatory

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The Pursuit of Interestingness

Whether the story I have to tell is weirdly surreal or recognisably realistic, I love writing about sexual taboos that many might deem unutterable. My motivation has never been to outrage, but to put down in words thoughts and feelings most folks would never admit to enjoying.

When an artist risks rejection they harness a special kind of creative energy. Artists relish the challenge of applying their skills to transform experiences most folk might consider shameful and disturbing into scenes that blossom in readers’ imaginations. Great art takes something that’s difficult to hold in our minds, and creates something persistent that’s unexpectedly compelling.

Boundaries need to be pushed, or our culture will go stale. Books like Frankenstein and Dracula were once considered outrageous, gruesome, and shocking. Most art that breaks the expectations of the time is considered crude, even grotesque, when it first appears.

All creatives have a part to play. Whilst only a miniscule number of writers will ever become household names, collectively we are the wellsprings of creativity. Art advances when hundreds of small ideas coalesce, not when one big idea spontaneously appears.

So you don’t have to be famous to pioneer new paths, just write about things no one else has written before. We have a duty to push out in new directions, and say what’s been unsaid. Who knows who might read your work, and what dreams you might inspire. Together, we writers help keep the world interesting.

I’ve always loved writing. For me, it's always been better than any video game. I get to create all these marvellous worlds, and whisk real life people away on exciting intimate adventures.

I began writing because I noticed something. In the works I grew up loving, I glimpsed subtle gaps: paths not taken. I wondered what would happen if I was bold enough to explore where my favourite writers had opted not to go. Perhaps they weren’t kinky themselves, or mindful of the narrative pact, and the collective stare of thousands of their fans.

But I had no one watching me. So I had the liberty to create the work I believed should exist in the world.

Fundamentally, writing is an attempt to tune into the mysterious signal of intuitions, impressions, and emotions that constitute the human experience, and record them in words. I knew whilst most people had witnessed a spanking, even if it was on screen, they’d struggle to put it into words.

That became my motivation: if an image could only depict a spanking as it appeared, my goal was to create stories that depicted spanking as it felt. I wanted to depict aspects of kink that would never be filmed. All the months and years of longing. How the seeds of fantasies are planted by subtly erotic moments that take us by surprise, and how they slowly germinate until they consume our minds.

I wanted to explore the paradox that shocking things can be reassuring too. A spanking story has the unique ability to describe what’s going on in the protagonists’ heads. So when the reader recognises they’ve had exactly the same fantasies too, there’s a feeling of being seen, a validation that they’re not so weird after all.

I started writing about spankings because it’s always easier to write about something you love. When I first dared to share, happily those who read them found them arousing too. That encouraged me to create more, and I discovered writing could put me into a delightful state of flow. It was as if I’d been connected to a limitless source of energy that made writing effortless.

In the erotic I found I could explore a theme that had always fascinated me, the ageless clash between order and rebelliousness. Rules and rule-breaking were at the heart of so many spanking stories. We cherish the liberty to transgress, yet it wouldn’t be anywhere near as arousing if an authority figure wasn’t looming nearby, one who believed in strict discipline and well-smacked bottoms.

Painting outside the lines, whether on a page, or in any aspect of life, is an act of audacity. It feels wrong and transgressive because we must go against our instincts about what others want, and what we feel we're allowed to do.

Yet audacity is not recklessness, it's a conscious decision not to play safe, and to explore the corners of life's game-board. It is the act of pursuing interestingness. In life, true audacity is surprisingly rare, I think that's why it turns us on so much.

Come to think of it, a good story is like a spanking in so many ways. Smacks should seize the attention, make recipients tingle, and yearn for more.

A smack is just a noise without its sting.