Editing Smut Writing Tips for Aspiring Writefags (section)

==The Act Itself==
''"Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, draining any heat from the surrounding material.”'' -Sandra Newman, How Not To Write a Novel

Try varying the length of your sentences and paragraphs to reflect what's going on. The foreplay should be slow, flowery and described in long chunks. By contrast, the paragraphs describing the actual sex act should be shorter and more succinct, and the sentences that constitute it should be equally short and to the point. A good example of this at work can be seen in Smutomancer's "The Covenant of Sanctified Souls" and "Avelorn Bliss".

If you're going to use euphemisms in place of the more common terms, be sure that your readers can figure out what it's supposed to mean. Take the semi-famous line from My Immortal: "He put his thingy in my you-know-what and we did it for the first time." If it takes someone more than five minutes to determine what your characters are doing, then you should consider changing the wording to make things clearer. On the other hand, if you just describe it mechanically, the end result will be no more arousing than an IKEA instruction manual. (And on that note, there's no need to rattle off specific measurements- saying that a character has apple-sized breasts is fine, but saying that she has a 32A bust size tends to be a libido-killer.)

[[Category:How-To Guides]][[Category:NSFW]]