Introduction
Last year, I published a book of writing prompts to help jumpstart muses and get the creative juices flowing. The prompts were for anyone to use, and could take any writer off in any tangent—all he or she had to do was hang on for the ride.
Many of the prompts that didn’t make the cut in that book were salacious, to say the least. As an erotica writer, I sometimes like to think outside my own boundaries and try to tackle the art of writing s*x in new and exciting ways. I mean, let’s be honest—there are only so many things you can say about s*x before you start feeling as if the scene has become rote or mechanical. The romance of your first s*x story soon dulls with time, almost like a marriage, and you’re left wondering what happened to the excitement you felt when you first fell in love with writing about…well, love.
That’s why I decided to write a book of writing prompts geared specifically towards the erotica writer. Maybe you want a different position, or a new way of thinking about a familiar scene. Maybe you want to try your hand at something you’ve never dared write before. Maybe you just want to write about two people getting it on and don’t really know where to begin.
Like my first book of prompts, the idea behind this one is to write every day. If you want to work your way through the year, starting at January 1st and ending at December 31st, you hopefully end up with 366 scenes you can flesh out into stories. Or if you just want to write something but don’t really know quite what, flip to the page for today’s date, and voila! Instant inspiration.
It’s only by writing that one becomes a writer, and practice makes perfect. Even if you aren’t working on a particular story, writing a brief scene or a short thousand-word story is a great way to stay in shape and hone your writing ability. It also gets you into a routine, and writing daily will sooner or later lead to a finished story or book.
This collection of writing prompts can be used on a daily basis. Every day turn the page to the new prompt, set a timer for fifteen or twenty minutes, and write wherever the prompt takes you. Or, if you’re between stories and looking for something different to work on, flip to the prompt for today and start fresh.
The prompts in this collection are my own creations. Readers familiar with my work will recognize many of the prompts as scenes I’ve written into my own stories. Hopefully these prompts will help get you writing—or, if you’re already writing on a daily basis, keep you going.
There are several types of prompts in this book. Some start simply, “Write a s*x scene involving…” or “Write about someone who…” Some of them you might have thought of before; some may be new to you. Some prompts ay sound similar to others in the book, but they present a different way of thinking about the same scene. For example, one prompt is to write a scene in which someone is being orally pleasured for the first time, and another is to write a scene in which someone is pleasing someone else orally for the first time. These scenes are similar in nature, but will be written in completely different ways.
Other prompts present a scenario in the second person, where “you” can be anyone—male or female, gay or straight, young or old, writer’s choice. I deliberately refrained from forcing a gender pairing in many of the prompts, unless they explore gay or straight s*x. But you can use these to write stories in any genre you prefer, be it contemporary, sci-fi or fantasy, horror, romance, paranormal…whatever tickles your fancy.
I hope you’ll find these prompts useful in kick-starting your writing or taking your current stories in exciting new directions. They were a lot of fun for me to write. I hope they’re just as fun for you to use as fodder for your next story!
J.M. Snyder
December 2013
