Grammatical Erotica Pt 01 02

Grammatical Erotica, Part I.

Styles for writing erotica should vary just as our lovemaking should vary.

There should many times and places for hot, quick, fast, intense sex: Take me hard in the morning, half-asleep, balls squeezed, lips on cock, your pussy moist from your own pleasuring, then mount me quick, and fuck me fast and furious, Hendrix riffing on the guitar.

But there should also be many times and places for our love supreme: the languorous, luxurious lovemaking that begins early in the evening with a man looking a woman in the eye and listening to her attentively through a beautiful dinner, then a concert featuring Rodrigo's "Concierto De Aranjuez," then a slow removal of clothes in the bedroom by a fire, sipping champagne or wine, maybe a bath together by candlelight/

Then like a long sentence, with many twists and turns, the man's tongue travels all along the contours and curves of her body, stopping in a few places, one nipple and then the other, for a bit of punctuation, a semicolon of a suckle, and then a parenthetical expression (a finger or two slipped inside the pussy), then bodies kneaded by slow hands of massage, the woman softened and pulled apart, loins open, the man fully risen, and then all the lovemaking comes to a brief stop, a colon, for a change of position: two bodies sinuously entangled in 69, lost in pleasuring each other, like a reader caught up in a sentence by William Faulkner or Henry James.

Then the lovemaking becomes all Hemingway: No flowery prose. Just hard pounding sentences. One after the other. Fast strokes of the pen. Action verbs. Prose stripped naked. Nothing cute. Sentences pounded out on the typewriter like fucking a woman doggie style. Drive each sentence home. Get to the point. Make her quiver. Fuck her with exclamation points!!! You've got her panting now. Short breaths. Shorter words. Do it to me. More. Don't stop. Yes. Yes. Yes. Ohh. Oh! O!!!.

The question is: What works the best for the most enjoyable reading experience?

Grammatical Erotica, Part 2

Here, let me offer three basic points of advice for invigorating prose--a triple dose of verbal Viagra, if you will:

1. Become master of five forms of punctuation: the semicolon, the colon, the parentheses, the dash, and the ellipsis.

The comma is to punctuation what the missionary position is to sex: It's basic, common, necessary, and overused. Although the English language offers far fewer possibilities for punctuation than the Kama Sutra does for sex, a mastery of four "positions"--the dash, the colon, the semicolon, and the parentheses--can do wonders for variety in prose.

The semicolon is like changing positions during sex; it provides for some change in direction, or a shift but without loss of continuity; for instance, we start out with cowgirl, and then shift to reverse cowgirl. (I was tempted to use an exclamation mark at the end of this last sentence, but the exclamation mark--despite its wonderfully phallic shape (!)--is my least favorite form of punctuation. The exclamation marks annoys me as much as underlining. It is like the way Oliver Stone uses music in his movies: he pounds the point into you, bludgeoning your ear, when something less loud, less insistent would be more effective.) (By the way, isn't it fun, when going down on a woman, to use all five fingers at the same time? It's almost as much fun just as trying to use my five favorite forms of punctuation in the same paragraph: the colon, the semicolon, the parentheses, the dash, and the ellipsis) (I particularly like inserting erotic bits in parenthetical comments.) The colon is neat: It grabs your attention for what follows. Here the shift is not from one position to another, but, say, from vaginal to anal intercourse: You need to be careful, however, not to overuse the colon or insert one more than once in the same sentence: Otherwise it gets too confusing for the reader.

I do like to think of punctuation as road signals for the reader, or musical directions for rhythm and tempo; they indicate when to take a quarter note rest (a comma) or a half note rest (a semicolon). My favorite mark of punctuation is the dash--it's like inserting fingers inside a pussy during cunnilingus: it adds some verve--indeed intensity--to a sentence. You can, like Faulkner, circle around and around with long sentences, sentences that just go on and on, as if you are writing them on a hot, lazy summer day in Mississippi, and you are writing as if to capture the rhythms of oral speech or tale telling in your prose, but the reader feels you don't know how to unfold the point and proceed more sharply, so then you need something quicker and faster--the dash--to speed things up (and, with some more vivacity, you can insert--for more enjoyment--at least two dashes, maybe even three or four, to a sentence, like adding, for tartness, wide cut lemon slices to a glass of lemonade). (Right now, I want to open you--unfold you--tongue you--and wiggle two...three...four fingers inside of you.)

Now the ellipsis is like wonderful lingerie.....breathtaking and suggestive. Better yet, the ellipsis is like when you are fooling around in bed in a hotel and the housekeeper knocks and then she enters...everything just stops, for a bit...or it should stop...but, with passionate, uninhibited lovers, it's just a comma of a pause, a suspended moment, as they are cool, natural, unashamed, and, if interrupted, they just wrap each other up in their arms, smile...and then continue. Or, to try another metaphor, an ellipsis is like when you move from kissing and sucking nipples in foreplay to lower down.....in a series of short, quick kisses..... from bosom to belly button.....a rapid line of kisses....that stops when you are all the way down there........between and below.

2. To write sexy, potent, thong-dropping prose, deploy strong verbs.

At a moment of passion, the writer of limp prose declares, "Sexual pleasure is the most wonderful thing in life." It's true, but the phrasing is pathetic: The writer turns to the weakest of verbs, "is," to make this declaration. He's got to pump up his prose at this point." "To be" verbs just deflate a sentence. It would be ok to use "is" in a sentence to make a more tepid point. For instance, "Like masturbation, reading 'The New York Review of Books' is a wonderful pleasure." But to use "is" in a sentence where you are describing the wonderful pleasures of sex conveys all the enthusiasm for sex that a married couple might summon up as they are about to make love on Saturday night from 11:20--11:35 pm after 20 years of marriage.

The only way I would allow a writer to get by using "is" in such a sentence about sex is if the writer declared, "Sex is fucking great. Nothing beats it. Not even reading The New York Review of Books naked in a bath by candlelight." A writer needs to insert some added emphasis--some vibration, if you will--into a sentence if he is going to use "is": For example, "I feel that sexual pleasure, heightened by eroticism or love, is the most wonderful thing in life...." Or he could be at once more romantic and more eloquent and more humorous if he wrote, "I feel that sexual pleasure surpasses all other wonders of life; yet too often we let opportunity for this joy pass us by, constrained as we are by a host of social conventions (particularly marriage)."

Here's another phrase that needs some verbal Viagra: "My desire is to have sex with you tonight," say, "I want to make you sweat," or, more concise, "I want to fuck you," or, be more suggestive, "I want to make love to you all night long." The best choice of words depends, very much, on the audience and the occasion, so that there are certainly times when "My desire is to make love to you" is the appropriate phrase, but other times, when the straight, bold, emphatic "Take me" (or "Fuck me") works best, and, yes, at times, you can and should be wordy, so that to get the point across repetition or verbosity is not a bad idea, as in, "Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me....yes, Yes. YES."

3. To allure in prose, create original metaphors, as metaphor is to literal language what eroticism is to sex.

Literal language is naked, plain, stripped down, functional. Metaphorical language is nude: it's alluring, sensual, charged, electric--it's lovemaking as ecstatic union. Metaphorical language is bliss: it's bringing together differences; it's uniting opposites; it's the tongues of lovers twisting and twirling together; it's arranging the shape and sound of words in unusual but smooth and alluring ways, a linguistic 69. Plain language is routine, missionary. Metaphorical language is language at play. Metaphor renders words unchaste, promiscuous. They lose their bond to an old relationship. They assume new meanings, new relationships, new associations. Language has its rules of grammar and syntax. But the best writers become grammar breakers and dictionary defiers: they free words from their traditional meanings. So instead of telling someone "love is great," you write (as I steal from Katrina and the Waves), "Love is like walking on sunshine." But if you want to write a story for Literotica that gets more than a 3, you need a storyline that is more complex than something found in most 3 minute pop songs. So keynote could be: "Love is not just like walking on sunshine; it can be like walking on broken glass [Annie Lennox]; it can be a battlefield (Pat Benatar)."

Of course, when it comes to the language of lovemaking, the best dirty talk is wordless, but not soundless, or as wordless and soundful as orchestral music or the non-verbal grunting of rap music or the scat singing of jazz music. So let us write to make words pierce us and curl up inside, and let us write, and let us make love, to take us beyond the limits of language, so that our words give way to the eloquent silence of eyes locking on to each other and hearts beating in unison (and everything curling up inside us right down to the toes, that wonderful little exclamation mark of sexual ecstasy). We must write for readers who use their spine....who read for the moments of bliss, of pleasure in the text, when language becomes charged up, special, unique, explosive--when you feel the words first in your spine, as if the spine is the wick of a candle, drawing up the wax, and your head the flame.