Research and Erotica? (Patreon)

Since I’ve been working on that “Unknown Stains” story I showed you guys an excerpt of last month, and I have edits on a different story I need to work on for Heat, I want to talk about some of the research I put into writing my fiction, specifically with these two erotica pieces as examples.

At first glance, the idea that you would need to do any research to write an erotica story might seem silly. Sure, there could be some basics, but once you get to the sex, doesn’t that kind of fall away? For some pieces, that is true, but I find some of my most successful erotica stories have actually required conducting quite a large amount of research to write. I’m also not talking about researching sexual positions or kinks I’m not familiar with. I’m talking the same world building you’d do for a story that doesn’t entail sex.

"Mile High," the story I need to do edits on that has been accepted for Heat, involves a pilot. Part of the action happens in Guadeloupe, an island in the Caribbean I have never been to. Since there are scenes that involve aircraft operations, I watched a number of videos involving people flying and landing planes. I also consulted with two friends who have worked on getting pilot licenses for small planes to review details of the aircraft operations. In addition, Guadeloupe is a French speaking island, so I sprinkled just a little bit of French into the story to give it some flavor, after consulting with a native French speaker. I’m not big on putting a lot of foreign language into my work, but just a little bit helped set a nice tone. Planning out this story also involved charting the routes I expected the plane to take, and making sure I selected an appropriate business jet capable of flying the routes for the charter flights it conducts in the story. There are some additional technical details I had to work on with this piece I can’t discuss without giving too much of the plot away, but I opted for a slick, modern jet equipped with the latest avionics packages out there because I wanted this story to remain fresh and relevant for years to come. (If this sounds familiar, I talked about this is story in FWG Member Spotlight late last this year.)

For “Unknown Stains,” things are simpler, but still quite a bit of research had to go into the story during the editing phase in order to make things feel realistic. In this piece, we have two characters on a road trip through the American west in a Fort Transit camper van. Shenanigans of course occur. Now, I originally wrote this story in three days while at the Regional Anthropomorphic Writers Retreat back in 2017. At the time, I did do some consulting of maps and pictures to get the desert setting right, but I was limited due to the compressed timeline I had to write the story in. I was able to rely on a previous trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon I took that let me capture the feeling of the setting. However, I horribly screwed up describing the camper van in the draft of the story that was work shopped at the retreat.

Originally, I gave the characters an old Ford Econoline with two seats and a futon in the back. They had a cooler, two duffel bags with clothes, and nothing else. Now you can go road tripping with a vehicle like this, but it sounds more like a two homeless people living out of a van than two guys taking a camper van on vacation. I wasn’t at the time acquainted with the #VanLife movement that’s sprung up in the last few years through Instagram. It’s not that I hadn’t seen an RV before or a custom designed camper van, I just didn’t think about it. Later, as I started working on this story again, I realized this was a major shortcoming in my world building I wanted to address. The positioning of objects in the van, and how the characters interact with them is critically important to the flow of the story. While they’re not living permanently in this vehicle, I felt it needed to feel authentic that the van I gave them fit the lifestyle they’re trying to experience. (If you want a quick crash course on what #VanLife is and entails, NPR has a great story that aired earlier today on the topic.)

The details for both these stories may not seem important at first because sex is at the heart of these stories, but without that rich background to support the plot and the characters, these stories would feel much flatter. Not all readers are going to be familiar with a camper van or the basics of flying a plane. Readers who do know these details though will notice when they’re wrong, and it damages the immersion they have in the story. I find capturing a few of these important elements help make the world feel more realistic and makes the story feel alive to the reader. Not everyone story is going to need this, but even in erotica, when you’re looking to blend a story with sex, a writer will want to conduct their research.

So, don’t be afraid to invest the same type of world building into your adult furry fiction. Not every story is going to require it, but when it does, it can be quite rewarding. And at least in my book, there is nothing wrong with putting that type of work into your writing, even if the story entails two animal people fucking.