I think that porn is one of the hardest things to write. This is because, with most types of writing, there are ways that a writer imagines a person reading what they have written. With stories for children, you assume that children will read your writing and you write accordingly, leaving out things that children do not know about or are not interested in. When you write for adults, you assume that adults will read whatever it is that you have to say and you also write accordingly. You leave out what adults can’t or don’t acknowledge.

However, people who write porn aren’t writing while imagining anyone else reading what it is that they have to say. To do so would be shocking—distressing even. I mean, what the hell would they be even doing?

No, pornographers write for themselves. If they happen to share what they’ve got to say, it’s merely accidental. A little embarrassing and a lot more deviously proud.

And I’m talking about writing porn. I’m not talking about erotica or love stories. Writing porn is hard because it must be done without resorting to vagueness and elaboration. When you resort to vagueness elaboration, you have slipped over into erotica. Your writing has become too flowery and too poetic. It’s not truncated and base enough. Porn must never be tedious or else it misses the point.

The biggest problem with writing porn is figuring out what you are going to call the genitals of your characters. This is because the point of porn is to turn yourself on. It’s not to produce laughter, which most names for genitals tend to do. Scientific words sound weird so they’re out of the question. Other then that, you have the degrading names and then the innuendos. Don’t use the innuendos. They make you sound like you’re full of yourself and, while that is good and necessary in most contexts, it’s the last thing that you want when you are writing porn.

No, porn has to be written in common language and basic terms. You have to figure out how to describe some of the most complex things that anyone can and will ever do in the most simple words that you can find.

No one uses complex dialogue words in pornography. It’s all “they said,” “she said.” But there must be dialogue. Porn with no dialogue is creepy, after all. You use words strategically. You place words that startle next to a great number of words that people are meant to miss.

Some of the best porn I’ve ever read is so short that you’d miss it if you blinked. Two sentences—that’s all you get of the action. The rest is story. It took thirteen chapters to make those two sentences worthwhile—a wild goose chase through space or maybe a complicated social game played by five friends. When you get to the two sentences, you read them over and over again. You remember them. You treasure them.

I think that everyone who writes should, at some point, write porn. When you are writing porn, you are writing to produce a physical reaction. Very few writers do this. The space that pornographers inhabit is shared by comedians and horror writers. You have to know something about yourself when you write pornography or, maybe, you write porngraphy because you are trying to learn something about yourself.