What Literary Erotica Actually Is (And Why It’s Not the Same as “Spicy”)

People ask me this a lot, or I ask myself before anyone else gets the chance: is this porn with nicer sentences, or is it something else. Short answer, it’s something else. Long answer needs a bit more room.

“Erotica” has become one of those words that’s absorbed everything spicy in the last few years — romance with explicit scenes, fast pacing, a happy ending you can basically set your watch by. Nothing wrong with that, honestly. It has its readers and its purpose, and I’d guess for a lot of people it’s exactly what they’re after on a random Tuesday night. But lumping it all together flattens things that aren’t actually the same, and that bugs me a little, as a reader more than as a writer.

Literary erotica — the kind that existed long before anyone slapped a hashtag on it — treats sex as a tool, not the point. The body is the door in. What matters is on the other side: power, choice, who you are once you’ve picked something you didn’t know you were going to pick. If a story only works because of the scene itself, that’s not this. It’s something else, fine in its own right, just not this.

And here’s where I get a bit insufferable, if you’ll allow it.

A story can be genuinely explicit — no euphemisms, none of that “her throbbing core” nonsense — and still be empty underneath. Explicitness isn’t the achievement or the flaw. It’s just the register. What actually decides whether something has psychological weight is whether what happens in bed means anything outside it.

There needs to be a rule, some kind of pact, something decided in advance, because desire without structure doesn’t hold my attention for long. There needs to be a choice that costs something real, not a fake one. And the power involved can’t just be muscle — the one holding it in these stories almost never raises their voice, and the one giving it up isn’t doing it out of weakness. They’re choosing the exact moment to surrender, which is the actually erotic part, more than the surrender itself.

Last thing, and this is the one I care about most: something has to be left standing once the lights go off. If the story ends at the orgasm and just cuts there, nothing real happened. That uncomfortable echo afterward — sometimes not even a pleasant one — is proof there was something at stake.

It’s not romance with extra heat either, while we’re at it. Romance needs, almost by contract, some kind of emotional resolution — the “we completed each other” kind of thing. That’s not what I’m going for. I want the character to walk away with a question about themselves they didn’t walk in with. It’s a messier ending than a happy one. And yes, that’s on purpose.

I don’t think this is for everyone. Probably isn’t. But if what you’re after is real intensity — not more scenes, just more weight — and you want the book to still be sitting with you a while after you close it, you’re probably in the right place.

How I Actually Write Literary Erotica

That same tension between looking at someone and really seeing them runs through Through His Eyes, which you can read for free.

If you want to keep reading: why I chose a safeword.