How I Actually Write Literary Erotica

I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone but me, but people ask fairly often: how to write literary erotica, and why I sign it with a name that isn’t mine.

The pen name as a working condition

The second part’s the quicker answer. Néstor N. Val doesn’t exist outside these stories, and that’s a choice, not an accident. Writing about desire, power, and the things adult characters do when nobody else is watching requires a kind of honesty that gets a lot harder when there’s a recognizable face attached, a day job, family members who might google your name out of curiosity.

Writing under a pen name isn’t a mask for something shameful. It’s a working condition. Without it I’d be writing with the handbrake on, and it would show on every page.

The psychological question before the scene

The first part — how it actually gets written — takes longer to answer properly.

Every story starts the same way, even when it doesn’t look like it from outside: with a psychological question, not a scene. Before I know what’s going to happen between two adult characters, I need to know what it’s going to cost one of them to take part in it. No cost, no story. There can be sex, there can be tension, but nothing holding up a few thousand words of anything real.

That question usually takes longer to surface than I’d like to admit. Sometimes I’ve got an entire draft finished and only realize, rereading it, that I didn’t actually know yet what I was writing about.

Then comes the part that sounds duller than it is: the rule. Every story I write has an explicit agreement somewhere in it, something the characters decide between themselves before anything happens. It’s not a structural quirk. It’s what separates desire from coincidence.

If something happens just because, with nobody choosing it, I’m not interested as a writer. If it happens because someone set a condition and the other person accepted it — or tested it, or half-broke it — now there’s something worth telling.

What has to remain after desire

The part that takes the most time, by a wide margin, is what happens after the scene. Anyone can write a climax. The hard part is what’s still there ten minutes later, once the body’s settled and the head starts talking instead.

That’s where a story earns its place or doesn’t. I go over that section more than any other, mostly because the first draft always sounds like an apology or a moral, and neither of those has any business being there.

I don’t have a tidy method to hand over. I write slowly, rewrite a lot, and I’m generally suspicious of any scene that came too easily on the first pass: if it was that easy, I’d probably read some version of it before, even without noticing.

What I do have is one fixed rule for anything with this name on it: if the character ends the story exactly the same as they started it, something went wrong. They have to leave with something. A question, a crack, an uncomfortable certainty about themselves. Otherwise, what was the point.

If you want to start with the definition of this poetics, read What Literary Erotica Actually Is.

A short example

If you’re curious what that looks like in practice, you can read Through His Eyes for free: an adult work of fiction built around looking, agreements, power and consequences.

Read Through His Eyes

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