The First Time

by | October 21, 2014 | General | 12 comments

By Lisabet Sarai

Revealed wisdom – or perhaps unsupported mythology – states that it takes time to become an accomplished author. I wish I had a dollar for every blog I’ve read where the writer claims his or her first efforts were pure unadulterated crap. Not having been privileged to read these early tales, I can’t judge whether this is the truth or merely misplaced humility. However, I’ve been noticing recently that in erotica, at least, an author’s first novel often possesses a special quality that’s hard to recreate in subsequent work.

From a craft perspective, that first book might be flawed. Somehow that doesn’t matter. First erotic novels have a life, an intensity, that’s unique. They offer a riotous explosion of lascivious fantasy, unchecked and uncensored. The scope of imagination compensates for less than perfect execution. Passion carries these books, overwhelming other considerations.

I realized this anew when I read K.D. Grace’s post last month here at the ERWA blog. She was celebrating the four year anniversary of her first novel, The Initiation of Ms Holly. I’m a huge admirer of K.D.’s writing – check out her steamy contribution to the current ERWA Gallery to see why – but I found Ms. Holly particularly arousing. It’s full of offbeat characters involved in creative and kinky carnal activities. A delicious sense of sexual license pervades the novel. Reading it, I knew the author had not held back, that she’d poured all her personal desires and fantasies into her lovely fable.

In some ways, it’s hard to believe this was K.D.’s first novel. Certainly, I didn’t realize this when I read it. At the same time, the heady mix of prurience and innocence in the book is typical of first timers.

The book that inspired me to publish erotica has some of the same characteristics. Portia da Costa’s Gemini Heat aroused and delighted me with its diversity and sexual creativity. I became an instant fan, and I’ve read many of her other books, all good, some brilliant. Still, none of them, except perhaps Entertaining Mr. Stone, can compare with Gemini Heat, in terms of its effect on me.

Despite having a happy ending for everyone involved, the book totally shatters romance conventions. (Of course, it wasn’t written as romance, though it’s marketed that way now.) Everyone has sex with everyone else. Both gender identification and power exchange are fluid. The hero is half-Asian, slightly androgynous, a total sybarite who’s nevertheless ferociously intelligent – almost the opposite of a typical alpha male.

Just recently, Portia mentioned to me that Gemini Heat was her first attempt at erotica. If I’d known that when I first read the book, back in 1999, I would have been astonished. Now I think I recognize the hallmarks of one’s first time, the erotic charge released when an author bares her sexual soul and dares to write what pushes her own buttons.

My own debut novel has some of the same characteristics. Like many new erotic authors, I didn’t really have a clue about the publishing business, about writing for a market, about genre conventions. I’d read some erotica, mostly classics, but nothing (other than Portia’s book) that could really serve as a model. Mostly, I was burning up with self-generated arousal. I wanted to share my fantasies, to vicariously explore what would happen if I extrapolated on my (not insignificant) real life sexual experiments. In the previous decade, I’d had life-changing experiences with dominance and submission. I wrote the book to capture that intensity, and amplify it with what-ifs.

The creative process was intuitive and close to effortless (especially compared to writing now). I’d sit down at the computer and the words would flow unobstructed from my dirty mind onto the page. I penned 72,000 words in my spare time, over the course of about six months. I wrote an additional 10,000 words in a single weekend, after the publisher complained that I hadn’t honored my contract, which called for a minimum of 80K. (Newbie that I was, I thought that clause was just advisory!)

The result, Raw Silk, has been released by three different publishers and is still in print. I can’t say it’s a best seller, but it’s the only one of my books that ever earned out its advance. And apparently, people are still reading it. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting erotic romance legend Desiree Holt. The first thing she told me was that she had loved Raw Silk. (Needless to say, that was one of the high points of my so-called career as an author!)

Depending on how you count, I’ve written seven or eight novels since Raw Silk. From a craft perspective, all greatly improve on my first effort, which suffers from wooden dialogue, an overabundance of adverbs, excessively long sentences and word repetition that makes me cringe. Still, I have the uncomfortable feeling none of my later novels can compete, in terms of genuine passion.

The more I write, it seems, the harder it becomes to tap that well-spring of pure sexual excitement that fueled my first attempt. At this point, I’ve read and written so much erotica that I’ve become jaded, I know. I’m sure the ebb in hormones as I’ve grown older has an impact, too.

As I continue to write, I hope that other factors compensate: original premises, surprising plots, engaging characters, polished and evocative language. Still, I look back wistfully on that first novel – so fully of naive sexual energy.

I wonder how many other erotica authors feel the same.

Lisabet Sarai

Sex and writing. I think I've always been fascinated by both. Freud was right. I definitely remember feelings that I now recognize as sexual, long before I reached puberty. I was horny before I knew what that meant. My teens and twenties I spent in a hormone-induced haze, perpetually "in love" with someone (sometimes more than one someone). I still recall the moment of enlightenment, in high school, when I realized that I could say "yes" to sexual exploration, even though society told me to say no. Despite being a shy egghead with world-class myopia who thought she was fat, I had managed to accumulate a pretty wide range of sexual experience by the time I got married. And I'm happy to report that, thanks to my husband's open mind and naughty imagination, my sexual adventures didn't end at that point! Meanwhile, I was born writing. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, though according to family apocrypha, I was talking at six months. Certainly, I started writing as soon as I learned how to form the letters. I penned my first poem when I was seven. While I was in elementary school I wrote more poetry, stories, at least two plays (one about the Beatles and one about the Goldwater-Johnson presidential contest, believe it or not), and a survival manual for Martians (really). I continued to write my way through high school, college, and grad school, mostly angst-ridden poems about love and desire, although I also remember working on a ghost story/romance novel (wish I could find that now). I've written song lyrics, meeting minutes, marketing copy, software manuals, research reports, a cookbook, a self-help book, and a five hundred page dissertation. For years, I wrote erotic stories and kinky fantasies for myself and for lovers' entertainment. I never considered trying to publish my work until I picked up a copy of Portia da Costa's Black Lace classic Gemini Heat while sojourning in Istanbul. My first reaction was "Wow!". It was possibly the most arousing thing I'd ever read, intelligent, articulate, diverse and wonderfully transgressive. My second reaction was, "I'll bet I could write a book like that." I wrote the first three chapters of Raw Silk and submitted a proposal to Black Lace, almost on a lark. I was astonished when they accepted it. The book was published in April 1999, and all at once, I was an official erotic author. A lot has changed since my Black Lace days. But I still get a thrill from writing erotica. It's a never-ending challenge, trying to capture the emotional complexities of a sexual encounter. I'm far less interested in what happens to my characters' bodies than in what goes on in their heads.

12 Comments

  1. Madeline Moore

    Darn. My comment disappeared. Now I've lost that initial excitement I felt when I typed it up. Thank you for this post, Lisabet. I don't think I can recreate the whole post right now. It's late and all my fancy metaphors have slipped my mind.
    I'll just say that I thought Wild Card was basically brilliant and so did my man, Felix Baron. I didn't know, then, that I was exempt from his critical eye. He thought everything I ever penned was brilliant. So I awaited my editor's response with excitement. "A good first effort."
    Wha-? Oh, he also called it "a blizzard of sex."
    That it is, it most certainly is. 😛

    • Lisabet Sarai

      Hi, Madeline,

      Thanks for your comment. But what is "Wild Card"? ;^)

      Sounds good…

  2. Donna Gallagher

    Great post Lisabet!

    Good to know I'm not the only author struggling to get the zing back into my writing – I also blame the hormones 😉
    When I wrote my first book the words came easy, I guess because I was writing the story more for myself. Then I went through the editing process (which by the way usually makes me cry and feel illiterate)
    Now I spend my time worrying about structure and punctuation, not to mention IBP's, instead of just letting the words flow.

    I tweeted this for you Lisabet.

    • Lisabet Sarai

      Thanks, Donna – both for your comment and for the tweet.

      We can never recover that innocence, alas. However, we can make conscious decisions to let the books flow from our hearts instead of from our analytical minds.

  3. elizabethcoldwell

    Really interesting post, Lisabet.

    Whether it's your first book or your fiftieth, I think the stories you enjoy the most are the ones you're writing for yourself, rather than to fit what you think the widest range of readers wants or whatever genre is most popular at the moment.

    I remember reviewing and enjoying Raw Silk when it was first published – don't remind me how long ago that is now 🙂

    Liz xx

    • Lisabet Sarai

      I agree. I think the best thing I've written in the past five years was Rajasthani Moon, which was pure fun – thumbing my nose at all the market dictates and just letting my imagination play.

      (And thanks for the kind words about Raw Silk. Fifteen years ago!)

  4. Spencer Dryden

    Lisabet:
    Very thoughtful post, especially relevant here at ERWA where we have so many aspiring writers.

    My first novel "Bliss" was published in April of 2014. I think it's more accurate to call it a novella as it weighed in at about 20,000 words. I started out to write an erotic novel about a woman's struggle sexual shame and ended up in another place. I've wanted to haul it back many times for further development but have surrendered to the notion that it is best to move on.

    The experience was not unlike my first time with sex. It happened so fast, I had no idea what I was doing and I was left hoping it might happen again some day.

    • Lisabet Sarai

      What a great analogy, Spencer!

      I'm sure it will happen again!

  5. Donna George Storey

    I absolutely agree that our first erotic tales have a wonderful, untrammeled energy and sense of possibility. Experience with the tools of writing doesn't necessarily create a hot story. I also agree that writing what we truly love, care about, can lose ourselves in, translates to the reader and transcends formula. Raw Silk is a wonderful, memorable novel and the sense of discovery of all kinds of things is palpable. But I don't want to give up hope that our more mature works can be magical, too! So I will keep hoping for myself….

    • Lisabet Sarai

      Hi, Donna,

      I was going to mention Amorous Woman in this post as well. Even if I didn't know you, I'd be able to tell how close the author was to that book. Obviously the product of your heart.

  6. KD Grace

    Lisabet, I am SO sorry I missed your lovely post! I was in the land of lousy internet and am only now catching up on what I missed. Just saw your post. First thanks for the shout-out, and second, I hadn't really thought about the ingredients that make the first erotic novel so unique, but i think you've pretty much hit on it. I'll be the first to admit that I was trying everything wildly and feely with Holly, and have toned down a bit since then, I suppose in an effort to fit in better … A bit sad that. But then, there is only one first, isn't there?
    KD xx

    • Lisabet Sarai

      It's never too late to comment, KD!

      Sometimes I think an awareness of the market just spoils us.

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