Why Do I Write?

Sometimes we are asked why we do something, and sometimes we ask ourselves why we do something.

This is a case of the latter. Specifically, I have been thinking about why I write erotica.

Actually, in my case, the question should really be, What changed? Long before I began to write erotica, I spent an inordinate amount of time writing game guides, primarily for racing games on the PlayStation, PlayStation2, DreamCast, and other gaming platforms. I had realized that I had a lot of knowledge about racing games in general which could assist others in bettering themselves in playing racing games, and/or in simply gaining more enjoyment from racing games. Even when I was not at the computer and not playing a game, I would be thinking about games and their game guides quite often – someone could have peered into my brain and seen track maps, cockpit views, visualizations of component settings, and the like. Even if I was simply having lunch at Subway, someone could have come up to me and asked "What are you thinking about?" and I would have honestly answered along the lines of, "Just trying to improve my lap times in an open prototype at Brno."

I suppose that the answer to What changed? is time. As I became more and more involved with my new job, I had less and less time to dedicate to playing games, which in turn meant less and less time to write game guides – after all, a game guide almost requires having the game in play at the same time to get the details right (even the same race circuit can appear very differently in two games). On the other hand, erotica does not require having a game in play at the same time – it does not even require having anything erotic happening to the writer at the same time.

My start with erotica came because of an erotic story I had read on Usenet. The story itself actually was not very erotic, but I recognized the essence of the story masked by the poor execution, and I felt that I could do at least a passable job with that same essence. Soon, "Once a Maiden" was written and released on Usenet, and readers generally seemed to like it. So I wrote a few more stories, and readers generally seemed to like them. Yet erotica was not yet something I thought about all the time – it was just a nice distraction from everyday concerns and issues.

Eventually, I discovered Literotica, and was impressed with the general quality of the stories I found on the site, and felt that a good way to test my erotica-writing abilities would be to submit my few stories to Literotica and see how the general readership reacted.

Clearly, the reaction was quite favorable overall, as I now have (with this essay) 401 accepted submissions on Literotica.

Yet I still cannot truly pinpoint the moment when I began to think about erotica a lot. I just know that, eventually, that transition happened, and combined with the positive feedback received on the initial stories I submitted to Literotica, I realized that I could engage in something I found I enjoyed doing and also give others some enjoyment as well as they read my writings.

So why do I continue to write? In large part, it is because now that I have spent over four years writing erotica, I still have a lot of ideas in my head which are waiting to be unleashed. Many of these ideas are admittedly for one-off or few-chapter stories, but I also have some ideas for far longer tales, including a story currently at seven chapters and growing.

But I also write to challenge myself. A significant step in that direction is NaNoWriMo 2008 – already, I am considering an idea and beginning to outline that story in my mind. I am branching out into new concepts and categories in my writing, including my first fanfic which is currently in development, nestled within the Robotech anime series. For the third year in a row, I am participating in the Literotica Survivor Contest, for which my goal is to attain a minimum of 150 points. To help keep myself in the habit of writing something on a daily basis, I created an online blog community dedicated to daily erotica fragments, and other community members are beginning to post daily as well.

And, more and more, I am giving serious consideration to trying to become published. While I write for myself first and foremost, it would be nice to be paid for my writing and gain a larger audience.

In the end, I suppose that Why do I write? and Why do I continue to write? are summed up by two ideas: the enjoyment and the challenge. Hopefully the readers will also enjoy each story and poem transferred from my mind to my laptop and onto the Internet, but ideally, the challenges will continue to come and, hopefully, be met.