Writing the Erotic

Writing about sex can be challenging. This course helps writers build erotic writing grounded in various characters, settings, and voices. We explore how humor, bad sex, or even problematic sex lend themselves to a fuller—and more erotic—interaction between two characters to establish a relationship between sex and literature, as well as how we make it fit naturally in the flow of a good story. This course encourages students to take chances and experiment with building eroticism into their work or creating a story that is primarily driven by the erotic, along the lines of Pauline Reage’s Story of O or George Bataille’s The Story of the Eye. Students leave the course with an understanding of both erotic writing as a genre and incorporating the erotic into other writing.