What inspired you to write?

[SpecterNecter]

I can remember two separate occasions. My first was Stephanie Myer's Twilight which I only read because my stepdaughter gave me her books to try. The ending was so ridiculously bad I rewrote it. My stepdaughter said my ending was "OK" which I took as high praise...The next was a story here by Lovecraft...It was a great story about a mature tutor giving sex lessons...it was inspiring and then the woman character called the young man 'baby' which pissed me off so much I decided to write my own erotica....I'm not trying to imply my reaction was rational...it simply was the catalyst.

 

[SimonDoom]

I've always enjoyed writing since I was a kid (a long time ago), but went into a job that involved no creative writing. 25 years ago I started reading erotic fiction online, and eventually found this place. I read stories for years before writing anything, but eventually the desire to prove to myself, "Hey, I can do that!" grew so strong I couldn't resist it. So I wrote one story, and then another, and eventually I wrote a lot.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I started reading to myself when I was 2 (I know, I know, I'm one of THOSE), and inventing my own stories when I was probably 4 or 5. When I had siblings, I'd play and construct imaginary games with them, using characters from stories or TV shows as the characters, but then gradually building ever-more elaborate and heavier-constructed worlds, with original characters, literally entire universes' worth of plots and characters, all intertwining over years, decades, millenia.

Did that up through high school, and we did it enough that I started to write them down. Fairly derivative, and my writing was horrible in retrospect, but it was just so cool seeing the stories we built with words take solid form. Just kept going from there, moving from our stories to ones brimming in my head, letting it all pour out.

 

[ronde]

My job has always been in the engineering side of the automotive business and I've written more technical papers than I can count. As a relief from that, I started reading stories here on Literotica. Somewhere in my first year as a reader I got the idea that I could write erotica as well as some of the author's works I'd been reading. I wrote my first story, was surprised at how well it did, and never looked back. It's been a way to express my creative side as opposed to the technically and usually boring side that my job demanded.

 

[SpecterNecter]

I started reading to myself when I was 2 (I know, I know, I'm one of THOSE), and inventing my own stories when I was probably 4 or 5. When I had siblings, I'd play and construct imaginary games with them, using characters from stories or TV shows as the characters, but then gradually building ever-more elaborate and heavier-constructed worlds, with original characters, literally entire universes' worth of plots and characters, all intertwining over years, decades, millenia.

Did that up through high school, and we did it enough that I started to write them down. Fairly derivative, and my writing was horrible in retrospect, but it was just so cool seeing the stories we built with words take solid form. Just kept going from there, moving from our stories to ones brimming in my head, letting it all pour out.

 

[SpecterNecter]

This reminds me of being in the bathtub very young. I didn't think of the scenarios going through my mind as stories. I imagine characters that always seemed to want to hurt me and ways I'd escape.

 

[VerbalAbuse]

dreams of the planet uranus

 

[StillStunned]

I started writing because I ran out of things I wanted to read.

 

[Bazzle]

I started to write because of my kinks... my spectrum of kinks were not often dealt with in fetish fiction, so to please myself I had to write it myself.

Since then I have tried writing "vanilla" erotica with some success, but my fetishes drove my writing, trying to explore the inner carnal desires of my creativity.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I started writing because I ran out of things I wanted to read.

May or may not be part of why I started writing anthro erotica here...

There's a lot of it, but, you know, certain itches and all that. Anthro erotica tend to be the same handful of species: felines, canines, bunnies, bovine—and no matter how well written they are, I wondered about the less common ones. Like, where's my tamandua? Where's my axolotl? Where's my maned wolf? (Very distinct from actual wolf, and technically not a real wolf. It's like a fox on stilts...and smells like weed.)

 

[redgarters]

Onehitwanda's stories. I was at a place in my life where I needed to find a creative outlet, and reading her stories inspired me to try writing romance.

 

[Erozetta]

I don't know if there was a singular catalyst that pushed me towards erotica, but I know it started with wanting to work on intimacy and connection between characters.

With writing, I've just always wrote stories. It was a coping mechanism for the environment I grew up in. The world kinda sucked, the people around me kinda sucked, so I made my own. Writing was basically how I survived this long.

 

[AchtungNight]

Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl inspired my first bit of fanfic as a child. My first erotic story was inspired by the works of KMB and the cover of Vanity Fair’s 2006 Hollywood issue. Other stories followed from various influences.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I joined Lit mainly with the intention of writing an autobiographical piece, about an early love affair that became my tragedy, but I couldn't tell a soul in my real world about it. We'd both moved on: married, children, the whole growing up life thing. The end of that piece is over in @StillStunned's Pain thread -----> Memory and Loss is the story - the clue is in the title.

Before I wrote that piece I wrote a long shaggy-dog shape-shifter story while my mum was dying. I was flying to Sydney every couple of weeks over several months, and bizarrely, started writing. Sex and death, I guess.

That story, which I've not read for a long time, contains a whole bunch of what I now know are EB signature tropes: my Pre-Raphaelite long haired women, my shaggy haired blondes, women I ached for, women I've loved, long train journeys up into the mountains, primal cities, the whole kaboodle.

That story also, famously for me, is where I discovered even Erotic Horror readers really cannot handle the notion of the son fucking his father while mother and sister looked on. Who knew? For a long time that chapter had pride of place as my lowest ever score, 3.98, for several years. Curiously, it's since climbed to 4.07, and has 2000 more Views than the chapters on either side of it. There's no accounting for taste, and a bunch of sick fuckers who are as bad, or worse, than I am. At least I had an excuse.

And in the process of doing all that, I discovered I really enjoyed this writing caper, got better at it, wandered off into a whole 'nother set of fantasies, met people through Lit, and here I still am. It's not therapy, but I've got to say, it's still a whole lot of fun.

 

[onehitwanda]

where I discovered even Erotic Horror readers really cannot handle the notion of the son fucking his father while mother and sister looked on

 

[old_prof]

TBH, I'm still mystified by it to a large extent. Before 11 months ago, my last creative writing was a story I wrote for a girl I was wooing. As I remember, it involved Allah one hitting a bong and getting grief from Jesus and Buddha. What can I say. That was more than a half century ago. A different era. Except for a 9 month hiatus after a concussion, all my creative outlet had been programming, which can be very creative if you don't understand. A year and a half ago, I cranked out one more project for one last paper and realized I was tired of programming after all those years. It took me a few months to accept that and a few months to get up the nerves to write my first story since that bong piece. I had thought about trying to write fiction a decade earlier, going so far as to create an account here, before going back to programming then. But that first story got written (terribly) and got immediately posted here almost eleven months ago. And I realized I really liked writing.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

As a child I always wanted more books, so writing them myself was an obvious solution. At 7 I wrote about half of an Enid Blyton fanfic novel - finding it as an adult proved I had the style down, just no idea of an ending and actual coherent plot. Still my main struggle today.

Kept diaries full of adolescent wangst, which was a better outlet than drugs and smashing stuff up, and generally easier to access. Later, spent time on long-distance travel, often ran out of books to read or it was too dim, so writing passed the time. Writing sexual fantasies or realities was entertaining.

Later still, got into certain fanfic communities. Posted some stuff that was well-received, including a full novel (flawed, but honestly not bad), but hitting 400 views was rare. Posted one story here as the best way to share with a friend, and instantly, thousands of hits. OK, lots probably didn't keep reading, but basically there's an audience for filth, even if my stories are much more niche than the really popular stuff on Lit.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

It depends... It's a long story.

I mean, like music, I've pretty much been a writer since the moment I held a pencil, but I never took it seriously, or even considered anything related with language or literature as something that I could pursue even as a hobby. I may have attempted to write a few things here and there, but nothing came out of it, even though people told me it was good. What got me into writing were two things that happened in my life that changed me: I met my mentor, and I had my first ever breakup of a long relationship.

My mentor is just 6 years older than me, and I met him when I was 15. Honestly, I didn't know he was a writer; our relationship was purely being teacher-student first, and he is who I still consider the best teacher I've ever had in my entire life, is the model I follow for teaching, and he made me love the piano. It was later on that my dad heard that he had a radio show on Sunday nights, and that's when I learned he was more than just a piano teacher, which lead to me eventually finding out he is a poet. Then, the shift happened, and when his career started to take off, I followed because he gave opportunities for potential writers, and I was always behind him. In a way, he lead me into pulp literature, because the techniques he used came from pulp fiction. Of course, we're very different: he's very high brow, and I'm a pulpster, but the admiration and the gratitude I feel for him is strong, and a lot of the things that I learned from art in general started from him. I have nothing but major respect to this guy, and I'm really, really lucky that our paths crossed.

Then I had my first long relationship, which was short considering my second long relationship ended recently, and it lasted for six years. I was 18 years old, and in this relationship is when I actually picked it up as a hobby. She and I would share stories we came up with back and forth; mostly horror or paranormal, but there was one that was my first erotica. Then she cheated, which broke my heart, and that's when the seed actually sprouted. By this point, I was 19 years old, stuck in my music career not knowing why, still fresh in university training myself to be as a music teacher while also feeling intimidated due to how my peers were more skilled than me... and this is when I started to actually consider writing as something serious because it was more creative, less repetitive, and more fulfilling than music. I don't mind playing the guitar or the piano, but I am more a creator than an interpreter, and I never had the chance to learn how to make music since my training focused more in operating the instrument properly rather than creating stuff, and I missed my chance to change, but I'm glad I did miss my chance.

As for erotica... well, it was 2019. At that point I've written cyberpunk, urban fantasy, crime, police procedural... but everything felt like I was hurling stuff to the wall to see what sticks. Only one thing stuck with me though since four years prior: pulp fiction. Not the Quentin Tarantino film; the actual pulp magazines. Weird Tales, Avon Fantasy, Black Mask, Spicy Stories, Science FIction Quarterly, Argosy All-Stories Weekly... See, back in those days I was writing cyberpunk, mostly, and Blade Runner is still my favorite film, but never did I dare to look into Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or where did the inspiration for Neuromancer came from. Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler introduced me in there, and I started to see how much pulp influenced pop culture, to the point that if it wasn't for it we wouldn't have DC and Marvel. I saw that authors that I admire had their origins there; chief among them C. Clarke, Asimov, Rice Burroughs, E. Howard, and Lovecraft (the H. P. one, not the one with numbers) drew my attention the most, not because of what they wrote, but because I knew what their names meant. Then I learned about Walter B. Gibson... and since then I've been grinding my way into pulp fiction, learning and practicing all that I could, and I think I finally got it, but there's still much work to be done. It's been more than ten years at this point, but the reason it took me so long is because I had no compass.

Returning to 2019, my second long relationship, and my longest relationship too, begun. This is when I made the return to erotica. I wrote for my girlfriend at the time, and that's when I fell in love with the genre. A year later I created this account, published stuff that it's now deleted (but hopefully I will repost it under extreme rewriting because I can do better justice to those stories, as they had the same issue I stated before: like me, they had no compass), but it got the needle moving forward. It was her who introduced me to the niche I furiously defend here, and I stick into that niche; her kink, because write what you know. At this point I was a teacher already, so I wrote what I know, but I also wrote what I didn't know. I wasn't fully in with it until the relationship progressed, and during the pandemic, I became a cam girl for a year, which also got me into writing about cam girls, and that got added into my voice. And even if we haven't been together for two years, and we haven't talked for a year, I'm still writing erotica because it's what I love the most.

Real life writes the plot, and everything shifted when I faced political persecusion. Nothing like being on the edge of switching between a real concern and extreme paranoia to make your writing shift into something darker. Nevertheless, what inspires me to write is everything: the life that I went through, the things that I've consumed, the people I've met... but most importantly, because if I don't write, I stop breathing. You have no idea how bad my anxiety gets when I don't put words into paper. So if anything fails, it's my own anxiety that inspires me to write, first and last.

 

[AG31]

My fiction writing "career" (I don't anticipate writing anything in the future) began a few years ago when I experienced a series of vivid erotic fantasies, over a period of months, accompanied by equally vivid erotic physical sensations (see my bio). I would revisit these fantasies, and enjoy the concomitant sensations. Then I hit on the idea of writing them down as accurately as I good, to preserve them for myself. I found that I took a lot of pleasure in finding the right words and phrases for what I was trying to convey. The idea of publishing them sneaked up on me. I had begun looking for erotica on line and found that, after designing many layers of anonymity and secrecy, it would be easy to publish them, and so I did.

Since publishing on Literotica I've shifted my focus to conversations on AH. I've found them perpetually enlightening on a host of subjects.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I was reading a story here and it wasn't good. Though it was right on the money as far as my interests. I've written in the past, was pretty good at creative writing in school, done a little fan fiction that my friends liked. Even love poems for my wife.

I was burned out on my other hobby and when I thought, "I could write something better than this", I thought I'd give it a try.

I thought I'd have two or three stories to tell and then the itch would be scratched. That was 50+ stories ago. It didn't hapen overnight, and my first attempts were kicked back, but I eventually got good enough.

 

[CalBishForNow]

Writing fiction has been high on the list of careers I thought I'd enjoy for as long as I can remember. When it came time to actually apply for jobs, I sought out and settled in things more reliable and lucrative, which isn't saying much, but I've always liked the idea in some sense.

Writing erotica started as a way to realize certain personal fantasies. I submitted a story to a contest just to see how it would do and was pleasantly surprised. It didn't come anywhere near winning, but "just" a thousand readers seemed impressive at the time. I kept going. I'm writing some non-erotica here and there, but erotica seems easier and more fun to stick with and finish.

 

[AG31]

I was reading a story here and it wasn't good. Though it was right on the money as far as my interests. I've written in the past, was pretty good at creative writing in school, done a little fan fiction that my friends liked. Even love poems for my wife.

I was burned out on my other hobby and when I thought, "I could write something better than this", I thought I'd give it a try.

I thought I'd have two or three stories to tell and then the itch would be scratched. That was 50+ stories ago. It didn't hapen overnight, and my first attempts were kicked back, but I eventually got good enough.

What was your other hobby? Just curious.

 

[Rob_Royale]

What was your other hobby? Just curious.

I built custom model cars and competed in contests with them.