Erotica As A Literary Genre
Erotica is easily the most misunderstood of all genres. Even people who think they write Erotica don’t actually know what Erotica is.
One of the most frequent complaints I’ve seen on Twitter is from literary agents who accept Erotica submissions. The complaint is almost always along the lines of Erotica is not just a book with lots of explicit sex in it.
Erotica is a genre in its own right. There are requirements that must be met for a book to be classified as Erotica beyond the inclusion of explicit sex scenes.
Every story should have a character arc for its main protagonist. In every story, the protagonist can no longer go on living how they have lived or they can no longer be the person they once were.
In Erotica, the reasons the protagonist’s character or life has been forced to change are of a sexual nature. If you take the scenes of a sexual nature out of a work of Erotica, the protagonist’s journey of change through the story would make no sense. Sex and sexuality are fundamental to the development of the characters and the plot.
In other genres it is the emotional lives of the characters that is important; in Erotica, the sexual and sensual lives of the characters are equally important.
