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| ***BIO*** KARL KOWESKI: I'm a 33 year old displaced Chicagoan, now living on top of a mountain in Alabama for reasons that involve a woman. I was the lead singer/banjo player of the now defunct country/punk/disco band The Screaming Shits. Now I just work in a machine shop and write articles for porno mags. |
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| How To Write Pornography
For Fun, Profit and the Adulation of Oversexed Women |
| by Karl Koweski |
| Sitting here, staring at this column title, it occurs to me, I can’t remember ever deciding to become a porn writer. No point where I placed pen against paper thinking I’m just gonna write about fucking for awhile. The desire to pen smut was always present, as genetically ingrained into my existence as the scoliosis, the halitosis, and the inability to ejaculate without at least three hours of vaginal jack-hammering.
I can remember as far back as my pre-kindergarten days, my mother reading Dick and Jane books to me. All the while I wondered, why isn’t there a book where Dick and Jane sneak off behind the tool shed and play doctor? Or, what would happen if Dick and Jane succumbed to their deviant curiosity and said yes to Stranger Danger? This may be the best time to point out during the early, formative years of my life, I was raised in a cramped studio apartment behind a go-go joint. Across the street from my porch/yard was a strip joint, its white wall painted with the black silhouettes of nubile, naked ladies kneeling in submission and lounging in massive martini glasses. Some might think this upbringing may have laid the groundwork for all my later obsessions. These people don’t know shit. I could have grown up in a goddam monastery staring at paintings of St. Francis of Assisi petting deer and still hit premature maturity overwhelmingly preoccupied with splitting beaver. Because I was born a straight up motherfucking pimp. I believe my folks sensed my pimpalicious proclivities from the beginning. There can be no other explanation as to why they continually dressed me in too tight polyester slacks and dagger-collared shirts embellished with garishly colored flora and fauna, the flora almost always hibiscus and palm trees, the fauna usually grass-skirted Hawaiian princesses or psychedelic marlin. My parents also baited me constantly with a string of young, luscious baby-sitters, pole dancers-in-waiting the lot of them. And with what’s become an oppressive theme shadowing my married life, none of the sitters wanted anything to do with my cock. Even when I dropped subtle hints like scrawling F-U-C-K on the kitchen cabinet in fuscia crayola. However, don’t allow this overly long, machismo drenched introduction to discourage you from attempting your own forays into the shadowy nether regions of morally-compromised literature. The world is teeming with writers incapable of filling my mental prophylactics. Just because you didn’t cut your teeth in the thick of the sin strip or your parents didn’t dress you like the white Black Moses doesn’t mean you can’t place blazing hot tales of debauchery into the pages of Swank, Hustler Fantasies or Gallery alongside literary smut geniuses such as myself and this guy named "Bob" who apparently has a garden hose for a cock. In fact, if you follow the advice laid out over the next thousand odd words, I can almost guarantee you’ll be churning out the sort of stories that will garner you a female readership lusting to spread their legs for you in no time. At least until they meet you in person and discover you do indeed suffer from the scoliosis, the halitosis, and the innate ability to severely impact vertebrae and dislodge uteruses with an almost Herculean sexual stamina. And if you’re a woman reading this. Congratulations. You can probably get laid at will. Might as well write about it and make a few bucks off your whorish promiscuity. Which brings me to the first point. "Write what you know". Every bullshit hack and first year English Comp teacher trots this old chestnut out into the gaudy light of academia. Fuck that. If smut writers wrote from experience, the Penthouse Letters section would be as barren as a spinster’s womb (unless said spinster hung her crocheting needles within driving range of my place). A better mantra would be "write what you heard about in a truck stop bathroom". Do I write from experience? That depends on whether or not my wife is asking the question. Let’s talk quickly about the basic structure of a porn story. Hopefully by now we’ve come to terms with the realization, we’re not gonna become the next Hemingway writing this shit. Sitting down to write, keep the word quota at the forefront of your mind. What we’re writing here isn’t much different from the "what I did on my summer vacation" essays from grade school (smut also calls upon your powers of exaggeration utilized in those essays). The average Hustler Fantasy (dear hustler, you wouldn’t believe what happened last night at the eunuch convention) story/letter weighs in between 750-900 words. This is decent entry level type drivel for the semi literate neophytes, and so it doesn’t pay more than $25. From here, the next step up is the featured stories. There are usually two or three feature stories per reader digest-sized issue. This allows you to give your story a little breathing room. But don’t go overboard. The reader doesn’t need to know the narrator owned a pet gerbil named Yarbles during his youth, unless, god help you, it’s pertinent to the plot. The length of feature stories depends on your market. Print magazines prefer feature stories within a 1250 to 1750 word limit. A website specializing in pornorotica such as www.ruthiesclub.com tops out at 2500 to 3000 words. Prices here tend to vary between $50 and $100. Also don’t shy away from the porn nonfiction markets ("How To Write Porno" or "How TO Treat Chlamydia From The Comfort of Your Own Home Using Only A Deadblow Hammer and a Corkscrew"). The largest paycheck I ever received was from Swank for an article about seducing strippers. The watch words here are "paying markets". There’s not too many around any more. Gone is the seventies heyday of men’s magazines when guys like Charles Bukowski, Stephen King and Ed Wood were knocking down two, three hundred dollars a story in now defunct magazines like Oui, Adam Reader, Adam Quarterly and Cavalier. Too many places, nowadays, want you to be content with a contributor copy or, in the case of Penthouse Letters, a snazzy T-shirt. Fuck that. If I was only after the cheap pop of seeing my byline, I’d stick with writing poetry for the small press. Paying markets are not totally extinct, as of this writing. Swank, Gallery, Hustler Fantasies being monthly periodicals open to smut. The Ruthiesclub website updates weekly with a fresh batch o’porn just like mommy useta read. And they pay anywhere up to a hundred bucks. Enough to treat yourself to a tank of gas and a new release rental at the Movie Gallery. It may also be worth noting there are roughly 4500 paying markets for gay porn fiction. It seems the gay community loves their smut. Unfortunately, they have no interest in reading smut detailing sex between a straight male and straight female. Silly queers. Anyway, the beauty of writing porn is the tales always begin the same way and always end the same way. And if you’re unsure as to how to begin or end a smut story, you might want to stick with scratching out poetic odes to masturbation. Hell, if my cock could hold a pencil, I’d be writing these stories in my sleep. The primary rule when writing for the skin mags; you always want to write the piece as a first person narrative. No fancy second person crap. The degenerates reading your work want to feel like they’re vicariously experiencing your ejaculatory triumphs second hand, as though told to them by a studly friend. Third person, twice removed, is the literary equivalent of fucking with two condoms on. You can do it, but the results won’t be worth a fuck. There are some male writers out there who think it’s swell to write from the female perspective. I say, if you’ve got that much estrogen in your pen, go for it. Remember, self amusement should remain your primary focus as in everything you do in life whether you’re a priest, soldier or purveyor of porn. If you ain’t enjoying yourself, you might as well ride off into the sunset, .38 slug to the temple style. Personally, I always write from the male perspective. This is because my cock is the nexus of my existence. It is the staff that comforts me and the rod that offers all the self amusement I could possibly ask for. Then there’s the question: To cum or not to come. It’s important to have a handle on the language, of course. Do you cum or do you come? I find the story dictates the spelling here. If I’m writing about a couple sophisticates fucking on the bow of a fifty foot yacht, the Captain usually comes on the debutantes’s botoxed face. If my characters are NASCAR enthusiasts humping beneath the grandstands of the local speedway, the mechanic cums on the trophy girl’s sunburned beak. It truly doesn’t matter which spelling you use so long as you’re consistent. Switching out cum for come every couple lines only pisses perverts off. Likewise, you wanna stay familiar with the most up-to-date sexual jargon. I don’t mean you’ve gotta scour the Kama Sutra for inspiration. Even your most diehard smut enthusiast is going to have a difficult time recalling exactly what a "reclining hippopotamus at the watering hole" is (fucking a fat woman doggy-style while dipping her head in a toilet bowl). But you should have a good grasp of sexy moves beyond the basic positions that make up married sex. Everyone knows a golden shower is when you piss on your lover. But how many people know that a golden oldie is when you piss on the elderly. This becomes important when your protagonist, the indelible "I" slips into Shady Acre Rest Home to deliver the high hard one to octogenarian room mates Irma and Ethel while VFW cap wearing Leldon with dentures the size of a picket fence and a tricky bladder shuffles his walker up and down the hallway waiting for his turn. It’s also tantamount to being a published porn writer to think outside the box. As in there’s other ways to fuck than a cock thrusting in and out of a pussy. Having your cock jerked off by a lovely woman’s panty-hose sheathed feet makes for a grand time. But don’t be afraid to go the extra mile and reciprocate with "the hobbit". The hobbit? You ask. Don’t bother to look it up in the brand new porn glossary you just purchased from the Book-Of-The-Month club. It ain’t in there. This is cutting edge shit. "The Hobbit" is when you stick your hairy big toe into a woman’s cooch. "The Hobbit" is not to be confused with "The Gollum". I can’t imagine a porno scenario that would have call for "The Gollum" since there are no skin mags out there interested in detailed accounts of tongue massaging hemorrhoids. In the end, it’s just gonna be you against the page. A thousand words doesn’t seem like much until you’re creating the sexcapade between a mildly confused electrician and a lusty Amish lass. Especially if you happen to be a two pump chump who rarely hits the five minute mark fucking let along the five hundred word mark writing about fucking. When struggling toward that quota, don’t be afraid to get creative with the genital metaphors. If the indelible "I" is a poet, there’s nothing wrong with referring to his cock (always cock. Penis is too high school health class. Tallywhacker is too silly. Dick is better left to describing mean people. And peter... just plain wrong) as an "ode to feminine satisfaction, eight stanzas long". POW. You’re seven words closer to your quota. If the narrator is fucking the hell outta a librarian, it’s perfectly acceptable to describe her cunt (never twat, sometimes pussy) as "a water-logged erotic novel opened between her legs dripping wet words like "sensual desire" and "Cleveland Steamer". We’re really cooking with fire now! An astute reader will realize the end of the column is fast approaching. That’s because I’m tired of writing at you. In the end, your success as a peddler of smut literature depends on how masturbation worthy your conglomeration of words are. And since most readers of porn are chronic masturbators, it’s like a vicious circle jerk. Enter at your own risk! Now go forth and write your porn. And remember, the art of penning pornorotica is a lot like contracting gonorrhea. You won’t get the STD if you don’t put cock to cunt and you can’t write a story if you don’t put pen to paper. And as far as the adulation of oversexed women... I lied. Happy writing, sucker. |
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