Recently as part of a personal exploration on pleasure (broadly), eroticism (categorically), intimacy (specifically) and sexuality (explicitly) I wrote a handful of fictional stories from a first person perspective where I have a series of sexual encounters.
As a non-sex haver I have questions on my own identity from a sexual perspective in addition to a romantic perspective. What kinds of situations, people, emotions, and activities did I want to explore? Are these realistic - as in, could they actually happen in the real world, or not? Would I like those activities, if I was involved with them? Where would my brain go, and what kind of connections and conversations would I want to have about these things?
Writing in this way, I created situations, containers, relationships, emotional connections. I made a point to not name or explicitly describe characters other than vaguest essentials for the vast majority of the stories. Some featured platonic sexual relationships, while others went from non-sexual to highly sexual relationships.
The stories ran the gamut in terms of what was described. Some stories were more about the anticipation and the meeting of partners - single partners, or multiple. Others were highly explicit in the detail. All of them had emotional connections as a primary feature, which gives me further reflection on the actual me, rather than the characterized, fictional me.
Many of the stories feature sexually assertive partners and my own lack of experience with sex as well. Some partners were active in kink, others were more of the vanilla persuasion. The way I had met those people also was important, as well.
Some descriptions involved groups, others in the singular. Only two specific stories to date featured specifically sexual BDSM related play. Not all stories featured me having sexual intercourse with the other characters in that story, either - maybe I was invited to be an observer.
I’m sure I can run more meta-analysis on the content of these stories. I was surprised as they came up in conversation that people I knew were interested in reading them - I may publish them more widely some time in the near future and also record audio narrative of them on the encouragement of faeriere, who I had met while at NARIX LA 2023 and correspond with from time to time.
Much like my journal writing in lifting weights, reading books, ramblings about rope and kink and sex, the target audience and purpose for these pieces of self-insert smut is my own internal exploration. The situations are set up, but I write through the consciousness and logic that follows in the story, not knowing where the end of that story is until I actually get to the end of it.
The reflective process in writing also gives me some level of courage that, conceptually, the territory that I plan to go has some geography. Rather than going in completely uninformed and uneducated to a new side of me - what a friend mentions as the journey to the authentic (and erotic, and sexual) me - instead I have begun to grasp the lay of the land, the mountains and valleys and rivers and lakes. I know now to watch out for crouching tigers and hidden dragons, as well, to be aware that there is risk in the unknown but still willing to step forward into it.
As I discover with my experiences with kink, reality often exceeds my own imagination, but the act of writing allows me to invite in this kind of energy, to learn more about what excites me, and manifest what I would like to have happen. It’s also important to note that these pieces of fiction are just that.
It’s a lot of fun to write smut. Sometimes I need to get up and walk away because things get quite exciting and I need a glass of water or another cup of tea before I continue writing this and that. These preliminary explorations engage my mind and senses in a certain way that I would like to continue exploring in greater detail.
Some of the stories in the future will likely be explorations further to the edges, discovering the boundaries of that territory. As an example, I’ve written stories in this container about me and women, me and nonbinary humans, me and multiple humans with internal and external genitalia that identify in or outside the binary. hom*osexual encounters I have not yet explored yet, but I’m curious about it.
In the seven stories thus far also, I have been approached by the other people in the story asserting that they want to have sex with me, rather than me in the driver’s seat, as it were, going out to go find people (in the fiction) to have sex with. Part of future writing would also be around being an initiator as well, to figure out what that would look like and how I feel about that. Currently, I feel a bit yucky about it, particularly surrounding sex. I wrote in other journal entries that I would prefer to be pursued and people tell me the things they’d like to do to me or with me, instead of the other way around.
Most to all of the stories (except maybe the latest story which involved sexually and anonymously milking a lady) are also more grounded in the real world. I also think it would be interesting to explore the significantly more fantastic side of things as well - lewd and bawdy harlequin tales of promiscuous elves, pleasure droids, sex demons, lusty princesses, and sexological thaumaturgists. You get the idea.
I also probably should put onto my list of things to read more smut, particularly ones that appeal more specifically to the emotional connection than a more traditional masculine writing of someone with a heaving bosom chesting boobily down a stairwell in a corset, or some kind of misguided Fifty Shades of Grey type exploration of BDSM. The authors I have been enjoying recently of the non-smut variety are Becky Chambers and Erin Morgenstern, who probably holds the award for having wrote the greatest hand holding scene to date.
Anyway, writing self-insert smut is fun, informative, and reflective. More people should try it out some time.
