Today we’re deep diving into that concept. We’re talking about finding the thread.

When writing a character, you need to understand things like who they are, what they believe, where they came from. All of it leads to more accurate storytelling. But another aspect you need to clearly know, whether it’s part of The Archive itself or not, is how you connect to the character.

There’s the obvious example: If you work with any kind of self-inserted inspiration, finding this thread will be much easier. Often these characters are the protagonist or a love interest. In my current draft, I connect the most with my main character. She’s a writer, she’s someone who’s seen some shit and hasn’t really known how to hold it. She’s in this complicated relationship with a man from a different era in her life who has seen and fostered a very private side of her. These are all experiences I resonate with her, and when I’m struggling to write her, these are the pieces I connect to.

This gets more complex moving out along the cast. I’ve written characters based on the myth of the Baba Yaga, because that’s a story near and dear to my heart.1 This character is a guide but keeps a very firm hand, and she’s ostracized by her community, regarded as a hedge woman. But she’s the one who has the guidance needed for another character to begin their walk across the coals. My connection to the story of the Baba Yaga is one of the pieces of her I pull myself to.

Now let’s talk about the platter on the table in front of us: how can you connect to a character that is truly evil?

I’m going to give a solidly hot take here: The potential for evil is something that connects us all. It’s not a fixed change that occurs at birth. Some people are predisposed to emotional distress that escalates when left without the resources they need. Some people make terrible decisions based on things like delusions, hatred, bigotry, selfishness, etc. But all characters, all people, are the good guy in their own story. Even the most horrendous human beings believe themselves to be doing the right thing for them.2

Back in 2018, I was writing a book about a circus around the turn of the century, and the story was deeply inspired by the dark history of PT Barnum and his Greatest Show on Earth. When I first came up with the book’s concept, it was after seeing The Greatest Showman.3 I couldn’t believe they’d made a film making a hero out of this despicable figure, turning him into a Harold Hill cartoon cutout. And here was Hugh Jackman making me tear up as a family man who just made a few mistakes alongside incredible dance numbers.

So, I wrote a book that displayed this ringleader, this Barnum implant, as the monster history informs us he is.

As I wrote this book, I dug into this character’s relationships with the others, including his daughter. She was a performer at the circus, the fat bearded lady, and she was his moral blind spot. He couldn’t face what he’d done to all the other individuals he’d collected, because if he did, it would mean facing he’d done the same to his daughter. It was easier to see himself as a hero, to be “saving this ragtag group of outcasts from a crueler outside world.” He wanted to provide a life for his daughter that took the narrative out of the hands of people rejecting them. He wanted to grant them agency so he could build a life for them. He simply had very few boundaries for what he’d do to get what he wanted.

But on a deep level, I understood that connection with his daughter, someone he would bend the world and himself for when facing desperation. While writing the story, I was with someone with very different ideals than me on a few things. How we viewed ourselves, how we chose to spend our time and energy, to a point of injury. At some point in the relationship, I let myself swallow down my own beliefs so I could shape myself to theirs because I couldn’t face how different we were. Because I couldn’t face my own identity.

I didn’t realize this until after I’d finished the initial draft, when I’d started analyzing where the plot holes were. I didn’t have my thread for the antagonist at that point, so there wasn’t much reality to pull from while reading his story. His story was weak because he didn’t feel real. He wasn’t based in truth.

Even the most sinister characters need to be based in truth if you want your book to be the best it can be. That means acknowledging your truth and shame, all the deepest, darkest corners of your heart that you’ve refused to share. It’s time to bring all that into the light and use it for something.

The main antagonist in a story I’m writing now is truly the scum of the earth. He’s a manipulator, he’s an abuser, and a liar. A wolf in priest’s clothing. But he needs to be real. So, I’m digging into how he became that way to find something I can tether to.

What beliefs did he take to heart so deeply that he lost his sense of self beneath a drive for power, control, godliness?

We’re not humanizing them to forgive their actions. But they need to be humanized to be made real. He’s not a puppet or a paper doll. He’s a real person and has real motivations, and he thinks he’s doing the best thing possible for what he thinks is important. In fact, in his current drafted state, he thinks he’s doing the best thing for an entire community. That belief is the real horrific factor, so strengthening it means giving it teeth in reality.

Embodying characters like this for pockets of time has always been something that intrigues me. When I was seventeen, I did a production of A Little Princess.4 In this production, I played the headmistress at a school for girls: Miss Minchin is an abusive, punitive, cruel person; one of the worst I’ve ever played. I specifically remember a rehearsal with my director where we went over one of my songs, examining the lyrics in which the character, an adult woman, shows deeply rooted jealousy against a little girl whose only crimes were having hope and showing others how to do the same.

I remember thinking, What must this woman have gone through, to be so self-loathing and insecure that she’s jealous of a child?

Using this self-analysis in character work in preparation for the performance, I connected on a deep level with Miss Minchin because I knew what that self-loathing and insecurity felt like. They’re horrific if left to rot, so I was able to understand how she got to where she ended up, even if I obviously didn’t feel the same or condone the behavior.

There’s a bitterness in my chest, a jaded cruelty that sits in the far reaches of my mind shaped by the experiences I’ve carried through my thirty years of life. Miss Minchin, other characters like this priest I’m writing—they’re ways to scratch that itch. Storytelling is how I take those parts out for walks without letting them rule me.

It seems so much easier to ignore them. To let them fade into the background, to reject the darkest parts of our personality as being too cold, too brash. Too selfish, too hurtful, too angry, to touch. But when we do that, they always come boiling to the surface in ways we don’t anticipate. We blow up at our partners, we cross our own boundaries, we push ourselves to the extremes for the sake of our own selfishness and insecurity.

But by embodying that piece of myself—the insecure, jaded, self-loathing part— in a way that created something beautiful rather than something destructive, I was able to heal part of it.5

Miss Minchin gets her comeuppance, and so will the character in my current story. These characters that portray villainy are still human, as much as we don’t want to admit it. It’s easier to turn them into monsters, into something to other. The further we push them from ourselves, the easier it is to hide from the similarities we share with them. And that’s when we’re vulnerable to the real monsters. But that’s another Substack entirely.

Maybe looking at and building characters like these, giving readers something to reflect on in a way that is easier to digest through the safety of story, there can be more darkness brought into the light.

Want to Work With Me?

If you’re a writer that’s struggling to finish their book, struggling to write a story that resonates, or can’t seem to write anything at all, I’d love to help. I’m a writing coach with slots opening soon for a special package launch, so be sure to join the email list below for the first news at the drop.

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I have wanted to die throughout many days of my twenties. Waking up with new emotional experiences to unpack, new dreams to grow attached to and see fade, new diagnoses to swallow, new questions that didn’t have answers. Without further understanding of why, my twenties have felt like the microcosm of my hurt, the whirling dervish that kept me tied to the pieces of me that splintered in my foundational years.

At thirty, I’m letting go of all of it.

Things like emotional growth and self-awareness are never an overnight process. But for many reasons that could come alongside diagnoses and experiences I’ve hid behind as excuses in my healing journey, I’ve always let the heaviest pieces slip to the wayside. Things like my debilitating urges to numb after years of masking combined with years of medical doubt and lack of self-recognition. Things like my desperation to build financial grounding in a niche industry at the birth of AI in a crumbling American wartime fanfare. Things like my tendencies to procrastinate, to run, from all of my responsibilities when things get hard, leaving me in a constant state of panic—which my body once took as the only way to motivate me.

I’ve never much watched Sex in the City.1 But as a teenager and young adult, I always pictured those women as... having it together. They weren’t perfect. They were flawed, sure. But they had jobs that paid well, they lived on their own or in a way that supported the lifestyle they wanted, and they were able to choose the people they wanted to be with.

When I got older, it became clear that those women were just as much imposters in their own right as I felt. The screen capped quotes from Samantha, Charlotte, Carrie, and sometimes even Miranda found their way onto my curated self-identity Pinterest board in captured moments that displayed raw relatability and humanism. Similarly to the ideal “working woman” I imagined while watching the seminal classic, 13 Going on 30, I imagined all these women working at a high-rise New York suite, wearing expensive blouses and heels while carrying iced coffees with enough sugar to last them through the grueling afternoon subway ride. To me, that said success. That felt real.

After living in NYC for six years on and off, I can tell you, it’s not. Most people are either broke or pretending they’re not broke. They’re scrambling to get to the subway, or they’re exhausted on the way to work. Just like the rest of us. NYC isn’t full of cardboard cutouts of the perfect woman, it’s full of human beings.

I moved away from New York City in 2019, but I think part of me never left that grind and dream behind. It just changed colors.

Moving to a small suburb in the Midwest, in a way, forced me to slow down. It made me unpack that dream for the core tenants it carried, for the forced puppeteering that read like “success” to me when I lived in the city. It made me approach my days with more grace, more softness, than the younger me once had. More intentionality in movement.

After another earth-shattering move and more chips falling that I could never have never prepared myself for, I can tell you with full confidence that to be alive is to accept that you are human. That you are flawed, exhausted, joyful, cringy, weird, and delightful. You’re real, and that’s the juice of what will make your stories real too.

One of the hardest things I’ve had to accept over my twenties is that being real means being welcoming of all those adjectives, warts and all. But now that I’ve officially stepped into my thirties, it’s become clear that those warts are exactly where the true dream lies. Where my stories flourish.

This birthday has come with a new lease on mental clarity, including knocking my cannabis addiction out of the park. Aside from a planned celebratory smoke that has remained an intentional celebration between breaks rather than a relapse, my head’s been clear of it since stepping over this annual checkpoint. I’d never gone so much as two weeks, let alone the full three I got under my belt. I’m on my next break now, which means I can add, “character arcs that explore ever-changing drug addiction” to my spectrum of story tools on hand. Talk about a recovery reframe!2

I spent a majority of my actual birthday trying to regulate myself, especially through my first sober luteal phase in years.3 I spent a good chunk of the day doing things for other people: taking calls, cleaning messes. But when I turned focus on myself? It came with an explosion of boundary setting with someone that I love so deeply because I’ve been walking over my own needs with a pair of combat boots for the last three years. Doing so made me swallow that, “I am thirty years old, and I’m not doing this anymore. My twenties were for learning. My thirties are for living. And I get to decide how that goes down. Full stop.” Something in that realization flipped a switch in me that has yet to flip back.

My first evening being thirty involved watching Bo Burnham’s Inside for the umpteenth time and writing the filthiest of smut with my spicy friends online. Those things were for me, and along with setting those boundaries, those are the parts of my birthday I will hold onto with the vice-like grip I once gave cannabis. They were what was real for me, no matter how it looked to anyone else. And since that day, the energy has only recharged and paid me back tenfold. Those boundaries set made the decisions I needed, culling back what isn’t for me and drawing in what is. I have my body and its new lease on awareness to thank for it. And you better believe that shit is finding its way into my book, prickly shame and all.

While I know it’s never as simple as my psyche makes it out to be, and while I’m not entirely sure where the road ahead will lead, I feel so confident in who I am now. I have moments of exhaustion, of dissociation, of despair. But I choose how I act on them now. Even if that choice is by enjoying a pint of ice cream and a solid cry, or by spending an hour with my new punching bag to get the energy out of my body enough to write.

This is exactly what all my teachings are about—getting in touch with what your body is saying and using it. You’ve got a plethora of stories and experiences inside you waiting to become an authentic reality. So get to writing them.

What the Future Holds

I’m facing a few different crossroads regarding various aspects of my life, and as the weave untangles strand by strand, I hope to share the threads I find as I pull them as authentically as possible.

Alongside my workshop on Smut and Storytelling for Neurodivergent Healing and Catharsis (which is in just under 24 hours, at 11am PST, I hope you can all join me!), I’ve spent this season slamming through editorial jobs that I am incredibly grateful for. They have, however, made it clear what direction I need to take the future of my work in. New limitations are requiring new stylistic choices, but part of me is hoping the sobriety will help with that, as well. Only time will tell. I’ll be launching more goodies in the coming weeks, but for now, I’m preparing for my panels and workshop with THRIVE for Pragmatic Kink. The events are online, donation-based, and run by Pragmatic Kink, an incredible organization that focuses on mental health and BDSM. The workshop (at this Zoom link) is on Sunday, May 3 at 1pm CST, and I really hope to see you all there. It’ll be a composite of all the teachings I’ve built around Smut Ed, so if you’re looking for a deep dive into the work, this is the workshop for you!

Keep your eyes peeled on my social media to check out all the goodies coming up on the feed. Until then, keep peeling back the onion and let yourself cry when you do. Every tear is a paycheck, and every limitation is one more lick of your freaky, unique style coming through.4

For many creatives, the concept of an outline, of plot beats, of knowing anything before they get there can be unbearable. “How will I explore if I know what the landscape is already? What fun is there in the journey if we plan it out ahead of time?”

As someone who regularly committed the egregious sin of reading the last page of a book first, I can tell you with great certainty that there is still plenty of fun to be had if you know the end result. In fact, Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” strategy of thriller writing explains exactly how beneficial knowing the ending before you arrive can be. This is also why the biggest hooks and best cuts of a movie are what get put in the trailer or synopsis. It excites cold readers enough to become hot ones.

Knowing where you’re going (as well as where you’re starting) is how you build tension. Your relationship with your book becomes a working one because you give it the respect and planning it deserves. There can never be forward movement without tension, without combustion, without a catalyst.

And that’s exactly what we’re going over today. What gives your story tension, what catalyzes your characters into change, and how to map out a few steps of the path (however large or small) to make the daily writing commitment that much easier.

Always returning to pirate’s code, a plot beat story map is more like a guideline than a rule. The idea is to keep exploring throughout the writing process. If the map needs to change, great! Make the changes to the map and not the pages you’ve already written, and then keep going.

Now let’s pull up our map.

What makes a story?

There are many cases made for the idea of only a few specific “stories” existing. The hero’s journey, popularized by Joseph Campbell’s hero myth and pattern studies via Hero with a Thousand Faces, details the concept of a monomyth. Campbell, deeply influenced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, compared and analyze religions and patterns among the universal human experience in how we tell stories. While the theories are certainly limited1, in terms of analyzing how we tell stories, Campbell was onto something.

Over the years, this universal narrative has been translated into various structures and plot ideas, but it all comes down to a singular idea: in a satisfying story that touches its readers,2 a character needs to go through a change. There are various common steps in this journey of change, as noted in Campbell’s work as well as in the plot structures we’ll discuss below. But it takes utilizing a few more tools to make the structure work for you, whether you’re a planner, a pantser, or some glorious cocktail of them both.

And now, for a controversial statement:

The great unknown can be just as frightening as the horrors in front of us, and blank-page syndrome is a hell of a staller. But trying to get someone who thrives without an outline to use one, as I mentioned, is like pulling teeth. The work that comes out the other end without a plan is also often rushed and shallow, as they felt the need to barrel their way through story craft as opposed to letting the inspiration flow in a controlled way.

For athletes, the real skill is not only the ability to exude massive amounts of physical strength and dexterity. It’s being able to balance when to run, when to hold, handling multiple things at once. Intentionality with how that energy flows to keep from burning it out.

When we talk plot beats all we’re making is a map, carving out the path to the needs of the writer. Plot beats become important when you want to look at things like structure, pacing, revision, and characterization because those are pillars of what makes a good story. The beats are the Rhythm through which your characters move about the space and story, accentuating the tension and relief when you need it.

But what’s a plot beat, and how many of them are there? Are they all crucial? How can a single story structure be translated across multiple genres and plots?

All will be answered in time, smutty writer. Let’s dive in.

Plot/Story Beats 101

There are a variety of specific story beats to reference, many of which are pulled from resources like Save the Cat Writes a Novel and Romancing the Beat. Those are the resources I personally pulled from to craft this article, though I like to shift things around and expound on specific ideas. But I’ll give credit where credit’s due.

I will repeat from the high heavens: these are simply guidelines. Your story can be whatever you need, but if you are looking to build a map for yourself, if you want to learn from the paths of writers before you, if you want to sell, this is for you.

Here’s a basic map to plot structure, as specified by story beats:

Act 1: The Thesis

1. The Opening Image

This is your snapshot “before” moment, setting the mood and tone for the reader. Character flaws are being shown to the reader through the problems they create for their life. This also works as a mirror beat to the final image. This is the moment where a hero needs to visually show the reader a piece of their Archive and bring it to the table in a way that makes the protagonist’s flaws evident.

2. The Setup

This is a multi-scene beat that sets the full status quo (and can overlap with the Theme and Opening Image, depending on your story’s structure). This is where the protagonist is after something they want (spoiler alert, it’s not what they need). Their flaws need to be very clear, and the old world they’re in needs to have something that needs fixing. This is the beat where you create a statement of stakes: stasis equals death. If the character were to stay in the spot they are now, it would “end them.” They don’t know how to change, but they know this is just not working. Staying here would mean they’d die, they’d never learn who they are, they’d be settling, they’d never forgive themselves, they’d live with too much regret, etc. Something is waiting to light a fire under their ass, and they are itching for the heat.

3. Theme Stated

This beat can be a subtle one, and it often features another character making a statement or posing a question to the protagonist related to what they have to learn (the thing they need versus what they want; this is the theme). The protagonist will most likely ignore this warning or question, leading them down the path of your story to learn it in full. It’s a balancing act—it needs to be stated delicately, and the protagonist needs to be able to disregard/dismiss it. If they heed the message now, they’ve learned the lesson and there’s no story. However, they can think they learn the lesson and be sorely corrected later on. Lots to play with here in terms of versatility.

4. Catalyst

This is the moment that smacks your main character upside the head with plot development. Something needs to happen to them, an action strong enough to break up the status quo of their Opening Image. If the Setup is Stasis=Death, this single-scene action beat is where the protagonist meets what the stakes of that stasis, of death, would look like if they remain inactive. They can no longer stay in the place/headspace they once were, and the next beat is watching them squirm as they digest that.

5. Debate

This multi-beat scene shows the protagonist resisting the change induced by the catalyst. Whatever happened to them, they take every opportunity to run from it, ignore it, fight it, and manipulate their way out of facing the change. It does not work. The hero needs to face their Opening Image (take them back home, to work, their “before” world, etc.) with the new lens of their conflict knocking at everything they see, every decision they try to make. They’re at war with themselves in this beat, and it shows in their hesitation to fully act until they do. Making those moves brings us to the next Act and beat.

Act 2: The Antithesis (of Act 1).

Everything is the opposite as it once was.

6. Break into 2

This single-act beat brings the protagonist fully from the old world to the new world. Dorothy has been picked up by the tornado and dumped onto the Wicked Witch of the East.3 This can be a new physical location or just a new thing they’re trying. Here, they’re making proactive moves and are still motivated by what they wanted in Act 1—the external goal (the want) that won’t fix them. Decisions they make here are only a temporary solution, and they are being reminded they need to fail before they succeed. And this will most likely be a failure, as it’s the “wrong” way to change in that it addresses the want over the need. The “right” way (the need, the internal goal) will be addressed in Act III.

7. B-Story

This is where your main character is joined by another supporting character (B-Character). Sometimes this is a love interest, but it can also be some kind of guide or support system they rely on through to the end. This B-Character is a representative of that new world we mentioned, in a way, a guide for the main character in the transition between these two spaces to begin their journey. The person your main character was in the first act would never have been open to or ready to meet the B-Character—they needed the Catalyst and Debate to get there, and they’d stick out like a sore thumb if they’d been in Act 1. This B-Character is also often a physical representation of the theme of your story.

8. Fun and Games

This is, by definition, one of the most varying and playful (structure-wise) parts of a story. This section is the second-longest in the book, and it delivers on the promise of your premise used in marketing or your synopses. Your main character is either floundering or having fun, much like a “bouncing ball” narrative: are they up or are they down? This is the montage space of a movie, where we see the characters trying and failing or stumbling and succeeding in the new world together. Take careful note, as whichever place they end up in will be how the rest of your book carries on. It should also visibly demonstrate how opposite it is from the world of Act 1.

9. Midpoint

Now you’re smack-dab in the middle of the book, where shit has officially gotten real. Your main character experiences either a false victory or false defeat, depending on how that ball bounce landed in the last beat. If they’re victorious, it’s hollow—they have yet to learn the real theme, the need over the want. Maybe they got what they wanted at first, and they think they’re done. (Not with that many pages to go, friend!) If they fail, they think it’s over and they’ve lost, but only on the surface. This is the point that they can no longer go back to the world they came from as the same person. Stakes shift from the want to the need, love stories escalate with a kiss or consummation, time clocks like ransom notes and resource scarcity appear, and major plot twists land that leave the reader itching for the second half. Sometimes there’s a big party or outing, where the hero can step into the Act 2 world and fully declare themselves part of it. Either way, things have changed.

10. Bad Guys Close In

Following either the false defeat or false victory in the Midpoint, this is the beat where we see the cascading spiral or upward climb. Whichever way your main character landed, this beat is the mirror opposite to the Fun and Games beat. It’s also where the internal bad guys (the character’s flaws) start closing in. If that multi-beat scene was a stumble and fall to false failure, this one reflects them staggering to their feet and finding hope again in an effort to grow from their flaws. If Fun and Games led your main character to a false victory, the bad guys closing in will bring them to their knees and remind them just what it is they need, because those flaws become debilitating. And that’s what we’re gearing up to: the rock bottom.

11. All Is Lost

This is your main character’s darkest moment. The worst-case scenario from the start of the catalyst has occurred. The last bit of hope has been chewed up and spit out, and they are lying naked on the floor, metaphorically speaking. They’ve lost everything important to them and can no longer see the path. The whiff of death, as mentioned in Save the Cat Writes a Novel, reflects the thematic element of an end. Whether a person in your story dies, an animal dies, someone is cut off from communication or resources, this chapter leaves the character feeling hopeless. There should be a serious risk of them turning back on everything, because they once again cannot stay the same after what they’ve experienced. This is another catalyst, and it’s pushing them right into the next beat. And that one is one of my personal favorites.

12. Dark Night of the Soul

This beat represents the crucial reaction of this Act, a mirror to Act 1’s Debate. Your character is reacting to the rock bottom they just experienced, and they’re realizing that they can’t stay down forever. So what’s the next best step? They may return to the familiar or the old world, regressing into who they once were. But this time, it feels wrong, hollow. It’s not the sanctuary it used to be, and it shines a light on how they’ve grown since beginning the journey. Now they’re somehow worse off than they were before! Up until the Epiphany moment of this beat (when a final clue falls into place, a hero sees something or someone in a new light, the truth they’d failed to see becomes clear, etc.), your main character will most likely spend a good amount of time wallowing. It’s cool, babe, we all have to do it. But once they’re ready? They’re done with the pity party, they stomped their feet, and they say, “Enough is enough! Let’s do this!” Then it’s go-time.

Act 3: The Synthesis (of Acts 1 and 2)

Who they were in Act 1 + What they learned in Act 2 = Who they will become in Act 3.

13. Break Into 3

Now your main character is entering the synthesis world of Act 3, and they’re on track to fix things the right way. Now they’re addressing the need without being distracted by the want. They got the want, and it didn’t hit the spot. So, they’ve pushed through to what they need to fix all their problems. The theme of this section is, “It was never them who had to change. It was me.” This single-scene beat is where they learn the theme or lesson of the story, and they make an active decision to fix something. The next beat is the big lump of development that will get them on track to solving that problem and getting what they truly always needed.

14. Finale

This is the pudding in which we see the proof of your main character’s growth and learning of the theme. This is a multi-scene beat that takes up most of Act 3, and there’s another helpful structure you can use to hit all the best plot beats your story needs. This is also when the A and B stories intertwine in some way.

1. Gathering the Team/the Tools

They’re assembling the troops, gathering intel, making a plan, swallowing their medicine with their spoonful of sugar. This is where they make amends with those they’ve wronged by following their want over their need. It depends on the kind of story you tell on how they’re going to mend those fences.

2. Executing the plan

It’s time to storm the castle! The risk seems astronomical, but progress can be made enough feign a working plan. This is also the point in the Finale where another character or team member may sacrifice themselves or fall back as a way to push your main character further over the coals. They’re going to have to walk them alone, but that’s how they get the real change they’re after.

3. The High Tower Surprise

This is another Catalyst moment where the hero is led into a trap, a twist, or a surprise. They were a fool for thinking the plan could ever work, it was always stacked against them. There was no potential for success, and they’re reminded of the darkness they found in All is Lost.

4. Dig Down Deep

Following the pattern, this is another Debate beat. This time, the main character sees the flaw they’ve overcome, and they’re holding the proof in that damn pudding the right way. They metaphorically, spiritually (or hell, physically) pull out a shard of glass and are touched by the divine. This doesn’t need to mean religion specifically, but it does need to touch your character and reader on a soul-level. The character takes a leap of faith, of belief in themselves or whatever it is they’re holding onto, and as we’ll find out next, it works.

5. Execution of the New Plan

They’ve dug down to their core at this point, so now they can really triumph. The main character takes their bold, new plan into action, and they emerge victorious. If the plan fails, there’s a point to the failure—that the failure was the lesson the whole time.

15. Final Image

The main character has learned the lesson, they’ve handled the conflict, and they’re in the “after” snapshot. This is often a single scene or chapter mirroring the Opening Image that shows just how far they’ve come and how much they’ve learned. The story has changed your main character for the better, and it shows, even if they haven’t come out unscathed.

And that’s a full breakdown of some generic story beats to get you started! It’s a lot to digest, but to make it easier to reference, I build a Template copy of the Canva Plot Beat Map I made for clients and uploaded it to my Freebie Resource Library. There’s also the option to print it out, but I find the digital version helps to squeeze in all that detail in the zoom. That Template link is available to all my free subscribers in your initial Welcome email. If you need that link again, feel free to send over a message.

Upcoming Classes and Panels

I am so thrilled to finally announce on Substack that I’ll be teaching my workshop, “Storytelling and Smut for Neurodivergent Healing and Catharsis,”4 through Pragmatic Kink on May 3, 2026 at 1pm CDT. This class, which is online and donation-based, will go over how smut can be used as a tool to explore your sexuality and personal life experiences. Neurodivergent writers who can tap into their own internal experience and Archive can use storytelling as a grounded way to express and explore desires, needs, and fears. We’ll go over direct tools, exercises, and examples of using smut storytelling to understand desire in addition to discussing limitations and boundaries on how to best share or publish your work.

Pragmatic Kink also runs THRIVE BDSM and Mental Health Conference in May, where I’ll be a speaking on the Neurodivergence and Power Exchange (May 31, 2026 at 7pm CDT) and s(ubmissive)-Type panels May 30, 2026 at 8:30pm CDT). Both are Q&A/AMA style and are also donation-based. I’m honored to be sharing the space with so many other talented and experienced educators and speakers, so definitely check it out if you have the opportunity.

Other than that, I hope all readers can stay warm, safe, and informed as we move into the rest of this year. It’s on track to be a heavy one. Find your lighthouses, find your support systems, and tend those gardens. I’ll see you on the other side.

Welcome to the last few breaths of 2025, my smut loving friends. It’s been a long one, to say the least.1

Keeping it bright to open, Smut Ed has officially been in publication for over a year, and I am immensely proud of it. Throughout my chronically online life, I’ve attempted many different projects with my writing,2 and for one that is entirely passion-led, the first year under my belt feels amazing! I’ve been coming back to home base with myself, remembering my goals and my foundations for who I am. In doing so, the creative wells have opened up bit by bit. But it takes consistent work, so I’m grateful all the same for the opportunity to strengthen that muscle.

In doing so, this year has been focused on the birth of my book, which still remains nameless up to now.3 My process of drafting is a little slow, but it’s consistent.4 And that’s what matters to me. Because it establishes a strong practice that I can lean on for many years to come. Eventually, the hope will be to teach it as well. What a wonderful place to be in, learning and experiencing the things I know I’ll get to teach one day.

This book has been the culmination of all the work I’ve put into myself thus far, both in my professional life as well as in my personal life and mental health journey. I’ve kept to my daily writing word count,5 even if it’s on my phone before bed. In the midst of a hormonal crash-out, I’ll pull open my notes and write: “This is for a scene. I don’t know where, but I’m not missing word count.” Then I’ll thrust my head into the character I resonate the most with in that moment and just go. I start writing the scene, sometimes vague in detail at first to give my brain time to connect to the story through my experience. After a few minutes, I find the story thread. I’ve had to do this three or four times this month,6 and each of the scenes I’ve written feel powerful and heavy in just the way I wanted them to. So whether they’ll end up in the final cut or not is down to the revisions, but I’m so proud of the creative and connective payoff my pain can help achieve.7

All the while, I’m developing my teaching and coaching curriculum for next year, beginning with developing two workshops I’m bringing to fruition! They cover the worlds of smut and storytelling as well as power play and D/s, so I can’t wait to hear back and share them with everyone soon. Depending on who the classes are served with (whether through a conference or on my own), they’ll be ready to go for 2026. If you’re interested in learning more about my educational services, definitely sign up for the newsletter below, or follow my Instagram or Threads. They’re currently my preferred social media, so I’ll be sharing anything I’m doing along both.

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For now, I’m continuing my developmental coaching packages for writers. It’s a great option if you’ve been the victim of rewriting your first two chapters a hundred times, or if you’re struggling to see how writing a book could even matter when multiple rounds of quality editing can be so expensive.8

Working on my own book has made my way forward clearer. But throughout that writing process, there have been layers of my journey wrapped up in what I’ve been up to, where I’ve been up to, the last few years. And while those details are a doozy, they’re still part of my story.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

I’ve mentioned before that my chosen family and I moved to the Midwest from the West Coast about three years ago with some stressful circumstances at the table. Over the last four years of understanding the various chronic illnesses laid out in front of me, workable energy and new pools for clients have slowly dwindled, so I’ve mostly relied on financial support from my loved ones to get by. I often feel like the rope of our family, stationary in movement but holding all our billowing sails together as various gusts of wind tug us along our wayward path.

I’ve spent most days this year caring for our home and animals alongside keeping my business afloat. Each moment has involved working with my bare-bones mental and physical health while my somatic nervous system is ignited by the news every five minutes. It’s also involved holding space for the vast multitude of emotions and conflict that come with cohabitation in a multi-adult, polyamorous home environment.

When you’ve abandoned yourself for years, the hardest seeds to foster are the ones you’ve buried yourself. The things you’ve shifted within you out of hope for being someone others want. Someone the ideal version of you wishes they could be. But those seeds are the foundation of who you are, and they need to be watered.

At seventeen, I realized that as much as I would love to, I wouldn’t be going into theatre like I’d trained my whole life to. The reasons I love theatre and performance are woven deeply in a system that requires consistent pushing and maintenance—I just physically and mentally can’t handle that. And I don’t want to. I’ve found a slower pace of life that allows me to be in the driver’s seat, allows me agency and freedom. I take the pieces I found in my love of theatre—analysis of story, performance and public speaking, empathetic connection through fiction, somatic connection through music and dance—and leave the rest behind to the person I used to be. She’s got a good enough head on her shoulders to hold space in that grief and gratitude.

It took me a long time to come to this sense of peace, the path isn’t linear, and there are Parts of me that ache to sing and perform again.9 But I know better than to put my eggs in that basket because it doesn’t support all Parts of me. I know what I need best. And who better to give it to me, than me?

I’m facing a similar crossroads now as I come to the threshold of my thirtieth year. I’ve always been a relatively solitary person, opting for one-on-ones over a dreaded group hang. After some really painful fractures when I moved around New York, I shut down the idea of living in close quarters (emotionally and physically) with more than one person. Opening up from that came at a time of deep ego pullback, radical acceptance of my physical and mental disabilities, and desperation for community and connection. I am grateful beyond words to have found the chosen family I did, and the love that exists here is more than I could put into words. But grieving my self-abandonment means grieving what I know I wish wasn’t true: that while I am most definitely still polyamorous, I’m a polyamorist who needs her space.

I’ve always had my ride-or-die best friend, and at any phase in my life, I’ve had about three or four other close friends to make up a happy island of misfit toys. As a polyamorous pansexual adult, this turned into, “If I trust you, I date you,” said with a gentle shrug.

I’ve never quite been able to tell if I wasn’t friends with more people, wasn’t closer to more students and classmates, simply because I like being alone. I like experiencing my life one moment at a time, one person at a time. With the way I experience autism, the more people you add to the moment, the more moments rush over you like waves before you can find presence in them. I take in everything around me, so much that it exhausts me. So I like to be pretty in control and have my expectations met in my immediate safe space—my home. That’s hard to do with other adults trying to live their own lives in the same space, even when you want those lives to have healthy and loving overlap.

In becoming a dog mom, there are pieces of that “control” I’ve definitely let go of, and for the better. I also like the idea of having people in my space for certain periods of time, like holidays or events, but I’ve come to terms with how limited I need that time to be. When I became polyamorous, specifically, a relationship anarchist, I think I let that piece fall to the wayside because I wanted my polyamory to look the way everyone else’s around me did.

Many of my partners and loved ones are social butterflies, people who are deeply communal and connected. I see it as a benefit—I struggle to do so, so it gives me an easy excuse to push myself to connect when I’m with others that do so easily. But it’s also come with losing my needs and privacy in the shuffle. Of course, I want to have the people I love closer to me. Of course, I want to wake up and walk only a few inches to some of the most important people in the world to me. To know we’re a family and are always there for each other, only a knock away if we’re not already together.

It’s taken a long time, and a lot of therapy, to realize that there’s some nuance there. That much like relationship anarchy, my family’s living dynamics can look like whatever they need to. Our love for each other can exist in whatever form we need it to in order to support the life we want.

And friends, your friendly neighborhood polyamorous writer and smut editor wants some space and financial freedom.10

This all comes at the point in my life known as a Saturn Return, for those of you familiar with the world of astrology. The Saturn Return is often one (of a few) periods in your life where things massively change. You go through foundational experiences that shape your life in ways that are deeply intertwined with your life’s purpose. This was most definitely the case with mine, down to the days.11 Everything about this period is centered around authenticity in your work and personal life, which is difficult when you’ve been in a financial freefall for years following burnout and coping with new diagnoses.

I’m glad I’ve had the chance to recover enough to listen to my inner voice with full clarity, and I’m grateful beyond words for the loved ones who have helped me do so. But authenticity, for me, means agency and financial freedom. It’s a starkly different path, in my personal experience, to one of investing the time and energy into a trusted commitment of financial support when embracing disability and limitations.12 When I first discovered polyamory, a Part of me hid behind my needs so I could dream of a world where I’d be satisfied with financial dependence. I thrive in keeping a home, in making sure the bills get paid and the fridge gets stocked.13 But I’m also reliant on things like federally funded disability support and medical insurance, neither of which are looking too good in the next few years (unless we take some serious left turns). If I’m reliant on partners and loved ones to take care of myself, there’s a layer of survival chained to how I frame our relationship. And I’ve seen in brilliantly horrific color how quickly a dynamic like that can go downhill.

I’m a relationship anarchist to my core: My relationships take the form each one needs, regardless of what the others look like. Much like my partners, I won’t force myself into a relational box with one person or another due to my relationship with money or with my business. And the last few years, that’s been exactly what I’ve allowed myself to do: abandon my needs in one area of life in order to accommodate for another. Sacrificing one thing for something else when all I’ve wanted has been to fully breathe.

The hardest grief has been coming to terms with being the one to have called those shots. There are fewer things that dig deeper than knives you’ve pushed in yourself, knives that cut to the core of who you are.

And that’s a lesson PMDD has taught me over, and over, and over again.

Every month, I’m reminded of the ways I’ve abandoned myself. Those are the “dark times” that all PMDDers fear, the dreaded luteal phase when emotions run high and every pain you’ve ever felt strikes back again with a vengence. But in my journey, my relationship with it has become far more revealing.

What have I been hiding, and what have I been hiding from? it whispers.

That’s what this book I’m writing is all about. Needing to find your own core piece and trust it, letting go of all the other noise. When my various Parts take the wheel, I feel at the whim of the rudder. Rather, this phase of my cycle forces me into contemplation and forward movement rather than stagnation. It lets me take what I learned from the last prompt and turn it into:

What can I do to bring this into the light, and who might it help?

This is why I write. I write about pain and emotional tempests because if I don’t, these voices will flood me and wash me away with the storm. And maybe in sharing them, someone else can grab onto the raft and keep from drowning too.

How It Translates

This year, I’ve repeatedly attempted to write an article on my experience healing and learning about myself following the end of my BDSM dynamic. I’ve worked some of the information into education for my upcoming workshops and classes as mentioned above, but the fearless vulnerability I hope to find in publishing it has drifted further away the deeper I dig into the core of my wounds with my therapist. With PMDD, everything you’ve ever dealt with suddenly feels fresh each month, despite years of work to patch over the hurt with care. Every time I think I get closer to finding its core, I fall further down into its well. This article has remained drafted up to now, and I hope to work through it enough to bring it into 2026.

In another way, the healing I’ve found in kink has threaded itself deeply into the plot of my book. I’ve built a story that translates how it feels to be grounded within yourself in safely giving power to someone else to hold. I’ve also framed it against a corrupt and abusive church, processing the feelings of exposure and shame I built during my Catholic upbringing. The two create the sense of duality I experienced in realizing that subspace feels a hell of a lot like deep meditation and prayer. I came to the final pieces of my plot after a few personal journaling sessions that landed me in breathless tears and the exact horrific but necessary directions my story needed to take.

While the writer in me would love to gush all about my plot, as it’s still in the process, I want to give it time to cook. But trust me, if any of that sounds interesting, you’re going to love it. While this process of drafting has been one of love and exhaustion in equal measure, I know the end result will be more than worth the climb. All the while, I recognize the climb itself is the bit that matters.

What I’ve Been Loving

Aside from diving into my own stories, I’ve been consuming a ton of other inspirational stories that cross my path. I’ve been on a romantic thriller kick so the new Frankenstein by Guillermo Del Toro scratched that itch. I’ve also been eating up its film analyses by Kaz Rowe on YouTube, who I’ve been following for years. They break down why the discourse on literary adaptations and interpretations of story has been so…bad. And I loved every minute of it.

I’ve also been digging into the new season of Stranger Things14 and the show Wayward, both on Netflix. Along with my latest library read, Gothictown by Emily Carpenter, they’ve been great to examine how other storytellers approach the intersection of genres and themes while maintaining a solid pace for the story.

My other favorite read lately has been Refuse to be Done by Matt Bell, which I’m digesting in parts as I complete my drafting. The first section (on finishing the initial first draft) was wonderful, so I look forward to breaking down the rest when I reach those phases.

Welcoming 2026

Smut lovers, I think that’s a wrap on this year from Smut Ed. In the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing articles discussing the beat sheets and guides I use for plotting, how to use somatic movement and grounding tools to unlock your creative wells, and what to consider before exploring heavier aspects of BDSM and kink. I’ll also be sharing more stories from the battlegrounds of my drafting process and updating the Freebie Resource Library soon, so make sure you’re subscribed below so you get first notification of my next uploads.

As always, if you’re interested in working with me, I offer developmental editing, manuscript critiques, and writing coaching sessions. I also recently launched a developmental editing and coaching package that is perfect for new writers on a tight budget, so feel free to check it out below if you’re looking to get started on your path to authentic creative expression!

My slots fill up fast, so be sure to reach out if you’d like to work with me!

Other than that, I hope you all have a beautiful holiday season, a blessed Yule and Winter Solstice, and can enjoy this liminal seasonal time with your loved ones near and far.

I’ll see you along the horizon next year.

Smut Editorial is a free publication for writers and readers of smut who learned about sex from fanfiction. If you want more free tips and resources on writing craft as well as incorporating kink and sexuality into your life, please consider following or pledging your support. Free followers gain access to my Freebie Resource Library in their welcome email.

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I hope your transition into the colder months has been filled with as much (if not more) joy than heaviness, as those often go hand in hand this time of year. I’ve been chugging away at my manuscript, and we’re now 23k strong, which is more than I’ve written since my first full manuscript in 2018.1

Being able to draft alongside my clients has been great: it gives me relatable, recent, concrete examples of how to fix and overcome some of the issues they’re facing. It really puts us all in the trenches together as writers, and having my feet here in the mud makes it easier to help walk everyone else through it too.

One of those obstacles has been the relationship between the story authors are telling and the world from which the story is being told.

Often good storytelling comes in threes.2 Beginning, middle, end. Protagonist, antagonist, conflict. For our Pyramid of Satisfying Smut, it’s the Archive, the Rhythm, and the Space. Specifically, we’re talking about the last of the three.

When it comes to worldbuilding and setting, authors usually fall in one of two camps:

Author A: I know every nook and cranny of the space my characters operate in. I’ll paint the whole thing for you on the page. Yes, of course, that includes the number of blankets in the linen closet the characters never use, why do you ask?

Author B: That room’s got walls, alright! Long as it keeps out the draft, you know what I mean? A door? Sure! Windows? Does it matter? I’ll just throw them somewhere. The reader’s imagination can handle it, and it doesn’t make a difference to the plot.

While this duality paints a comedic extreme, neither camp is any better than the other. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and most authors are a delicate cocktail of both.3

But when crafting a story, characters need grounding in the world to make the reader care about what they do in it.

There’s an intriguing analysis of the Disney Princess merchandising called the “pink void” by .4 In Disney’s marketed imagery, the princesses often tend to be floating around in this unspecified space, a pink void. It creates an uncanny lack of distinction between their worlds and where they are as characters, because they’re nowhere.5 It’s disorienting, and if you take that concept and translate it to fiction, it equals a story that doesn’t feel real.

Putting your characters in a world that is real, that has teeth that bite into the reader and pull them in, is what makes those readers care. Keeping it seasonal, those Hallmark Christmas films and other small-town romances face the same issue. Without intentional distinction, these places feel like cardboard cutouts, making the characters in them feel like paper dolls.

And we want our characters to have plenty more dimension than Flat Stanley.6

Maybe you’ve been a victim of white-room syndrome, of characters that seem to float in a void, or just of a story that doesn’t feel real enough and you’re not sure why. Maybe you’ve done “everything right” on paper and can’t figure out why your readers are so detached. If so, this could be the post for you.

Let’s dive in.

Make it Organic

When walking a character through your story, the setting and world, ideally, are painted organically by the perspective of your characters.

Think about it this way: When you wake up each morning, how often do you take visual stock of the room, of the walls, of the patterns in the doorway? Without a specific reason, most likely not. When you wake up in the same place, the room has become so regular that it almost fades into the background of your awareness.7 Why would your main character do any different?

One of the best ways to build the world around your character is to do so when they interact with it.

In making an example we can carry through this strategy, let’s give you a main character running late to meet their spicy situationship at a science fiction conference.

To organically bring the setting into this scene, your main character (named Mollie) is leaving her home (along a beach) to go visit the love interest (Richard) at a conference taking place at a convention center further inland. The setting is a Western coastal city, around summer.

Mollie is deeply familiar with her own home. So the best places to insert description are where she interacts with the setting organically—like while pacing nervously waiting for the toaster.

With a racing heart, I move back and forth across the wooden floorboards. They creak under my sandals. My eyes fixate on the bottom corner where the wood meets decaying floral wallpaper. We never bothered replacing it, and we never would if we’ll be gone next year.

What else are we leaving behind?

I stop my staring and bring my head up to check the toaster again. Nothing. Checking the watch on my left wrist, I realize I’ll never get to the center in time. I slam my eyes shut and grip the warped, wooden counter in frustration. A cockroach crawls out, nearly touching my hand, and I thwack it away.

My head pops up again when I hear the toaster go off. Carefully, I pry my it from the aging metal, taking note of the crumb catcher I’d need to clean later before the roaches get to it.

But for now? I’m out the door.

In this example, the character doesn’t bother taking note of the room around her until she interacts with it. She’s familiar with the layout, the design, the decor, the experience of existing in that Space. So there’s less description needed until it affects her directly than a place she’d be unfamiliar with. But the things that do affect her create a strong image for what that house looks like.

Here’s another example.

I slam the brakes just in time to see a dust cloud roar behind me. The clock on my dash flicks to the hour, and my heart sinks. The minute my feet hit sand, I run along the wide parking lot to the entrance of the convention center, a massive doorway covered in banners and tarps with various speakers on them. Richard’s presentation is set for Lecture Hall F. My lungs don’t catch a beat as I pant along the hallway toward the lectures.

All the entryways are decorated with standing cardboard figures in space armor or various colorful droid suits donning mechanical gear. One has a blaster I recognize from a series Richard had me watch last summer, and I take note to return with him later if time allows.

The conversion space is quiet with most of the talks already beginning in their respective rooms, so my path along the shrub-lined cement quad is relatively clear. But once inside, I dart past other patrons wearing similar outfits to the cutouts. Polyester fabric and colorful wigs fly past my vision. In my rush through carpeted presentation halls of vendors and artists, I nearly collide with a sign covered in the same blue and yellow guild stickers I recognize from Richard’s laptop.

Found it.

Standing still for the first time since leaving the beach two hours ago, I let out a breath of relief. Just as I start moving toward the sign’s carpeted path, I feel a tap on my shoulder. When I turn around, Richard’s kind eyes meet mine. All the stress, all the irrelevant detail of the room and the convention, slips away.

In this example, the main character is in a place they aren’t familiar with, so you’re getting a lot more description of the space around them (even in their rush). Lacking that familiarity (as well as for your readers—it’s not a universally known space) calls for more detail about the space aside from what the character is individually interacting with. But keep your eyes trained on where theirs are while you’re drafting to keep the story moving.8

The reader’s eye follows your character’s, so the setting can appear organic in whichever way you need depending on how they’re moving throughout the space.

Make it High-Stakes

What are the consequences for the stakes of your characters, your story, and the setting? How will those aspects shape the description and how you paint a scene?

Are they in a dank, dark space? What time of year is it? Where in the world are they, and how will the weather and environment affect the scene? Are they in a place where oxygen is low, like in high-altitude? Are they in a location with a lot of tension and stress, like a fast-food restaurant? How will that space affect the energy of the conversation they have and how they perceive each other?

Let’s go back to the example of our situationship at the convention center. Mollie’s unfamiliar with the center, and it’s a place adding more stress to her situation (distance to find Richard, time and obstacles from the presentation, etc.). This will, in turn, shift the way description is utilized to paint the scene.

“What are you doing out here?” I ask Richard as he places a hand on my cheek. My skin feels flush and hot against his cool hand, but I’m not sure if it’s the run, the summer dryness, or the butterflies in my stomach causing it. His finger gently strokes away a bead of sweat as I try to say, “Your presentation is—”

“Delayed,” he smiles, wrapping his arms firmly around me. “You made it. Thank you.”

The sun beats down on us as we hug in the courtyard, and I lean into him to catch my breath as he’s holding me. The air leaves my lungs gasping, and I find myself missing the comfort of the beach spray. But as Richard strokes a strand of hair out of my damp face, I know I’d follow him anywhere.

That’s what I’ve been working up my courage up to say.

I feel eyes on us everywhere, those of nerds who may recognize Richard from his designs or who just live for public displays of affection. A few shoppers in a tent across the aisle flick through t-shirts but are clearly doing so to peer over the display at our interaction. The toaster sandwich roils in my stomach.

“He’s recognizable,” I say to myself, “you knew this when you met him.”

Richard’s heartbeat along my ear brings me back and reminds me of my initial reason for wanting to attend. Only now, I have mere minutes instead of hours. I didn’t imagine doing this in the sweltering heat before ticketed conventiongoers and fiery posters announcing a new space shooter game, but it’s my best shot. Otherwise, this feeling will eat me from the inside out.

“If we have time,” I pant, “can we talk? There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you. For a long time, and knowing what today means to you…” My hands are clammy from the heat and my nerves, but I don’t pull them from his. “I wanted to do it now.”

The example above shows a few different ways that consequences of the environment, the setting, or the situation can exhibit in the way you describe your story. The heat and the exertion are causing her to sweat, and that’s bringing back the anxiety in her body. She’s anxious about the audience around them and the vulnerability she’s trying to share in a private v. public space, so that’s a good opportunity to show some of that landscape.

Last, we’ll talk about how to make the character, and your readers, care about the setting you’re painting.

Make Them Care

Engage your character in the space around them, bringing that organic nature to the next level. This is also an aspect that deeply engages each character’s Archive, so it comes back to that pyramid and how the three forces work together to make a satisfying smut scene.

Is your main character making their first move on your love interest? How does the space affect that experience? If they’re in a dank, dark space, do they have to peer into the light to see ahead of them, bringing back training they’ve done to prepare? Are their hands scaling stone walls covered in dust to feel their way along? Do their toes lead their center of gravity as they creep along the corridor out of fear of setting off a trap? Perhaps your characters are things platonic while sharing a bed and being very careful about where their hands explore the sheets lest their lust take over.

Follow the emotional journey of your character, truly thrust them into the world and what it brings to the table. This doesn’t just need to be for things like fantasy and grander fantasy sagas. Any space can mean something to someone for some reason. If they care about the space, so will your reader. And getting the reader to care is what keeps them turning the page.

At my request, Richard pulls me to one of the side rooms of the convention hall. I stumble behind him in surprise as he cheekily yanks us in and closes the door behind us. A pack of toilet paper falls over his shoulder, and I realize we’re in a janitorial closet.

Without the lights or a window, it’s hard to see much detail in his face, but the brightness coming through the crack in the door shines enough for me to make out his blue eyes, his soft, pink lips. My gaze lingers on them, and I lose my inhibitions before walking him back toward the door and sealing the space between us.

The closet reminds me of the first one we frolicked into back at the studio, the small metal box stocked with bags of peanuts we ransacked after hookups. The dim light and musty air feels familiar, safe.

He feels safe.

Between kisses and gulps of air, I don’t spy any peanuts in this room. However, Richard’s lips kissing down my neck make up the difference in pleasure.

“Richard, I—” I try to speak between quiet moans as Richard travels along my jaw, but he cuts me off.

“Wait,” he says, kissing me again. It tastes like reckless abandon, wild and desperate on our tongues. I fall back into the wall, nearly smacking into a broom in the process. We both laugh as he helps me up, the sound intimate and calming in the inches between our lips. The distance doesn’t last long.

His hands squeeze down to my waist to steady me as he pulls back to kiss my collarbone. What little oxygen that is still lingering in my lungs hisses out when he holds me closer and trails my lower back. The confined air in the closet makes breathing more difficult when I keep losing control of it, but I don’t mind the gentle high it brings between our embraces. Richard barely gives me a moment to reground before I’m gasping again at fingers sliding to the band of my cotton panties under my navy-blue skirt.

“Richard!” I exclaim in surprise, but his free hand meets my mouth to silence me instead.

His smile is wicked, as is his caressing grip on my face, and I can’t help but match his grin from beneath. “Do you want me to stop?” he asks.

Before I can second-guess myself, I shake my head vigorously. My hair splays against his hand, and he grins again at my eagerness.

“We can talk later. Don’t let anyone hear you.”

And despite knowing I put it off for so long already, that I cowered behind the shield of our causal relationship, I let go for now. I let myself feel alive in his arms within the confines of the shelved walls around us. But I know I can only go so long before it all spills out of me anyway.

We can talk when we’re done. Maybe we’ll find some peanuts in here.

This example specifically highlights how the environment the characters are in can shape the scene and description, especially concerning their emotional investment with the Space itself. If the characters were in the closet at, say, a good friend’s funeral, how might that affect the energy of the space? What about at an award or graduation ceremony?

And that’s just closets! Think of all the other rooms and spaces at your fingertips, whether manmade or natural. The possibilities are truly endless!

Finding different ways for the characters to get engaged with the world and Space around them is an opportunity to pull your readers further into the story. A Space that is fully fleshed, a world that’s real, will make your characters and story feel that much more real themselves.

What are some books you feel bring the setting and Space into the action? What kind of scenes have you been struggling to draft due to difficulty painting the setting? Let me know in the comments!

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Smut Editorial is a free publication for writers and readers of smut who learned about sex from fanfiction. If you want more free tips and resources on writing craft as well as incorporating kink and sexuality into your life, please consider following or pledging your support. Free followers gain access to my Freebie Resource Library in their welcome email.

Subscribe now

If you’re interested in working with me on your project, writing craft, or publication, send an email my way or check out my website! Along with my regular editorial packages, I also offer affordable monthly packages9 for writers and authors that include coaching calls and developmental edits of your manuscript/text. It’s a great option for writers on a budget who are looking to improve their work in the long run through consistent, dedicated mentorship.

If that sounds like something you’re after, I’d love to help you publish the story you’ve always needed.

9

Usually between $100-$400/month, but this depends on your manuscript and timeline.

We’re getting into a room with them.

I’m not being entirely literal here: there's unfortunately no way to manifest your character as a human being (or dog, or dragon, or sentient house,1 etc.) to speak to them directly.2 But your imagination is a way to tap into a bit of the energy behind that idea.

If you remember, in the 2000s, the outtakes on certain animated Disney and Pixar movies would involve characters breaking the fourth wall, addressing the camera and audience directly. They even brought that concept into the narrative for The Incredibles in 2004.

It showed a sillier, more vulnerable, deeply human side of the characters. That made them feel even more real to us, and that’s why the idea was so creative and popular.

We're aiming for something similar. Interviewing your characters is a powerful tool, as it puts them in situations that allow you to step back and witness their behaviors and thoughts. That means you can carry the energy of the exercise with you when writing certain scenes for your actual manuscript.

Not sure how a character would respond in a life-or-death situation? Ask them about their history, where their fight-or-flight responses come from, and work backwards. Need to see what they'd do when faced with grief? Ask about the first time they experienced the emotion, and notice if their body language says they’re responding authentically.

I’ll break down how to do this below, but if you’re having trouble with your characters “responding” as you’re writing, try some of the methods offered in my post on sensory immersion during writing sessions. There’s a free printable version available in my Freebie Resource Library. I’ve also created a list of interview questions in the library, so keep reading to learn more on how to use it.

I’ve talked about the overlaps between journaling to process and writing fiction before, and this exercise is another fantastic way to process your experiences and emotions in fiction. I do so often using Parts exercises,3 though I put my own creative spin on it. I find it to be a deeply healing experience, but it's also one crucial to understanding how a character or person may present, may think, if given the chance to take the mic.4

How would their Archive affect their thoughts or actions? What would you, as an observer, see is true about them in how they present themselves that someone else might not? How would they translate the experience of being observed?

These are all big questions, so let's get into explaining the origins of how I compiled this process.

Interviewing Your Future Self

In my more recent dark periods, I've carried a journaling practice that has given my thoughts and emotions clarity and cohesion. It’s a tool I use when everything seems too overwhelming to carry. The first time I found it5, I had just done a chaotic cross-country move with my polycule6, and I was lost in within myself as we resettled in a new place as new people. I had also just gone through a hyperfixation/special interest period for Daisy Jones and the Six (the show, I'd read the book back in 2020 when this concept first started percolating), and I had the idea of interviewing myself 20 years in the future.

I wanted to imagine a version of me that had made it through the trials and tribulations I was currently facing. I wanted to know she had survived all the tear-stained pillowcases and blood-curdling screams of frustration in order to come out the other side. I wanted to seek refuge in her, for her to tell me how the hell she'd made it there alive.

I sat down to interview her a few times, asking her these questions, and honestly? She's doing great. She's done a killer job of recognizing the hard work she's done, and she takes herself seriously as an artist. She and the interviewer (both me) even had some witty back-and-forth quips7 that told me her sense of humor has grown but also remained consistent to who I am. I won't discuss details of her life, as I want to respect her privacy and leave the certainty of it up to time, but I would recommend the experience to anyone struggling to ground in their current reality.

It'll also be a foundational piece to the next step, which is interviewing the characters in your book.

The Chair Exercise

In Gestalt-modality therapy, the Empty Chair Technique is an exercise where you imagine someone (a friend, a parent, a sibling, a partner, etc.) sitting on a chair in front of you. You're safe to say or ask anything you'd like, and this process is often guided by a therapist, coach, or medical professional. Directly, this is a wonderful tool for therapy (and goes well with the Interview journaling exercise mentioned above). Personally, I love doing it as a way to speak directly to my characters.

Imagine the main character from the story you're working on, or one you're plotting over in your head. Now imagine them sitting on a chair in front of you.

What might you ask them? What would it sound like when they respond, and what might their reactions to the questions be?

For ideas on questions to ask when trying out this technique, I've added a worksheet to Freebie Resource Library. Once you subscribe for free to this Substack, the link for the Library is on the Welcome Page. The Library also currently includes the “Writing Your Truest Self" worksheets and “Writing Session Reminders: Engage Your Senses” printable.

Subscribe now

Looking Beyond What They Say

Aside from the dialogue and text you directly uncover while “interviewing,” you also want to pay attention to the way the characters behave, the sensations experienced around the room, and what it feels like energetically to be around them.

Take note of what they're wearing, how they're sitting. Is there a perfume or cologne you can smell? What mannerisms do they show as you speak to them?

There are a lot of ways to utilize sensory, body, and setting description throughout the interview process. Keep in mind that you are the interviewer as well as the interviewee. You can reroute the conversation if things get off-track, but since this is an exercise,8 try to let your subject guide the flow of discussion. This is truly an experiment in letting your characters lead the way, and it can lead to some very interesting details and unpacking of your writing process in addition to the character details themselves.

Looking For More?

If you really want to dig into a character and you're coming up dry, plotting it out with the assistance of a developmental editor or coach may help. Often, there are aspects of a character hidden just beneath the surface, and it takes asking the right questions and pulling the right stones to find the nuggets of creative wisdom underneath.

If you're looking for an affordable way to push past your own shame and limitations to get your writing out there, I’m opening a few spots open for my Long-Term Writing Coach services. This is a great option for writers already juggling a million other tasks (and bills) but who still need quality editorial services that fit into their calendar and budget. Benefits of my coaching include:

1. Developmental edits on one chapter a month9

2. 1-2 coaching calls a month10

3. Consistent accountability and cheering-on as you get your manuscript written

Prices vary depending on your manuscript and are in alignment with EFA standards, but they’re split up over a period of months to allow for a wider budget and timeline. This package allows authors the chance to address their writing journey at the base, then apply the concepts directly while working alongside someone who knows what she’s looking for and how to improve it. It also makes my services more accessible, which I'm always a fan of.

My slots fill up fast, so be sure to reach out if you'd like to work with me!

Writing a book is not an overnight feat. It’s often many overnight feats, lots of reassigned obligations and extensive periods of smacking your head into a keyboard in avoiding the dreaded blank page syndrome. When you’re done, it can feel like bringing a newborn baby into the world, vulnerable and scary.

Particularly from the first moment you type the words, “The End,” there’s a sense of wonder that only sticks around until the first moment someone else’s eyes touch it (or ears hear it).

Then it’s out of your mind and in someone else’s. Everything changes.

What an understandably frightening experience! At the same time1, what a liberating practice in radical acceptance and self-confidence. Similarly, it’s a fabulous tool to bring you closer to people you care about and other supportive individuals in your community.

Now, let’s put it into practice.

Separating Yourself from Your Art

We’re not talking about the moral dilemma on separating the art from the artist here. But we are discussing the idea that once you put your art out into the world, it is no longer exclusively yours. It now has a life of its own, and what it becomes through the lens of whoever reads it has nothing to do with you. You are not defined by how other people receive your book. While in revisions, the only thing you need to worry about when it comes to outside opinion is weeding through for nuggets of how to improve it. You want the book to be what it needs to be, not what this reader or that reader wants it to be.2

But just like I tell all my editorial clients, you know your book better than anyone else. Half the job of an editor, agent, or other publishing professional is to make the book digestive enough to sell3. That’s a very specific game, and it’s not conducive to solidifying your self-worth. Whether your book sells one copy or a million: you get to define who you are, and that book is simply one window into a facet of who you are. It’s not the whole picture.

When people are afraid of others consuming their art, it’s often out of fear of judgement.

• “They’ll tell me it’s terrible, and that will mean I am a terrible writer.”

• “They’ll love it and pressure me all the time to publish it, and that will mean I am not a fast enough writer.”

These voices all come from fears of someone else defining who you are. But no one can define you but you. If you know yourself, deeply, then there’s nothing anyone can pull out of left field and “uncover” about you. There’s no imposter hiding in your closet.

So recognize that once your book is in the hands of a reader, that version of it is out of your control. If it comes back for revisions, you can work on it again as you step into the next phase of its life. But if you let that need for approval fester, the feeling may come up again when you go to publish.

You have to trust that you did your best and that you told the story in the best way you could. Anyone else’s opinions on it are just that: opinions. And you don’t have to read any of them.4

Publishing as a Practice in Self-Confidence

Building self-confidence in any manner is crucial, and writing a book is a practice that can stack those foundational bricks with conviction. Not only does writing a (good) story require hard work and a solid understanding of craft foundations (how to tell a story, how to write a character, etc.). It also requires a constant commitment to a long-term goal with no guarantee of measurable success at the end.

As someone who is neurodivergent, let me tell you, that list is gnarly from the outside. If you’ve found a way to take the wheel on your brain and stick to a habit like writing long enough to reach a complete manuscript draft, you’re already passing the class in my gradebook.

The more continuously you stretch this muscle of self-discipline, the more evidence your mind will have when faced with the awful symptoms of imposter syndrome.

“What right do you have to believe you can do this?”

And that’s how you build self-confidence.

If writing a book is a confidence builder, then publishing a book is a further confidence builder, one that can be affirmed by a wider audience. Think of writing a book as graduating from college, and publishing is being hired for the first time. Every book or goal met after that is a new shift in your career, a promotion to a next level. On the small scale, it might seem like one book or goal is sucking your soul and will last forever. But taking a look at the path that got you there will remind you of those confidence builders, which can help push you forward. Then, lo and behold, you finish the book or piece and a new project emerges to take you away again.

Confidently move towards your goals, whatever they may be. Doing so allows you to trust yourself with your stories, to take yourself seriously when you say you want to write a book rather than sitting on those dreams for years.

Remember, you’re the one you need to trust before others can do the same.

Let People Love Your Art (And You)

The ability to trust someone enough to hand them something like a fresh manuscript is magical. It is a bravery not many cheer themselves on for. And why would they? When you’re done with something, we’re conditioned that the first thing we want is for someone else to tell us it’s good.5

But opening that floodgate when the terrain has been naturally flowing since you started writing is deeply vulnerable. Any old thing or idea or criticism could get in there, and those waters are untouched. Anything that lands will affect the whole pool.

In turn, the people you trust enough to read your work are showing their love for you in doing so. You’re being authentically vulnerable and trusting of them. That’s a display of love, whether you call it that or not.

Honor that bid for connection, and accept the support when it’s given. That also means to ensure they have your best interests in mind before passing the manuscript off.

None of this is to say you only want the compliments but none of the constructive criticism. But you should be able to trust they’re going to read with an open heart and mind because they care about the person who wrote it.

If they come to you with thoughts on what they read, and they trust you enough to receive it honestly and without censorship, that’s them showing you they love you. The opposite is also true: When they give compliments on your work, take them as what they are. You’re getting a compliment from someone who loves you and wants to see you succeed.

Those are the kinds of people you want reading your book, anyway.

Ways to Build Writing Confidence

Building the confidence in your skill to show your writing to someone you already know might be the difficult part. If you’re interested in building your confidence first before showing your best friend/partner/editor, there are a few different ways to do so.

The Wonderful World of Fanfiction

One of my favorite ways to build confidence and good habits when it comes to writing is fanfiction. Utilizing fanfic communities as a way to practice falling back in love with the act of writing is such an easy tool to access. It’s also a great place to get feedback by people who are already passionate about the subject matter. It’s no replacement for building an audience for your original works, but it gets you into the habit of regularly receiving criticism and compliments without identifying with and feeling beholden to them.

Fanfiction, in one form or another, has existed since the history of the written word. Dante’s Inferno could be considered self-insert fanfiction of the Bible, and plenty of Shakespeare’s work was based on the work of his contemporaries. Fanfiction really took off with the modern birth of “fandom” through communities like Star Trek fanzines and the early days of the internet. In recent years, a lot of fanfiction has lived on mainstream sites like FanFic.net, Archive of Our Own (AO3), Wattpad, and Tumblr. Fanfiction communities formed around the original IPs, but they soon spawned into worlds of their own.

I wrote a massive collection of fanfiction on various sites before I ever started working on anything under my own name and original characters.6 Having a place to write about something you’re passionate about while having the existing world to lean on like guardrails can make it easier to build confidence in the regular practice of writing for an audience. Once you’ve built some good habits, use fanfiction as a vehicle to jump off from. Then you can explore your own unique characters and worlds.

Writing Groups

Another way to scratch the itch of presenting your writing to critical but more trustworthy eyes is to join a writing class or critique group. The entire point is for everyone to come together and, with a lack of judgement and an excess of respect, share your writing and provide feedback for others. There are also online classes and communities that may allow for even more anonymity, many of which can be found on the aforementioned social media channels. I’ve also found writing peers in Patreon community groups (specifically in their associated Discord and Facebook groups).

Remember Your Why

I mention this nearly every article, but that’s because it’s crucial: always hold onto your “Why” when it comes to your writing. The Why concerns the message of the book or story you’re putting out there as well as your reason for writing as a whole. In the most difficult periods of the writing process, one of which is presenting a finished piece, the Why is even more crucial.

Remind yourself of why you want other people to read this piece, and why you trust this person as someone to read the piece in its current state. I have people that I trust with my life and more, but that doesn’t mean they’re ideal to see the first draft of a story. I have other people who are the best hype-up humans. They could find the most beautiful piece of tinfoil in a giant pile of garbage, and those are the people I send my early work to when I feel insecure. Once I’ve reality-checked that the document I’ve been working on every single night isn’t nonsensical in plot and formatted in Wingdings, I’ll send it to people I trust are inclined for deep, constructive criticism.

Then I can take the criticism and judge it with a fresh eye. The process becomes easier when I trust the people around me to be honest and caring in delivering any words of feedback, whatever they may be.

And that’s the goal with anyone you have in your circles. Hopefully sharing your writing is one way of prioritizing finding them.

Today’s article is about why that’s exactly what capitalistic systems built on racism, sexism, classism, ablism, and power want.

It’s also about how to use smut and storytelling as a vehicle to snap the hell out of it.

When we ourselves are gone, the stories we told others are what live on. They connect us, and they’re the fuel keeping our fire burning until we get to our own bittersweet end. When faced with utter disaster ahead, when bleeding and sobbing into the floor, that connection is what keeps us going.

It reminds us that we are alive.

Connection is at the base of sexuality; it brings us closer to ourselves as well as others. By sharing that fire with others, often through the art of storytelling, we remember the desire to feel and why it’s pivotal to our existance.

When I say, “Smut is a tool of resistance,” this is why: it has the capacity to ground us in the reality that we are alive and that our stories will live on. It’s not just about the monster smut or the hottest open-door romance on Amazon. It’s deeply knowing our own stories and sharing our experiences to use them as avenues for human understanding.

In this article, I’ll be going over how storytelling and connection can be tools of resistance by using them to process your experiences, to speak out and educate, and to find community. I’ll also be giving some action steps for individuals who need more of a roadmap for how to keep going in this messy hellscape we’re in.

Personal Safety in Expression

When it feels like I can do nothing, I can write. When I’m cornered, I can write. I have the ability to explore, to escape, to discover, to teach, and to learn with nothing but a pen and paper or the closest electronic device I can find. No matter the uphill battle I face, no one will ever be able to stop me from writing my thoughts and bringing my ideas into reality as I script them.3

In the darkest moments of my life, I’ve always had a secret journal, document, or diary. A place where I’ve drafted the deepest desires and fears I carry with me beneath the surface. I write them down, separating myself from them, in order to relieve my shoulders of some of that burden so I can keep moving.

When I was a pre-teen, my story was in a spiral-bound notebook of self-insert fanfiction I shared with my best friend featuring our favorite band. We started it at a sleepover and regularly traded custody of the notebook on weekends. As we lived in different zip codes, we eventually transferred the process to an emailed Word document. In it, we explored the fantasy of feeling wanted by the peers around us, “chosen” by someone we idolized. We even toyed with our real-life dynamics and family members in a way that was controlled and cathartic.4 We talked to each other about it and giggled over what we would do next without a creative ceiling. Our stories became so extensive that some portions were moved to an “outtakes” page, mainly used for inside jokes and out-of-canon laughter.5

We felt safe in that story, and I used that experience as a touchstone for my relationship with writing and catharsis as an adult. The urge only became stronger as sexuality took a more starring role in my life, leading me to complete longer stories exploring sex and gender. I wrote my first manuscript draft in 2019, a lesbian historical fantasy fiction inspired by P.T. Barnum and The Greatest Showman. I was newly out of the closet and in my first long-term relationship, and I wanted a place to safely explore my queerness and the magic that comes with first love.

That safe exploration through storytelling is the link that writing has always provided to my life. It’s also how I started building the ideas behind Smut Ed and my most recent manuscript.

Tldr: Writing cathartically connects you with your deepest self.

Getting Into Your Body

Smut and storytelling are tools that can get you in touch with your body, ground you in your senses, and help process your experiences and connections with others. Erotic stories have the added bonus of often inspiring direct connection with the body and grounding you, connecting to the text directly.

What does this look like in practice?

While reading a book you’re really enjoying, are there points you gasp, you cry, you grip the pages or your Kindle tighter, desperate to get to the next page?

Maybe a really spicy book has inspired you to explore your own pleasure at the same time, bringing the imaginative into the physical.6

Writing a book is even stronger of a physical connection. You’re using the imagination to bring characters, places, smells, sensations, experiences, fears, and pleasures into the physical world. Then it’s being consumed and grounded by all the readers who enjoy the book. That’s bringing the story into the physical on an exponential scale.

Clearly, stories, especially sexual stories, can bring you into your body. They ground you in who you are, both in relation to the world and other people as well as to yourself. They’re a way to find presence, to fully feel everything you’re physically experiencing, if you give it the chance to do so.

Put another pin in that. Let’s keep going.

Pleasure and Pain, Refusing to Be Silenced

As the war machine keeps turning, it becomes clearer that our current reality is one filled with sadness and suffering. We’ve been watching children and families be ripped apart and killed in places like Gaza as well as the United States, and hateful violence tints every news story on our feeds. We are in times that are not unprecedented, but they are indeed horrific and traumatic.

The systems around us, specifically capitalistic ones, thrive on our ability to detach from ourselves. This is the disconnect I mentioned earlier. Individuals craving power are able to do so in societies that lack self-awareness, which is part of the base the idea of seeking class consciousness.

Our attention spans are the newest brand of digestible colonization, and numbing through the difficulty our current crises are part of why industries like online gambling and cannabis are also thriving. The economy depends on you ignoring how exhausted you are, or at least distracting you with things you want to push you through that exhaustion. It’s a well-oiled machine, and to truly be in connection with yourself is antithetical to the digestion of the ouroboros.

Writing cathartically connects you with your deepest self and grounds you into presence, however painful it may be.

Even just the simple act of remaining present in yourself and your experience is an act of resistance. Use it as fuel to keep your ball rolling.

Pleasure in Opposition to Fear

In Emily Nagoski's Come As You Are, she describes how fear presents itself in the body in terms of our nervous systems. Capitalism keeps your body in fight or flight, locking your nervous system with fear and scarcity in order to make you easier to control.

Nagoski looks at research by Erick Janssen and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute in the late 90s regarding the dual control model of sexual response. The model describes our central nervous system (brains and spinal cords) as made up of a series of partnerships of accelerators and brakes—like the pairing of your sympathetic nervous system ("accelerator") and parasympathetic nervous system ("brakes"). The Sexual Excitation System (SES) and Sexual Inhibition System (SIS) come into effect when "almost everything is perceived as a potential threat," such as when your brain is in a consistently stressed state.

"More than half of women report that stress, depression, and anxiety decrease their interest in sex; they also reduce sexual arousal and can interfere with orgasm. Chronic stress also disrupts the menstrual cycle, decreases fertility and lactation, and increases miscarriage, as well as reducing genital response and increasing both distractibility and pain with sex. When there's too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even ignoring some things. If you can't breathe, then it doesn't matter how long it's been since you've eaten, you will not feel hungry."

Emily Nagoski, Come as You Are

The status quo (capitalism) likes it when we’re stressed, angry, and exhausted, because that means we’re too overwhelmed to give much thought to the situation we’re in. If you’re struggling to survive every day, you don’t have time to question the fairness of the whole arrangement, or what any realistic alternatives might be.

This conversation of consistent states of stress becomes heavier when considering that our bodies are one of the only things we have control over, especially in a growing authoritarian state. That control is one of the first things governments seeking power will hit, which is why you see things like Roe v. Wade overturns and attempts at overturning Obergefell v. Hodges with the current administration. Vulnerable populations become more so when the 1% is taking shots, and these communities are also ones often societally hit with ostracizing racism and bigotry.

For marginalized people, our pleasure shouts “I see your violence, but you do not get to take THIS from me. My pleasure is mine, and mine alone. I will revel in it, defying your crusade to strip me of any joy. I am in charge now.

Formidable Femme, “Pleasure is Resistance”

So capitalism exists in direct opposition to pleasure, making it the perfect point for individual resistance. Seeking freedom through pleasure and sexuality has always been a pillar of revolution. In 2025, it looks like that freedom is being questioned all over again, so take root in your pleasure and ground yourself in it.

Smut as Education

There’s a reason why book bans have flourished over the past few years. People can learn a lot from the books they read, whether that’s direct information from textbooks or reading the experience of someone wildly different than them in a fiction novel.

Especially concerning sexual education, there are so many aspects of storytelling that can be used as vehicles for education and representation. And seeing as it’s borderline irresponsible relying on our current public education system to do the heavy lifting at this point, storytelling is one way we can take the reins and start walking the walk we expect our children to understand.

Stronger Together

As I mentioned above, the systems we’re trudging through thrive on our sense of disconnection to yourself and others. Capitalism, hatred, power, all those things that keep us on the hamster wheel of suffering—they want you to believe you’re alone. But I promise, that is absolutely not the case.

One of the best parts of our internet age is our ability to find endless amounts of people from all across the globe and talk to them. There are various communities on every social media network out there covering everything kink, sexuality, and smut fiction. I traverse through them myself, and perhaps you initially found me on one! Whether you’re interested in birdwatching or being chased in the woods by a sexy man in a mask, there is a group of people out there just like you. Nothing about you is too weird, too broken, too kinky.

You can trust me on that one.

No matter how vanilla or deliciously twisted you might think you are, someone else is ready to back you up.7 Now you just need to discover them. My location preferences for finding like-minded kinksters and smut lovers are Facebook (surprising) and the BDSM/fetish social network, Fetlife (less surprising). Neither are for the faint of heart, but with patience and an ability to sift through a lot of useless muck, they’re gardens of smutty Eden.

Facebook is home to numerous private and public groups for every topic and community one could imagine. Spicier kink groups mainly exist by flying under the censorship radar, so keep in mind it may take digging, personal recommendation, and strict rule-answering to make it to the communities that work for you. Great places to start are wider-scope groups (podcasts, video games, hobbies, locations, etc.) and interacting organically to find subsections and individuals you flow well with in conversation.

Fetlife, on the other hand, is a social network dedicated to the kink/alternative lifestyle scene. It’s mainly used by people who actively practice or seek out kink and BDSM in their life (as well as ethical nonmonogamy), and there are a plethora of events in whatever area you may be in listed on their catalogue. It’s often more populated in city areas, but there are also online groups available. You may even gain the confidence to host your own event, such as a social or munch (a safe-for-work, vanilla event for kinky or ethically nonmonogamous people). Public places like food courts, diners, and parks are great for events like these, and you can scroll through other listings for inspiration on rules and etiquette. Always be safe when meeting individuals from online, and always practice considerate and consensually appropriate behavior regarding how you present in public.8

Action Steps

We’ve talked a lot about how smut and sexual erotica can be used as a pillar of resistance in theory, but let’s give some action steps for how it can realistically be brought into practice.

As discussed above, finding community is a great step to building strength in resistance. It’s much easier to keep standing up for what you believe is right when there are others standing with you. Whether it’s other writers, other kinksters and people to play with, or voices of people educating about the importance of sexual safety and wellness, consent, boundaries, and sex-positivity, continue following and supporting individuals who inspire you and push you to keep going.

Another way to support community is by championing your local library and school systems. Vote for and help fund organizations that lift up education and community care. Libraries are often some of the first spaces hit by economic downturns and federal cuts in funding, and we already chatted about how harmful book bans can be. But the more we support the written word, in any capacity (whether sexual or otherwise) the easier it will be to maintain that supportive communal space.

Aside from finding other like-minded individuals to build your network of support, do what you can to get yourself educated on current events and how you can get actively involved in a way that feels safe for you. This can be voting in local elections, attending local rallies, and donating to worthwhile causes9.

The Power in Smut

I don’t think that stories about people getting pleasure will fix things. Seeing seeing innocent families torn apart and bombed, seeing nonverbal autistic teens like Victor Perez shot by police multiple times before any semblance of mediation was attempted…

Books promoting sex positivity and consent will never bring any of those people back.

But there’s a chance that by creating a world that is less judgmental, that is more open to learning about themselves and others in ways that change them for the better, that ideas like empathy can be spread. That story can be used as a bridge to connection, with yourself and with others around you.

Smut won’t fix things. But it just might make the interim between peace and suffering a bit more bearable. Don’t let that fire go out—it’s what will keep us running.

I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself in its creation, namely, to ensure that my voice on this topic is well-educated and intentionally spoken. I also want it to serve the best interest of my current readers as well as individuals who might be floundering and seeking new resources.

Medical treatments and a body demanding accommodation to function have kept me floundering, but I can’t fail to mention my imposter syndrome’s grip on my mind over the last few months1. Hormonal shifts and the ways my mental health affects my creative spirit do so through making my internal voices stronger rather than by weakening my creative voices. They’re still there, the juicy stuff is just hidden under a constant highway of shame and self-loathing plaguing my mind for half the month.

Then the funniest thing happened while I was in therapy.

I found a graphic novel I’d written in college for an art course. The prompt for our final project was open, and I remember everyone (including myself) being somewhat startled by the eeriness in my subject matter. When they asked about it, I didn’t have a response beyond, “I just think the idea’s pretty cool.”

Here are a few cuts from that graphic novel.

I wrote this when I was nineteen. A decade later, I spoke the text verbatim while describing an experience with a particularly strong Part during an IFS meditation. It wasn’t until I discovered the pages2 that I realized this part had been screaming out through the void for a long time, desperate to be acknowledged.

In an effort to ground, I started journaling with this part, scripting scenarios with it to step outside of the sensations it brought onto my body.3 I’d done this practice therapeutically before: the year prior, I’d worked through a lot of trauma via Interviews with My Future Self, a concept I’ll be discussing on Substack soon. The new practice took it a step further: Interviews with My Shadow Self.

And let me tell you, these interviews have not been for the faint of heart.

I’ve spent hours drafting prior to and after therapy in an effort to walk through the fire of my psyche. When I come out the other end, often 5-10k words deep and in an exhausted stupor, I’m somehow able to breathe a bit easier and communicate my fears and experiences with less destress. In combination with my other treatments, I’ve managed more tasks and calm interactions with fewer slips of reactivity.4

These extensive journal entries are part of why I’ve spent the last few months in a creative standstill—a will-they-won’t-they in crafting cathartic and educational text to share with the world. To me, the entries are raw and cruel, a direct script of the endless radio broadcast in my mind where torment and joy often cross paths. The entries themselves will most likely never see the light of day, and for the sake of my inner safety to continue writing, they probably shouldn’t. But the things I learned about myself while drafting them…those I’ll never stop talking about, and those are the pieces I’m pulling for my next moves.5

In high school and college, I foolishly idolized the Lost Generation of writers who gained traction in the early 20th century, fantasizing over their decadent escapism and disillusionment with the world. Though I could analyze the sorrows they drank away in academic papers with wide eyes, there was nothing that could prepare me what a sociopolitical world inducing that level of disillusionment and need to escape could feel like.

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
- Pablo Picasso for LIFE, 1964.

Flashing forward to the beginning of this year, I started watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It was a four-season long musical sitcom created by Rachel Bloom in the 2010s about a mentally ill woman who moves from NYC to West Covina, California to chase after her childhood sweetheart. As simple as it seemed, something in me changed by the time I finished the series.6

The next paragraph has spoilers for the show, so skip it if you’d like to watch it blindly. I highly recommend it, but I also can’t wait to rewatch it knowing the ending.

Rachel Bloom’s character, Rebecca, goes through four seasons of burning bridges and self-discovery while visualizing everyday interactions as (often inaccurate to reality) high-budget musical numbers. By the end of the series, this thing that’s isolated her, this coping skill she’s built for herself in her mind, turns into the basis for her creativity. She starts songwriting, and the series ends as she performs all her hopes and fears for an audience of strangers. In that, she finds peace.

Writing (and art in general) is the space where we learn who we are and how we function, all through the power of storytelling. It’s how people like me make sense of the world, and it’s why I built my editorial business and Smut Ed. My whole mission has been to teach other people how to do so.

Then I looked at how long my manuscript drafts had been gathering dust on the bookshelf. For seven years, I’ve taught other people to craft their stories skillfully in part so I could hide from my own.

Who has time to write a book when they’re launching a business to get out of customer service?

That quickly became, Who has time to write a book when they’re keeping a business afloat during COVID?

To, Who has time to write a book when they’re in one of the deepest health crises they’ve ever faced, and it’s not seeming to end?

Seven years of pretending my writing was out of my hands due to situations out of my control.

And I don’t call all of them excuses. One of the best ways to run a creative well dry is to jump into creation from a pool of survival-mode. It just doesn’t work, and I’ve been wading the tide there for months. But I spent those months learning more about myself than I ever thought possible, which really only set me up with a dozen more questions needing answers. I also learned a lot about writing, editing, social media, and the publishing industry as a whole.

The most important thing I learned was that if I want to teach people to write a book, I have to do the damn thing myself.

So that’s what we’re doing.

Some, not all, of the posts from Smut Ed will pull back the curtain on the drafting of my novel. I’ll be letting you know where I’m at, what I’m coming up against, and what I’m celebrating. I’m also hoping cluing people into my work will help with the shame of sticking to a strict content calendar. As much as I’d like to, until I can batch enough content to have it scheduled out to twice a month the way I dream of doing, I need to lower my expectations for myself. Whether I’m sharing some helpful insight on how to write a polyamorous relationship or updating you on the word count and progress on my new book and plans for the Substack, you’ll be hearing from me more often. The type of content will shift and grow as I do, but I’ll be taking you with me the entire way there.

With that said, if you’re only interested in reading the hard-hitting, sourced material on writing and kink tips, you can unfollow the section The Smut Editor’s Journal in your subscription settings for Smut Ed. Here’s a guide for how to do that. If the extra content isn’t for you, that’s totally okay.

But if you have any interest in following my journey a little closer, including journal-like entries where I discuss my intimate experience with hormonal mood swings, IFS and somatic therapy, self-awareness in polyamory and kink, my writing process, my healing process, and managing when they all overlap while running a multi-dog household, please consider remaining subscribed to this section. While the future will have a paid tier with additional educational content, this tier will remain free. I don’t believe the ability to learn from my experience should be gatekept (especially as it’s so reciprocal through accountability and community).

Wins and Gratitude

• I’ve been on a probationary contract with a romance publisher, testing for a long-term position that would regularly pay me to write within one of my chosen genres alongside a team that makes me feel like I’m learning while I’m working. For a freelancer like me, that’s really, really exciting. I’m still on the test project, so we’ll see if I continue working with them, but I acknowledge the disappointment I may feel reading this back in a few months if things didn’t work out. Even if that’s the case, I’m grateful for the experience and mentorship this has provided so far, and I’ve spent so much time working on it that I still want to celebrate how hard I’ve worked in the process.

• I’ve broken some serious barriers for myself following some incredible coaching resources by I’ve worked through over the last two months. The habits I’m building have pushed me to make posts like this, which feel deeply personal and as such, far less polished to perfection. But when I’ve been sitting in the back, shining and revising an article on Smut as Resistance, six times, continuing to over-polish isn’t helping anyone. So, I’m opening up about my journey in all its imperfect pieces with the hope that someone reading resonates with it and can glean something from my fumbling.

• I’ve fully plotted through the zero draft of my new book, a paranormal psychological thriller with erotica at the core of its story. It takes place in a dusty town in Nevada and features a second-chance romance, generational trauma, and factors of BDSM power dynamics that highlight the aspects of control inspired by my PMDD episodes. I’ll be discussing more of the plot process in the coming weeks as I write the rest of the draft, but as I’m writing this on Monday, the word count is sitting at around 10k. I’m waiting to hear back from a few close friends on a loose plot summary so I can better shape how I move want to forward. But after years of throwing my writing around journals, notebooks, fanfiction sites, message boards, and critique course, I’m elated to finally have a piece I really feel connected to and compelled to publish.

• With this article, I will have posted to Substack (and my subsequent social media) for the first time in over a month. When it comes to my prior habits of falling behind by missing a few days, then being unable to catch up and quitting instead, this is a massive win. I’m still aiming for a release of the aforementioned article in the next two weeks. Up to now, it’s been difficult to share at all, the all-or-nothing feeling of, “I said I’d post this, and I can’t say a word until I do!” seems silly, but silly can be debilitating in the right light. Now I’m just trying to acknowledge my balance of accurate education and imperfect passion, both of which sit at the core mission of my publication.

• I read through How to Write Erotica by editor Rachel Kramer Bussel. I found its advice and prompts priceless, so it’ll now be included on crucial resources I recommend to clients alongside Save the Cat.

Where does shame come from?

The number one thing that allows shame to fester is the fear of sharing it. Once it's brought into the light, it has no power. It goes by the same rule as Fight Club: The only rule about shame is that we don't talk about the shame.

There are multiple aspects of shame that allow it to take root, constricting its psychological tendrils around your spicy exploration to keep pleasure subdued. But most of its growth comes down to two base seedlings, depending on how it was first planted in your body—fear and guilt. Both come from a similar place, but guilt shares a specific piece of religious and controlling framework that makes it awfully unique.

There are plenty of ways fear and guilt can speak to you. A few common ones are:

• I'm afraid of not being “enough.”2

• I’m afraid of taking up space.

• I'm afraid of someone/everyone leaving me.

• I'm afraid the people I do have won't meet my needs.3

and most notably,

• I'm afraid that if I'm my truest and most authentic self, I will be rejected.

Especially for those of us with religious upbringings (more about mine later), guilt makes for a perfect recipe of scarcity mindset. This is the belief that there's only so much to go around, that there's something about you and only you that keeps you from being “allowed” to enjoy something. That scarcity then acts as a whirlpool. Trying to swim straight out of it without acknowledging its core and currents just gives it more gravitational pull to suck you down.

That shame also takes a direct opposition to pleasure: the more authentic pleasure you experience without acknowledging that shame, the harder it'll knock at your door in ways you don’t anticipate. You might not even notice that’s where it’s coming from. And like I mentioned, shame is a slut for going unnoticed.

So how can we battle this nightmare of internal criticism?

By laying our swords down and embracing it.

Unpacking the Shame Holding You Back

Once you can see the pieces you’re ashamed of in all their glory, accept them. Tell that version of yourself there is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Once you can embody that authenticity without judgement, the shame will eventually begin to loosen its grip, and deep, authentic exploration can begin.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Not quite.

Parts Work and Shame

Often, the part of you carrying all this shame is a much younger version of yourself, one that foundationally took in the words and beliefs of others around them. A sense of self was formed with that shame in tow, and you may find the Self you are now doesn't resonate with the messages you received when you were younger.

Richard Schwartz, founder of the Internal Family Systems therapeutic framework4, defines identifying with those beliefs and thoughts as being “blended.” IFS says there's a system of “parts” within all of us: protectors, managers, exiles. These parts make up our experiences, the foundational messaging we received from our caretakers and society around us. These are some aspects of the Archive I've mentioned in the Pyramid of Satisfying Smut—its everything that makes us who we are in relationship to ourselves and others.

These parts are often in conflict with each other when blended with the Self, causing the disjointed distress we might experience but not understand. When a person's parts have deeply blended with their Self—the essence of who they are, their core spirit, whatever language is preferred—the Self can drown in it. If someone had an experience of growing up too fast or being given too much responsibility at a young age, their body may act out in ways that lack mindfulness and intention. This can look like being quick to anger, possessiveness, inability to commit to things, and behavior that feels “childish” or immature.5 These are our fearful, shameful parts taking the wheel, whether we want them to or not. Our body remembers our hurt, even if our mind can’t always put it into words.6

When it comes to writers and kinksters who struggle with sexual shame, there are all kinds of ways it can rear its head. Someone whose shame is deeply blended with their identity might attempt to explore sexually but be faced with a teary explosion in the middle of play. Other individuals may avoid sexual exploration at all, shielding the need for pleasure with moral high ground. That sexual shame, the giant hole of guilt and fear, can be a massive ravine to climb out of.

But it’s not impossible.

We’ve talked about the first step of recognizing the shame. But how do you recognize it when you’ve spent so long trying to ignore and push it down (as in the burst of tears)?

When experiencing these reactions or feelings, ones that make you feel conflicted and out of control, use it as a signal to grab the grappling hook, jump in the hole, and start digging.

Ground in The Body

Check in with your body and take a few deep breaths when the shame hits. What does that shame physically feel like for you? Is it a roiling coil in your chest? Like you’ve swallowed your tongue and can’t speak?7 Take a moment to ground so you can recognize it’s shame controlling the wheel. Once you’ve reconnected with your Self, ask your body about the first time it felt this sensation. Don’t even focus on the shame, focus on the feeling. Use those body sensations as a path back into your memories. You might not get to the core right away, especially if you spent a lot of time dissociating.8 But bringing a light to that shame, in whatever form it takes, is the first step.

Once you’ve unpacked the basis of your shame, the rest of the work becomes at least a little easier with time. Then the process is about making the daily decision to recommit to self-acceptance. After acknowledging it once or twice, you’ll notice where the shame pops up everywhere. Often your body will register it before it hits your mind. Remember that your body speaking to you is the signal to dig again. Part of healing means doing this process over and over again, giving your self-acceptance muscles time to strengthen.

In recognizing that shame, allow it to become an old friend you respect and love even if you walk different paths with who you are now. As you peel those layers back, it will become easier to enjoy pleasure authentically in every aspect—including your writing, while reading, and during spicy time. Trust me, the pleasure on the other side of shame is tastier than you could ever imagine. But the job is never quite done, and the shame is always waiting to rear its head if you let it go unnoticed for too long.

You might be asking, “Alexa, you teach about sexuality and kink with reckless abandon. What kind of shame can you possibly have at this point?”

Well, gear up, folks, we’re turning on the lights and taking a ride along the Smut Editor’s shame tour.

My Shame Stories

My shame has many tentacles that spread throughout my psyche, and I’m sure I’ll find more as the years go on. But a large portion of it sits in the deconstruction of my Catholic upbringing.

Sexuality has been demonized by the Church for years, especially for women. The most notable women in the bible are Mary (the literal icon of sacred virginity), Eve (who “succumbed to temptation” and is the physical manifestation of origin of sin9), and Mary Magdalene (who was exercised of seven demons and is often labeled a prostitute10).

With that framework (and the limitation for how women are allowed to participate in formal Catholic ceremony in my childhood rite), it's no wonder that especially for women, anything sexual is inherently shameful. The Church thrives on shame.11

In the Byzantine Catholic tradition I was raised in, we had rituals that were a bit different than my Roman Catholic and Christian peers. For instance, when baptized, infants are presented before the entire congregation naked and are fully submerged (three times, including their face) in a basin of water.

When I feel shame, sometimes my body feels like its drowning, and everyone around me is just watching as I suffocate. As my paranoia of the shame being seen is brought to light, my body feels exposed, and I feel invisible, judgmental eyes all around me.

Those two experiences are directly connected.

In another example, when we gave confession, we didn’t use a confessional booth like our Roman Catholic counterparts. Rather, I stood at the front of our church as congregants arrived and could overhear if close enough.12 I wore a cloth shroud on my head, staring at the shoes of the priest, a father figure, who stood over me as I admitted my deepest shame. This included coming up with “something I had to have done” that was wrong in order to have something to confess13 and confessing to masturbating or petty shoplifting as a teenager.

I took my prayer penance assignment with an ashamed sob, often not silent enough to avoid the stares. I knew after service, he would walk down to the social hall and most likely share a conversation over coffee and donuts with my parents. While I personally believe he never directly spoke about it14 , I always felt that shameful truth hanging over my head during mutual interactions. This added to my shame the physical layer of not making eye-contact, of always having my head down in submission, and of experiencing a twisting terror in my stomach when I apologize for my actions, whether the apology is warranted or not.

When I go back to those experiences and witness them with my younger parts as an adult, I’m the one to shield my tiny body away from the crowd and keep my head from going underwater. I’m the one to stop my priest’s hand as he declares that in my current, infant state, I am with sin. I’m the one to pull back my confessional shroud and reassure that girl that she’s safe, that she’s normal, no matter what the Bible says.

Rather, I’m perfectly wonderful as I am.

Just as you are now. Your shame is just an embodiment of your experiences, trying to keep your heart safe. Now you can be aware enough to care for it yourself. Tools that helped us in another situation aren’t universally applicable.15

What Were My First Steps

In full hindsight, I started shining a light on my shame when, on a whim, I did a nude light bath photoshoot while living in New York City.16

I happened across a sex shop while crossing through Williamsburg called Shag, and they were hosting a pop-up photoshoot event by the wildly talented artist, Jarid Blue. I’d never done anything that vulnerable and exposing, and the sudden urge to rip the Band-Aid of shame hit me like a truck. I knew that doorway was where I needed to be, and a few months later, I applied for a job at the shop itself. Slinging dildos at Shag put me on a path I could never have planned17, but it’s one I wouldn’t change for the world. That was the day I decided to start looking my shame in the eye and treating it like an old friend. I remember that feeling every time I see my favorite photo from the shoot framed on my wall.

Obviously, that singular day didn’t turn off the shame I’d experienced up to then, and it doesn’t fix the shame I’ve built up since. It affects every aspect of my life, including my connections with others, my work and livelihood, and my self-image and worth. But until I started peeling back those layers and parts that have worked so long to protect me through periods of hurt, I didn’t know where the traumas ended and I began. It was all a big melting pot of reactive emotions. It still can be, on my hardest days.

When I started tracking my mental health, I learned my behaviors and headspace shifted drastically along my menstrual cycle. After some time and a diagnosis or two, it became clear that PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), as well as the mood swings and body dysregulation accompanying it, put those fears and shame on blast each month. Every two weeks, I’d be unpacking new layers to that fear and overwhelming self-hatred, thanks to the beautiful gift of my luteal phase.

And in a heartbreaking way, I do see it as a gift. I’m grateful for my mood swings acting as a signal that someone, somewhere inside me, is going unheard. Sometimes those signals are frightening, and many months I feel held hostage in my body. But even the shame I carry for my body’s experience can now be addressed head-on: I understand my body goes into chemical crisis every month, and every month, I need more support than I would otherwise. Bringing that shame to light means asking for help, letting my self-care reminders take center stage in living spaces, and giving myself ample time to decompress and process all the thoughts racing through my head. My latest strategy to cope has been the most powerful: sitting myself down at a computer or notebook and writing until I can’t write anymore.

This can mean pages upon pages of prose barely able to be called a single train of thought. It can sometimes mean thrusting my imagination into a scene and crafting a fictional moment to express the feelings at hand.18 It can mean taking a marker and writing the words, “Do not forget who I am,” over and over again until the ink pattern is tearstained and scattered from my stimming. However long it takes, I am willing to sit with myself until the whirlwind has passed through me. Unloading the words as they pour out is better than stewing in shame and guilt of those thoughts as they run amuck in my head. Now I hold myself to core tenants, things like never walking away from something out of fear and shame. I will only walk towards something with joy. That’s how I know it’s right for me.

When I make the effort to open my eyes, I can see the forest for the trees. As I learn to trust myself and my experience, it’s much easier to go for a walk in the woods, even if I can only see a few feet in front of me. The rest of the forest may be dark, but I trust my ability to take the next step and keep my balance with whatever terrain or creature I might find ahead.

The journey of accepting and coming to terms with your shame and the younger self that carries it becomes the goal. There is no final destination when every day is a choice to shine a light on those feelings. In doing so, they no longer act as weights on the scale. Rather, they become morally neutral signs you can act on and embrace.

Let’s Get Hot in Here

Now that we’ve spent all that time unpacking the roots of your shame (work that you’ll surely continue long after you’ve finished reading this Substack), it’s time to use that fresh sense of self as a key to unlock the door to your inner world. And that room is full of sexy, organic connection to yourself and others.

Fiction is one of many art forms that allows room for sexuality and expression of physical connection to flourish. Hell, I built an entire career out of it. The rising popularity of BDSM romances, monster smut, and spicy fiction are a testament to that.19 But with things like the harmful representation in Fifty Shades20, dismissing smut lovers who love monster fantasies, and those misleading illustrated covers currently trending21, there’s a strong undercurrent of shame beneath the surface even in mainstream published works.

If you’re exploring my work and the resources I have available on my platforms, you’re already doing the hardest part: noticing a craving for more knowledge. The next step is digging into those shame pieces of yours we talked about and reworking them into functional storytelling tools and themes!

I even made a free tool for you to start digging under the floorboards to unpack storytelling tropes and themes you’ve carried your whole life. But maybe you’ve just been too ashamed to explore them further. Here at Smut Ed, unpacking shame is the name of the game!

The worksheet is called Knowing and Writing Your Truest Self, and in it, you’ll answer some questions about story aspects you've had interest in since childhood. Then we’ll take those details and pull out story nuggets for you to explore further in your fiction and nonfiction journey.

To get access to the worksheet, you can subscribe below. Your worksheet will be available on the welcome page!

If you’re already subscribed and can’t find the link, shoot me an email and I’ll send it right over.

Until next time, my smut loving crew. Best of luck on your digging, and my doors are open if you ever need a hand with your shovel.

Before I get into the analysis and breakdown: I liked this film a lot. It was deeply flawed, but there were a lot of positive aspects along with all the criticisms I mention below. The bar for what a mainstream film about sexuality has to do to impress me is both on the ground and upon a mighty pedestal, so I did my best to give this film a fair shot to stand on its own.

If you haven't been privy to the sweeping this film did for the early award season (namely for Nicole Kidman's performance, including an award for Female Orgasm on Screen Sponsored by Intimacy on Set), Babygirl introduces us to Romy Mathis, a mature woman whose identity revolves around being the perfect mother and the CEO of an Amazon-coded automation company2. Underneath the faux perfection, Romy is deeply unsatisfied, abandoning her husband (played by a stunning Antonio Banderas) to satisfy herself with porn on a shame-laden living room floor.

When her company hires a group of interns, she is quickly drawn to Samuel, a presumptuous and alluring young man among them. Neither seem able to resist their urges toward each other, making their boundaries as employer and subordinate look like dental floss within minutes. But in a subversion that causes Romy to question her entire identity and cheat on her devoted husband, Romy is not just sexually attracted to Samuel—she’s attracted to his power over her. Though Romy battles her own desires, the two begin a torrid affair of dominance and submission.

Romy: You’re very young, I don’t want to hurt you.

Samuel: Hurt me? I think I have power over you. Because I could make one call, and you lose everything. Does that turn you on when I say that?

Hollywood isn't entirely unfamiliar with BDSM. The Secretary (2002) was a turning point in both my career and personal life, and shows like Bonding (2019-2021) and Principles of Pleasure (2022)3 on Netflix are creating a wider conversation in the mainstream. But it's rare to see a story that tackles deeper aspects of D/s in a way that is both semi-informed and digestible4. Its Christmas release alongside Nosforatu also echoed of 2023’s Barbenheimer. Truly a holiday blessing for the freaks.

In all its imperfect glory, Babygirl was one of those films that left me thrilled to talk about what writers can learn from its storytelling. Additionally, as someone with lived experience in a formal D/s dynamic (as well as many experiences educating and casually exploring) this film presented so many opportunities to bring my unique lens to the table and pry under the floorboards a bit.

So let's get digging.

The Show and Tell of Dominance and Submission

Throughout the film, Romy is consistently battling her need to keep control and her desperation to give it all up. The viewer gets a lot of detail to learn why she is the way she is, and by the crux of the film, we’re able to empathize with her experience as she navigates connection and exploration with both herself and others. We see her desperate to keep her plates of expectation spinning: the successful CEO, the attentive mother, the sexual vixen wife. When her submissive behaviors come out, they’re erratic and inconsistent—which is understandable due to these stressors and layers of shame she’s battling. From the conversation she has with Samuel5, she’s never even approached ideas of consent, let alone self-awareness of her sexuality.

We aren’t given nearly as much about Samuel. The first scene we get of him is taming a dog with a treat from his pocket before it can attack Romy on the street. The director attempts for a strange contrast of Samuel’s control over the dog to his relationship with Romy (which reoccurs in his ending scene directly against Romy having kinky sex with her “new Dominant,” her husband). It’s a somewhat lazy way to show Samuel’s tendency for dominance without actually having to show it in action with another person6 or with organic personality traits. Additionally, during one of the hottest scenes of the film (the first time we see them intentionally exploring kink together), our Dominant falters in his power. He grows almost meek, trying to give commands to an ill-receiving Romy while openly saying, "Is this what you want?" And up to then, it’s clear she’s not really sure what she wants, but at least we know why. It's frustrating watching Kidman carry the emotional labor of the scene on her back, and Samuel looks uncomfortable in the Dominant's shoes as a result. If we knew more about his own Archive (what in his life drives him to be interested in submissive partners, what aspects of dominance resonate with him, where did those tendencies originate, etc.) it may have been easier to empathize with his nervousness, like Romy’s. But his position as a plot device rather than a character undermines the dynamic from both ends.

How can this problem be remedied?

Give. Him. Depth.

We know very little about Samuel's background; the only time we're privy to his inner world is when he tells Romy to therapize him after their second, more intimate hotel tryst. We get two aspects of his inner world and Archive here: he's afraid of being seen as a "bad person" (to which Romy reassures him otherwise), and that he scares himself. We're led to assume Romy's analysis is correct—she notes how perceptive he is of the world and other people's desires—but we get no additional details about Samuel's background, perceptions of the world, opinions, wants, and fears. It's not entirely clear what about Romy drives him to disregard the boundaries of his internship, nor do we get more than a morsel of his presence as a whole once Romy's personal growth cycle has completed. In fact, his Irish goodbye makes it even more clear how unimportant he is to the overall development of the story outside of the purpose he fills for Romy's journey.

While this is certainly a constraint of the film format (though I'm sure we could have gotten at least a few more nuggets of Archival evidence throughout the film to ground him), adding backstory, connection, and emotional relevance to characters is the simplest way to have them carry more weight in a dynamic. Give them standards. Give them stakes. That's what makes the reader care about them—with something at stake, there's further to fall.

It’s not about a safe word or a safe place or consent or the kink… there has to be danger. Things have to be at stake.

How to Make a Morally Gray Character Likeable

As Romy slowly opens herself to the idea of kink and exploring with Samuel, her indecision caused by battling her inner shame and judgement is tangible. Her stressed behavior to satisfy her needs and keep her vanilla expectations fulfilled is obvious from the beginning (the elopement to watch porn). But her inability to see and recognize boundaries, to confront her behaviors and take responsibility for them, makes it feel more reactive than realistic.

In order for a character to be likable, most of the time, the reader needs to empathize with them and see them as redeemable. Moral grayness and antiheros don’t remain fan favorites because they’re good people. They’re likable because the reader understands what makes their morals so gray, and we’re shown the intention as well as the attempts (whether they fly or fall). But even in understanding Romy is on a journey of self-discovery, she still completely disregards the needs of people around her. She's selfish, disregarding, and cowardly. None of those aspects specifically make for an ineffective character. But they need rounding out to be empathized with, and we need to know she sees through the consequences of her actions.

By the end of the film, it’s not clear if she’s ever truly honest with Jacob about her continual faked orgasms. But we see them rekindling their love and embracing kink…so that’s something, right? We have to hope she told him the truth, but we don't see her facing the consequences of her actions. The piper has not been paid.

During a confrontation with Esme, another employee who is dating Samuel and who Romy tried to manipulate away from him, she is blackmailed into "being a better person,” but it's clear that if she hadn't been caught and the table flipped, Romy would have happily thrown Esme under her proverbial bus. Even her standing up to sexual coercion and harassment by a slimy board member leaves a bad taste in the viewer's mouth when it's clear she's not doing anything to dismantle the systemic problems in company structure herself. She doesn’t face consequences for her actions. The piper has, once again, not been paid.

When Samuel leaves at the end of the film, he takes with him the last semblance of responsibility Romy will need to face. He removes himself from the situation rather than rock the boat. He's fulfilled his purpose. He doesn't face issues with upward mobility in his career, and Romy is never held responsible for engaging in sexual relations with an intern.

At this point, the piper is getting his knuckle-breaker on the phone.

Giving characters a chance to face the music, to come full circle and grow, is a rite of passage for a good story. When we describe the Hero's Journey, for a character to have truly found change, they need to confront the mistakes and decisions they've made to persevere in spite of them.

Let the reader hold witness to the growth of your characters. Let them grow to stand confident in that vulnerability and earn their place in the heart of your readers.

Pacing: The Name of the Game

We've talked a bit about pacing up to now, but as this is an umbrella issue throughout the film, I wanted to unpack it further.

Up until the moment Romy slips into subspace during the first hotel scene7, the pacing for the kink dynamic felt absolutely bonkers. Putting aside that these kinds of dynamics rarely form with mindfulness and intention when the players already have an existing power imbalance between them, as Romy and Samuel do, forcing characters to speed through the building of tension and connection made it incredibly difficult to follow their storyline with accuracy and empathy.

I talked about pacing for erotica in my January Substack article, but mapping out character arcs (making up the Archive from the Pyramid of Satisfying Smut) along the plot can make it easier to give their beats room to breathe. Gwen Hayes discusses ways to map out your beats in her book, Romance Writers8, and getting to know your characters deeply simplifies the process.

Gratitude for Representation

There are a few aspects of this film I was thrilled to see represented, and it gave me hope for viewers noting their importance and utilizing them in their own storytelling.

Of course, representation of any kind for Dominant/submissive relationships that are satisfying for both parties is amazing. This film does go above and beyond in some aspects, including direct fetish references (making insinuations to pet play, degradation, public play, consensual nonconsent, dubious consent9 and servitude as well as direct displays of choking and sensory deprivation) in its displays of their dynamic.

Additionally, one of my favorite scenes in the film consists of Jacob having a panic attack while confronting Samuel and discussing BDSM. In a powerful display of nonsexual kink and supportive dominance, Samuel coaxes Jacob and holds space through his processing. It's a beautiful moment shared, and Jacob cries when he releases his breath and experiences what Samuel has been trying to tell him firsthand—that D/s is about vulnerability and safety, not about relinquishing to a male fantasy, as Jacob supposes.10

Now, could I go on about the safety of choking, how to best utilize sensory deprivation based on the signals she's showing, and extrapolating Samuel's needs outside of Romy's? Yes.

Will I still be grateful for a film like this giving voice to a community that needs more loving representation, giving someone somewhere the chance to see their inclinations are not at all indicative of how good or bad a person they are?

Also yes.

That doesn't mean I won't continue my criticism and analysis of the text and directorial decisions. What it does mean is I will do so while acknowledging what films like this can mean for individuals who have been too afraid to explore up to now.

Mixed Messaging Regarding Feminine Solidarity in the Workplace

Whenever a story comes along that plays with the subversion of power dynamics and a woman or femme is featured as part of that dynamic, I personally believe the feminist lens should be considered. For the most part, this film did well in dissecting the "dated idea of sexuality" as Samuel puts it for Jacob, showing that D/s relationships can be deeply empowering and fulfilling for all parties in involved.

Then we get a subplot of blackmail and women using each other as climbing pieces on the corporate ladder.

I think the writers really thought they were doing something by having a POC employee stand up to nepotism and sexual harassment within the company. But as we discussed earlier, Romy isn't one to face her consequences.

Esme knows the system is broken and plays into it in order to achieve her goal. But she doesn’t want to take Romy down—she's "one of the few women who made it to the top,” and Esme's interest is in keeping her there.11 She forces Romy to never see Samuel again, to be a good leader, and to be a role model for all of the women in the company. And it works, seems like manipulation really can stick it to corporate selfishness!

Romy doesn’t change out of her own decision, an active choice. Instead, it's out of fear for her loss of status and power.

Is that the messaging we want to engage in when crafting stories of women in power?

I'm not sure I have an answer to that hypothetical question, because every day, I look around at the world being shaped by corporations and greed. Every day, I wonder how those of us who carry empathy for others in our hearts will survive. I've fought the urge to burn my hope for humanity to the ground, submitting to manipulation and stooping to their level to get our needs met. But at what point does the cycle continue with us at the wheel? How long until the next marginalized group is speaking up against our own actions that we refuse to look in the eye? When will those of us who paved our way to hell with good intentions be too cowardly to face our own music of becoming the monsters we stand up to?12

These difficulties all make one of the final lines that should have landed with an absolute punch feel forced and hollow.

If I want to be humiliated, I'm gonna pay someone to do it.

Some additional reading

• Pretty informative breakdown of what a D/s can look like: Dominant and submissive relationships - Rewriting The Rules

• Great article by the LA Times on the film: What 'Babygirl' gets right and wrong about dom/sub kink - Los Angeles Times

Want to Write Smut That Leaves Readers Enchanted?

If you've seen Babygirl and this article got your engines revving to write smut readers will love, spice that acts as solid representation for healthy BDSM, kink, and sexual exploration, you've come to the right place.

I share Smut Editorial as a free publication dedicated to helping writers learn how to write tantalizing smut and learn more about their own sexual journey in the process. I also offer editorial services (developmental, sensitivity, manuscript critiques) and coaching, so if you want one-on-one help with your writing or sexual exploration, follow the link below so we can get to chatting.

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Welcome back into our den of delicious debauchery, fellow smut lovers.

Today I'm going to be discussing the foundation of a structurally sound and satisfying spicy bedroom scene1. That foundation is called the Pyramid of Satisfying Smut.

As I was drafting notes and editorial feedback for my authors, I found myself regularly breaking down a few main aspects of spicy scenes consistently. Then in building my workbook that's all about writing characters with emotional resonance2, I started drafting ideas on a structural tool to help authors craft sex scenes that were engaging, emotionally resonating, and complexly developed.

The kinds of scenes I'm talking about are the ones that will get readers in a roar on social media, that will get booksellers to make playfully flirtatious displays on tables during release days. Using the Pyramid, we're crafting smut that stays with readers long after they finish a book.

To bring a reader into the bedroom with your characters (metaphorically speaking, of course) crafts trust in an author to handle the heavier lifting. A story with good smut is obviously enjoyable for the sex scenes, but it also hopefully means other high-stakes moments (like death, marriages and unions, having children or pets, traumas) will be addressed with a similar attentiveness and development. Additionally, most great advice for smut scenes will almost always translate to non-smut scenes, which means that even if you're writing scenes without sex or kink (because a book with all sex and no plot is just boring), these tips can still be applied.

Without further ado, let's dive into the Satisfying Smut Pyramid!

Creating a Foundation

I'm a person who loves to break things down into super simplistic ideas while I'm learning as well as teaching. One of those ideas became the Satisfying Smut Pyramid.

I wanted to create a tool that displays the three main aspects of what I consider to be foundations to a smut scene. I'll break them down in further detail below, but here's the basic idea:

The Satisfying Smut Pyramid is made of three parts: The Archive, The Space, and The Rhythm.

The Archive

Any spicy romance scene will most likely involve at least one character, often two or three3. Each of these characters will be coming to the scene with an entire life story in tow, a history inclusive of traumas and attachments that create a framework for how they see the world.4 Due to the interconnectedness of sexuality within a person's inner world, this section also includes any kinds of sexual fetishes and kinks that may have developed as a result of their Archive.

The Archive: The collection of experiences, attachments, perceptions, traumas, and connections of a character or characters.

What is each character is coming to the table with mentally, and how does their inner world affect their perception of the outside world? footnote: We'll address that outer world in the next section. What traumas and attachments do they carry? What have their relationships been like in the past, and how does that affect who they are now? How do their traumas and relationships with others affect their sexuality? What kinks and sexual fetishes have developed due to prior interactions, relationships, situations, and prior development?

Let's look at an example, a main character named Stephen. He's cis-male, bisexual, and grew up with an older brother and two busy parents. His brother, Davis was consistently acting out (due to reasons in his own character profile that we'll continue unpacking further down), so Stephen learned to people-please and make himself more palatable as he matured to gain acceptance. His Shadow now lies in struggling to relinquish control in his daily life—seeing his brother "out of control" pushed him into the opposite pattern of hyper-independence. But in his deepest desires, he craves relinquishing that faux sense of perfection. When his love interest provides a natural opportunity to give up control and submit, he welcomes himself in fully for the first time and can connect with that deeper part of himself, resulting in a much more satisfying sexual arc for both him and his relationship with the love interest.

That example is incredibly simplified, as people are complex and one experience often isn't the only thing shaping their sexuality. But my intention is to highlight the character-building opportunities and pipelines you can follow to unpack a character's wants, needs, motivations, and hesitations. Their sexuality is only one presentation of those things, and each will be unique.

Mentioned in the example is the Shadow, a concept based in the idea of the Shadow Self5. In a nutshell, the Shadow is the umbrella for all aspects of ourselves that are repressed or kept out of the light. This includes all those pesky trauma and developmental parts of a person that may cause repressed sexuality and shame, as mentioned in the example above. Most aspects of kink and subversive sexuality live within the Shadow, so that's something we're going to be talking about a lot.

The Shadow: The aspects of a character/person that remain undiscovered or repressed that often come out in unintentional ways.

Additionally, if you're interested in writing a specific kink or two in your book, dig into the characters to ask yourself why they would be turned on by those kinks, or how they would have fallen into them on their own. Would they have been introduced by a prior partner, directly or indirectly? Would it have come up during their development at some point? If so, what was the draw for them—what in their Archive does that kink stimulate?

Once you've started exploring the cavernous depths of your character's sexual psyche, do so with your other characters as well (namely, main characters or ones involved in your smut). We'll also discuss in the other sections how to start working different character wants and needs together.

The Space

This section of the pyramid regards everything in the physical realm of the scene. This includes the characters' bodies and the space around them (the setting). Each character has a different relationship with their body (as informed by the prior section on their Archive), and each of those bodies is going to have a different relationship with the environment they're in.

The Space: The bodies or space the characters inhabit, and the space or setting in which those bodies exist and interact.

In a well-developed story, a character's body could often be considered a distinct "character" itself. We've discussed the basis of a character's inner world, and this section is all about how that inner world interacts with the outer one. All those traumas and attachments, the sexual tension and stuntedness within our Shadow—that energy all needs a place to go. Often, it goes outward.

How do a character's traumas, attachments, and relationships show in how their body reacts to spikes in hormones, to threats, to sexual tension, or to sensory stimulation? Those Archives affect every single experience the character will have, no matter how big or small.

Stephanie Foo talks about the concept of body memory in her book, What My Bones Know.

“My fear of being abandoned forced me to need proof of love in abundance, over and over and over again, a hundred times a day.”

Attachment issues and core fears don’t just affect a person in childhood—it affects how the brain is wired. The body holds onto the responses it's carried since childhood and throughout traumatizing experiences, often unintentionally.

Going back to our example with Stephen:

His brother, Davis, had an experience with their mother as a child that affected how his attachments developed, and his body will remember that. As a child, he starts acting out; he's craving attention and physical touch, but due to the negative experiences had with his mother and distrusting the reliance of safe touch, he may be physically standoffish as an adult. He may also manipulate physical touch around him, or he may crave a certain kind of touch over others. This is just one example of how touch and development can translate into adult fetishes and sexual inclinations once, but psychology is complex beast to tackle, so make sure to approach your character development with an attentive heart.

As you unpack how your characters hold tension and relief in their bodies, the writing process can also include translating that experience through language. Understanding how to communicate various sensations throughout the body is difficult if you haven't experienced them yourself, so one of the best ways to get in touch with your sensual prose is to get in touch with your own body. Once you can communicate with your own experience on how sensation is translated, it will become far easier to write other sensations as well. Of course, doing outside research and getting additional insight from more experienced parties to inform you writing is always preferred. Smut readers love immersion, and they'll notice if you don't quite know what you're talking about.

The characters will have relationships with the other people in your story, but also with the space itself. How does your character's body interact with the setting and space it's in, and what does it do for the character's sensory experience? How do lighting, sound, texture, and smell change or shift the energy of your character? Are there ways that their inner world and needs can come more into communion with the setting and other bodies around them in order to create a more rounded characterization?

Creating a solid Space for your characters to explore themselves and others can make a good smut scene a fantastic one. White-room syndrome is frustrating in fiction, but in erotica, it can mean losing an entire lens for the physicality of the scene. Feel free to indulge and play in the space, utilizing it to the best of your abilities!

The Rhythm

For the last leg of the pyramid, the focus will be creating a wave that binds the other two sections together. This is where the Rhythm of the scene comes into play, creating a pace for the story that lets the reader follow along in immersive delight.

When you understand what Archive and Shadow the character is coming to the scene with, and you can have them exist in a Space that serves the energy of the smut, the Rhythm is how you tie all those pieces together.

The Rhythm: The pacing and flow of the scene that ties the Archive and the Space together.

How does the relationship between the character's bodies and the space they exist in affect the pacing of the scene? How does time operate in the translation of their experience to the reader? What beats and plot landmarks are hit within the scene, and how do they shift the character's internal world moving forward?

To give an example, let's use a scene with Stephen again. Stephen's relationship with his body is disjointed—he struggles to remain present, and in doing so, he struggles to feel connected and pleasurable with other partners when he is in control of himself. But as he submits and finds his pleasure in giving up that control, he becomes more comfortable in his body. He gives himself permission to be fully present in the space, and in doing so, the erotic connection between the characters is tangible.

Alternatively, another character named Adine might have an Archive consisting of being catered to as an only child, and her confidence soared because of it. She received dutiful attention from her caretakers, and when she experienced interpersonal conflict for the first time as a teenager, her powerful and stubborn personality cut her off from potential vulnerability and connection. As an adult, she chooses to keep people at arm's length in order to maintain her sense of control, but those that do get close become scared off at her immediate clingy nature and need to enmesh. That codependence is the only way she's experienced trust.

During a smut scene with her respective partner (say, a friends-with-benefits turned partner named Aphron) he attempts a serious emotional connection in the tenderness of their eroticism. She panics and shuts him out, and in doing so, her body responds. The Rhythm of the scene quickly drops, and eroticism is lost until reconnection can be made through the development of their relationship.

As you can see, using Rhythm as a tool for shaping a scene and plot within your intended character arcs can allow for some pretty versatile results. Additionally, you can reverse engineer any of the aspects of the Pyramid depending on what your story needs. This is especially helpful if the scene seems to be missing…something, but you can't quite put your finger on it.

To analyze a scene using the Pyramid of Satisfying Smut, here are some questions to ask to address each section and build a more balanced spicy encounter.

1. What Archives are your characters coming to the scene with? What traumas, predispositions, attachments, and prior beliefs do they carry? What remains in their Shadow?

2. What is the character's relationship to their body and the Space around them? Do they feel safe enough in their body to be present and enjoy pleasure fully, or do they fear taking up that space?

3. How do each of the character's Archives and the Space they're in flow for the pacing intention of the scene? Are there aspects of the Archive or the Space that would cause stilted rhythm, or do the relationships with those aspects create a smooth flowline through the scene?

If you end up using the Pyramid of Satisfying Smut, I'd love to hear about what you unpacked!

It's been a while, and the reason is one I want to touch upon in today's article. A big struggle I face due to mental health in own writing is coming back to it when the momentum has fallen, or when my inner critic and shame-bug have crawled beneath my skin. Creative spirit, especially for writers, is often viewed as a phantasmal force, one that exists outside of us and can only be accessed via a series of specific strategies, such as isolating along a pond in Massachusetts a la Thoreau, or via a content garden of inspirational prompts that will definitely make you a bestseller, charging six monthly payments of $19.991.

But while all these tools try to serve you access to your own well of imagination, know that it’s not something that can be commodified. Rather, creativity is a tool that sits on our mental bench, waiting for us to reach out and ask it to play. And when a good portion of our social interactions, personal security, and intellectual development are being sold to the highest bidder online, being able to play becomes crucial.

If you've been awaiting a divine bolt of excitement in working on your book or idea for years, using only hyper-focused storms to create that have trouble staying consistent beyond the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., then this article may be for you.

Facing My Inner Critic's Heaviest Hitters

In pitching myself as an expert in my field, I want to be transparent about the foundation of my work, and why what I do now is important.

I went into editorial because I was afraid.2

When I built my editorial business and tackled my why, I decided on "wanting to help people tell their stories." And while that is still true, it took me a long time to unpack a second, unspoken part of that why.

"I want to help people tell their stories because I'm afraid to tell my own."

You might imagine how hard that one was to swallow, especially as someone who touted themselves as a seasoned storyteller. For a decade, the unrevised manuscripts on my shelf, the dozens of homeless stories and chapters on my hard drive, all finished the silent suffix for me. I allowed my shame to cast my creativity to the wayside, and with it, a large aspect of my sense of self.

After seven years in editorial, countless new therapy sessions and medical diagnoses3, and peeling back the layers of my spirit that have kept my creativity at bay, I'm slowly coming back home to myself. In doing so, I've held strong to my love of writing, creativity, and storytelling. I'm working on a new book I'm hoping to revise and publish soon, but I'm also here, writing articles about sexuality and fiction. I'm drafting content for authors to dissect their smut writing process and find new trailheads of creative exploration.

My definition of what makes a story worth exploring has widened, and my creative spirit has been all the better for it.

Redefining Play

So, while I'm still helping other writers craft their work, I'm tackling my why again, this time for the person and writer I want to be. The person who would make Little Me, who stapled pages to make comics and handwrote self-insert romance fanfiction with her best friend, proud. That girl was an expert at exploring her feelings and the world around her through the act of play.

I started writing as a child to traverse realities and truths that didn’t exist in the world I could touch and see. Especially with an unknown autism diagnosis, I used stories to translate the world around me and process my interactions. In doing so, I met others who did the same, and it made wanting to continue my own play and exploration that much easier.4

But as I grew older, the world grew crueler. Or my eyes just opened to the cruelty that had always existed beneath the surface.

On multiple occasions and in more ways than one, I let other people's actions and opinions dictate my actions for more than ten years. My sense of play became a festering splinter in my side, one too childish to dare touch.

But that's exactly what writing is—childish. It's a form of magic, one that allows you to create worlds and grand love stories from nothing, explore creatures and characters out of dreams and nightmares, all behind the safety of holding a pen and paper or typing on a keyboard.

Writing is play. And I spent ten years losing that realization to fear.

In the United States, we're currently experiencing a surge of conservative censorship, including the censorship of informed and safe displays of sexuality, kink, and disability in the media.5 At this point, it’s hard to tighten the lens and take action as individuals to help such a systemic and far-reaching problem. And while there are absolutely things we can do no matter your prerequisites, to engage in play in the face of censorship is and always will be an act of revolution.

Finding joy and peace in mundanity is a valid tactic to surviving oppression. To read and write books about sex is resistance. To support and spread the education of media literacy, both sexual and nonsexual, is mutual aid. To continue to create and build in the face of fear is strength6.

To play is to be alive.

Where I Find My Sense of Play

Here are a few things I've been doing to add to my sense of play and exploration in ways that are accessible to me in the face of my fears.

• Diving back into Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere and reminding myself worldbuilding doesn't have to be overwhelming, I'm just not Brandon Sanderson (and have no interest in being him)

• Binging romantic comedies and analyzing their writing styles for nuggets I can utilize despite my inner critic's ranting about public perception (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend being taken off streaming should have been a crime, but it’s driven me back to using DVDs)

• Engaging with my local kink community and catching up on our current book club read, the Sex Wizards series by Alethea Fox (the magic system is kink-based, and I am over the moon)

• Getting in touch with my inner child and teenager, both of whom shaped my relationship with creativity and shame (I highly recommend No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz and a really great IFS therapist)

• Using Dungeons & Dragons/Baldr’s Gate as a tool for inspiration, exploration, and learning the consequences a character's actions (Everything I Need to Know I Learned from RPGs by Jeff Ashworth is an amazing resource)

How You Can Find Play Again

After letting creativity and joy slink into the background, it can feel impossible to yank them back out from their criticism-mucked prison.

But on many occasions when I was little, my mother and grandmother both taught me how to clear my hair of knots: separating one strand at a time. Work strand by strand, massaging through small bunches using the tools you have.7

Open yourself to small forms of play by redefining what it can look like. Doodle on the corners of your date book. Rewrite a movie's ending in your head or on a page. Give yourself the opportunity to ask, "What if?" and be open and supportive of whatever surfaces.

If your creative spirit remains stifled, know that it takes time to build (or rebuild) the self-trust required for uninhibited creativity.

One of the most important tips I can give to someone seeking to let their analytical and critical brains take a rest is to do what your body needs to feel safe. This is crucial when it comes to kink and sexuality, both of which are often overshadowed by insecurity and confidence issues regarding the perception of ourselves and others.

If you happen to be in a period or space in your life that is affecting your body’s sense of safety (this can mean being in literal danger, but it can also mean being in fight-or-flight and burnout), you may find accessing your sense of play more difficult. This is not at all to dissuade you from trying, but it is to give you an honest lay of the land.8 Conversely, working with your inner child and embracing your creativity can also help regulate your nervous system, so it’s up to you to decide where you in the equation is best to start.

A Word on Knowing Yourself

When it comes to allowing your creative spirit to fly, pushing it off the edge by force can give you the opportunity to spread your wings and find your own way. But it can also be how you find out your wings have been clipped before you've had the chance to heal.

It takes self-awareness and grounding to know where you are in your journey and what your outcome on the other side of that mountain might be. But as someone who dove and was lucky enough to have people supporting me on the landing, just know that sometimes the trust-fall is worth it. All it takes is the next step, the next word, the next verse we contribute to the powerful play that will go on long after we’re gone.

What will your verse be?9

Sometimes, you'll want your reader to feel and embody the melancholy of your main character after a particularly rough breakup. You may want to ease your pacing down, just enough to keep the momentum going, but so the reader can feel the lingering, the yearning, your character is experiencing.

Pacing is often what bugs people about Insta-Love or super slow burns.1 Depending on your story and what it needs, mismatched pacing can throw your reader off. If there's one thing you want to avoid as an author, it's a reader waiting for water to boil until they reach The End and have been met with nothing beyond your initial simmer.

In mystery or thriller novels, pacing is sometimes translated using suspense. While in erotica, tension is more of the focus, the connection here between sexuality and fear is not without notice. Literature and fiction are some of the best places to explore it, which I'll be discussing at length in the coming months here on Smut Ed. If you're intrigued by that concept and want to nerd out about it further, stick around, you're probably in the right place.

Pacing is all about movement along a journey. Bilbo is not the same little Hobbit we met back in the Shire by the time he gets back. He's seen some shit, and he's changed because of it. Give your characters somewhere to start separate from where you want them to end up, both in their overall arcs as well as in their sexual bonds with other characters. When looking at smut, there are a few different avenues you can explore to improve a story's pacing depending on the outcome you want the reader to experience and how the story needs to be told to make sense.

Okay, but what does that actually mean for your story?

Let's start with an umbrella example: Insta-Love.

While this is a specific sub-genre itself, in genres where that trope is not as functional (ie: a slow-burn dark romance), characters that meet and are instantly infatuated with each other lose any sense of longing, which is a massive catalyst opportunity in fiction.

A main character will enter the room, and for not much reason at all, the love interest suddenly can't get enough of them. Sometimes, the infatuation is in contrast to other characters fawning over the love interest that are met with disdain. Insta-Love often goes hand-in-hand with needing to develop the characters as individuals. This is a Mary Sue's entire gimmick—characters lacking in flaw or weakness.2 Often these narratives rely on their romantic bond to make the reader yearn enough for them. And if the only thing they have in common or can talk to each other about is how much they love each other or the color of their eyes…you've lost the believability of your reader.

Over the years, I’ve discovered plenty of remedies to a pacing cocktail that tastes a little off. I'll discuss some of those revision suggestions below and how they can be specifically utilized for smut.

How to utilize pacing for spicy scenes

When it comes to pacing, it's all about flow. How do the characters get from one moment to the next? On a wider level, it's carrying your reader emotionally through your book reliably and with a sense of intention. On a technical level, it's making sure that:

• your transitions are smooth and tight

• your plot points are strong and wrap up in whatever delicious satisfaction your story needs

• your characters are moving throughout these moments with each other in a relatable and believable way

I want to go back to that word, intention. Smut includes a thick lumping of books, spanning small-town spice, omegaverse fantasies, BDSM billionaire romances, and everything in between. Pacing structure takes more of a pirate’s code when it comes to sub-genres and niches, so your creativity can take the wheel as long as it comes with that aforementioned intentionality.

One of my favorite resources to turn to when it comes to pacing is Romancing the Beat by author Gwen Hayes, which breaks down romance stories into identifiable and structural story beats (similar to fan favorite Save the Cat). Here’s an example of the overall beat structure.

As described in her book, each phase is broken down into beats that can be applied to most tropes within the general romance genre. Then you can rework it as needed to fit your sub-genre.

Another resource I recommend is content by Shaelin Writes, specifically regarding this video on outlining your chapters. It can be broken down into one idea: Figure out what your chapters mean for your story. What is the purpose of your chapters regarding pacing? Often, a chapter is a full story in itself—containing a beginning, middle, and end with conflict and resolution. But maybe you want your chapters to give your reader a breather between sex scenes that are short enough to keep them turning the page, thus inspiring bingability3? A favorite strategy of mine is creating a heartbeat for my novel and using that to literally measure the tension I want my reader to experience. This is a fun one to explore in smut, trust me ;)

Once you can pinpoint how you want your characters and your reader to feel along each of these beats, you can use pacing as a tool to bring those readers on an emotional journey they can follow and lose themselves in with ease.

When I talk about good smut, that's the stuff I'm referring to. The smut that welcomes catharsis, exploration, and escapism. And that's what Smut Ed is all about.

Using structural pacing methods can help make both planning and revision much easier, so your smut can be that good smut. I enjoy moving my beats into a color-coded spreadsheet4 to make visualizing the flow of the story easier. I'll be doing a post about my own drafting process in the coming months, as I'm currently working on the zero-draft of my own smut novel. I'm hopeful to release it by the end of this year, so keep your eyes peeled!

If you've barely begun your first chapter, try working with structural methods and beats to reshape them for your story's sub-genre. If you are in the revision trenches, do a revision (and/or hire a developmental editor or book coach) that zeroes in on pacing and how the reader feels in each scene or moment. Mark down when the beats seem to shift naturally, take note of scenes that feel incomplete, and break down what each character is up to by tracking their arcs. Timelines and trackers are at the heart of pacing revision, as they help you widen your lens and see the long game of how pacing can affect the story arc as a whole so you can move things around or add scenes with ease.

Apply That Shit

Now let's give a direct example—insta-love.

This is not specifically addressing the trope of insta-romance, where the reader is expecting the characters to fall in love quickly. Remember, if you intentionally lean into a sub-genre, it will shift your pacing needs.

In general, the goal in a romance is for characters to fall for each other and reach a point of completion5 by the end of your book. Tension is something that builds slowly throughout every scene and sets the overall tone of the book, especially when it comes to smut. Sex is obviously one of the main highlights of smut, and just like good smut, good sex requires everyone to be on the same page. If they're not, the end result can culminate in misaligned limbs and dissatisfaction. That's something easily translatable to fiction.6

When pacing a slow-burn, let that fire simmer, baby! If a nomadic artist and a disgruntled stableboy meet for the first time on page six when he hires her as a farmhand until she can afford to leave town, don't throw them in bed together by page ten. You'll end up with a lust-story that fizzles out in your reader's hands before they hit The End. Similarly, if you want to tackle an ages-long love story in one book, you've got to break down your goals for the characters and give them a reasonable time to get there. Otherwise, your manuscript may end up longer than the bible.

That's not to say it's impossible to write an erotic tome, but you're better off splitting it into a series. Smut readers love a good series, especially when they follow memorable characters or have reoccurring smutty themes. Of course, a good smut series would need structural planning as well, but most of the ideas above can be translated to that, as well. If you're interested in exploring series pacing, leave a comment below!

I'll be showing specific examples in existing works over the coming weeks, especially as I tackle plot and character breakdowns of well-known titles like 50 Shades of Grey and Haunting Adeline. I'll be tugging out nuggets of their success as well as unpacking where many of their issues lie so we can learn from them to craft even better smut.

If you're still struggling with pacing and tension in your romance novel, feel free to reach out. I have a few slots available through March for manuscript critiques, which are an affordable and accessible way for authors to get a big-picture idea of how to move forward in revisions.

While it may not be as chilly wherever you are as it is here in the Midwest, I hope you stay warm and safe. It's hard to focus on things like creativity and sexuality in a time as harrowing as January 2025, but I believe that's when our imaginations are the most crucial. If we can't imagine a world that looks different than our own, what will drive us to choose differently next time?

The new year can be a catalyst for self-improvement or overwhelm, as cameras often turn to resolutions and goal setting. That can be a double-edged sword for creatives and book lovers, especially in the political hurricane circling at our feet.

Goals and resolutions have been a consistent thorn in my side, particularly when it comes to my own writing and creative spirit. As someone whose mental flow fluctuates so often (three cheers for neurodivergence and chronic illness), committing and achieving creative goals has required some restructuring.

Sound familiar? If so, read ahead. 2025 might be a bumpy ride, but here are a few tips to keep your creative writing and reading juices flowing all year round.

Be Honest About Your Journey

Take a real review of how your 2024 went, whether you set goals for yourself or not. If you struggled to read a book a month, don't boost that goal in the same format this year. Take what helped and rework what didn't. Did you struggle to find time to read, or did you thrive listening to audiobooks on your commute? Was your focus improved when using pen and paper, or during morning writing sessions? Maybe writing more than five words on weekdays is a fool's errand. Take note of what you learn and create routines from them.

They don't have to make sense to other people. Focus on goals that serve you and will set you up for success.

Learn from Smut Trends.

Browse popular releases from 2024 year on Amazon, Goodreads, or in recommendations on social media like Instagram and Tiktok. What can you learn from the titles readers loved or struggled to connect with? What communities thrived based on newly-popularized niches? What went viral, and what can you learn from those cases? Are the tiles that speak to you cozy cabin reads? Or are you drawn to messy and raw plots and dynamics? Smut often reflects what we process (looking at you, COVID romance novels!) so dive into societal fears and fantasies you might carry to inspire your writing and reading habits. I'll talk more about exploring those later.

Release Reading and Writing Goal Pressure.

Don't pressure yourself with a Goodreads 500 Book Reading Challenge or in publishing a polished spicy novel every month. Er0tica and smut are inherent acts of liberation, meaning they can be easy paths to burnout. Pace yourself. Finding community, inspiration, and resources are all important but don't happen overnight. And don't let the extra noise overshadow why these stories resonate with you in the first place.

Be a Smutty Dreamer.

Lose yourself in fantasy and creativity for a while. Dive into the threads of your mind (and online!) that you had never considered. Leave no stone unturned—if you've ever been intrigued by a dark fantasy you don't quite understand, or you've been nervous about googling something, now might be the time to explore it through writing or reading! Leave shame and censorship behind, and allow your imagination to walk alongside your desire.

Mix Pleasure and Play.

Writing is a creative and playful act, especially within erotica and smut. Have a plan for your writing and reading, but also keep it flexible. While you don't want to be distracted every five minutes by the New Relationship Energy that comes from a new idea, welcome in creativity and exploration when they strike you. Set a timer and try brainstorming all your ideas for a few minutes, or have a weekend to deep-dive into a smutty new romance you picked up. Once the timer's up or the weekend's over, return to your original project or book. Try giving yourself a reward of extra reading and writing time when you finish chunks of work!

Your Contribution Matters.

Whatever your goal, just keep going. A list of ideas or a TBR will never have a complete ending, and that's okay. Instead, the everlasting paths of creation and consumption can motivate us to create and consume more intentionally.

If you’re writing, keep writing. Your story is important, and the way you want to tell it is important. As someone who works in the deepest of niches, trust me when I tell you that your audience exists, it just takes finding them.

Keep reading everything you can, whether it's classic literature or the latest monster smut romance. There are so many different perspectives and lessons we can learn from fiction, especially smutty ones. I'll be discussing a lot of them here on Smut Ed in the coming months.

Need a Guide For Your Smut Journey?

Setting goals on your own—reading, writing, or finding your creative flow—can be tough to tackle on your own. Whether you're looking to organize your ideas, build sustainable creative habits, or explore new aspects of your literary smut journey, I'm here to help. Send a message or comment below and we can get started!

Keep an eye on socials for announcements regarding tools, workshops, educational courses, and articles. I want to help you make this your smuttiest book year yet!

Have you started goal setting for the year yet? What's on your list to try and tackle for 2025? Let us know in the comments!

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I'm Alexa (she/her), an autistic developmental romance editor, writer, and sex educator, and I’d like to share two facts with you today, along with a few questions that may leave you pondering this text for a while. At least, I hope they do.

Fact #1: I learned about sexuality primarily through the unregulated wild west that was 2000s fanfiction forums. This can be verified in accounts that no, I will not be sharing, but those of you who know the Fanfic Lifestyle™ will know where to find me.

Fact #2: My experience was in no way unique.1

fiction as a vehicle of learning

The attention span for the length and format of storytelling for adults in the US has shifted massively with the advancement of technology, but creating art that reflects the human condition has remained consistent. We learn from the stories we're told, whether by watching the news or reading a classical piece of literature. Messages in books touch us in ways we don't entirely understand until we reach a precipice in ourselves that reminds us what built our foundation.

American English courses often focus on the idea of media literacy (even if they don’t label it that way) by teaching kids to examine stories and poetry. It’s how we show the next generation to think for themselves and grow a sense of empathy by stepping into someone else’s shoes. Our public education system struggles to keep its head above water in the present political and cultural rapids, but education surrounding sexuality (especially as it intersects with gender, race, disability, and trauma) is and already has been sitting at the bottom of that river.

lack of sex education leads to damage on every front

me as i brainstormed writing ideas to my peers: "no, i'm not just planning a career to shit on poorly-written smut"

I will say that shitting just a little bit on poorly written smut that is actively damaging to readers and writers alike will be part of my agenda, but it will always be through a lens of education.

While working at my first sex shop in Brooklyn (shoutout to Shag Williamsburg!) I often had customers coming in referencing 50 Shades of Grey as they shopped, which isn't inherently a bad thing. I'd been working at a bookstore when the movies were popular, so customer behavior regarding the phenomenon wasn’t new to me. What concerned me, however, were individuals coming in discussing things like 50 Shades of Grey who ended up being the most interested in gear they had no idea how to use or how to use safely, simply because they'd seen it in the movie or read it in the book. We provided as much in-store support as possible, but the concern here was the blind jumping people took into something that does have its risks, both emotionally and physically, if practiced haphazardly.

One customer came in asking for anal desensitizing cream—these products need to be used with caution because anything that shuts off pain removes signals from your body that something is wrong—because her boyfriend wanted to try anal penetration, and she simply couldn't get through it without pain. I asked if they'd tried anal stimulation, using gloved hands and toys, and how much lube they were using. She said she'd never used lube, and it was clear as she talked about her boyfriend that she hadn't been the one to bring up anal play in the first place. She unfortunately ended up leaving with just the numbing gel, and all I could do was silently wish her luck in the hospital if she ended up with damage. The wounds in our sex education and information we pass along to our children are the gateway to adults that don't know how to prioritize their own pleasure and safety.

where are people learning about sex and their bodies, then?

A big answer is both fortunately and unfortunately, porn. That's not to say porn can't be an educational tool. It absolutely can be. But in the same sense that any life experience can be a learning tool with the right lens, it takes knowing the right lens to wear when analyzing it to absorb usable knowledge.2 This is even heightened in neurodivergent and autistic individuals, who use analogies and storytelling as a method of understanding the world around us, so it’s aptly understood this would be translated to sexuality in adulthood.3 I’ll be talking about this concept down the line a lot!

The wider answer is the Internet in general. This makes information highly accessible, which is amazing, but that information is also accessible to youth. Kids have the biggest and most limitless almanacs in the world (a word most of them might not even recognize anymore) at their fingertips, but they're not given any kind of lens to digest it. For the most part, it's up to their parents to teach them. The hope is that however parents choose to educate their child regarding sexuality, they are giving their child the tools they need to think critically about situations they may face.

so, what have those parents learned?

I'm not a parent (other than to a pack of fur babies that keep me on my last nerve and bring me relentless joy), but with so many friends and peers who are, I can tell you with certainty that any education those parents picked up did not come from schools. It came from their friends, who learned from their friends, who probably learned from some video or book they read in the dark when their parents weren't watching.

Those parents grew up trying to piece together experiences and lessons they had to learn on their own, the hard way, in an effort to give their kids a better education than they got. Sally teaches her daughter to hold her own when it comes to people in positions of power trying to push her boundaries. Dani's dad teaches them to ask for consent before doing anything because he doesn't want Dani to put others in an unsafe position. All of these educational tools come from the basis of "Please do this to protect yourself, because I didn't, and I don't want you to go through that."

If anyone out there is a fan of horror novels regarding family dynamics, this sounds like a fabulous story setup, but it's not something you want to use as a basis for raising a well-adjusted child.

But what if there's a better answer?

What if you didn't have to numb your butthole, Jackie?

(in this example, no one's name was actually Jackie)

what is SmutEd?

SmutEd (short for Smut Editorial and Education) is my answer (and I am not nearly egotistical to say the only) to the plot holes in the digital age's sex education. We're all living online, and any idea of shielding people from sexuality from anyone online is a fool's errand.

Maybe, just maybe, I can help teach people how to consume it (and, in turn, write it) in an educated and representative way. Sexuality and connection are part of the human condition, and we need to learn how to translate it in a way that promotes love and support, or those people with selfish and harmful intentions (say, capitalistic ideas of bodily autonomy, misogyny, transphobia, to name a few) will take the opportunity to instead.

Many states with abstinence-only sex education have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STI rates, and when students receive comprehensive sex education before college, they are significantly less likely to be assaulted while in college.4

No, I don't want to hand out pamphlets titled, "How to Watch Porn: For Fun!" to children. And I'm not saying that teaching people how to write smut that looks, sounds, and feels good will help keep anyone safe. But what I am saying is that parents who are aware of sexual health and wellness, boundaries, and consent will have the opportunity to teach those skills to their children in a way that works for them.

And a lot of those parents grew up just like me, alone and navigating my sexuality online the best I could.

So, if you're a Booktok writer who loves smutty romance, a neurodivergent late-night reader who got their story start on Wattpad or AO3, or just a queer person trying to find a series or two with a character that does that one thing you really like, then welcome. SmutEd is for you.