World-building vs titilation: If your erotica is set in a fictional universe, how do you balance backstory with plot?

[boozer1337]

This is something that has frequently eluded me over the years, and I was wondering what others writers might have to suggest!

I write femdom erotica that is very often set in a fictional universe. Sometimes it's an already-established fictional universe such as the Sex Mage World created by Salamando and PancakesForDinner over the last two decades. Other times it's set in a matriarchal universe of my own invention, similar in its setup to the sex mage world except without the magical element.

I'm currently writing a story which involves a man being on trial for making AI porn involving women he knows without their permission. The trial however is merely a setup for the plot, it's the aftermath of it which is the main focus on the story. In writing the trial scene, I have a flashback to the moment he was arrested - and at this point I'm going off on a tangent explaining how this alternate universe came to be the way it is, with female characters holding all of the positions of authority from his boss to the police, and eventually the judge and jury in his trial.

I have a whole backstory in my mind about this, but it's very contemporary-politics related and not erotic at all. At the very least I worry that talking too much about it will be boring for the audience, and at the very worst I worry that talk of real-life actual politics in a fictional erotica story might be an active turn-off, considering many people read such stories as an escape from the real world and all its troubles.

Initially I was actually just going to briefly and vaguely allude to the new order if you will, and not really explain how it had come into existence - for example, a few vague references to "crimes such as this were taken far more seriously since the womens' revolution than they ever had been in the past" and "the sex police had come to be among the most feared policewomen since the change of government", but without going into any real detail about it. However, writing it today it occurred to me to delve a little into the lead-up to the aforementioned revolution just as an aside to the story, in which I'm envisioning essentially a "general strike" or "laying flat" type movement among the women of this universe, which ultimately leads to regime change.

Essentially I'm returning to writing this story after not looking at it for a while, and I feel the world-building I had for it was fairly weak, and have massively fleshed it out this morning. I'm also aware though that people don't necessarily read erotica for deep worldbuilding and certainly not any kind of real-world politics, which the entire internet is already over-saturated with.

How does one balance world-building enough that the story doesn't seem like it shoddily glossed over the worldbuilding to get to the actual plot, vs worldbuilding so much that people are reading paragraph after paragraph and wondering when we get back to what's actually happening with our actual POV characters?

 

[ticklish.mark]

From my experience writing in other erotica genres, write enough for the reader to know what's going on and to understand the character's motivation. People usually don't care about extreme world building in an erotica, but they will care about how the world effects your character and how he interacts with it. Don't approach it like you're explaining an alternate universe. Go at the world's history like it's your character's history.

For your specific story, I'd suggest to mention the woman's revolution in relation to your character's crime. Tie it to how he's maybe afraid of getting caught along with how he's frustrated with his lack of power in this new society. Maybe contrast it with the past to highlight the differences. Don't drop a wall of text to set up the world and all it's rules, but sprinkle in a paragraph or two here and there so the reader can understand the how.

For example, maybe in the flashback he's writing about how angry/annoyed/what have you he is about how his boss makes him feel powerless or how she acts better than him just because she's a woman. When the police come, focus on how much worse it is to be caught by these policewomen rather than the average police officer ever since they were established as a result of the crack down on sex crimes after the revolution. When he's on trial, maybe he's bitter that instead of having a jury of his peers like his father or grandfather would have (assuming the revolution was recent), he instead has a jury of all women who already have their minds made up before hearing his case.

They reader doesn't need to know the revolution happened in 20XX or 19XX lead by activist Jane Doe that resulted in the creation of the anti sex crimes police force and subsequent laws and culture that made it harder for men to take positions of power that lead to a woman's take over. But they do need to know how the character feels in this world, why he made the ai porn despite the risks and how great those risks were.

 

[sophilos]

A mere suggestion. Write your backstory as an allegory, a quick sketch of "this has happened before, and it didn't turn out well". As you develop your plot, you can adjust your allegory to leverage the foreshadowing influence of your backstory. The darker the allegory, the more tense the climax of your main plot, the more gratifying the resolution.

And a distinctly odd suggestion. Write your allegory in past tense and your main plot in present tense. There is an argument to be made that present tense engages the reader more closely, and you may feel this as you write.

Regardless, writing in the present tense chops out dozens of elaborate verb formulations. For myself, I find that I write more quickly without the word "had" frequently noodging at my keyboard.

Regards, fellow ink-stained wretch.