it's actually so funny how challenging it is to write bona fide graphic, horny smut. like people don't give smut writers enough credit. you are constantly running out of words to describe the same 2-4 body parts and same 4-6 motions. you are constantly attempting to do interesting and dynamic things in the prose with this extremely limited set of words. you are looking at your prose for the nastier bits and wondering if it actually sounds hot or if it just sounds goofy. you are then toning down your prose and then wondering if it now sounds tasteful or if it's just boring. you do ctrl+F for the word "cock" and there are 37 instances of it in the doc but you hate the 1-2 acceptable synonyms so there's nothing much you can do about it
And because you know other authors do this Spectacularly and you wanna be Good At Writing Smut, you’re trying to figure the scene out as essentially a dance or a song or a fight that builds and builds and builds to a huge climax and then resolves to a close. You’d love for the reader to be as breathless as the blorbo, it’s extra credit that way. HOW TO BUILD TO A CRESCENDO, fic writers edition. I am weeping.
I'm sorry, I'm adding this to the post because I ctrl+F and
Lord knows I'm not the best at it, but I do a decent job, so here's some smut writing tips for anyone searching for them:
It is more distracting to use synonyms than to just repeat a word. 'Cock' is like 'said'-- it becomes invisible to a reader after a while.
If you are still self-conscious about repetition, try to describe more of other things going on rather than just what the genitals are getting up to. If you are really trying to highlight the sex, engage the other senses to create a sense of heightened sensation. If you are using sex as a way of conveying something else, intersperse it throughout the sexual descriptions.
Speaking of the something else: the best sex scenes are the same as any other scene, meaning they contribute to the development of characters, relationships, theme, etc. Even the eighth time of vanilla sex between a loving couple should in some way add something to the story, even if it's just exploring how much they love each other.
For pacing, reading a sex scene should feel like sex i.e. there should be foreplay, a steady build, a climax, and an afterglow. That doesn't necessarily mean the sex: sometimes the climax is ejaculation, sometimes it's emotional catharsis, sometimes it's a release of narrative tension. Once you know what the climax of the scene is, you can gradually build the narrative or characters towards it as well as their bodies. The foreplay is not just in the making out but the tension that leads to the characters having sex in the first place. And the afterglow can be any form of resolution that comes from whatever took place during the sex.