How I Come Up With Story Ideas: An Erotica Authors Confession

People have asked me how I come up with my story ideas. There are many different ways and I'll try to explain some of them here.

1. Observing Life

I love to watch people doing their every day mundane things and wonder about what their day is like outside of that particular moment. I started doing this back when I started acting. It helped me to get into people's minds and use that in bringing different characters to life. Now that I write erotica it makes the imagining much more fun!

Example: The Gambler in Her

I go to the casino on a regular basis. I don't bet much when I go, usually twenty dollars or so, but I love the machines and the people. One night, while I was playing a slot machine, I had the idea of a woman meeting the owner of the casino and how they would end up having loads of glorious sex. Many of the locations and people in The Gambler in Her are based on the casino I go to in real life. I changed the names, of course, but wanted to give tribute to the place that brought me the inspiration for my first book.

2. Dreams

I am a vivid dreamer. They aren't always about sex, but when they are, boy howdy, they're fun! When I wake from a sex dream I think about it in terms of a story and wonder if it's something that people would like to read or was it just weird. Even if they are weird, I can sometimes spin it to make it appealing.

Example: Rainstorm

I had a dream about someone I knew that I don't find sexually attractive in real life, but in my dream he was smoking hot and we had amazing sex. In the dream, we were caught in a rainstorm and jumped in his car to avoid getting wet. As we were laughing and attempting to dry each other off, there was that moment where our eyes met and it went from laughing to kissing. Then we had incredibly hot sex. When I turned this dream into a story I changed the car to a tent to give the lovers more space and more things to play with like sleeping bags and pillows.

3. My Own Fantasies

The thing about observation and dreams is that they are based on things that I see, either when I'm awake or sleeping, whereas my fantasies can be about absolutely anything. I have an active imagination and sometimes something will creep into my head and it won't leave until I write about it.

Example: The Librarian Series

It all started with Dracula. I've always wanted to have sex with Dracula. Always. He was one of my first crushes when I was a kid. Now that I was writing about sex I wanted to make it a reality. I looked up the character and found that he was in the public domain so I was legally able to write him into a story. While I was looking at this public domain page of literary characters, I found there were several that I thought would make for fun partners. Then I tried to figure out how they would appear. I wanted something that tied them all together and I wanted it to be fun. That's when The Librarian was born. Having a librarian who was visited by different literary characters and having sex with them in her library sounded like a ton of fun to write, and, admittedly, it is one of my favorite characters to revisit from time to time.

So those are the three main ways I come up with story ideas. It's nice to have an outlet for my thoughts!

If you're a writer, how do you come up with your ideas? Do you have something different you would like to share? I would love to hear from you!

~Eda