I hear people say that writing erotica is easy, that anyone can do it. Just watch a porn and write. I think they're wrong.
Erotica is all about the nuts and bolts. You have to take a story and distill it down to strictly the nuts and bolts. Erotica is all about the movement of the story. It's action, but action with intent. It's emotion through action and action alone. Especially with short erotica. Just as with any type of short prose, you have to be able to convey as much as possible with as few words as possible. And to do that, and do it well is hard. It is easier to expand than compress, and to tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in less than 20k words is as hard as anything.
With erotica there is action, but it's sensual action. Again, though, its action distilled into its primal components. It uses all of the senses, and uses them at their most basic level. With these actions and senses you have to convey all of the emotion and physicality's of the situation. Every sensation has to be linked with an emotion of some form or another, from love to lust, all dependent on the character experiencing it, and the situation.
And for that short while you're writing the story, you have to care. You have to care about the story, the characters, and even your readers.
