Hi hi! Ok here is the question I was kinda shy to ask before: as someone who’s tried to write smut but gets really embarrassed, how did you initially gather the confidence to start posting it? I know it shouldn’t really be embarrassing and I should own it but yeah :s
Ahahaha oh my gosh....this is actually quite a funny story.
I fell headfirst into the world of, uh, explicit fiction QUITE early. I’ve been reading smut since I was 11, and writing it since I was 12. This might seem...weird to some people, but I think some backstory is necessary:
I grew up in Arizona, a generally red and conservative state with a piss poor education system and an even worse sexual education program. Never got the Talk, either.
I was the first of my friends to hit puberty, and to put it lightly, AZ’s sex ed did NOT prepare me for any of it. Our sex-ed programs in elementary school consisted of cheerful, meaningless animations; middle school was even worse, they just showed us graphic photos of advanced stages of STDs and basically gave us the “don’t have sex or you will get pregnant and you will die” talk.
I wasn’t unique, either. We were all unprepared, confused, and frankly when it came down to it, terrified, children with changing bodies that we didn’t understand. For me, some of the worst changes were not so much physical as they were mental and emotional. Puberty hit me HARD, and sent me into a truly impressive depressive spiral. So I was 11 years old, starting middle school, and frequently thought about ending it all, or hurting myself, or both, because I just felt so worthless and frustrated and sad. It was a bad time!
Cue me accidentally finding my first fandom, the infamous early-mid 2000s Bandom. The platform I started out on was deviantART, which is....a weird place for writers, because the artists:writers ratio is skewed in a way that it isn’t on other fanfiction platforms. There were way more artists. I saw some things. So many things lmao (because of course I lied about my age). And at first, yeah, I was kind of scarred. But after I got over the shock, I got curious. And when you’re depressed bordering on suicidal, curiosity is a rare feeling. When you find it, you follow it. So I kept looking.
I can pinpoint the exact moment I “found” my sexuality. I was 12 and stumbled upon an MCR fic that wasn’t even about the ship I was into at the time, but like...I dunno, just the way it was written was by far the most sensual and visceral thing I had ever read, and on some weird level I connected to it. It was about nightswimming hahah but I found it....weirdly beautiful? I’ve always loved writing and something struck me about this expression of sexuality and love and sex. I really, really liked it, and I’d never seen anything like it before. I didn’t even know smut writing was an option. But I also didn’t think I could ever write something like that, because yes, shame is a prevalent human emotion when it comes to smut writing.
Fast-forward. Before I finally got on the pill, my periods were comparable to Satan hollowing out my insides with a red-hot fire poker. THEY WERE BAD. On one of these particular days, during which I found myself wanting to throttle God or whoever had cursed me with this torture, and also found myself DEEPLY FRUSTRATED in ways I didn’t at the time know how to describe (read: horny. i was horny.), I opened a Word Doc and started typing furiously. So...my first smut fic was not born out of shame and indecision. It was born out of the righteous rage of the worst day of my period and the bottled-up frustration of being in an environment that refused to explain my own body to me.
And guess what? When I was done with it, I felt better. It was cathartic as hell. So I kept writing them. And people liked them, and read them, but here, I think, is the key when you find yourself embarrassed to write & post smut: don’t think about the other people who are reading it. Because you’re not writing it for them. You’re writing it for you.
Once you get more confident in your smut writing, sure, you can write it with others in mind, but at its core, it has always been a catharsis and a coping mechanism for me personally. I was in an environment that was already filled with shame; it was freeing to write shamelessly.
It was an act of rebellion, I suppose, but one that felt unexpectedly healthy and had the side effect of making me by far the most knowledgeable of my middle school friends about sex and sexuality. I had to explain to my 3 best friends what an orgasm was when we were 13. They had no idea (even after 2 years of middle school sex ed), and I guarantee you the explanation I gave them was better than what they would have found if they had braved the dark pit that is Urban Dictionary.
In addition, I feel that writing smut during some of the most formative years of my life really gave me a sense of agency. It gave me confidence in my sexuality and expression of that sexuality that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. It taught me to say no. Writing explicit works gave me an environment that was not only a safe space in which to learn about sexuality, it gave me an environment where ultimately I was in control of that learning and exploration, and had readers supporting me along the way. And I am very grateful for that.
That’s not to say that I still don’t get embarrassed sometimes. You should always have a LITTLE shame, lol. It’s been 7 years and counting, and I still absolutely can’t handle people reading my nsfw stuff IRL, I will put my hands over my ears and hide my face in my shirt and turn bright red! I prefer to let my fics exist in the ether realm of the Internet and my brain :’D
But at the same time, over the years I’ve written so much smut that I’ve reached a point where I find myself being bolder and discovering things about myself I didn’t know (i.e. dragon shiro, ‘nuff said), just because, well, I wanted to. Self-exploration through writing (smut or otherwise) is fun, and it’s even more fun when you have some readers to come along with you on the wild ride.
