There’s a lot to this, but I think I can explain a bit.

Firstly, it is REALLY REALLY individual depending on what I am writing. A lot of my writing style kind of self-selects for its own details.

I think one thing is identifying what I think would specifically would serve a ship/scene/character/whatever. A lot of sexy stuff in fanfic originates from a perspective of ‘I think X is hot and Y is hot and I also think Act Z is hot, so I am going to pair X and Y and have them do Z, and it will be hot.’ Or, ‘I think X is hot and I relate to Y, so I will pair these two characters off and have them do Z action, because Z action is hot, and I like using Y as a bit of a self-insert because I relate to them.”

And like this is literally fine and can in fact be fun/hot. There is nothing wrong with it, like at all. I have written from this place, I have read and enjoyed fanfic from this place.

But I think it can be easy to fall into mechanics when you’re writing from this POV. And honestly idk if I just…have banged a lot in my personal life, or have some flavor of demisexuality running through my tastes, or whatever, but eventually…a blowjob is a boob is doggy-style bent over a table is a strap-on is a whatever. It all kind of conflates to me when I am writing it, and I get…bored. And like. There is. Nothing wrong with not getting bored by this. Tbh, I think I am a deep weirdo for getting bored by it, or at least getting bored of writing it. It just starts to feel like diminishing returns.

BUT I still like writing ships and erotica and I don’t necessarily have to write erotica for characters I think are hot so much as I think are interesting. (Though, they’re usually hot)

So I think from there I start thinking about the ships I like or stories woven through canon*, and it just kind of naturally becomes more character-driven than sexual fantasy driven exclusively, and when I start thinking from the character POV i start thinking…what would this character actually fixate when they’re in an intimate moment? Also, can I redirect the eroticism from the body directly into, like…I dunno, the crickets chirping outside, joining the noise that’s inside, in place of the mechanics of the fucking. Like…can I make the atmosphere speak for the sex. Can I make the orange candlelight feel like a finger. Should I just say the orange candlelight is a finger.

Whatever. Basically, can I make the setting do 80% of the work, and strip the actual sex down to barest mechanics just to ground the scene into what’s actually going on?

I also think about language. I like rich, luxuriant prose and long-ass sentences, but if I really think about what I like, it’s poetry-level compression and bursty-ass phrases that are then stacked on top of each other into what is arguably a rhythmic run-on that’s comma spliced into oblivion. I like explaining feelings through the quiver of a leaf or the scent and steam of a bath and how it chokes the lungs and then coupling it with a short little punch of ‘also, there’s a finger in there.’ (I consider it to be different than purple prose, which to me doesn’t really do anything to add to the scene, but a lot of people would consider my writing style purple prose, lol).

Basically I like redirection and a sort-of synesthesia of words. and I think it’s because it’s how I personally experience the world.

And to note: Some characters might warrant a more explicit/mechanical sort of scene. Some characters are better served by a punchy two-sentence ‘oh wait they’re fucking’ moment (eg I have a Shink fic where the only sexy bit is Sheik yelling at Link to not leave his damn weapons laying around while ‘her hips were flush to his, stimulated’ and the rest is them staring at each other and being apart, and it’s lowkey still one of my favorite bits of sex I have ever written shrug shrug shrug shrug).

So i guess the actual answer for what gets on the page: I interrogate what I think the character I like at a particular moment in time would fixate on, write all of it out, strip about half of it into redirection or into a more oblique way of saying or describing the sensation or remove it altogether, couch it into a bunch of musical run-ons because it’s fun, create hyphenated sensorial double-words that should have an actual term in the english language but don’t, post to Ao3 every five months because editing this process requires a lot of Brain, and enjoy my reduced kudos and occasional ‘this dialogue fucking sucks and I feel like I am in english class when I am reading this, why don’t you write anal anymore’ hate comment because being stylistic is more rewarding than anything else to me.