Writing popular fiction

must be believable; the
bedroom
action plentiful; the hero and/or heroine sympathetic (she or he should have problems which all of us can identify with: married but in love with another man/woman; problems with children and jobs); the background at least exotic if not colorfully developed; but there need not be a terribly strong plot, in the sense of telling an exciting, tension-filled story. The "plot" of a BigSN is constructed from the peek-behind-the-scenes of whichever one of the five backgrounds you're using, and from the string of sex scenes and the sexual interrelationships of the characters. A carefully developed, exciting plot would require too high a ratio of story to sex; every chapter of the BigSN must have at least one sexual encounter, which leaves only a small portion of the book for other purposes.
    The BigSN will have one major problem that must be solved by the end of the story, though that problem will not be one that requires great physical resources on the hero's part and will be solved after the hero has climbed over only a minimum of obstacles to his success (or failure). For example: the publisher-hero might be losing financial control of his magazine empire and be fighting desperately to hold onto it; the doctor-hero might have a big and important operation to perform on someone of note, on the woman he loves, or on a small and defenseless child; the lawyer-hero might be arguing a nationally publicized case upon which his whole reputation is staked. But the main plot of the BigSN will come from the dozens of affairs, between the many characters, and the reader's curiosity about how each will turn out. ("Will Samantha get her just rewards and lose Bill to Tina?" "Can Joan and Don find happiness together when she is so frigid?" "Will Arthur's homosexuality prove incurable, or will Beth's love help him to straighten himself out?")
    Understandably, with all these interlocking affairs progressing simultaneously, you almost always require the modified omniscient viewpoint to tell the story—that from which you can settle into the head of each of the characters when you need to and can develop several plot threads at once. (See Chapter Nine for a discussion of viewpoints in category fiction.) If you insist on using the third person limited or the first person viewpoint, you must stretch the story action over a considerably longer period of time than when employing the modified omniscient voice: if you have twenty characters and use the latter voice, you can write about a hundred different sexual encounters in a week or ten days of story time; but you cannot expect a reader to believe that your hero and heroine have the stamina to indulge that often in the same amount of time. Besides, the more characters you introduce, the more kinds of kinky behavior you can write about—and variety is the spice of the Big Sexy Novel.
    A BigSN hero should be a sexual dynamo, thinking about making love when he isn't, a handsome and virile dream-boat. The BigSN heroine should be exceedingly desirable, possessed of a handsome lust of her own—but she should always be somewhat hesitant at the start of every sex sequence. Even if she has bedded five different men on fifteen different occasions since the start of the book, she must be a bit trembly and unsure with the sixth man on the sixteenth occasion. She will stall, wonder if they really ought to, and only give in to the hero's gentle but persistent urging. Once she has decided to participate, however, she must be his equal as a lover, enthusiastic and versatile.
    The vocabulary of the BigSN should always be simple. The fewer multi-syllabic words you use, the better. This does not mean that the BigSN reader has a more limited vocabulary than other genre readers; however, most BigSN fans want a book that can be read at the beach, over several evenings, between household chores—in short, a book that is interesting but not so demanding that it must be read carefully and in as few sittings as possible. You must learn to deliver simple entertainment slightly cloaked in "meaning," in a style as easily read as anything in
The New York Daily News
.
    In the Rough Sexy Novel, the plot is also minimal. The main story problem may be similar to that in the BigSN, or it may be strictly sexual in nature. For example, your heroine may be a nymphomaniac trying to come to terms with her sexual nature, or a frigid wife learning to be a good lover, or a young boy or girl coming of