Hey y’all, I’ve been something a lurker for a while on here, and I’ve started posting on the forum from time to time recently, but I’d like to contribute something to the community. I can barely draw stick figures, and while I can write essays well, fiction feels like a different beast entirely. I’ve considered learning coding, but I’ve only written in school stuff. (MATLAB and TI-Basic, for reference. I read C++ is similar to MATLAB but idk much about coding beyond those)

I’ve seen a lot of people creating great stories or cool sites, and I figured talking to some of the creative people behind such projects would put me on the path towards inspiration, or maybe someone else if I don’t find the time! Any ideas are welcome, if not for me than for my fellow lurkers looking to make their grand entrance!

Uploading stuff and helping tag images is pretty simple and helps a lot
Even just commenting and chatting on the forums helps keep the community alive!

If you do ever decide to work on coding, I documented pretty much all of the API (since the docs are outdated and even plain wrong), and I wouldn't mind helping you (I'm only good at python though :/)

I can't draw for shit, but I'm decent at image editing and am pretty good at writing, so I stick to manips (aka image manipulations).

My advice for writing is:

One: Start writing even if you don't have a clear idea, and try not to stop or go back 'till the end of the session. I know, easier said than done, but you'll often get your creative juices flowing as you do, and you can always fix the early mistakes and inconsistencies later. To give an example: If you thought you wanted X to have happened, but then you decide you want Y to have happened instead, make a note of it in the text and continue the scene as if Y had always happened. You want to preserve your momentum as much as possible. Editing the draft later is boring, but it's a lot easier than running out of inspiration and getting stuck because you doubled-back to change some things.

Two: If you get an idea, write it down ASAP. The more you can do in one sitting, the easier your life will be when you come back to it later. If you don't have time to do any proper writing, at least note what the concept was somewhere you can review it later. This goes for sentence and paragraph fragments as well. If you've got a detailed image in your head but don't know what should come before or after it, just write the image itself and figure out how to connect it afterwards.

Like, I know this sounds all literary and official, and it sort of is, but this is also how I come up with my fetishy as hell manip stories here as well. The application is different, but the toolset is the same.

Start small.
If you want to try writing, just give it a shot. Start with writing a "story" of 50 words. Then graduate to 100. Then go for 500. Some people like to start raw, others like to use prompts or pictures as inspiration.
As already mentioned by jaaysiin, writing your ideas down in as much detail as possible is HUGE. It sucks sometimes, but it works.

Make sure your characters talk like an actual person would. Nothing pulls people out of a story like characters who don't speak in a manner that makes sense.

Make VERY sure to keep your tense constant. Don't switch between the past or present tense unless it makes sense to do so or without good reason.

If you're good at essay writing, then you likely have good punctuation skills. But apply those here as well. It just makes reading easier for the audience.


If you want to try coding, there's tons of options out there, but again, start small. You could learn a language and make a small application for something:
hypnosis script text reader, for example. Just get it to read a file and display text.
Or you could learn a "simple" game software like ren'py. Just get one character saying something to the player.


If you want to try drawing, just do it. Start basic, but try something new each time. Then strive to improve on that ONE thing. Learn anatomy; Basics first, then get more advanced. Don't start digital, because then you'll rely on the computer/tablet to do a lot of the work for you. As cool as it is, and as convenient as it may be, it won't make your art any better in the beginning, so get the fundamentals down first.

My advice is to not look to develop your creative skills in NSFW contexts at first. Unless you have huge levels of talent, it can be a relatively alienating experience. There's a lot of porn and relatively few people looking at any particular kind of it, and nobody will care about yours until it's at a certain level of quality anyhow. That's opposed to the SFW world, where the market is much wider, and you're more likely to find people showing appreciation for the work you put in at an earlier stage. Appreciation is what drives passion, in most cases.

Also, quality >= consistency >>>> any other factor, whether or not you're doing NSFW. An artist being regularly active is going to be much more likely to develop dedicated fans.

That's a good point, but I slightly disagree on your reasoning. The issue isn't that it's too hard to meet the bar for quality, it's that it's too easy.

Porn is not going to attract the most discriminating of audiences. You're going to see less return on effort than you would elsewhere. Sure, there are quality standards here that set a "floor," but you're not going to get much recognition for going the extra mile. Not that you should expect to see a ton of that anywhere really, but it's more true in the SFW sphere in my experience, because people aren't just there for a good fap.

I'm speaking from my own experience with writing. You're going to have much more fulfilling engagement if you write in SFW spaces. For drawing, it matters less, because your brain's either initialized with the right weights to produce something interesting even when you're pretty new, or you go sit in the grinding cave for like a year or two. And that's true for both SFW and NSFW, but I would say that still the NSFW bar for interest is higher.

I agree with pretty much everyone on here. Start small and slow, don’t expect much if anything at all, and just work on improving what you’re doing. Expectations are the enemy I generally find. Likewise, don’t be a tool for other people’s desires and only create what other people want.

Most importantly, do what you enjoy. If posting or helping out here makes you miserable, then don’t. Do what’s right for you and make sure you enjoy creating content for the hub. And make sure you take care of yourself too. Real life will always be more important.

And remember to have fun. Least, that’s what my time writing fanfiction and erotic fanfiction has taught me. So take my advice with a grain of salt haha.

Sorry I’m late replying to the tread, but I appreciate all the advice. I’m taking notes for all of the erotica advice, for sure, but I think for now I’m gonna start with something I’m more familiar with and dabble in coding, specifically I’m gonna learn Python because it seems pretty common. In addition, I figured a project like making a spiral script would be simple once I learn more, and would be appealing on here. I’ll probably come back and try erotica at some point in the future once inspiration strikes.