Smut Marathon 2018: A Review

With just a few hours to go till the launch of Smut Marathon 2019, it feels like a good time to reflect on my experience of competing in – and winning – the 2018 edition.

I’ve already shared a few stray thoughts at various points over the last five months (along with eight of my 10 entries), in posts you’ll find here, here and here. What I want to do today is step back and answer a couple of questions that get to the heart of my broader feelings about Smut Marathon – feelings that definitely changed over the course of the year, and have done so again recently as I’ve mulled over whether to defend my crown.

Do I have a nerdy, pointless graph summarising my Smut Marathon 2018 performance?

Why yes, yes I do.

What did I enjoy most about Smut Marathon 2018?

Honestly? The writing. That’s hardly a ground-breaking answer, but one of the beauties of the Smut Marathon concept is that when you strip it right back, you’ll find something wonderful at its core: a reason to write. When you’re busy with work, or family commitments, or just the general hustle and bustle of life, forcing yourself to carve out a few hours every 2-4 weeks for something creative is basically an act of self-care. Or it was for me, anyway.

Even when I didn’t love the assignment (*cough* Round 5 *cough*), I quickly found myself immersed in the challenge of constructing something worth submitting for public scrutiny. In that respect, the competitive element really helped me. It sharpened my focus, and ensured that I gave each prompt serious thought before putting pen to paper. I guess it provided purpose – or at least triggered an element of professional pride, which I was able to harness when necessary.

Through school, university and most of my working life, I’ve been someone who enjoys solving problems and who thrives under deadline pressure. My Smut Marathon experience leaned heavily on both those traits (strengths?). The problem-solving requirement is an interesting one. For those of us who don’t do it for a living, the imperative to write – and especially to write fiction – comes from multiple places, but most of them involve at least the kernel of an existing idea. Something to turn over in your head and work with. Smut Marathon flips this round: it defines the parameters (loose or tight) in which you must work, and then forces you to develop an idea. It gives you an end-point – the criteria you must satisfy – and says “ok, go figure out how to get there.” I really valued that, which is just as well really!

In contrast, the decision to impose largely artificial deadline pressure on myself was mine and mine alone. Marie is actually very generous with the time she gives writers to complete assignments. From what I saw on Twitter throughout the contest, most of my competitors preferred to start drafting their stories early in the writing window, to avoid the anxiety of feeling like they might run out of time. Indeed in her email introducing each assignment, Marie offered this as her top tip:

‘Start writing your piece as soon as possible after receiving the assignment. Let it rest for a while and then start editing, deleting, re-writing. Never leave the writing until the last moment.’

Sensible advice for most people, but not for me, sadly! I’m at my most focused and creative when I feel like I’m racing against the clock, so in every round bar maybe one or two, I didn’t start getting anything down on paper till 48 hours or so before the deadline.

It was also brilliant reading so many different responses to the same prompt. Each writing assignment made me examine (and sometimes rethink) what constitutes ‘erotica’, but often the real insight came from other people’s work. The human brain is a sexy, sexy thing, and few things demonstrate that more clearly than a quick skim through a list of Smut Marathon entries.

Which was my favourite round/prompt?

The fact that this is such a hard question to answer (I’ve gone back and forth on it several times!) is testament to how great a job Marie did with the writing assignments. Some were harder than others – or just more stressful in some way – but one thing I noticed throughout the competition was the almost universal level of positive feedback on what we were being asked to do.

I particularly enjoyed Round 4 (‘Write a hot, erotic masturbation scene where your character uses a sex toy. One character. One sex toy. No brand names.’) for its simplicity and flexibility, and Round 9 (‘Start your story with these words: The wind howled around the corners of the cabin…’) for the way it subverted a fiction trope and gave us licence to play with it. However, I think my best work may have been done in Round 8, the assignment for which initially made me wrinkle my nose a bit. A sex scene in a lift? Between two strangers? How do you make that realistic and original?! Turns out the answer to that one is: set it in a ski lift and leave them up there for a looooong time…

And of course I can’t talk about favourite prompts without mentioning the Final. I’ve posted my winning story here, but it’s worth noting that I had the Bletchley Park idea fairly late in proceedings. I was planning to write an espionage story set in Buenos Aires around the Battle of the River Plate, and…well, I think it’s safe to say I wouldn’t be sitting here as the winner if I’d run with that idea instead. What it does show though is the versatility of the prompt. ‘World War 2’ offers a writer so many different possibilities, even if I’d argue that it’s quite hard to make many of them sexy.

What did I find most difficult/challenging about Smut Marathon 2018?

I signed up for last year’s contest on a bit of a whim, assuming I’d do it for a couple of rounds before quietly dropping out and focusing on something else. My initial ambivalence was driven by a number of things, but foremost among them was the sense that I didn’t really know what Smut Marathon was trying to be. Fierce competition for experienced writers? Development exercise for newbies? Friendly, year-long writing meme? I could see the appeal of each, but I was hesitant about committing myself to something that might turn out to be an awkward mish-mash of all three.

In the end, I needn’t have worried. Not because it wasn’t a mish-mash – it was – nor even because it wasn’t awkward – at times it was that too – but because the challenge of navigating those different waters turned out to be a big part of what made Smut Marathon special. It’s a broad church, and somehow that just works.

However, at an individual level I found that it sometimes forced me into difficult choices. Should I write the story I think is hottest or the one tailored to the jury members’ preferences? Should I try something new and stretch myself a bit, even if it doesn’t come off, or go with a tried-and-trusted scenario that I know will get me lots of public votes? As the competition intensified and the field was whittled down to 20, 15, 10 writers, those decisions got easier – by the end I really wanted to win – but in the early rounds I often found myself confused over which hat to wear.

On balance, I think those trade-offs are a necessary evil, given the inclusivity of the current format. That doesn’t mean they’re always fun though, and it will be interesting to see how the writers manage that in 2019. Marie has assembled an excellent jury, and while I have faith in all five members when it comes to assessing writing quality, there’s an ‘X factor’ in erotica that doesn’t really exist in other genres. Like it or not, we all respond best as readers to stories that push our own sexual buttons; to scenarios and characters designed to appeal to our kinks or preferences. With (at least) four of the five jurors either submissive cis women or dominant cis men, anyone choosing to write – for example – a hardcore femdom story will have to consider whether they might be at an immediate disadvantage in the jury voting (however slight) versus another competitor taking the same prompt in a femsub direction.

What are my thoughts on Smut Marathon 2019?

At the finish line of my first actual marathon, the only thought running through my exhausted brain was ‘never again’. A month later, I still felt that way. Three months later though, once muscles had healed and the memory of the pain I’d felt at 23, 24, 25 miles had started to fade? Different story.

It took me five years to follow through on the notion that I might – one day – fancy running another marathon. At that stage though, there was no real imperative to get off my arse and do it. No entry deadline looming just seven weeks later. No daily tweets from Marie, urging/tempting writers to dive back in and do it all again. It was much easier to ignore the whole thing for a bit.

Now though…well now, my 180 has taken place with almost indecent haste. As I tried to get my head round the idea that I’d actually won last year’s Smut Marathon, the ‘never again’ light was definitely flashing in my head. ‘You’ll never top last year, so get out while the getting’s good’, and all that. It’s why I volunteered to sit on the 2019 jury – to remove the option of backsliding on that instinctive initial decision.

Because the problem, of course, is that I now know how much damn fun it is! The FOMO associated with sitting on the sidelines and watching everyone else throw themselves into it is not something I want to inflict upon myself. I probably won’t win this time – I may not make it past Round 2 – but I figure I’m playing with house money at this stage, so why not?

Besides, I figure I’m doing everyone else a favour too. As the old boxing adage goes: if you want to be the champ, you gotta beat the champ. Well here I am, people – come at me with your best shot!