A quick four-way

Here's the end of a scene I wrote this morning. It's from the first draft of Live Wild, the third book in my Glass Room Adventures series:

Denise slides off Charlie and wedges between me and Walter. I give her man to her, and take mine. I rest my head on Charlie's belly and look up at him. His eyes startle me with their kindness. He runs a hand through my hair. I go lower. My mouth finds his cock. Kisses, licks, and down my throat. I wonder, while I begin the task of sucking him back to hardness, if the man inside this old body is too deep for me to understand.

 One thing I like about this passage is its brevity. In 86 words, I describe the bodily interactions of four people, plus one explicit sex act, and a moment of self doubt. The entire scene, two couples entering a bedroom, undressing, exchanging partners, fucking, and exchanging again, takes less than 700 words,

 A writing teacher once told me that people today won't sit still for the kind of lingering descriptions you see in older novels. There's something to this, although I think it's true that many readers will tolerate wordiness if there's a sense that the story is going somewhere. Recently I read Dickens' Domby & Son, and loved every plodding line of it.

Whether the narrative moves slowly or quickly, you need to include enough detail to make the scene convincing. In erotic fiction, the descriptive details are often body parts. And you need action that provokes an emotional reaction. Since the action in erotic fiction generally involves sex, emotional reactions are fairly easy to get to. The passage above ends with a sequence of an exchanged look, a blow job, and a blooming uncertainty.