Sexy elves and alpha dwarves
Librettist and novelist Hannah Hayden on what men really want
The worst part about ghostwriting multiple erotic novels at once is when you type the wrong guy’s name during sex. I wonder if my editors feel that pang of infidelity in their gut: what do you mean Bryce and not Hank? Or whether it’s just a standard, known secret that everyone of us ghostwriters is secretly writing as other people, too.
After all, standard known secrets are the name of the game as a ghostwriter, which I’ve been for the past three years. During the time I have been pursuing extended degrees and making music, I’ve also been moonlighting as a popular writer of men’s erotic fantasy fiction.
They’re hyper-masculine hero stories that are supposedly ‘by a man and for men’, which is to say, by a 5’5 left-wing 20-something with three humanities degrees who lives in a janky flat in North London with bad water pressure. As a literary graduate, the world of online erotic fiction was not one that I was at all familiar with. But I’m pretty certain that very few of us with high-minded degrees and academic leanings are generally aware of what actually sells. And let me tell you from the sweatshop of the English language, that graphic sex absolutely sells.
But so do elves. The briefs I work to are in the fantasy genre, which means I deal with creatures such as dwarves and hot fairies on a daily basis. Much of the syntax and subject matter is inspired by video games, and the quests and challenges the main character will face are written to appeal to the D&D nerd. Like Dan Brown’s compendiums of schlock, each chapter ends on a cliffhanger that urges you onto the next whether you like it or not. And then back to the online store, to buy the next book. And so you’re hooked. I give you entertainment, I give you sex, and the industry thrives.
Bodice-rippers and steamy romances are a genre often associated with lonely women, but I write almost exclusively for a male readership. In my brief time writing billionaire romance (a subgenre of romance fiction dedicated to plots in which a mousy, unassuming woman unfailingly wins the heart of a business tycoon), I found that there were much more misogynistic tropes and undertones than those contained in male-oriented romance stories. In billionaire romances, the protagonist often finds herself in a toxic game of cat and mouse with a troubled and emotionally abusive hyper-wealthy alpha male figure. Unhealthy obsession is encouraged, and after being sent numerous emails with pictures of both Patrick Bateman and Christian Grey as inspiration, I was eventually let go by a client for making the male love interests too ‘friendly’.
My target demographic is men in rural America. Men in trucks are whacking off to this. Lumberjacks, too. They pull over on the highway, gaze at the sunset, pull out their tablets (most of these are e-books), and whack off. At least that’s what I imagine. A book can sell between 1-5,000 copies to give a rough estimate, and the readership has a say on what they want to whack off to: Redditors, Amazon commenters. And we act like we don’t read every comment, but these responses shape the literature. After all, it’s not trying to accomplish anything artistic. It’s just trying to sell.
One thing I’ve been asked by friends, in whom I confide the particulars of my job, is whether I consider my occupation sex work. This generally varies on my level of self esteem. At some points in my working life I have considered myself an enigmatic and mysterious character in my own right, a bard of sorts who has had to resort to seedy paid work in order to support my more dignified and important ambitions— like writing opera librettos about bananas who are having an existential crisis (to be performed at the Royal Academy of Music in March 2025). You know, like when F. Scott Fitzgerald resorted to writing crappy Hollywood flicks as he declined out of jazz age decadence and into prodigious alcoholism.
There’s a cartoon from the website Married to the Sea which reads, ‘Oh, god. People are still reading Hamlet? Jesus. I wrote that shit in like one fortnight. I owed some people some money… Shakespeare got to get paid, son.’ I posted the cartoon it on my Instagram story, captioning that this is precisely the way that I feel about myself: I am the Shakespeare that owes some people some money, and needs to get a Hamlet done. This is how I want to feel about whacking out an entire novel in just a month.
But it’s how I want to feel, it is not how I actually do feel. Yes, I do consider this whoring of a certain kind. In my personal life I can track the fluidity with which I use certain sexual verbiage back to my experiences with phone sex, which I always found performative and hated. And yet I did it anyway to appease someone else. It was easy: I could sit on the end of my bed and lie, say I was doing things I wasn’t, which is the first building block in making someone believe that you are someone that you aren’t. It was exhilarating. The exchanges were with someone that I looked up to, and I liked that I’d caught him at a weak moment, that I could suspend him in disbelief without his knowledge. A form of trickery.
From then on, I became adept at building a wall of kinky bullshit that guarded me from any real semblance of intimacy. I used words like pussy, cock, and member. Vocabulary such as this is ubiquitous in the romance genre, which brings up one of the essential difficulties for writers who are publishing in this world. Like pop music, readers are looking for the familiar comfort of a well-established genre with well-established tropes, vocabulary, and expectations. It’s a linguistic version of the sheen on porn stars, the waxed-car slick glow that transmogrifies them from human women into mannequin idols.
One time I got a nudge from an editor because I’d accidentally called a vagina cavernous, which isn’t sexy. Words like tight, inviting, welcoming, and wet, are considered sexy. Anything that can describe a friendly boa constrictor, or an obliging servant caught in a rainstorm is on-style for an appealing description of the female sex organ.
I don’t know what led me to describe a vagina as cavernous, perhaps a misguided respect for the non-literal largesse and mystery of the female genitalia? Probably not. I was most likely just exhausted and scraping my brain for any old adjective, and in a haze I found myself bumbling down the wrong neural pathway. The industry relies on overworked and underpaid writers who work at a rate of 3,000-1000 words per day for pay that often necessitates part-time work, and in countries such as the USA most likely won’t include ‘benefits’ (healthcare) due to its freelance nature. Aside from the material impracticalities and unfairness of doing lots of work that goes to someone else, I often wonder what the process of generating this much text on a daily basis does to ones brain. The habit develops discipline, for sure, but I worry that my muscle for fabrication has grown too strong after essentially being roided up for so long on hot elves.
The writers, or ‘writers’, who rise to the top have a small but specific flair that makes their own work their own brand. It’s not necessarily an individual voice that completely sets them apart, but one that varies just enough within a small, set margin of deviation that is almost impossible to predict, and which these writers fight to maintain. This is where people like me come in. Instead of developing or pushing the voice of a writer forward, it’s essential for the market to keep it trapped in a stasis of specific themes, syntax, and subject matter. This hyper-capitalist approach is leveraged by every industry, and I liken my work to an amalgam of generally crappy media: Hallmark movies, chart music, and musical adaptations of blockbusters. Of course I’m not proud of it. Of course I would never want my name on anything I’ve written for money. But while you were at an opening arguing about a forgettable piece of auto-fiction, I was at home giving the people what they wanted: which is sex, money, and hot women. Happy endings all around.
Listen to Hannah talk to Patrick Galbraith about the threat of AI and holding her readers’ attention on the latest episode of the Boundless podcast.