keep a perverted diary for the protagonist of your novel

You should keep a perverted diary for the protagonist of your novel. I think the truest test of how well you understand your character's psyche is whether or not you know why their relationship to sexual depravity and the erotic in general is the way it is—even if it's not a central theme. A person's relationship to the erotic in general is probably one of the most unvarnished windows into their relational history that you're going to get—not necessarily to the objective truth of its events, but to the truth of how they felt about them and how they reacted to them in that moment; and to the way they subsequently interacted with these traumas through the slightly more comfortable experience of desire. Comfortable in that on the surface it seems to present this rather primitive kind of binary with regards to the capacity it has to reach you. You know, either you accept the thing or you reject the thing. Either you do it or you don't do it. And for a certain kind of person, I think this this allows them to entertain like the self-obliterative fantasy that no context beyond their body's actions exists, which in part I think motivates sexual hedonism (don't quote me on that). When we're crafting a psychological profile for a character, I think one of the main inclinations tends to be to note these traits and traumas and events individually and rarely in relation to one another in a way that can sometimes strip agency from a character and having them only relate to that Thing—you know, the trigger or the habit in question—exclusively in terms of some catalytic event. You know, "my mother was such a bitch" which is why you know I now have boundary issues" and that being the fullest extent to which the thing in question is explored even in the present tense of the character. As if the fact that The Thing in question could be traced back to one or several clear points of origin suggests that it could therefore be eliminated rather miraculously if for whatever reason the origin were to not have existed, and it reminds me kind of of how we tend to approach discussion about kinks. We sometimes refuse to consider what might motivate a kink and how the kink-haver might feel about that now in the present beyond like these somewhat simplistic identifications of likely reasonable formation. "my god you like being spanked because your father was a disciplinarian? Everybody clap! Now f*ck off out of my face and put ointment on your a**. I mean it's just what do we get out of that. There are just so many things we neglect to consider, and bringing it back to the main character. I mean for starters has The Thing caused within them a contradiction between philosophy and actions? Has The Thing's pull been exacerbated by anything more developmentally recent? Is its pull going to be more seductive because they've had it validated by some friends, therefore making them more likely to fall within the confirmation bias (like the many Republicans fucking us in the a** without lube)? That there's such little attention given to how the character interacts in the present tense with the thing kind of makes it feel replaceable—as if it could be swapped for virtually anything of similar emotional weight and not much would fundamentally change about the psychological dilemmas surrounding this hypothetical trigger habit, whatever that we've been calling The Thing. And while it's definitely helpful, this model, for you know organizing events and ideas in general, never venturing further than "the character's mother was X, which is why they did Y and Z" doesn't really force you to consider causal or reactive overlap elsewhere, which is to say that it encourages you to view the thing and its effect as an isolated event. However, the erotic forces you to work backwards from synthesis, subtext, and accumulation. It simultaneously suggests, you know, "the character's mother was X" and virtually all other driving forces both past and present that are the reason for The Thing's continued existence. We tend to reveal our need most in what we expect not to have to ask for yet react viscerally to not receiving (ask me how I know— actually you don't need to just read my Substack). And this is to be magnified to the point of what can sometimes feel like caricature during erotic encounters. Consider what a character who's a voyeur suggests. Who is a voyeur that gains no sexual gratification from the act whatsoever suggests. It could suggest a history of being suspended to the sidelines within their own life; it could suggest a history of alienation from peers; it could suggest a desire to covet something that all of their subjects have in common; it could suggest a desire to overcome profound social anxiety that don't quite know how to go about resolving. It could suggest a number of absences which you're able to see with greater immediacy as a collection of factors rather than individual nodes to be collected one by one in a linear fashion as the other model encourages you to do. So it gives you a broader scope to view your character's psychological dilemmas through. Also, it's just really fun writing like a pervert, seriously. I mean you have to try it sometime.