Re: How to write sex scenes
A writer in another conference asked how to write sex scenes. I answered it as well as I could, and Jim asked if I'd re-post the message here.
History and theory:
1. Explicit sex scenes and serious literature have always had an on-again off-again relationship; for instance, they spent the nineteenth century pretending they'd never met each other. The upshot of this has never been that people stopped writing and reading about sex. What it meant was that they did it in books and magazines whose existence was taken note of far more often by the legal system than by the literary canon.
Low pay, anonymous publication, effectively no copyright protection, and the threat of arrest, don't make for good professional writing; but since attempts to suppress its publication didn't suppress the public's desire to read it, the censorship era's artificial scarcity of erotica simply meant that people took whatever they could get, bad or good. It was very much like the situation that produced the the rotgut whisky and bathtub gin of the Prohibition era, which were saleable only because better hootch and normal distribution channels had been suppressed.
Since there was no percentage in making erotic writing any better than it had to be, the marginal characters who published and distributed it didn't particularly care about its quality. It just had to do the job. A lot of appallingly bad books got into print (as well as a few that were better than almost anyone noticed). This further emphasized the division between literature and erotica.
Thing was, both forms might well be written by the same writers. In the days before tie-in novels, some authors made ends meet by cranking out smut, and in the process picked up its diction and conventions. Then, when censorship loosened up and it became possible to have sex scenes in real books (and what a bacchanalia there was for a few years!), that writing style was the one in their repertoire labeled "how to write about sex."
Most of the sex scenes you've ever read will have been influenced by that commercial porn writing style. Think of it as a nightmare from which we're still trying to awaken.
2. One more useful principle is that there are three subjects almost everyone thinks they know enough about: politics, pop music, and sex. You already know how you rate your fellow citizens' political beliefs and musical tastes, so you can probably infer the rest. What this means to you as a writer is that if you actually study this subject, and put some work into learning how to write it well, you'll be ahead of the game.
Practical issues:
Most people have their attention in the wrong place when they're writing sex scenes. They may be metaphorically looking away from their work because the subject makes them uncomfortable, or they may be too deep into the fantasy experience to get it out properly onto the page. In their different ways, both approaches make for bad prose.
What follows is the full-scale overdocumented first-timer method for writing a sex scene. As you become more familiar with the form, you won't have to do quite so much advance work. Incidentally, the advice that follows is also good for writing battle scenes, fast-moving violent action, complex magical transformations, and other set pieces.
1. Plan the action like Eisenhower planning D-Day. Why are you including this scene? What is its emotional tone? What is it intended to establish? Does the action in the scene actually establish that? Is the action consistent with the characters? (Nothing kills a characterization deader faster than a misconceived sex scene.)
Construct a timeline. Draw a diagram of the setting. Work out a list of things that are going to happen and things that are going to get said. If you don't have a good visual imagination, wait for an afternoon when everyone's out of the house, then rehearse the actions. Make sure they all make sense and are physically possible. Be doubly careful about exotic and/or outdoor settings.
Make sure you're not trying to make the scene do too much. If it's intended to do too little, either cut it out, or figure out something useful for it to do. This is fiction. Anything that doesn't contribute is a drag on the whole.
A few evocative actions, gestures, and details will work better than too many. Your readers will fill in the rest. If you want to see an illustration of this, watch the scene at the end of episode 109 in the sixth season of Buffy. There's just barely enough physical detail shown for you to tell what they're doing with the plumbing, so to speak. Most of the focus is on how it's happening, as these two characters interact with each other and with their physical environment. What the whole scene is about is this extremely intense moment of interaction between them, and its implications for the storyline. It's part of the overall ongoing story, only this part of it is being told in a series of succinct, concrete images of physical action.
2. Now that you know what they're going to be doing, you have to figure out how you're going to explain it.
This is going to sound counterintuitive, but you want to keep the descriptive language as plain, simple, and lucid as possible. Seriously. Sex scenes are emphatically not the place to get fancy with the purple prose. You're writing about sex for an audience of primates. You don't have to dress it up to get them to pay attention to what's going on, and fancied-up language will just get you into trouble.
a. You're allowed one metaphor and one simile per scene. It's best if you never use them.
Watch out for buried metaphors: figures of speech that have become so standardized that we don't think of them as figurative language: Mark leaned over and whispered a suggestion. Marcia initially looked intrigued, then worried and distressed. "I'm sorry," she said; "I just can't swallow that."
Watch out for common words that have strong sexual connotations: hard, come, ejaculate, etc. And don't name your character Dick.
b. Don't use that horrible coy figurative language you see in bodice-ripper novels, where his hardness and/or maleness hovers in the vicinity of her softness and/or wetness and/or openness and both parties hyperventilate like crazy while docking procedures are being negotiated, whereupon !!! *IT* !!! happens in some hypothetical subjunctive null-space, and then both parties come in a burst of metaphors.
If you can't stand saying what you're saying, don't say it. It's possible to do a perfectly good sex scene without mentioning the mechanics, if you prefer, and it's far better not to mention them at all than to put see-through lace-ruffled sex cozies on all the naughty bits.
c. Don't use that dreadful flattened-out cliche-ridden language you get in hacked-out naughty books (see earlier remarks on the history of the form), where (among other sins) they came up with endless stupid synonyms to disguise the fact that they were essentially using the same nouns and verbs over and over and over again.
As a rule of thumb, if the language you're using starts sounding like any other sex scene you've ever read, you probably need to rewrite that passage, because almost all sex scenes are dreadful. John D. Macdonald has written some decent ones.
Breasts are not like melons; neither are they like billiard balls. Breasts are tauter and nipples are harder in a state of arousal, but that's relative; they still feel like a baggie full of cooked oatmeal. Nipples do not go spung! Female genitalia are not naturally mossy. Nobody has a penis like a braunschweiger, though they may have a schlong like a braunschweiger. Furthermore, a penis may be a c ock, and for humorous effect it may even be a throbbing waga, but it is never a turgid, engorged, or empurpled member. The word "raging" is deeply suspect, as is "sword". Burning loins are Right Out.
Never write a scene in which a female character admires her own breasts in the mirror -- or, worse, thinks, "Gee, it's great having breasts; it means that any time I want to cop a feel, I've got one with me, instead of having to go find someone else who has one." (I actually saw that one in a published book.) Your female readers will at minimum be snickering at you, and you may never recover your credibility with them.
If body parts appear to be conducting operations entirely on their own, you have gone wrong.
d. Listen closely while you and your sweetie are having sex. Write dialogue that sounds like that.
e. Don't attempt to invent amusingly wicked perversions if you've never participated in same. I'm serious. Straight vanilla types never get this stuff right. Usually they wind up writing dumb scenes where people make lubricious faces at each other while playing unconvincing games with food. This is one of the many aspects of writing that's improved by doing a little experimentation at home. If you're writing scenes where people are messing around with champagne or chocolate sauce or popsicles, talk your sweetie into helping you stage these scenes in real life. See if they're actually erotic, not to mention feasible. If they aren't, don't write them.
(Popsicles. Such a bad idea. Remember how you put ice on an injury to help numb it? Same effect, and the high sugar content leads to yeast infections.)
(And the gerbil story? Don't believe it. Don't pass it on, either.)
f. If you're thinking of writing about the kinkier stuff, there are two big reasons to avoid areas where you don't actually know what you're talking about. One is that some of your readers will know, and you'll lose credibility with them at a catastrophic rate. The idea is not to have your readers muttering "Uh huh. Tell me again where they're supposed to have placed that attachment point?" or "Not without an extension cord, you don't," or "Turn it around and use the handle instead," or "That will only work in zero gee."
The other reason to not mess around with stuff you don't understand is that some poor fool could get the impression that you know what you're doing, try to imitate it, and do themselves or their partner an injury. This issue comes up for debate amongst writers of erotica. Some argue for the legitimacy of having weird, unrealistic, or impossible sex in works of fiction. Others argue that in a society where reliable information about this stuff is not always available, and so much misinformation is floating around loose, it's irresponsible to lead your readers into potential error.
You'll choose as you will. I'm strongly in favor of caution. I'd just as soon we never again saw a story in which characters are strung up by their hands or feet, or held by ropes that are under tension, for more than a minute or two; and I'd just as soon we didn't give readers stupid ideas involving bullwhips, vacuum cleaner hoses, long-necked glass bottles, autoasphyxiation, sex play while driving, or sticking untested objects up one's bottom. The story you're trying to tell here should not be the kind EMTs, paramedics, and ER personnel swap over an after-hours beer.
g. Cultivate a dirty-minded friend who spent a good chunk of his or her youth in dissolute pursuits, and have them beta-read your manuscripts.
This is good advice for everyone, not just authors who are trying to write sex scenes. There's a very early Georgette Heyer historical novel wherein Simon Coldheart, owner of the local castle, is indifferent to the charms of women, but has a record number of young pageboys in his service. They hero-worship him, sleep in his bedchamber, share his meals, etc., and he's visibly fond of them. In the book, Simon's neighbors keep saying "He's so good with children; what a pity he hasn't found the right woman yet! What a wonderful father he'll be someday." And as I read it, all I could think was, "Nope, unh-uh; that's not what his neighbors are saying about him." What young Georgette Heyer needed was a formerly dissolute friend to tell her what Simon's neighbors were really saying.
h. You know how reading someone's novel will tell you a lot about how they view the world, what they believe, etc., even if they don't mean to tell you that about themselves? Double and redouble that if you're writing sex scenes.
And that's enough for now.