Ten ***s about Writing S*x

And why ***s may or may not be the problem

If you need a content warning after that title, please consider yourself content-ly warned. I’ve blogged about writing sex before, first in the context of being commissioned to write an erotic story for the collection In Bed With, and then a post riffing on a great blog by Sebstien de Castell about writing violence. This post gathers all that thinking together, and also draws on Elizabeth Benedict’s The Joy of Writing Sex, which is super-helpful.

Talking of which, if we’re talking about writing sex it’s going to be impossible to avoid snigger-inducing double entendres, except by way of ridiculous circumlocution. So let’s just brazen it out, shall we?

*** Writing sex is hard, except when it isn’t. For many it’s weirdly easier to write scenes of bad sex well, than write scenes of good sex well. Perhaps that’s because a good deal of the point of the original act is to reach an altered state, and most fiction’s job is to induce something in the reader which is also an altered state: Gardner’s ‘vivid and continuous’ imaginative ‘dream’. If the sex was bad it’s unlikely to have been dreamy, so that’s only one dream, instead of two, you’re having to create for the reader.

*** To write sex well you need a terrific imagination. The first essential imaginative act is to imagine that anyone you know, or who knows your partner/parents/children, is dead. Just for now. The second is to imagine, again for now, that the Bad Sex Awards never existed. (When you’re miles away from writing any such scenes, it can be educative to dip into that link. But only if you can trust it not to feed your Inner Critic.)

*** It naturally and normally underlies the life of all novels, as sex does in life. The mistake is to think that writing it needs different writing tools and choices from the job of writing anything else.

*** But readers do often feel it’s different from the rest of what they’re reading, just as societies, too, put sex into a category on its own for all sorts of rules and customs. So to induce the effect in readers that you want to induce, you need to take some of their probable reactions into account too.

*** What matters isn’t how much you put in, it’s that the writing of the sex scenes is consistent with your storytelling as a whole. Does your prose usually unpack full, gory physical details, or does it evoke animal or icky things with subtly-applied implications? Is this light and wittily euphemistic comedy? Does it dig into psychological and emotional investigation with only enough physical detail for the reader to know what’s going on? Whatever you do with the rest of the story, do it with the sex scenes.

*** A sex scene is just a scene. And, like all scenes, what matters for the story is the difference between where the characters are pyschologically, emotionally and physically, at the beginning, and the end. The sieve to help you decide what to write of what happened in between is: does it move the story on towards that end? Think ‘Then - But - Therefore - But’ when drafting, and in editing: ‘Why this? Why now?’ If, honestly, all that matters is that they did it - then that’s where a *** or a closing bedroom door may be just right. And if the only end the scene is aiming at is - euphemism alert! - the reader’s physical satisfaction, then you’re not writing fiction, you’re writing what used to be wrapped in opaque plastic and restricted to the top shelf in the newsagents.

*** You don’t need to write everything that happens from soup to nuts. In his fantastic book Essayism, (highly recommened for all writers not just memoirists and essayists, Brian Dillon quotes William Gass’s essay ‘On Being Blue’: ‘a stroke by stroke story of copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing’ - or the consumption of a ten-course gourmet dinner that starts with a organic foam of consommé and ends with estate-grown Fair Trade-certified macadamia nuts. More here.

*** Part of the problem is that we need words for something that’s largely beyond words. Dillon also quotes Gass on this: ‘We have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses. We have a name for the Second Coming, but not for the second coming.’ The path between the Scylla of crude Anglo-Saxon, which for many people sounds merely sweary or comic, the Charybdis of medical Latin, and the (where’s the right Greek Myth when you need one?) third option of euphemism and not-saying, is a narrow one. But, I promise you, it does exist - and beta-readers can help you find it.

*** Working with psychic distance can make all the difference. The closest-in level (PD5, in Gardner’s taxonomy) is super-useful for all altered states, not just sex, because it evokes exactly the losing-touch-with-context which is central to the such experiences. The further-out levels can also help you withdraw (ahem) when restraint and implication are what is needed.

*** In the end, the best-written sex scene is the scene the reader writes in their head, whether the experience for the protagonists was ghastly or transcendant. This idea is, if you like, another essential sieve to put your words through, and it’s really an aspect of Andrew Stanton’s ‘rule of two plus two’, off which I jumped ‘The Desirable Difficulty of Sleeve and Paint’. What is the right kind of enough to enable your reader’s mind to get working, without crowding out their own processes of imaginative recreation? The flip side of not being afraid to get down and dirty if the storytelling needs it, whatever your mother-in-law might think, is not being afraid to trust your reader to supply their own down and… whatever this scene is being in your story.

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Image credit: Caeciliusinhorto at Wikimedia Commons