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On Writing Sex Scenes Writing sex scenes is partly a matter of taste. Unless you’re writing pornography, the graphic description of body parts inserted into body parts is not the best way to go. One exception to that statement is when you are aiming for something cold. It is the description of a woman having sex with a man she loathes, going through with it for some reason other than desire. Then the bare physical description would work. The other extreme is to go all metaphorical. A few well chosen metaphors are dandy, but too much reliance on metaphor can get ludicrous. You have to watch your language carefully. You want to infuse the scene with the emotions of your protagonist, if she or he has them. Sex can be a great door into character. How someone thinks about sex is a good clue to character. Is he making love, establishing possession, making a conquest, proving his superiority as a male, taking from another man? Is she submitting or making love or establishing her own desirability, taking from another woman, having or letting herself be taken? Is making love a pleasure or an investment? Is your protagonist sharing or spending? Also the way someone makes love can also demonstrate character. Does he always make love in the same way? Would it make him nervous to change position? Does she always want to be a bottom or a top? Is she orgasmic? Does he make love brutally, slam bang, or is he conscious of the woman’s reactions and interested in giving her maximum pleasure? Is she knowledgeable about the male body or ignorant? Does she think about what she is going to wear tomorrow as the act continues? Is she making To Do lists in her head? Is he fantasizing about someone he saw on television or his old girlfriend? Is there role playing involved? Some lovers make animal noises. Some wail or scream. Some are silent. Some speak words they consider dirty. Others say they love the partner, over and over again, whether or not in fact they do. You have to consider how to reveal character; you have to consider what affect you want your scene to have. Is it romantic? Is it sensuous? Is it boring? Is it distressful in some way to one or the other participants? Is it painful for one of them? Is it disillusioning? Is it startling in some way? Is it some kind of breakthrough for your characters or just the usual? Is it sex for money without involvement? Is the woman faking an orgasm or the man faking emotion? Don’t unless you are writing romance or pornography have your characters achieve instant simultaneous ecstasy when they tumble into bed. Sex is as complicated as anything else in our lives, one reason it is useful for characterization. If the sex is too perfect, we won’t believe you. Some writers put in too many sex scenes, as if afraid the action will bog down and the reader will lose interest. Such writers do not trust their own storytelling and think they need to seduce the reader into continuing with one sex event after another. But repetitive sex scenes are as boring as any other kind of scene that is repeated too often. Other writers are too embarrassed or prudish or proper to write sex scenes at all. If you are writing about two people flirting for forty pages and then getting it on, mostly we do not want to skip that part. We want to find out what really happens between them in that bedroom. It need not go on for pages, but mostly we do need to be present. We’ve been waiting for them to get together, and we cannot be cheated of that moment . . . CATEGORY: Writing / Reference / Memoir / The Novel
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| Copyright 2005 Marge Piercy | ||||||
