Reading and Writing: Sex Scenes
The highest selling genre of books is romance. They hold something like a 50% share of the market for all books sold … that’s all books sold.
When I was taking writing classes in college, I had one professor instruct the class to write a love scene. For good reason, love scenes help new writers open up. Writers should definitely know how to present intimacy. And intimacy is one of those things first-time writers can be shy about.
Still, I’ve often wondered what it was like for the professor to receive an entire class’ worth of amateurly written love scenes. I can only imagine it was an interesting night of grading.
I love writing. So, yeah, I remember what I wrote. It was a reflection on two pairs of wet footprints (after a thunderstorm). (The equivalent of a camera panning over a floor covered in discarded clothing, moving up to a burnt out candle.) Being sex-adjacent was enough. The assignment wasn’t to write erotic fiction. Still, I kind of chickened out. I could have been more adventurous and less metaphorical.
Speaking of which, erotic fiction is also very popular, like, extremely popular. As a bonus, it’s lead to some pretty entertaining stuff, like, oh, dinosaur porn? (Go ahead, argue with me. I don’t care. That shit is gold.)
It’s lead me to wonder what, as a collective culture, we can’t fetishize. The answer is, apparently – NOT MUCH.
Try it. Look long enough at anything, you’ll start seeing certain supple qualities. You don’t even have to strain your imagination. Even something as ordinary as a binder clip.
Come on.
Or grain silo …
Come on.
Or post-it …
I’m not trying to “yuck your yum.” No shame. To each their own. (And if you don’t like sex, more power to you. It’s all good.)
Sex is pretty universal (look at any individual in the world, sex made that!) and many different people have it in many different ways. So, my approach and maybe my advice, if you’re willing to take it, is if you have a sex scene in your book—don’t be afraid of it (same goes for readers). Weaving it into your story, it should adhere to your characters’ unique POV. It should fill us in on who they are as a character and not just be a generic sex scene where suddenly, a very awkward person morphs into a perfectly lit, romantic Casinova/Femme Fatale.
A well written sex scene can help in creating different cultures in the world building of your novel. For example, if it’s a fantasy novel, a dwarf, generally speaking, would do things differently than an elf. Characters should have different ideas of what romance is and isn’t, depending on their background and experiences - and these experiences should help inform the reader of who/where/what they are. Sex and intimacy are acts that should run through the filter of the character’s engagement - just as much as any other action that specific character would take. It should be something they do that’s unique to them. Maybe a narcissist would be a bit masturbatory (see Fast Food Heroes). Each character can be different and take a different approach.
An example in my own writing (no spoilers) would be in Cuckoo-Spit and the Froghoppers, where I’ve created two distinctly different cultures. While illustrating the differences between these cultures I give the reader an opportunity to see how each interprets intimacy. This generates a window into the different expressions of value these cultures make about intimacy and I hope, informed the reader more about the main character’s journey as a whole.
I am, at some point, going to write a story about a rock. That will be the main protagonist. In this story, there will be intimacy, perhaps as a root pries that rock from its warm resting place and throws it down an ancestral mountainside. The rock will, for the first time in its life, experience the bliss of freedom, flung through the air and falling past eons of molten history, in an ecstatic moment of unearthly flight.
(I’m not kidding. This is going to happen. I have it outlined.)
With a little imagination and a bit of flourish, something as plain as an ordinary rock can be sexual, can be intimate. This is why new writers (and readers) need to make it weird. The weirder it is, the more it will have a chance to hook into the individual characters and color their stories in a way that is unique and specifically wonderful to the tale they’re trying to tell.