he's gonna do another strip tease.
mood: 
creative
creative![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
commodorified's fault I figured this out.The way to write effective sex is not to write it any differently than anything else. I mean, I've been saying for years that I write sex the same way I write fight scenes and I write fight scenes the same way I write conversations.
And that's exactly it.
A sex scene is not different from any other character interaction. You present it in exactly as much detail as is useful and/or revelatory. And as for the readers who fetishize it one way or another (who won't read sex scenes, or who focuses on the sex scenes....) well, I say screw 'em. I don't make special allowances for people who skip the fight scenes or the dinner scenes or the trudging across the tundra mile after mile scenes.
If it's in there, it's because I thought it improved the narrative. If it's not, then it's because I didn't.
(Please note, if you're going to apply this principle to writing, it's important to make sure you're not just writing your kinks, because the squid in your mouth is only interesting to people who like to watch trains wreck. Also, this does not apply to writing erotica. I don't know bupkiss about writing erotica; nor do I claim to. This applies to writing plot-and-character-driven genre fiction.)
And if you want to know how I handle sex in narrative, there's at least one example in the sample of By the Mountain Bound that's up over at
elizabethbear.
I figured that out about 20 years ago, and then went on to worry about other things, like where I left my car keys, why the debates (let's be nice and not call them fights) in any group like the SCA or an area of fandom are always about pretty much the same things, and why I seem to be the only person in the house who understands how to change a cat box or wash dishes.
I can grant a small amount of sympathy towards women who consider themselves upstanding upholders of traditional values who gravitate towards the romance novels with inserted sex, because most of them would go splody if they did admit to themselves what they wanted was erotica, and the others are too busy to read narrative fiction and erotica, and are just multitaking their reading the way they multitask everything else in their lives.
Also, I just saw Eragon today, and the dragon was well-animated and the dialogue appears to have been bought by the mixed gross from Bob's Used Dialogue Store (Motto: Selling only the most thoroughly tested clichés since Hector was a pup). Also, the doughty rebels appear to have a hideout seated on top of the continent's textile mines, and are currently working an especially colorful seam, while the Bad Guys appear to have managed only to get the monopoly rights on ugly acrylic nails.
But my kinks are all about death-or-glory stands and doomed heroics and people faced with impossible decisions.
I am. All about the fraught.
Eragon, huh? I think I'll stay home and watch Mythbusters...
But the movie is a fine vein of snark in many ways.
I may have to avoid the SCA for a while until the young people finish mining the movie for their garb.
I know you're not taking TV recommendations at present, but I have to say it: Rome.
I don't think this is true. Unless, perhaps, you mean erotic romance. In that a lot romance readers want their hot sex and their happy ever after. They don't enjoy the former without the latter. Erotica doesn't guarantee a relationship.
Though maybe I've misunderstood you.
Fortunately, while they are vocal on the internets, I suspect they're a loud minority in the real world.
(In other words, I suspect that 95% of J. K. Rowling's readers are not *actually* wishing she would just write Sirius/Harry dog-smut.)
I think you're overlooking, or overlooking the frequency of, a very common motive for seeking out serious fiction with erotic elements: if what one wants is erotica not presently available.
Given the choice between insufficiently explicit material which hits one's kinks just right and also has an absorbing story and explicit fiction which does not either hit one's kinks right NOR offer a story...
Yeah. Serious fiction it is. I mean, I love Dorothy Sayers' writing greatly, and will happily reread all of it, but there's a reason my copy of Busman's Honeymoon is more worn to death than the rest of the series.
And for some people, erotic serious fiction IS the kink. I like mine with redemption in it, personally.
It really gets my panties in a twist that Roeper (for example) is dissing on Mr. Paolini's writing skilz because the movie's dialogue came from the aforementioned Bob's Used Dialogue Store. The book WAS NOT LIKE THAT. Dammit.
It was also not all about the flying and the flaming and the WHEE, CGI DWAGONS!!!, which I gather the movie *is*.
Dammit.
I was expending a lot of 'pleasedontsuck, pleasedontsuck' prayers on it, which were apparently wasted.
I totally agree.........
Word. If there's one thing you CAN'T control in this world, it's whether a certain portion of the population is going to fetishize or get squicked by any given thing.
My latest realization was that the sex scenes I like best are written the same way most people write about experiencing food (whether the experience is positive or negative).
Since it more fun to talk about doing it wrong, you usually wouldn't write:
"She slid the fork into her mouth. Then removed it, leaving a morsel of food behind. She began to masticate, jaw working up and down, up and down."
But I might write, "Her teeth nipped through the prawn, crunching fragments of shell into sweet, resilient meat. Raw ginger and garlic crushed between her teeth and stung her palate and sinuses. She snorted, which made it sting more.
"Across the table, Emily looked at her in amusement. 'Sweetheart, you're doing it wrong.'"
It's not a bad comparison. But it's a bit false in some ways: sex is usually more important to the plot and characters than food is, and there's less opportunity to use it for catharsis, revelation, tension and so on, because it's less fraught in our culture. And fraught is good. Fraught is where the emotional action is.
If it's not fraught, you're writing cosies.
*g* (Although in my last book, the food was at least as important as the sex, and got considerably more pages, come to think of it. And if I had found a place to make Angelo eat that caterpillar, it would have been at least a page worth of payoff. *g*)
Part of what I meant was that most decent writers are good at adding vivid descriptions of meals when it's important (fraught!) and at leaving them out when it's not.
It's also a lot less common for important-eating scenes to get bogged down in physical description when what the reader really wants is how the characters experience it.
Of course, there are reasons for a writer to get technical in either case. They might intricately describe how someone with a broken jaw (or a caterpillar) manages to eat -- they could do the same for someone who has particular sexual needs.
My comment to you later post, where I say something in regard to "showing" sex, is intended to make this same point.