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commodorified is still talking about sex (with a capable assist from Lois McMaster Bujold). And when commodorified talks about sex, everybody listens. And not just because she's a beautiful woman.(Also, my responses are colored by this post over here and its comments, which of course I did find because I am the Devil, and if you speak my name I appear. I think it's also an excellent post, and not just because the writer says that I (and Lois, to close the circle entirely) write decent sex scenes.)
The comment in particular I disagree with is this one, from
calimac: (By the way, I ask my loyal readers please not to go descend en masse upon this poor person who is nattering away in sie private journel. Y'all can be a little overwhelming, I'm told, en masse, and since I found sie via the magic of ego-google, it seems like a mean thing to do. *g*)This is asking the wrong question. It may be sometimes necessary to know that characters are having sex, though you're better off guessing. It is never necessary to see them doing it, any more than it's necessary to follow them into the bathroom to know they're doing that.
I've certainly written a few scenes that involved trips to the bathroom. They weren't routine trips to the bathroom. (There's a puking-and-head-holding scene in One-Eyed Jack that I'm mighty proud of, and which is probably going to end up on the cutting room floor, alas, because it's meant to model a certain kind of hurt/comfort fic (One-Eyed Jack is the fanfiction novel in the Promethean Age universe) and it bears insufficiently on the plot, la.)
And there's not much reason, it's true, to show routine sex, unless you are doing it to establish a baseline. But I think the attitude that it is never necessary to show sex in fiction stems from the very mistaken idea that sex is only there to do one thing, that it only serves one narrative purpose. And of course, like every other kind of scene, it serves thousands. Romeo climbing into bed with Juliet, in other words, serves a very different narrative purpose than Oedipus climbing into bed with Jocasta. But I can certainly see why you might make the narrative choice to show each of those things.
(I can think of two really effective and fairly graphic movie sex scenes without trying--there's a scene in Boys on the Side where you can practically hear the audience chanting "don't do that, don't do that" under their breaths--it's the tensest moment in the movie, frankly: tenser than the murder--and there's one in Cooler that is my single favorite movie sex scene ever. It is really graphic, as far as non-pornographic movies go, and it not only tells you everything you need to know about the protagonists, it humanizes them and makes them beautiful. Let's see. Without straining myself, there's also narratively useful sex in A History of Violence, Trainspotting, A Clockwork Orange, Kinsey, Brokeback Mountain....)
Squeamishness, in other words, does not make for good literature. The purpose of the artist is never to look down.
Anyway, digression endeth.
commodorified is more interested in talking about the purpose of sex in erotic writing, but what she has to say is well-worth reading. (And you can feel free to go clamber all over her comments. She's here with informed consent. *g*) Here's a taster:So I'm mapping this to 'subgenre', as in the differences between, say, the difference between cozy country-house mysteries, police proceedurals, the detective-centric mystery novel of character, and the overtly literary mystery that wants to state a broader theme.
Sometimes you describe the blood spatter minutely. Sometimes you just say there's a body.
Word.
So, when I said this job is like playing whack-a-mole? What I meant is, there is always some other little job that needs doing, and they proliferate while your back is turned. And they all have deadlines. My big job for this week was finishing the New Amsterdam draft. However, before Christmas, I still have to get through the entire thing on a revision pass; I have to do galleys for "Tideline" and review the contracts (It's appearing in Asimov's, my first story there ever); I have to revise the emergency last minute 1500-word review I wrote last night (today); and I have to be ready to do the proposal for Dust by Jan 15. Then I have to deliver "Periastron" by April 1 (it's a novella), and I have to have finished drafts of Dust and All the Windwracked Stars by the end of the summer.
And there will be other jobs. Galleys and revisions and contracts and arguments and (sex and sex and sex and sex and *stuffs Mick back into the box* sorry) and keeping this thing interesting and my monthly column for Storytellersunplugged.com (next one due January 6) and...
...and of course the business of living.
Gimme that hammer. WHACK!
- Mood:
teaaaaaa zoooombieeeeee - Music:still binging on Mandy (The Fisher King, Part II)
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Comments
Anyone who's read Altered Carbon and Fallen Angels y Richard Morgan will shout to the rafters that sometimes, a cigar is NOT just a cigar, and sex isn't gratuitous page filler. In fact, his psychosexual fiddlings have stuck in my mind and tweaked my worldview a few degrees off 180.
We can do David Bowie too!
*g*
(Nice to meet you.)
That group responding to anderyn's sex critique is a bunch of prudes. Harumph. I read an otherwise unremarkable science fiction book when I was a young something or other, I couldn't tell you a thing about it, though it was a big fat paperback... but the denoument of the novel was this extraordinary sex scene that was wrapped up in cotton gingham dresses, flat burned prairielands, and UFO's landing on earth, all wrapped and warped through this vacant eyed girl and an anguished stranger. I'll never look at simple summer dresses in quite the same way, again.
Sex is a part of life. If it's not just thrown into a book for the titillation factor, I enjoy reading it. Why on earth would I wade through a gruesome murder mystery without batting an eyelash, but get squicked out when someone gets an erection? Sheez.
I reckon what everybody needs to do is write at least one sex scene a month and post it on their blog for public critiquing/ridicule/admiration. Regardless of whatever else they're doing. Because you can't get good at something unless you practice it.
And while squeamishness can be charming in a lover -- or a character -- it's perfectly useless in an author.
You'll have to ask somebody who has a picture of "American" as a type rather than as a collective of completely contradictory individuals. ;-)
Ditto for bathroom scenes: the context matters. Best bathroom scene ever: the one from Clive Barker's Damnation Game, which hits all the ways humans can feel vulnerable--literally caught with their pants down--in the bathroom. The reader understands on a primal level how much the character has reason to be at this point.
Why, to sum up, should "Show, don't tell" be good fiction-writing advice for every human activity except sex and excretion?
Show what needs to be shown. Tell what needs to be told. "Show, don't tell" is intended to keep writers from producing expository lumps when they should be giving a scene, and from declaring that something or somebody feels or reacts a certain way rather than depicting them doing it.
So far so good, but it does not mean, and has never meant, that you have to write a scene in detail just to convey the fact that the events in it happened.
In fact, I'd say - for example - show that a couple are in love by their general loving behavior rather than by telling us that by describing their sex acts.
But I also don't buy into the notion that one knows everything about the characters when following them into the bedroom (or bathroom) to witness them in situ. One might see what they are doing, but it's what they are thinking that interests me more. If the scene is meant to be erotic, an element left to the imagination gives the reader a chance to imagine their own particular trigger which can be more effective than, say, reading one zie finds repellent.
I don't think that just applies to erotic scenes-- some empty space for reader identification can be useful in writing meant to evoke any emotional response.
The trick in any sort of emotionally-charged writing is to show enough of what the character is experiencing to get across what they're feeling and why, while allowing the reader enough slack to map their triggers and responses over it. Attraction or arousal are no different from fear in that way, or from humiliation or pride or grief or joy.
And I think in all those cases, telling details are perhaps riskier than strategic vagueness, but the payoff is greater. If all the story gives is a framework for the reader's own kinks and experiences, they might go along more easily, but they're not going to take anything but their own kinks out of that scene. Explicit detail is harder to do well, and more likely to bounce the reader out if it's done badly, but if it's not there at all, neither is the character.
In a story where the sex is part of the story, the specific reactions of the reader may not (in fact probably shouldn't be) top of the menu. In those situations, the ideal is that the scene reveal something of the character; establish things about them, and the relationship.
Which me projecting my kinks into isn't going to do.
TK
For narratively useful sex, my dark horse candidate is The Terminator. :)
And yeah, that is just such a fabulous scene.
I think the problem is we too often stylize sex, write it like movie sex, and sex isn't like it is in the movies....
I reserve you for a meal at the next convention we're both at. You got my hopes up and now you owe me. :-)
Sex scenes like fight scenes can be over-done. I've read a few Laurell K. Hamilton's and more than a few Rosemary Rodgers novels in my lifetime, where it was basically just one sex scene after another, to the point in which I was bored out of my mind and skimming. Diana Gabaladon does the same thing - repeats the same sex scene over and over in Outlander, to the point, that I finally gave up on the book and decided to read something else. I've seen writers do it with fight sequences and war scenes - George RR Martin comes to mind, as does Tolkien, and Dorothy Dunnett - I remember skimming those sequences, going back to see if I missed anything, realizing I hadn't and wishing they'd cut a few of them out. Also the most interesting thing sometimes about a sex scene or even an action sequence isn't the actual fight or sex - but the build up to it. The tension.
The foreplay.
I think part of the craft of writing isn't necessarily how well you write a sex scene or rather how "erotic" it is to the reader, but knowing when it is needed, what its purpose is, and how it pushes the characters and plot forward. Is it there merely to turn on the reader and writer - if so, not a problem, if that is the book you are writing. Is it there to reveal something about the characters and themes? Iriving Welsh writes sex scenes that turn my stomach, but they are supposed to, they are intended to do that to reveal items about his characters. Sometimes the hottest sex scenes in books and films are ones we never see - because the writer or filmmaker has done a good job of giving our imaginations enough to play with. You can convey quite a bit with just a touch, a kiss, or a look.
For me, I think every writer has their own style. To state that you "have" to do sex scenes for the book to work - seems silly (not that I'm saying you are) just as to state that you shouldn't do them seems silly. I've read books that have them and books that don't.
Both worked. The ones that don't work for me are the ones that appear to be more interested in just writing a sex scene between two hot archetypes than telling a story about them, which I can do on my own without help from the writer.
In my own novel, I've written three sex scenes, somewhat vague, not overly detailed, and they are more post-coital - they are there for a reason - to describe a character who doesn't take sex seriously and has slept with quite a few men, and now suddenly finds herself in a relationship with a man that she does care about and the sex is less about the fucking and more about the loving. To get that across, I've pulled back on the details, and stayed in her point of view. Giving out bits and pieces. But since the book is *not* a romance and the relationship is an important plot point but not the main focus, it has to remain in the background. Also the character is a private one.
She's not one who thinks about it much. And since we are in her point of view - it needs to remain implied.
[Haven't had a chance to read the other comments, so ignore me if this is repetitive.]
And also I'm blushing into my coffee again.
The explanation for the conclusion that you draw from my comment (that I believe sex scenes are only there for one thing) is contained in the additional sentence which you did not quote: "I have only ever seen one actual sex scene in a movie (or literature) whose purpose in being explicitly there (as opposed to implied) seemed to be anything other than salacious."
In other words that, in actual practice, it is only there for one thing - the explicit depiction of it, I mean. There are many reasons readers might be told - or, better, be able to infer - that characters are having a sex life. I have not seen these purposes furthered by explicit descriptions of the sex.
Of course I have not read every sex scene ever published, and (I regret to say) nothing of yours with sex scenes that I recall. Also, I did say that it wasn't necessary, not that it was totally unnecessary. A writer may wish to include it anyway. Only in the most grimly pared-down fiction is everything literally necessary.
I cited the bathroom not because it's icky, but as the strongest possible example to prove a point. Some authors (not necessarily you) say, or at least give the impression that they think, that adequate characterization is not possible without following characters into the depths of their personal lives - and by "personal lives" they seem usually to mean "sex lives." But other parts of life are equally important, and often get ignored by these same authors: intellectual lives, spiritual lives, food, and yes, the toilet.
Also to authors (the same not necessarily you authors) who think that they cannot characterize their protagonists without putting in details of their sex lives: how did authors ever do it back in the days of Shakespeare or Austen or Dickens who were societally prevented from publishing any such thing.
Shakespeare is incredibly bawdy. There are entire scenes that are extended sex jokes. Or toilet jokes.
Just saying. Don't make the mistake of confusing the Elizabethans and the Victorians: The Elizabethans sensibility is formed before the overwhelming influence of the Puritans, and partakes far more of Chaucer's "privily he took her by the cunt" than Dickens.
Now, I am a rank amateur and a dabbler, and write shameless pulp to boot, so no one has any reason to listen to me. But it seems to me that, looking at my own work, the places where I've glimpsed at the characters' sex lives aren't any more gratuitous than - and "serve the narrative" exactly as much as - the eldritch monsters, mysterious immortals, and Magicians in Big Coats. If my intended audience for the latter list is people who are as fascinated by my squid as I am, why should the sex be any different? And if the intent of showing the sex is "salacious" - a word with a hell of a lot of unfortunate sex-negative baggage all over it - how is that a baser or less worthy goal than hoping a reader thinks my qlippoth are terrifying and my protagonist is cool?
We try to slip the literary value in between, like a heartworm tablet into a piece of hot dog.