I clearly remember the time I read through my first literary sex scene.
I was probably around 10, or 11 years old, and I was probably reading some adult book I had pilfered from my mom’s bedside table or that someone else had pilfered from their own mom’s bedside table. Where the book came from, or even it’s title, isn’t important, what is important is that Anne Rice was behind it — and spared no details.
Obviously, I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on in the pages I skimmed through during one long summer afternoon, but even as a very young writer, one who had just barely begun to record life with big, loopy letters, I was concerned with how Rice actually got the courage to write such lurid details. And they were lurid. At least to a 10-year-old.
These days, I have that same concern.
Yes, I’m older. Yes, I understand sex and see it as a natural part of life (I somehow missed the whole Shame and Guilt dance Roman Catholicism can often force its young followers to do…and left the church before they could tell me it was even worse to do It before marriage), but I’m still much preoccupied with putting it into my own writing.
I mean, we all like to watch sex scenes. And we all like to read them, too. They’re fun. They break up the monotony. They give us ideas. Etc. But. How does one create a sex scene that doesn’t (ahem…) suck?
One of my Lit Drift cohorts recently pondered the question of writing good sex, and brought up proof that I have a reason to be concerned: The Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
There are people out there just waiting to point and laugh at your vulnerable, quivering paragraphs and descriptions. They can’t wait to expose it’s flaws in the harsh, mean light of literary criticism.
It makes a girl want to keep her characters clothed forever.
Not only is there now officially a place where earnest sex scenes go to be neutered, there’s also the issue of excitement. Do you write a sex scene that’s exciting, enjoyable, fun? …Or do you write about what really happens?
I haven’t yet come up against a place in my writing where I need to get all detail-heavy during an intimate moment, but when the time does come, there’s no way anyone will be ripping anyone’s bodice or sighing uncontrollably. I couldn’t write the candle-lit, beautiful people with no awkward tendencies Hollywood version. I’d have to write the real version. Which might sound like this:
…And then he took out his less-than-impressive member and poked around for a bit before her right arm went numb and they had to switch positions. Which they did, knocking over a cheap Target lamp in the process. Ten minutes later, someone went to sleep satisfied while someone else turned on a rerun of Friends.
OK, perhaps a slight exaggeration of how I would do it, but you can see my point, can’t you? Sex isn’t always exciting or smooth. Sometimes people knock over candles and almost start fires. Sometimes someone gets poked in the eye. Sometimes it’s annoying.
And yes, sometimes it’s beautiful and passionate and vaguely like that scene in that movie you saw starring Angelina Jolie, but even our best real life sex hardly compares to a carefully edited, romanticized, made up version.
So what do we do? Create scenes that are erotic page turners because they’re so unlike our real life (and risk a Bad Sex Award for sincerely overshooting the mark?), or fashion something that hit so close to home you can almost taste the “strawberry-flavored” condom which actually just made your throat itch?
