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? Read more »

"Come over here, Sugar - and type me something sexy."

In my sophomore year at NYU, I was writing a feature screenplay that required two types of scenes that I had never written before – the fight sequence and the sex scene.  Since I had less experience in the former, I decided to tackle it first (ha) and get it over with.  The fight sequence turned out to be incredibly detailed.  It was different, interesting and moved the story forward.  I proudly brought it into class that week and we did a read-through of the scene.  My predominantly red-blooded, action-movie-loving, male classmates really got into it.  They physically reenacted the scenes and asked me if personal experience inspired any of it.  I shared the story of the one fight I had ever been in: at thirteen, a girl slapped me across the face with a spoonful of ice cream to impress the boy she liked.  Long story short, I won the fight and we were banned from our local Häagen-Dazs.

Armed with the confidence that my classmates had given me, I returned home to write what I thought was the easier half of the ordeal – the sex scene.  After typing hours worth of blush-worthy, shuddery scenarios and being overly conscious that my classmates may associate what I wrote with my personal experience (or try to reenact it), I ultimately rejected it all and opted to have my characters simply enter a bedroom and shut the door.  I know… I totally wussed out.  I rationalized that implication and cliché was the way to go.  A screenwriter or even a playwright writes with the knowledge that their work will be seen.  If your actors are hot enough, who cares that the sex is clichéd?

So what does sex look like as a novelist? Read more »

Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and other famous writers narrate the funny pages.

Some NaNoWriMo tips from Mark Sample: Use foreshadowing to hint what’s to come. E.g., have the vampire say “I want to suck your blood” before he sucks blood. And: Add tension by making the gender of your narrator indeterminate. This works for race too. And age. And number of nipples.

Another (more serious) NaNo tip: write slowly.

The Millions thinks the recent film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are made a better trailer than it did a feature film.

Is Stephen King the most underrated novelist of our time?

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