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When push comes to shove...

12:22 / 21.04.05

In this thread Alex made a comment about writing sex scenes.

So, Barbelith scribblers, how do you do sex? Do you get all hot and bothered and describe every thrutch, push and fettle, or do you gently draw a veil over matters of the bedroom?

12:33 / 21.04.05

It depends what you are attempting to narrate with your sex scene - if you are using it in the hollywood sense of every story being essentially a love story* the cosumation of that 'love' is often irrelevant and could be replaced by a banner bearing the legend 'intermission' or 'insert soft metal ballad and montage of naked people here'.

If there is something particular you want to narrate about your characters and how they interact during and through sex, you might approach the scene rather differently and produce more interesting results...

*this is not necessarily a bad thing - Markl Kermode describes the exorcist as a love story between a priest and his god one in which 'lovers' are reunited...

18:22 / 21.04.05

Clumsily.

I really like the Jimmy Reardon (book and film with River Phoenix both good) with his bit on the side love scene - really realistic, and quite funny.

But I'm quite prone to feeling embaressed by them, so tend to glaze over them or rush through them.

Read the end of Angels and Devils or whatever the Dan Brown book is called, just because someone mentioned it somewhere on a thread about it being a joke - the sex scene in that was terrible. One in The Earth Shook - basically was the dialogue between two lovers as they explored each other rahter than any description of the acts - it worked really well.

21:35 / 21.04.05

I completely agree with sleazenation. A great sex scene should help to reveal the characters more than anything else in a story can. It's when characters are at their most vulnerable (or in some cases, their most uncomfortable), so we get to learn alot about them.

"Clumsily."
I actually happen to love this approach. Here's a little piece I wrote for a writing excercise that deals with it that way:

It was dark, and so we stumbled about most unromantically, knocking over lamps and photos of dead relatives before we fell onto the bed, me hitting my head against the wall. We proceeded, in a rhythmic fashion, to fornicate, skipping past all forms of foreplay and the like (which always seemed quite silly to me). It took a few minutes before our rhythms synchronized, and even then it still felt awkward. Perhaps I wasn’t doing it right.

06:54 / 22.04.05

"They took off their clothes and had sex"

From time to time I wonder if this is erotic or not. It has a certain frankness but lacks emotion. Discuss.....

Whisky Priestess

18:14 / 22.04.05

Hmm, an interesting one. I have a creeping horror of using terms, either colloquial or proper, for genitals (they either sound medical or obscene) and metaphors of the "purple-headed truncheon"/"molten core of her womanhood" variety are even worse. I have to admit that I always avoid writing sex scenes as far as I possibly can - but if I have to I often think the best compromise is to describe the incidental physical details or the effect (emotional, physical) of the encounter. Call me Miss Coy, but that's how I do it.

Here's an example: I was editing this para (last passage of a chapter) for my writing group the other week and noticed something:*

"Impatient with her hesitation, he pulls her towards him in a brusque movement. He hugs her to him tightly and swiftly, feeling the awkward bulk of the laptop strapped to her body. She can smell the perfume of smoke and salt in his hair, and his skin feels hot and scratchy where he hasn't had a chance to shave. He holds her still against him until she relaxes, stroking her short, smooth hair. He feels her fingers twist in his hair and her mouth open suddenly onto his. She catches his lip between her teeth and bites, not hard enough to draw blood but hard enough to hurt. He leans into her body, awkwardly, tasting oranges and cranberries on her tongue. His heart batters against his ribs and he feels her breathing become ragged. He has to stop. They draw apart. No last chances, no more goodbyes. Her lips tremble as he strokes them with his thumb, smiles."

Hpefully it's pretty obvious what's happening, but at no point did I use the word "kiss" - which was completely undeliberate (if that's a word?) but sort of encapsulates my approach.

*Please do not mock the above, I wrote it years ago and am polishing it at the moment in the hope that it can be salvaged and done something with.

06:03 / 23.04.05

Sex scenes are a bit more difficult to do than say, murder scenes certainly, doesn't everyone find ?

Ages ago, I rote this thing in what everyone was suddenly rich and famous, because they'd had a major Lotto win, celeb burn-out etc, in which one of the characters was called Leanne, and Seventeen, Bardot look-a-like, from Dagenham or wherever, who was prone to saying things like " I wouldn't mind if it was just my body they were after... "

Originally conceived as a kind of walk-on figure ( one of the main leads was in the business of trying to get her back home, just to hurt her Dad, the cabbie, over the head of the money, to which the guy had a nebulous, but valid, claim, so -

'What have you done to my daughter you scumbag ?'

'Well, let me see...'

And so on.

When I got to the point of anyone showing any interest in this stuff, I was asked by teh 'agent' to 'do a bit more with Leanne.'

'Right,' I remember coughing, 'Well ok, so...'

'She should have more sex.'

'Right...'

The upshot of this was, that while the burned-out narrator sat about in the living room doing coke, Leanne and one of other characters were having sex on live feed down to the living room telly, for blackmail purposes, so to the extent that there was zex in this book, the narrator would just sit there quietly, worrying perhaps about the hole in his arm, but mainly more concerned about what Martin Amis refers to as 'consensual Lawrentian sex,' which never really happens, in the guy's particular world.

It was a bust, TBH, that novel, it remains unpublished, but I can't help feeling that if I'd copied even more out of 'Club International,' I'd have a bleeding sixty foot cruiser by now, dammnit !

It's not a mistake I intend to make again.

On the other though, Mr S, if you'd gone into forensic detail every time 'Dave' got his rocks off, Hinterland would have been more like the Yellow Pages, rather than wot it is, which is two fingers up to those 'Mickey Mousers,' specifically, Clive Barker.

Super Boiling Hero RamenKing

03:43 / 19.05.05

I haven't really written any sex scenes yet, not sure where it can fit in my current story...a regenerative undead guy who loves instant udon, and is just trying to get past some "Identity Crises." Oi...
Otherwise, it really depends on the mood.

All Acting Regiment

09:34 / 19.05.05

Inclusion needs to be considered carefully. I think the post above about the "Leanne" character shows us that unless it should be there, it shouldn't be there. I know that doesn't seem overly helpful, but it's true, just like everything else you could possibly put in a peice of fiction. Note that I'm not knocking you or your work- it just seems from your post that you knew there wasn't really a place for it.

The other thing is, I mean, if you want to write something different and challenging, that contrasts with all the bull we get forcefed by the bullshitmedia(tm), a retelling of the dirty bits from Footballer's Wives isn't going to cut it, nor is an account of a crappy late night channel 5 film.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

21:16 / 19.05.05

Blessedly, I'm not required to come up with good adjectives for this kind of thing. I just describe what we see on the screen as best I can. Only very rarely have I read sex scenes in novels which didn't make me cringe. All that "his strong hands massaged her creamy (turn over the page)"... yuck.

I've seen it done all ways (so to speak). I'm not a fan of the flowery approach, because to me it stinks of embarrassment. If the scene has to be explicit, then it should be explicit. You don't gasp "embrace my engorged manhood in your exquisitve centre" when you're fucking. (Well, maybe some people do.) On the other hand, too many hard Anglo Saxon terms and you start to sound like a Guy Ritchie movie or a Henry Miller wannabe. So my vote is either 'fade to' or 'explicit but stylish'.

In other words, like anything else - do what you like, but do it well.

23:48 / 19.05.05

I should edit that post, but;

'A retelling of the dirty bits from Footballer's Wives' would have actually worked out ok under the circumstances, given that in that there aren't really any, it all happens off camera, as it were. The characters in Footballer's Wives are far more interested in the idea of being sexy than they are perhaps arguably in the actual, erm, nuts and bolts of the issue, which depending on what you're writing about obviously, as noted above, would seem to be an interesting way of approaching sex in a novel in the Twenty First century, as a performance in progress being reviewed by it's 'star.' Brett Easton Ellis does this pretty well I'd say, the inner porn reels that go in the minds of his characters, that on the one hand are there for a ( really ) cheap thrill for a certain type of reader, and on the other, erm, hammer home the various points about alienation.

Personally though, if I'm trying to write anything, cunts, cocks and so on are generally people that work at the office.