Writing sex: a confession

[fictional]

It may come as a surprise to those of you who read IHNIIHBT, which is sort of a pornographic epic, but I greatly dislike writing sex.

No, really.

I hate it a lot. Which is funny because lately, we've been doing a lot of it.

Don't get me wrong. I love that our story is so filthy and x-rated. In fact, sometimes I even think it could stand to be filthier. I like reading sex. Oh man, do I. Porn, for me, is a primarily written-word driven thing, and it was that way long before I discovered fandom and its box of erotic delights. Think reading bodice-rippers and skimming my way through Tess of the D'Urbervilles at seven, desperately (and unsuccessfully, fuck you, Thomas Hardy) searching for the dirty bits...! Flipping through the Mists of Avalon for the threesome scene, etc. etc.

But writing it? A resounding "feh!"

For one thing, it's really hard [no pun intended]. Sex is repetitive. We have a finite number of moving parts, we have a finite number of slots for those parts to fit into. We tweak, we stroke, we push, we pull, we slap, we tickle; we get wet, we get hard. It feels great, except when it doesn't. And if you add in too many adverbs and adjectives -- you run the risk of sounding like a romance novel, a bad romance novel.

I don't know about you, but I have sex in my head. If my brain isn't getting off, I can spasm all I want, but I haven't come. It's no good to me without the brainfuck. There's an internal narrative always going on -- which mirrors to varying degrees what's actually happening in the physical, corporeal world. Sometimes, the degree is zero. Things I would never do "for real", things I would find actively offensive or disturbing if I weren't in bed, and believing that the things people imagine or play at in order to find pleasure are all perfectly okay.¹

Thing is, when you're writing, the characters can't have internal narratives, unrelated to what's around them, because they're already in a narrative! Hell, they are the narrative. And of what interest to the reader -- who's using your story to furnish their own fantasy about say, Jack and Ianto -- is an internal, unrelated narrative that the character might possibly be having, if they were real? My feeling is, generally speaking, probably not much. Because that's like being OOC on purpose, and no one wants to see that, right?

So there's ways around it. Hence: dirty talk, d/s, drag, s & m, 3somes -- all games that are all about the stories you tell yourself. Narratives embraced and imposed.

But. I have to wonder, what are the fantasies of fantasies? What are the stories that stories whisper to themselves in the dark, or the ones they hold tightly to themselves, too ashamed even to say out loud?

Because that? That might be hot.


¹That's what I tell myself anyway. Rationalizations: more important than sex. Think about it. Ever made it through a day without a rationalization? Yeah..

Comments

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Some of us *waves* have a cast of characters living in our heads, and they whisper things to us on occasion that turn into passionate stories, sexual or otherwise...Also, while I am hoping to please readers with what I post, I care about pleasing my characters and serving the story at least as much.

Oh yeah, we are so on board that train too. For me, the problem is, they're just different from me, and sometimes, in the midst of writing they leave me hanging. Like. Jack is sexually innovative. If he goes away and doesn't tell me what the hell he's going to do next -- I'm at a loss, because in real life, I'm not the one who innovates, I am far more likely to be the one innovated upon.

You still have characterization, action, motivation, conflict and resolution to deal with. Sex is narrative, it's a form of communication, and it reveals different things about the people involved. And personally, I can get into internal narratives running alongside sex if there's a good reason to show it. That's one of the things I loved about the end of the last installment of IHNIIBT--that Ianto was clearly reacting to something very different from the man he was with in the moment, and he could neither explain it to Jack nor stop doing that. It was heartbreaking but real, and it worked beautifully for me.

Thank you. =D And you are totally right there about sex being narrative. And when there's time spent on that, I think it's much easier for me personally to write. *g*

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

But one of the things about characters is that they make choices, and in making choices, they open and close options, so that it's not so much that they don't say what they'll do next, but that there are certain things they could do and other things they could never do, some they will do, and others they probably won't unless given a good reason.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Oh man, the characters take on a life of their own thing - SO TRUE. I even tried to explain this to my students, and I think they thought I was some sort of mystical hoodoo crazy person.

But really. I believe it completely. It's one of the reasons I feel the 7th Potter book was such a failure; she'd created a world, and people that took off, and then she tried to yank it all back to what she "originally" intended. The Dictator School of Writing. Epic fail.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

That's the problem with authors saying that they have the ending planned -- the story exceeds the ending. Matt Hills uses the term "endlessly deferred narrative". When I was a little girl, I was always disappointed to get to the last page. "But what happened after that?" Because something had to have happened after the last page. It wasn't all there was to tell. I really do wish I'd known back in the '70s that fan fiction existed. Instead I wrote stories that were heavily influenced by Tolkien, but not within his universe.