What Does Explicit Sex Mean Anyway?

Think about real sex and fictional sex made me remember being taken to task by someone at a workshop I ran earlier in the year.  Someone had asked about writing sex scenes, and I'd done my usual no body parts, no instructions spiel.  At which point someone else perked up and said, 'But you write explicit sex.'

I was surprised, because I think I don't.  So I asked when had I written explicit sex.  He cited the beginning of Adultery for Beginners.  I frowned, because I don't think that's explicit at all.  In my opinion, there are no body parts, no instructions, the word sex (or any synonyms) isn't used at all.  I hope - as I hope for all my sex scenes - that if you know what's going on, you know what's going on.  If you don't know, you wouldn't be any the wiser.  

But maybe I'm wrong. With trepidation, I'm going to copy the beginning paragraph here, and see what you think...

Damn, Isabel thought, feeling a cooling trickle of stickiness on her inner thighs. Neil lay heavily on top of her, as if the effort had given him heart failure. The huffing and puffing seemed to have expelled all the air from him.  Perhaps he wasn’t breathing. His body, hairy, sweaty, still rumpled with sleep, swamped hers. She felt her arms and legs sticking out from under his body, flat as a gingerbread woman. The tissues were out of reach, supposing there were any left in the box. Damn, damn, damn, she thought. I only changed the sheets yesterday.

So, what's just happened, and what's happening now?  I think it's clear, but I also think that it is implicit rather than explicit - nothing is spelled out: if you've never been in Isabel's position I don't think you'd know what's going on. (In passing, I wonder how many men have, in real life, had the thought about sheets, compared to how many women.)

Implicit or explicit? Over to you...

Real Sex or Fictional Sex?

As I bid farewell to a friend the other day I cheerily said, 'I'm off to write a sex scene.'  Their response was, ' Will it be real sex or fictional sex?'  And I've been pondering the question ever since.  

My thoughts so far...

Real sex, if it's good, takes place in the present.  In other words, it's very hard to capture because while it's happening you're not referencing it to anything else past or future, or external to what is happening right here, right now.  So it's hard - if not impossible - to capture that and put it into words, whether you're trying to remember that wonderful night of passion while waiting at the bus stop, or recounting it to a friend, or putting it onto the page.  

The best you can hope for is for the reader to be so caught up in the experience they get a sense of what's going on.  But reading about sex is never going to be like having sex.  It can't be.  The most the author can hope for is to stimulate the same emotional and physical responses in the reader that they would experience if they were having sex.  

At which point the author has another problem.  What emotional or physical responses I personally experience may not be the same as those you experience.  What I like from sex may be quite different from what you like.  So if I write my real experiences of sex, you might be going mmmm or yuck or somewhere in the middle.  

So, I think you can't write real sex.  When I write about sex I'm deliberately vague as to what is actually going on.  No body parts!  No instructions!  What I'm hoping to write is something that makes the reader think back to good sex they've had, how it made them feel both emotionally and physically.  It's more like an impression, an outline for the reader to colour in by adding their own personal details. 

Now, some people might think that's a cop out, like photographing porn through a soft focus lens.  But I believe that, through having to do some of the work, the reader engages more readily and the fictional experience of sex can come closer to their own experience of real sex, without the distractions of the author's experience.  So I hope my fictional impression of sex recalls real sex in the reader's mind.  

Sex Sells - Or Does It?

We're always told that sex sells. Sex attracts attention. It's certainly easier to get media coverage if you have some sexy element in your writing, and media coverage helps to sell books. But, taking the erotica market out of the equation and thinking solely of mainstream titles aimed at a general audience...

I'm thinking of all the books that have been sold on the basis of their sexual content, from Memoirs of a Round Heeled Woman to One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, and realising that although I know the titles and have a rough idea of the contents I haven't read them, and certainly haven't actually bought them.

In fact, the only book based on sex I have bought was written by a friend under a pseudonym, which was why I bought it. I may be wrong on this, but I think most people make their buying decisions based on good story telling - which may or may not include sex.

If anything, lots of sex scenes may put people off. I write fewer sex scenes in my books because I'm aware that quite a few people don't like to read sex scenes in novels. The number of people who have said they prefer my later books to my earlier ones because there's less sex in them has been one of the things about being a novelist that has surprised me.*

It's anecdotal but if you look at the best seller lists, there are an awful lot of characters who aren't having sex, or at least, not on the page. In fact, I'm struggling to think of a best selling author who does include a lot of sex in their books. Sexual tension, yes. Sex scenes, no.

So, I'm thinking that while sex attracts attention, it might not sell that well after all. Good news for those who don't want to write about sex despite all my blog posts this week.

* I told my friend Caroline I'd decided to cut back on the sex scenes in my novels when we were having a nice cup of tea at the very genteel Pump Rooms in Bath - where Jane Austen took tea - and just at the moment the trio stopped playing she said loudly, 'You can't give up sex, Sarah, you're far too good at it'. It took ages before I felt able to show my face there again.

Teasing the Reader

I was asked by a student recently if it was okay to have two characters be attracted to each other, to nearly have sex, but then decide not to at the last minute. Would the readers be disappointed?

The only answer to this was: Yes. No. Maybe.

If your novel is entirely about these two characters getting together and they don't, then the reader will be disappointed. I read a novel a few years back where the main character doesn't realise X is the man for her until near the end (despite lots of Unresolved Sexual Tension simmering between them), then finally at the end of Chapter 23 decides to tell him how she feels. I eagerly turned the page to Chapter 24 and read: The following year... What had happened in that following year was quickly summarised, and the book ended with every one happy except me, the reader. There had been all that emotional build up, and for nothing. The author had cheated me of the scene when the two characters got together.

On the other hand, if we'd had the scene and it had all gone wrong, X had revealed that he'd been interested but had got fed up with waiting and was now involved with Y I'd have been - not exactly happy (because I'm a sucker for a happy ending), but satisfied as a reader. In Adaptation Charlie Kauffman does much the same, and it sits naturally with the main character's story line. Joanna Trollope did something similar in The Men and the Girls and not only was it satisfying, it worked better than the more traditional ending.

So, in answer to the question, it's not compulsory to fulfill reader expectations; in fact, it can work just as well if we subvert their expectations and give them something different. What is compulsory is that we write the scene. It's not okay to cop out and write: The following year...

Why Write Sex Scenes?

The good news is, for those who don't like the idea of writing about sex, it's not compulsory. Lots of stories exist where sex never gets a mention. But...

Sex is one of the big human motivations along with love, money and power. It's an important part of human life and that's why people have been writing about it since we started writing fiction. We may feel more relaxed about the level of explicitness nowadays, but writing about sex has always been around.

I write about relationships, generally about people getting together or breaking up. Sex plays an important part in relationships, so I include sex scenes in my books. It's important for my characters and where they are in the story. If I were writing about bank robberies or space travel where the main character motivators were things like money, power and discovery, I would probably write no sex scenes at all.

Sex is part of being human, so we should write about it - if appropriate to that particular story. But if it isn't appropriate then it shouldn't be there. Take Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong. There are some fairly explicit sex scenes in that, and I've heard people say that they are inappropriate. But the scenes of WWI are equally explicit in their depiction of the horrors of war, so to me the sex scenes and battle scenes balance each other.

It's part of your judgement as a writer whether a sex scene is appropriate in your writing. And if not, that's fine. It really isn't compulsory.

And The Most Important Rule About Writing About Sex Is...

Like any other scene, a sex scene needs to have purpose - and that purpose should more than just to titillate the reader. The main character might discover something about themselves or another person. There might be an emotional change within characters such as liking turning to love, love turning to indifference, indifference turning to hatred or hatred turning to lust. Characters reach out emotionally and physically, and perhaps their needs are met and perhaps they aren't, but the story will move on because of the emotional change.

Sex scenes are useful as story turning points - as Isabel says to herself in Adultery for Beginners, she would never be Neil's faithful wife again. She can't go back, so the story has to go forwards. Becca, in Another Woman's Husband, has been dreaming about sex with Paul, but finds the reality inconclusive and unsatisfactory and as a result begins to move away from him emotionally.

Scenes have many purposes: to convey information, to develop character, to add humour, to move the story on etc. Sex scenes should have just as many purposes as any other scene, because that's the only reason for writing them. Sex may be going on in a scene, but the mechanics aren't the reason readers are reading. They're finding out what happens next in the story. If nothing is happening, if nothing is changing, if all that is going on is mechanics, then you need to add some purposes. And if you can't think of any, then don't write the scene.

10 Rules for Writing about Sex: II

Continued from yesterday...

6. Some words are sexier than others. Sibilant sounds work well - simmer, sizzle, shimmer, sensation. Hard edged words are less good. Khaki. Bitter. Nasty. Write a list of words you find attractive: verbs, nouns, adjectives, whatever. Then weave them into scene.  You can also use your vocabulary to control the pace - long vowel sounds will slow things down (glide, slide) as will multi-syllabic words (voluptuous, sensuous).  Speed the pace up with single syllables and short vowel sounds - quick, fast, hot, NOW!

7. Emotions, emotions, emotions. They say that the most sexually responsive organ in the body is the one between your ears. I can't imagine writing a sex scene without a heavy emotional content - even if that emotion might be anger rather than love. Sex without the emotions becomes a matter of mechanics. Pornographic, rather than sensual. Now, some might say this is the difference between a male and female perspective. They might even point out that nearly all the short lists for the Bad Sex in Fiction award over the past 18 years have been heavily male dominated. I don't agree. Even James Bond, that serial seducer, is emotionally engaged with his partners (in the novels).

8. Foreplay. I read Joe Orton's diaries as a wide-eyed teenager, completely amazed at the casual sex. And I mean casual - he might see a stranger he fancied on the tube, they did a bit of eyeing each other up, then at the next stop they'd get off, nip round a corner, have sex, then go their separate ways. Blimey - casual or what? But when you think about it, he spent quite a long time imagining the casual sex and looking forward to it. It was mental rather than physical foreplay. But mental or physical, you need to have a lead up to your sex. There's nothing unsexier than simply grabbing and shagging, in real life and in fiction.

9. Anticipation is everything. Why do more people book their summer holidays in January than at any other time of year? Because it gives them most of the year to think about their holiday and what's going to happen when it finally arrives. It's been estimated that people get more pleasure from imagining what's going to happen on holiday than they do from the holiday itself - which, let's face it, is pretty much bound to be a let down after all that yearning. In terms of writing about sex, the longer your characters take to get round to doing the deed, the better. It's sometimes referred to as UST - Unrequited Sexual Tension. You can overdo this - I've certainly read novels where I'm saying, oh, just get on with it.

10. Don't write anything you feel uncomfortable with. Write only within your personal comfort zone. Bit like sex itself, really, you can only relax and enjoy it when you're not anxious. Relax, have fun, enjoy yourself.

10 Rules for Writing about Sex: I

I seem to considered a bit of an expert on writing about sex - I've had several media requests recently for my thoughts on the topic - so I thought I'd share my rules with you too.

1. No named body parts. What do you call your sexual bits and pieces? There are the correct anatomical terms, which you might use in front of the doctor and if you were giving some sex education to your child, and then there are all the others. There are the ones you use with your friends, the ones you use with your lover, the ones you use for swearing, the ones that you use to yourself. They all might be different. What I can guarantee is that there is no term for any sexual body part that won't have someone going, yuck, how twee, or yuck, how crude. Much, much, much easier to avoid using body parts in writing, except for bits we all agree to use the same names for - arms, legs, hands, fingers.

2. No maps. You're not giving directions on how to get to a friend's house without using the A30. We don't need to know you turn left at the letter box after the pub. Any attempts to describe what is going where is asking for a reader to leave the story to try to work out what is going on....he put his left hand on her right thigh, she slid her right hand round the small of his back, his right hand clutched her left shoulder. It's asking for someone to try to emulate it at home, a sort of DIY Twister. Diagrams should also be avoided.

3. No metaphors or similes. It's all too easy to go horribly wrong. Cue Rowan Somerville who won the 2010 Bad Sex in Fiction award for The Shape of You which contains metaphors such as

"Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her".

Molly Ringle won the Bulwer-Lytton Prize in 2010 (for a deliberately badly written opening paragraph) with the following:

" For the first month of Ricard and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss - a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he the world's thirstiest gerbil."

Metaphor and simile are doomed; what seemed a neat idea when it was just you and the laptop, will seem hilarious in print. The exception is when you are deliberately writing about bad sex. Then use all the gerbil imagery you like.

4. Stick in the present. We're writing about good sex here, and with good sex you don't do much thinking about what has happened in the past, or is going to happen in the future. With good sex you're thinking about nothing other than the immediate present. All conscious thought goes out of your head, and you only think about what is happening right now. (I think this is one of the reasons metaphors don't work; they're too conscious.) Concentrate on the sensations happening NOW - taste, touch, sound, smell, sight.

5. Get up close and personal. Remember that your characters are really close to each other physically (one assumes) so only describe visuals that are close up. My near sight's not that good, so for me it's all a bit bleary. Be 100% in your viewpoint character's head, let us see what they see, feel what they feel. The more in their head you are, the more chance the reader will be there too.

Part II tomorrow....

Writing about Writing about Sex

I wrote a piece for the Guardian's BooksBlog on writing about writing about sex. Afterwards I realised that it was a piece written with the benefit of hindsight: This is what I try to do. But when I started writing, I hadn't thought any of those ideas let alone formulated them into something close to rules. Instead I was making it all up as I went along.

I've always been interested in writing about relationships, so sex seemed a natural part of that. I wrote what I imagined my characters might be doing and what their emotions were without thinking of what my potential readers might think. It was only later that I realised that some writers become hamstrung by their worries of what their mother/father/partner/children/neighbours/friends might think. It cripples their writing, and no wonder, if that bunch is forever peering over their shoulder and commenting on what they've written.

Writing about sex should, ideally, be like having sex. You shouldn't write about sex if it makes you anxious or unhappy. It's not compulsory. It's an optional but, in my opinion, important element of human relationships. It should be something that feels natural and comfortable to you and happens in a non-judgmental environment. Let's face it, it's difficult to enjoy sex fully if you're worrying about your spare tyre or stretch marks, the same way that good writing is inhibited if you've got the critics sitting on your shoulder.

But the wonderful thing about writing about sex - about all writing in fact - is that you can write without inhibition because no one need see it. You have full control. Your characters can do whatever you fancy them doing, and they'll never answer back. And after it's all over, if you don't like it you can press the delete button, and there - It's gone. Your mother need never know.

My next event will be speaking at Corsham Library, Wiltshire with fellow New Romantics Lucy Diamond and Veronica Henry 3rd June at 7.30pm. Come and join us!

Jane Austen had it Easy II

And another thing Jane Austen didn't have to contend with was keeping her hero and heroine from jumping into bed with each other. Let's face it, most people when they meet someone they like, they kiss pretty soon and if that seems satisfactory, take it further. I'm not suggesting that we all telescope those steps into the course of an evening but there's nothing to stop us doing that if we choose. And then we split up or stay together.

This makes problems for anyone writing romance. Your main characters meet early on, ideally in the first chapter, and then you have to contrive to keep them being attracted to each other while at the same time not developing their relationship. It can be done, but it's much harder when there isn't a reason such as social etiquette, religion, race or class keeping them apart.

With Nice Girls Do, the original version didn't have Will and Anna making love. This was partly because it didn't fit in with the story as it was, and also I had qualms about having Anna - who had so enthusiastically shagged Oliver at the beginning of the novel - sleeping with another man a few hundred pages along, even if he was The One for her. She was a Nice Girl, after all.

My editor said that they had to make love. In her opinion, Anna was an experienced woman, not a timid virgin and it would be unbelievable for Anna to be so in love with a man she hadn't slept with. So I re-wrote the ending, and the book IS better for it but it caused me all sorts of logistical problems that Ms Jane Austen didn't have to deal with, from the mechanics of providing a comfortable location for the event to how to make it plausible that they wouldn't come together relationship-wise until the last page.

Life might be easier now we're more relaxed about these things, but not necessarily for writers.

If anyone is near Chipping Sodbury on Thursday evening, I'm speaking at the library at 7.30pm, click here for further details. I'd love to see some friendly faces. Or any faces, for that matter.

Bad Sex for St Valentine's Day

It's St Valentine's Day and it was obvious that I should write something about writing about love. Only trouble was, it was like meeting a bloke your best friend insists is perfect for you: he looks all right, he sounds all right, but he doesn't do it for you. In fact, I don't really like writing about love at all. My characters fall in love, and out of love, but they do it as part of a 100,000 word novel. To write about love now, just because it's St Valentine's Day, feels a bit like being some poor chap at the IVF clinic being asked to provide a sample.

What I do like writing about at almost any time, however, is bad sex. (By this I mean the sex is bad, rather than the writing. I hope.) Good sex should be involving, happening entirely in the present, with no distance between mind and sensation and emotion. That makes it much harder to convey an individual experience in a way that is universal. Bad sex on the other hand...

Well, we've all been there, haven't we? Sex when you realise that you don't fancy them after all, sex where it goes wrong, sex when you'd rather read a novel. When the sex is bad, your brain doesn't engage, you become an observer. The characters can observe what's about to happen to them - Is he really going to do that? Oh God, yes he is. Wish he'd hurry up so I can get back to Chapter 4. You can make bad sex sad, or funny. You can make it slapstick - my favourite bad sex scene is in Another Woman's Husband when everything conspired against the would-be lovers. You can use metaphors in a way you'd never get away with if the sex was supposed to be good - take going round the golf course, him getting to the 18th while she's still stuck in a bunker over by the seventh, putters rattling in the golf bag, missing the shots, hole in one.

I hope in real life you're having a lovely romantic day. And if stuck alone with a laptop, I hope you're enjoying fantastic bad sex.

Writing about Writing about Sex

I've got a piece up on the Guardian's BooksBlog about writing about writing about sex:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/19/bad-sex-award-good-sex-fiction

Afterwards I realised that it was a piece written with the benefit of hindsight: This is what I try to do. But when I started writing, I hadn't thought any of those ideas let alone formulated them into something close to rules. Instead I was making it all up as I went along.

I've always been interested in writing about relationships, so sex seemed a natural part of that. I wrote what I imagined my characters might be doing and what their emotions were without thinking of what my potential readers might think. It was only later that I realised that some writers become hamstrung by their worries of what their mother/father/partner/children/neighbours/friends might think. It cripples their writing, and no wonder, if that bunch is forever peering over their shoulder and commenting on what they've written.

Writing about sex should, ideally, be like having sex. You shouldn't write about sex if it makes you anxious or unhappy. It's not compulsory. It's an optional but, in my opinion, important element of human relationships. It should be something that feels natural and comfortable to you and happens in a non-judgmental environment. Let's face it, it's difficult to enjoy sex fully if you're worrying about your spare tyre or stretch marks, the same way that good writing is inhibited if you've got the critics sitting on your shoulder.

But the wonderful thing about writing about sex - about all writing in fact - is that you can write without inhibition because no one need see it. You have full control. Your characters can do whatever you fancy them doing, and they'll never answer back. And after it's all over, if you don't like it you can press the delete button, and there - It's gone. Your mother need never know.