The Reason I Avoid Writing Sex Scenes

[dr_pretentious]

What amazes me about having written 3053 words today is that I had several 3K days last November. How on earth did I do it?

Only 7684 words to go. How that will fit into two more days, I have no idea.

42,316 / 50,000 (84.6%)

For the first time, I have written a sex scene that is more than one sentence long. I'm too tired to reopen the file and count, but I would guess that the sex scene in question takes up maybe five or six sentences.

As a matter of general principle, I think one sentence is about the right length for a sex scene, since no writer can titillate the reader's mind as perfectly as the reader can titillate it for herself. If readers didn't prefer to imagine sex scenes for themselves, entirely unfettered by whatever the author has put on the page, there wouldn't be so very much fanfic out there.

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It's my loss, really, that I find most sex scenes in fiction so dull. If I found a writer of fiction--any writer of fiction--whose sex scenes I admired from the point of view of craftsmanship, I would dread less the prospect of having to write such scenes myself.

Who writes the sex scenes you like best? I have tried, in a halfhearted kind of way, to find writers who write sex scenes that entertain me, with no luck at all. Every time my search strikes out, my motivation to keep looking diminishes. I guess this is my tiny glimmer of what my unhappily single friends are going through in their searches for mates. Such scenes manifestly exist in films. I wish I knew why print's different for me.

It's not that I don't imagine sex scenes for my characters when I'm writing. There were times in the writing of the Big Book when I thought about nothing else, for days or weeks at a stretch. If I could believe in my heart of hearts that there actually was such a thing as an entertaining sex scene, I'd try putting more of that stuff on the page.

It's just that, when I'm reading other people's novels and I come to a sex scene, their stories stop dead, and I'm bored bored bored with what they imagine will titillate me, and usually nothing is happening in the sex scene but sex. Even if they've somehow threaded some plot through the sex scene, I spend the whole scene thinking about how much more entertainingly they could have presented the same bit of plot in some other way. There are two options--skim ahead and hope the story starts up again when the tedious heavy breathing is over, or abandon the book and pick up another in the hope that there's not a lot of blow-by-blow choreography of coitus cluttering up the plot. Usually I skim, but there are authors I've given up on permanently because of the sex clutter problem.

Maybe it's that I'm waiting to see anyone write sex that sounds better than the sex I have in my actual life. Apparently that's a high standard to meet.