Tag Archives: how to write sex scenes

Writing Sex Scenes: The Complete Writer *FREE READS*

The Complete Writer
Part V. Writing Fiction

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Please note: This chapter contains a scene that may not be appropriate for all readers. If you are uncomfortable with depiction of sexuality, please pass over this chapter.

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Writing Sex Scenes

One of my clients was wrestling with the question of how to present a sex scene between his two favorite characters. He would swing between flummoxed (oh, no! writer’s block!) and exuberant (yipes!). Though I recognized that there’s an in-between, I also found myself wrestling: trying to explain how to handle it.

When an author addresses the sexual frolics of a story’s characters, he or she confronts a slew of challenges:

  • One’s own hang-ups.
  • One’s own fantasies (Even in fiction, there’s such a thing as over-sharing . . .)
  • The characters’ hang-ups and fantasies
  • The influence of other authors’ sex scenes (“and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”)
  • The sense that it is impossible to improve on some other author’s sex scene (see above.)
  • Political correctness
  • Resentment of political correctness
  • Absence of political correctness
  • Expectations of the perceived audience
  • Imagined or real hang-ups of the perceived audience

One could go on at length. As it were.

We could add to the list of challenges: “The essential ludicrousness of the sex act between human beings and the difficulty of making a love scene appear less than (or more than) ludicrous.”

I try to advise, but am limited by all of the above. I certainly have written a number of very randy sex scenes, one of which, with some trepidation, I copy and send over to him as a sort of example.

This gets him past his Victorian mores and jump-starts a pretty lively exchange between the characters. But now I think the result is a bit much. Baroque, even.

When it comes to writing sex, there’s a fine line between not enough and too much; between wimpy and creepy. And as for what the readers want to read? It’s anyone’s guess.

Personally, I think the writer is better served by restraint than by extravagance, where sexuality is concerned. Tone it up. Tone it down. But make it part of the story.

As a real-life human being’s sexuality cannot be divorced from his or her experience and milieu, so a fictional character’s sex life must fit into the plot and the action. Whatever that character gets up to must relate in some way, preferably in a significant way, to the ongoing narrative.

From one of our pseudonymous authors writing as Roberta Stuart comes a passage from Cabin Fever. In that novelette, a crusty sea-salt of a lady yacht cabin hires a young man to help crew her boat across the Caribbean so that she can meet some tourists who await her arrival. At the outset, she takes him for a rich-boy frat rat looking for a little adventure, but as the story proceeds we see he’s deeper than that. The two fight the attraction slowly growing between them…until that fateful night…

When my alarm woke me at midnight, the chop had subsided somewhat. I climbed the ladder and stepped into a world transformed.

The moon was high and full, and all around me, the sea glowed as if lit from within. Millions of plankton, too small to be seen with the naked eye, hung suspended in the water. And everywhere, as the water moved and the moon struck them, they lit with a bioluminescent glow.

Pete needs to see this.

I bolted back down the ladder. “Pete!”

He sat bolt upright, and if we’d had stacked bunks, he’d have put himself out like a light. “What’s wrong?” He lunged for his shorts.

I hadn’t meant to worry him. “Nothing’s wrong. Something I want you to see, is all.”

He let out his breath. “Oh. Okay.” He rummaged for his shorts.

“Never mind that! Who’s going to see you? Come on! I bolted back topside without waiting to see whether he followed.

He did, of course. He stopped short halfway out of the hatch.

“Wow,” he breathed. He came up the rest of the way and turned in a slow circle, taking it in. “It—it’s beautiful.”

I swallowed hard. No matter how many times I’d seen it, it always got me that way, too. “Go up front and look at the bow.”

By the time I’d checked the readings and updated the log, Pete was standing braced at the front of the boat, watching the phosphorescent wave rolling away from the bow. “It’s like magic,” he said when he heard me behind him.

“Yeah.”

I sat down on the decking, and after a moment, Pete flopped down beside me, his leg warm against mine.

“Bioluminescent plankton,” I told him, a little short of breath. “The moonlight hits them and they—”

“I know.” A slow grin spread across his face. “I’ve heard of it, but I never thought I’d get to see it. Thank you.” His eyes watered up a little. “Thank you.” And before I knew he was going to do it, he leaned down and kissed me, very gently, right on the lips.

Bad idea. Terrible idea. I drew back to tell him so, and then I was kissing him, full on, my arm coming up around his neck to steady us both.

We fell back on the deck together, side by side. Our arms came around each other, and our legs tangled as we pressed close together.

Pete’s hands came up to cup my breasts through my shirt, thumbs squeezing my nipples gently. I groaned and ran my fingernails up his spine, goading him.

His tongue darted between my lips and slid away, and mine chased it eagerly. It felt wonderful, lying here on Fever’s deck with his hands and mouth on me, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

I cupped his balls through his shorts, then squeezed his hard-on. He groaned into my mouth. “I want you,” I growled.

“God, yes!” Pete reached down and freed his cock from his shorts, and I slithered out of my panties, kicking them away.

His eyes widened when I rolled him onto his back and straddled him. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah. I mean, it— Yeah. It’s great.” His cock twitched beneath me. “It’s wonderful.”

I lined us up and he slid into me, filling me. Damn, it felt good!

Pete’s hands came up to squeeze my breasts again. I yanked my shirt over my head, swung it like a rodeo cowboy, and let it fly. I thought it landed somewhere on the boathouse.

Fever pitched a little, and I grabbed Pete’s arm to steady myself. I leaned back and slapped his thigh. “Lift up a little.” He brought his knees up a bit and I tucked my heels under his thighs, locking us together. There was no way I was coming off him now, not even if we both slid right off the deck. Pete propped his hands up and I braced myself on them and began to ride.

I rode with the motion of the boat, letting it move me. Up and up as we crested a wave, then down into the trough, Pete plunging deep into me. As we bottomed out, I ground hard against his pubic bone. Then the next wave was lifting me, and I was soaring higher and higher into the night air.

Up. Down. Around. Up. Down. Around.

I could have gone on like that forever, surging and falling with the sea. But all too soon, my orgasm came crashing over me like a wave.

Like any scene in a piece of fiction, the effective sex scene does more than add spice. Otherwise you get a hot tamale with no interest other than its jalapeños. Not that we don’t enjoy the occasional hot tamale . . . but Man cannot live on jalapeños alone.

This passage echoes not only the sights and feel of the open ocean but resonates with the characters’ faltering resistance to their mutual attraction. It continues to characterize the two while it moves the plot’s action forward.

A sex scene needs to add spice. But it also needs to serve another purpose. Jalapeños, after all, are full of vitamin C.

What NOT to do . . .

My goodness, there’s some bad writing out there! Most “erotic romances” are awful: graced with dangling modifiers (some of them truly funny), typos, unidiomatic language (“grinded”; “withering” for “writhing”; and on and on), lapses in point of view, characters dissolving pointlessly in laughter, eye-glazing clichés . . .

Oh, well. Clearly literature is not what people are buying the things for.

Some erotica does display workmanlike writing, and some stories are even done with style and humor. But even those self-consciously deploy tried-and-true tropes. There’s a sameness to the things, especially where the female characters are concerned.

The female character almost invariably is said to be lonely: either she describes herself as lonely, explicitly, or some other character observes or speculates that she’s lonely.

As the story unwinds, the woman is “rescued” in some way from an unhappy relationship with a former husband or boyfriend. The male lover(s)’ sex is better, kinder, hotter, more positive all the way around.

The female character yearns for change or sometimes simply for an outrageous spree.

She often is described as feeling self-conscious or insecure about herself.

Attraction is immediate, as you’d expect in such short pieces—the characters lust after each other at first glance.

Men are described as “gods.”

Men are often described as cooking or doing some other domestic activity; this seems to be part of their appeal or at least a repeating trope.

We’ll redact some of the other observations, lest the young, the impressionable, or the tender be reading. Suffice it to say that all the way across the board, a kind of monotony reigns.

It explains why some very, very silly things rise to the top in the erotic romance genre. Like the series about the woman who gets it on with Bigfoot.

Yes. That one is said to be authored by a stay-at-home mom who home-schools the kiddies.

Erotica vs. porn

In front of me I had the work of an author who would like to publish with Camptown Races Press and whom we would like to have writing for us. After plowing through his current effort, I thought, Where’s my coffee? Toss in an extra shot of espresso, please. . .

Once again I tried, as I have tried with various scribblers in the past, to explain about writing sex scenes. This boils down, really, to explaining the difference between erotica and pornography.

Pornography is a variety of erotica, but erotica is not a variety of pornography. As author Kate Douglas wrote in her essay “Writing the Fine Line between Erotica and Porn” (published in Shoshanna Evers’s collection, How to Write Hot Sex), the term erotic means “having to do with sexual love; amatory.” Pornography is “intended primarily to arouse sexual desire.” Amatory has to do with love, whereas unalloyed sexual desire amounts to lust.

There’s a difference.

Sex Scenes: How much to say, how much not to say?

So one of my clients has been wrestling with the question of how to present a sex scene between his two favorite characters. He swings between flummoxed (oh, no! writer’s block!) and exuberant (hooleeee mackerel!). I think there’s an in-between, but am not sure how to explain it. Assuming there is an in-between.

When an author addresses the sexual frolics of a story’s characters, he or she runs into a slew of challenges:

  • One’s own hang-ups. (Thanks, Mom & Dad! Thanks, Favorite Sixth-Grade Teacher!)
  • One’s own fantasies (Even in fiction, there’s such a thing as over-sharing…)
  • The characters’ hang-ups and fantasies
  • The influence of other authors’ sex scenes (“and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”)
  • The sense that it is impossible to improve on some other author’s sex scene (See above.)
  • Political correctness
  • Resentment of political correctness
  • Absence of political correctness
  • Expectations of the perceived audience
  • Imagined or real hang-ups of the perceived audience

One could go on at length. As it were.

Oh. Ahem. Sorry! One could add: “The essential ludicrousness of the sex act between human beings and the difficulty of making a love scene appear less than (or more than) ludicrous.”

I try to advise, but am limited by all of the above. I certainly have written a number of very randy sex scenes, one of which, with some trepidation, I copy and send over him as a sort of example. This gets him past his Victorian mores and jump-starts a pretty lively exchange. But I think it’s a bit much. Baroque, even.

When it comes to writing sex, there’s a fine line between not enough and too much; between wimpy and creepy. And as for what the readers want to read? It’s anyone’s guess.

Personally, I think the writer is better served by restraint than by extravagance, where sexuality is concerned. Tone it up. Tone it down. But make it part of the story.

As a real-life human being’s sexuality cannot be divorced from his experience and his milieu, so a fictional character’s sex life must fit into the plot and the action. Whatever that character gets up to must relate in some way, preferably in a significant way, to the ongoing narrative.

In this one, Aniel and his wife Jenna reflect on an episode in which young Tavio almost got himself killed, and which led the warlord Kaybrel to risk his own life to track him through a blizzard and rescue him. Although Tavi is scolded and punished mildly, he escapes serious censure. Aniel, however, remains skeptical.

In their quarters later that night, Jenna and Ani curled up together, warm under layers of blankets, and basked in the afterglow of their love-making. A single candle burned on the nightstand. Ani gazed at Jenna’s delicately flushed face, a wisp of hair at the temple still damp with sweat, and thought how perfect this slender, small woman was, and how miraculous it was that life had brought him to her.

“Do you think Kay will let Tavi come with us when we go up to Cham Fos?” Jenna asked. The kubna and kubnath planned to visit Bett Kubnath of Cham Fos and the exotic newcomer, Hapa Cottrite, shortly before the winter solstice and then return to Moor Lek to officiate at the town’s midwinter religious holidays. They would take the children, of course. That meant Jenna would go along to help care for them and Ani to manhandle luggage and deal with the horses and carriage.

“I dunno,” Ani said. “There’s really no reason for him to. Why should he?”

“Well, Tavi might like to see his friend Duarto. And to see what Cham Fos is like.”

“You and I won’t need any help,” Ani replied, “so it would make more sense to keep him on the job. Especially if he’s going to make the kid live at Jehm and Nina’s house.”

“All work and no play…,” Jenna said.

Ani chuckled. “I think it’s the other way around with that kid!”

She stifled a giggle. Then she ran her fingers up Ani’s muscular arm, along the collarbone, and up the side of his neck. He shivered with pleasure.

“Want to go again?” he asked.

“Could be,” she said.

“Well,” he said and kissed her shell-pink cheek, “give me a chance to catch my breath, OK?” He planted a line of exquisitely gentle kisses from her cheek to the back of her ear, then across her jaw to her lips, where he paused and savored before laying back against the pillows. She breathed a contented sigh, turned toward him, and laid an arm over his shoulder, waiting for him to feel ready again.

“Kay was kind of harsh on Tavi this evening,” she remarked.

“Don’t think so,” Aniel said.

“‘Not as much sense as God gave a donkey?’ That wasn’t very kind.”

Ani laughed aloud. “But so accurate,” he said.

Jenna couldn’t help laughing, too, but then added “Making him stay in town is pretty hard. He seemed really upset by that.”

“I’m sure. If he has to stay in the shop until Jehm knocks off, he’ll have to put in a full day’s work. That is rough.”

“He’s just a kid,” she said.

Ani fell silent for a moment, thinking about this. If Tavio was “just a kid,” he reflected, then Ani was Maire’s pet cat. What they both had seen of the wars in Socalia would make a man of a boy at any age, if it didn’t turn him into a raving lunatic. Tavi was every bit as much a toughened camp boy as Ani had been a dozen years before, when the Okan warlords were barreling around the south, fomenting trouble between the provinces and the alacaldo Consayo of Roksan, raiding towns, and burning villages. Out there in the field, Kay and his cousin, Mitchel Kubna of Cham Fos (God rest him and long may his name be honored), had rolled the dice for a tasty prize: Aniel. Kay won.

So, Ani supposed, had he. Ultimately. Jenna breathed softly beside him. Ani brushed a finger across her cheek.

“Doesn’t it strike you that there’s something odd about that story?” he said. The candle was guttering, and he spoke the question more or less into the dark.

“What story?”

“Well, I mean the whole thing about him supposedly leaving Jehm’s shop in time to get back here before the worst of the storm hit and then the thing coming up faster than they expected.”

“He…well, he has to walk home before it gets dark,” she said.

“Yeah, but think about it: after the first snow started to fall, it was a good thirty, forty-five minutes before this blizzard set in.

“It’s only a fifteen- or twenty-minute walk from the town to the keep. If he’d left when he said he did—when he might have some excuse for saying he couldn’t tell the thing would turn into a whiteout—then he should’ve gotten here ahead of the storm.

“Besides. Jehm’s no donkey. He wouldn’t have let the kid go if he could see a blizzard right on top of them.”

“So…what do you think happened?” Jenna asked.

“Dunno. Either he left later than he said he did—in which case Jehm wouldn’t have let him go out into a storm like this—or he went someplace on the way home.”

“Where on earth would he go? You think he has a secret girlfriend?”

“Not likely!” Ani said. He chuckled again at the thought. “No, I reckon he probably dawdled on the way back. Lollygagged up into the woods chasing butterflies—who knows?”

“Maybe the storm blew up faster there. The town’s closer to the lake than we are.”

“Maybe. It’s fishy, though. I wonder if he’s being straight with Kay. If he’s not, he surely deserves what he gets. He put his own life in danger, and Kay risked his to go get him and haul him home.”

Time to change the subject, Jenna thought. She propped herself on an elbow, found Ani’s mouth with her lips, then gave him a deep, probing kiss. She felt him catch his breath and stir beneath her hand.

“My turn to get on top,” she whispered. Her cascading blonde hair fell over their faces like a veil between them and the darkened world.

This particular scene, which at the outset wasn’t conceived as an erotic scene, uses the two characters’ love-making as a kind of frame story, an event in which the retrospective narration of other events is set.

It serves at least four purposes:

  1. To advance the plot.
  2. To characterize Aniel and Jenna.
  3. To introduce and explain Ani’s increasingly jaundiced view of Tavi.
  4. To add a little spice to the narrative.

Like any scene in a piece of fiction, I suspect the effective sex scene does more than add spice. Otherwise you get a hot tamale with no interest other than its jalapeños. Not that we don’t enjoy the occasional hot tamale…but Man cannot live on jalapeños alone.

A sex scene needs to add spice. But it also needs to serve another purpose. Jalapeños, after all, are full of vitamin C.

😉