Length of sex scenes

[Hypoxia]

First times: My absolute first involved meeting a stranger in a strange place, getting naked, and fucking five minutes later, to great satisfaction for both parties. I've had other first-with-them encounters with just as little buildup and as much satisfaction. Other relationships required weeks of pursuit (on both our parts) before contact. So, ya never can tell...

Story buildups: My first Hallowe'en contest entry (A TASTE OF INCEST: PUMPKIN & CANDY) will be online tonight and consists of a trip of vignettes. All feature mental buildups; the first is fast and snarky, the second is pretty nuts, and the last is slow and tender. In very few of my tales do people just get together and fuck, and there's usually a good reason when they do. A good buildup is usually mandatory.

Sex-scene lengths: Like I said before, it depends. There's generally no need to go into the same level of detail when the participants are fucking for the Nth time. OK, so the characters are doing something, and then they do something sexual, and then they go on and do other stuff that's part of their life. The Nth fuck is just part of the story. Too much detail gets tedious.

 

[dutchrain]

Not to mention the mishaps that happen during sex. Aside from condom-failure pregnancy fetish stuff, I hardly ever see stuff where things go wrong the way it can IRL. You know, the doorbell rings and you have to get rid of the Jehovah's Witnesses, or you've just tied somebody up from head to foot and they get a massive unsexy cramp. Call me weird, but I like stories with a bit of that "mere mortals" stuff; makes it feel more human.

I mention those mishaps often, people bump into things because they only have eyes for the person in front of, or beside them, they get cramps, and so on. It makes the stories more about people just like me and almost everyone else, than about "Barbies&Kens".

 

[lovecraft68]

I wrote one where the guy wakes up and he's scoping out his lover and thinking about waking her up in a fun way when he.....has to pee, you know, like people do when they first wake up in real life.

As he heads to the bathroom I added the line, "Fuck, this shit never happens in the movies"

 

[patientlee]

Yeah, like people in movies never have morning breath. There should be no kissing before a good toothbrushing.

 

[MSTarot]

Yeah, like people in movies never have morning breath. There should be no kissing before a good toothbrushing.

well... not anywhere near a nose anyway.

 

[lovecraft68]

My biggest real life, this does not happen in porn, mishaps occured five years ago in the shower.

The wife decided to kind of "go porno" and in the middle of playing around in the shower, decided to jump up and put her legs around my waist so I could nail her against the wall/

Well wet floor, soapy floor, I wasn't expecting it. Right over backwards and through the glass shower doors onto the floor. 14 stitches in my back from three different cuts and an hour in the er for not only the stitches but for them to pull all the tiny pieces of glass out of my back.

Also a few hundred dollars to replace the custom glass doors that we installed six months before that.

That does not happen in porn.

 

[Swilly]

Yeah, like people in movies never have morning breath. There should be no kissing before a good toothbrushing.

That's when you start with oral. After that...makes no difference.

 

[lovecraft68]

That's when you start with oral. After that...makes no difference.

By that logic a rim job would be even better.

 

[Swilly]

My biggest real life, this does not happen in porn, mishaps occured five years ago in the shower.

The wife decided to kind of "go porno" and in the middle of playing around in the shower, decided to jump up and put her legs around my waist so I could nail her against the wall/

Well wet floor, soapy floor, I wasn't expecting it. Right over backwards and through the glass shower doors onto the floor. 14 stitches in my back from three different cuts and an hour in the er for not only the stitches but for them to pull all the tiny pieces of glass out of my back.

Also a few hundred dollars to replace the custom glass doors that we installed six months before that.

That does not happen in porn.

I get the feeling you have a frequent customer card in the ER, LC

 

[lovecraft68]

I get the feeling you have a frequent customer card in the ER, LC

Remember Roadhouse? Dalton carries his medical records with him (I don't) but the nurse comes up with add this to your list of.....

I've been into martial arts for 30 years and got in my fair share of trouble in my teens and early twenties. I'm held together by stitches, a couple of metal plates scar tissue and raw nerves.

 

[patientlee]

My biggest real life, this does not happen in porn, mishaps occured five years ago in the shower.

The wife decided to kind of "go porno" and in the middle of playing around in the shower, decided to jump up and put her legs around my waist so I could nail her against the wall/

Well wet floor, soapy floor, I wasn't expecting it. Right over backwards and through the glass shower doors onto the floor. 14 stitches in my back from three different cuts and an hour in the er for not only the stitches but for them to pull all the tiny pieces of glass out of my back.

Also a few hundred dollars to replace the custom glass doors that we installed six months before that.

That does not happen in porn.

Thank you for that. I just laughed so hard, my stomach hurts.

 

[PervOtaku]

From just a general literary prospective, the first time anything happens in the story, you spend more time describing it, and then the more often it happens the less you have to explain things. Now, we're talking about sex scenes here, so the entire point of things is to describe them in explicit detail (pun intended), however this also creates encouragement to keep the scenes new and fresh, either with new pairings, new situations, and new sex acts.

 

[lovecraft68]

Thank you for that. I just laughed so hard, my stomach hurts.

I can assure you that would never happen to Mark or if it did he would have given a proper fucking before going off to the hospital

 

[redzinger]

One of the most common bits of feedback I get for this vignette:
http://www.literotica.com/s/a-wheelie-good-time
is that the female character is 'too sex-obsessed', and a friend mentioned that there was a lot of build-up, then the break before the actual action made the piece lose momentum.

I've also noticed that the sex scenes in my books naturally get shorter/less frequent as the novel reaches the end. Anyone else find that?

 

[TheeGoatPig]

Personally, I can't stand it when there are pages of buildup to a sex scene that is one paragraph of fucking.

 

[Hypoxia]

From just a general literary prospective, the first time anything happens in the story, you spend more time describing it, and then the more often it happens the less you have to explain things. Now, we're talking about sex scenes here, so the entire point of things is to describe them in explicit detail (pun intended), however this also creates encouragement to keep the scenes new and fresh, either with new pairings, new situations, and new sex acts.

Exactly. Novelty rules. Tedium drools.

 

[Barahir]

From just a general literary prospective, the first time anything happens in the story, you spend more time describing it

I'm nearing the end of a very long (35-ish chapters) story, and there have been several periods in which the title character has had sex with the same partner(s) over a number of encounters. The first such instance was easy, because everything that was happening was her first time, but all the subsequent repeat encounters -- even the really orgiastic ones that ran to zillions of words -- were also really easy to write.

Now, however, I've got her naked and sweaty, for the first time, with the guy she's fallen in love with and will, eventually, marry. The kinky shenanigans will recommence a few chapters hence, but meanwhile I've got to get her through her initial sexual connection with this crucial character (who will not be participating in said shenanigans), and I'm finding it surprisingly difficult. So much so that I'm spending my time editing the 26 previous chapters; important and necessary work, to be sure, but I'd like to finish before I take the digital red pen to everything.

I was confused by this, because I figured these chapters would be really easy to write: neither of them is a virgin, they're going to do basically everything without shame or remorse (or recrimination about the pasts), and all I'd have to do is make sure it's clear that she's also in love and not just horny in these scenes. But still, it has been difficult. The dialogue has been easy and fun, but the sex...far less so. Eventually, I realized that the problem wasn't the scenes I'm writing, but all the future scenes I'll never write. These two will be having sex for decades, but meanwhile I'm trying to make what they're doing right now as hot as possible without thinking about the fact that some future scene -- which, again, I'm not going to write -- will basically be a repeat of what they're doing now. It's that purely theoretical future narrative "pressure" of knowing that they'll be doing all of it again, over and over, that's making the scenes hard to write.

And yes, I've considered the likelihood that I've lost my mind.

Anyway, it's been so difficult that -- here's where I drag myself back on-topic -- that I did, briefly, consider grossly under-describing them. Not "...and then they had sex," but turning what should be about five slow encounters into one. I did an edit like that, looked at it, and hated it. It grossly undersold what really *is* a crucial relationship for this story.

So I have to get through it, one way or another. But for the first time, ever, I feel like I'm padding...adding words and acts and adjectives for the sake of doing so...and the scenes are suffering for it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I was confused by this, because I figured these chapters would be really easy to write: neither of them is a virgin, they're going to do basically everything without shame or remorse (or recrimination about the pasts), and all I'd have to do is make sure it's clear that she's also in love and not just horny in these scenes. But still, it has been difficult. The dialogue has been easy and fun, but the sex...far less so. Eventually, I realized that the problem wasn't the scenes I'm writing, but all the future scenes I'll never write. These two will be having sex for decades, but meanwhile I'm trying to make what they're doing right now as hot as possible without thinking about the fact that some future scene -- which, again, I'm not going to write -- will basically be a repeat of what they're doing now. It's that purely theoretical future narrative "pressure" of knowing that they'll be doing all of it again, over and over, that's making the scenes hard to write.

And yes, I've considered the likelihood that I've lost my mind.

Anyway, it's been so difficult that -- here's where I drag myself back on-topic -- that I did, briefly, consider grossly under-describing them. Not "...and then they had sex," but turning what should be about five slow encounters into one. I did an edit like that, looked at it, and hated it. It grossly undersold what really *is* a crucial relationship for this story.

So I have to get through it, one way or another. But for the first time, ever, I feel like I'm padding...adding words and acts and adjectives for the sake of doing so...and the scenes are suffering for it.

I hit a similar feeling with my 14-part series: after the first few chapters, relationship's established, I was worried about just writing the same sex over and over.

What worked for me was putting the sex in context of other stuff that's happening in the relationship. Sometimes it's "your parents would kill us if they found out", someone it's "feeling insecure and need reassurance", etc etc, and that flavours how they're interacting. So even if the physical act is "girl goes down on girl again", it's not the same scene.

 

[lovecraft68]

SWB was 44 chapters and back when I was writing it I had not been here long and was caught up in "every chapter needs sex"

And many of my chapters were long and had more than one encounter. I estimate the brother/sister had sex about 60 times during it.

Now it had a heavy BDSM flavor to it which allowed for some creativity with some of the scenes, but it was difficult to try to do better than here they go again. I also had them have sex with other people as they tried to fight their attraction at some points.

Ironically the published version has much less sex because reading a chapter every couple of weeks the constant sex is fine, but if reading straight through its way too much.

If I were to write it today there would be a lot of sexless chapters as I have since learned that readers will "forgive it" as long as the story is solid.

 

[Barahir]

What worked for me was putting the sex in context of other stuff that's happening in the relationship.

And that's what I was relying on until I actually started to write it. I figured, "OK, she's never actually been in love with any of the previous partners, and there are all sorts of fun ways his non-relationship responsibilities could interfere with what they're doing, but the notion is that they'll have what is, for her, amazing sex with a whole different set of emotions than she's had before."

In reserve was the idea that she would be falling incredibly hard for him but be in denial about the secret urges that are eventually, post- these scenes, going to overwhelm her.

I thought both would allow me to write good scenes. But I'm finding them tedious. I'm not finding their sex nearly as hot as it should be. I just think it's dragging, and that's not good. Hence my post in this thread rather than another; I find myself wanting to cut them off. Maybe I'll just abandon these chapters and come back to them later.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

I try really hard to make my sex scenes as valuable to the story as anything else. There isn't a story without the sex and the sex part MUST be told in relative detail. At least that's the theory and the goal. Am I guilty of writing stroke material? Compared to most of the AH'ers I've read, probably so. But I really prefer thinking the sex happening between the characters is what leads to their change.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My biggest real life, this does not happen in porn, mishaps occured five years ago in the shower.

The wife decided to kind of "go porno" and in the middle of playing around in the shower, decided to jump up and put her legs around my waist so I could nail her against the wall/

Well wet floor, soapy floor, I wasn't expecting it. Right over backwards and through the glass shower doors onto the floor. 14 stitches in my back from three different cuts and an hour in the er for not only the stitches but for them to pull all the tiny pieces of glass out of my back.

Also a few hundred dollars to replace the custom glass doors that we installed six months before that.

That does not happen in porn.

This sort of thing might make a good FAWC theme one day.

I think my most memorable RL incident was: my partner was tied to the four corners of the bed by wrists and ankles, completely helpless. I had to leave the bedroom just for a couple of seconds - can't remember why, but I was just in the next room.

That's when our dog tore in, jumped on the bed, licked her all over the face (but ONLY the face) and ran off again. Quite the mood-killer.

 

[Montanos]

Yeah, like people in movies never have morning breath. There should be no kissing before a good toothbrushing.

Haha. I have to agree.

Dental hygiene is something that is never included in most stories.

I have a half finished book where a futuristic soldier is stuck in a non futuristic world: castles, swords and sorcery type of stuff.

For chucks and giggles, I wrote the soldier with an extreme dislike towards bad dental hygiene.

So every time the 'beautiful' romanticized women of the magical world smile or etc ... those .. darn ... ugly ... teeth! CRINGE!

I also gave them: fleas, bad breath, a strong lack of beauty products, shaving, etc. One scene I had a native look upon a woman and describe her. The next scene I had the futuristic soldier describe the same person with modern concepts of beauty.

It was fascinating, at least for me, to study the dichotomy.

Montanos

 

[Montanos]

My biggest real life, this does not happen in porn, mishaps occured five years ago in the shower.

The wife decided to kind of "go porno" and in the middle of playing around in the shower, decided to jump up and put her legs around my waist so I could nail her against the wall/

Well wet floor, soapy floor, I wasn't expecting it. Right over backwards and through the glass shower doors onto the floor. 14 stitches in my back from three different cuts and an hour in the er for not only the stitches but for them to pull all the tiny pieces of glass out of my back.

Also a few hundred dollars to replace the custom glass doors that we installed six months before that.

That does not happen in porn.

Forgive me sir, this is quite hilarious.

Montanos

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

My problem with Brian Garfield's writing is: His long, tedious, boring stories are punctuated with amazing action. The contrast is startling. And many LIT writers do the same....the story sux but the sex is great. Its like the old castle in Spain, miles and miles from anywhere and hard to get to, but offers the best site on Earth to bird watch.