Sex scenes...

[JaxRhapsody]

If it takes five minutes to read its still lasting longer than a lot of men.

I don't get caught up in thinking how long the scene would last in real time. "They did this for five minutes, this for ten, it took her fifteen minutes to get off" is the only way I could see me writing-or reading-that would spell give me that answer.

I see time the way I see describing breast/cock or any physical stat which is I don't do it. I describe the scene. Let the reader decide-if they even want to-how long the sex lasts.

If you're talking long in actual word count and think yours are too short you can pad it with descriptions outside of just the physical action, throw in some of their thoughts and feelings during, describe what's around them etc..

I think trying to get the sex real time would just ruin it. There's ways to make it seem longer than it reads. I'm not counting the strokes it takes a guy to get to the. center of his and hers "tootsie roll pop". Like you said, one can do those things, have them talk to each other. Or have other things going on. One of the sex scenes in my incest fic has the mc's cousin talking to him and his mom while they're having sex, just briefly before she gives them their alone time. Moments later after getting turned on, she goes back in there and takes the offer to use a dildo, then runs back in because she forgot a towel.

It's not too much different than any other part of a story, where you inflate a passage of time. Considering the difference between books and movies where the book can show a lot more than the movie counterpart, the movie, unlike the book, is more restrained in real time, without the use of scene changes, cutaways, and montages. Books don't have that same restraint, we as writers control the passage of time. If that makes sense.

Over time a lot of writers here mention really getting into writing the story, then scuffling through a sex scene. When you first start writing them they're fun and exciting/ When you have written dozens to hundreds of them it becomes a lot more ho-hum, just another part of the story. The story is always different, but its hard to make sex different after so long. Only so many positions, word choices, physical descriptions and it starts to be the speed bump in the story.

There are readers here who are okay with shorter sex scenes if the story itself can keep them hooked.

If all you're here for is sex, that's a different story, you don't care about the story at all.

Sometimes I don't think sex scenes are so hard to write because they're challenging, it's more like this. You've written enough of them, that it's some kinda chore. Trying to make washing dishes fun. She sucks his dick, he eats her pussy, missionary or doggystyle, maybe one or two more positions. I imagine most characters are somewhat normal people having somewhat normal sex, they don't have the KamaSutra position of the day phone app.

 

[intim8]

I think trying to get the sex real time would just ruin it.

Partly because the passage of time kind of disappears for the people involved. An hour can go by before you know it. Setting a timer on it, if you're in one or more of the character's heads, doesn't work with that.

I just try to show the progression of it. Not every single time somebody moves their arm or each flick of a tongue (though, sometimes), but it's an action scene, it should move. And not just back and forth or in and out. I think if you get the progression right, the actual time involved isn't very relevant.

You've written enough of them, that it's some kinda chore. Trying to make washing dishes fun. She sucks his dick, he eats her pussy, missionary or doggystyle, maybe one or two more positions. I imagine most characters are somewhat normal people having somewhat normal sex,

What makes each scene unique is the context and what is going through the heads of the characters. It might just be the old in-n-out, but it's different in a bed than it is in a car, or on a picnic bench in broad daylight, or in her parents' house while they're sleeping just down the hall. Slow and romantic is different from a hate-fuck is different from complete strangers hooking up, even if they're all the same basic positions. Trying to get pregnant is different from trying not to.

The sex isn't the story, it's an event within the story. Too often, stories here seem like they go on pause while the characters do the deed, then it picks up after. Or it just ends there.

 

[oneagainst]

This is why AH is worth the investment: actual dispassionate discussion about the mechanics of something that would drive most people up the wall.

Written a few, been doing this for a while, and can honestly say the reason why it's still fresh isn't because of position or circumstance or any of that stuff. Instead, there is that moment when the MCs come together and they find the truth. The ultimate act of character progression is in that singular moment.

Or, you're doing it wrong

 

[BobbyLaker]

I'm a contrary so-and-so.

Sometimes I really enjoy writing long... ahem... mechanical scenes; other times, it's a bit of a slog.

What can be fun is when Tab A ends up in Slot C rather than Slot B

 

[dadadadiox]

Does anyone have any good sex scenes I could read?

None that I’ve written. I’m 100% with you on not enjoying the process of writing lengthy sex scenes and I feel the same about reading them. Even when done well I find long sex scenes tedious.

The sexual thesaurus just isn’t deep enough to avoid the repetitive use of words; nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I struggle with this in writing and reading.

As for time, I get inside the characters head and insert thoughts they have during the act, or dialogue. Also, sounds and distractions outside of the actual sex act, written in narrative, can create a short break while not taking the reader out of the action. Who hasn’t fucked with someone in the next room distracting you?

I have always preferred scenes that leave a little to the imagination and don’t drag on too long. I’m more into the characters, the story, and the anticipation leading up to the sex.

I don’t know if that’s uncommon, but it seems to be in Lit as there is no category for soft porn. It’s either erotic or non-erotic. If you go soft the strokers kill you with shit ratings. If you do even a little sex in the NE genre, as I have tried, the cleanies hammer you.

 

[DustofFallenStars]

I'm going to throw my hat into the "sex scenes work best when they're integrated into the story in service to furthering the plot or characters" group, although like all rules, it's knowing when to apply the exceptions to make it work.

I've only written a few sex scenes so far, but so long as I keep in mind what the purpose of a sex scene is I've mostly found it easy to keep the action going?

The action and the dialogue and the emotion of the scene are a result of putting those characters there with that goal; what happens next?

For me it's about how do I move characters/plot from point A to point B in the story arc during a sex scene rather than worrying about tab A/slot B

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

You can embellish your scenes with the emotion of the moment, or descriptions of each parties reactions and physical response to certain enticements. And remember, not all sex scenes need to be long and detailed. Implied is good, too in context.

<Long drawn out, explicitly detailed sex scene>
...

“I love you, too.” It felt so good to say it. “Now go to sleep. Amber told me I’d feel better if I fucked your brains out in the morning. I’m not sure I believe it’s possible to feel any better than I do now, but I’ll need some rest if we’re going to find out.”

Amber was right, twice.

 

[GrushaVashnadze]

Does anyone have any good sex scenes I could read? How do you handle it? How do you deal with the time span, considering it probably takes way longer in real life than on the page?

In writing a "sex scene", I find it is not the idea of "sex" which is the challenge, but the concept of "scene". Sex does not have to make a scene. And "sex scenes" do not have to consist entirely - or even mainly - of sex. If sex is merely the principal medium through which my intentions as an author are expressed, then, though sex may define the style of the story, it need not define its structure, nor its subject matter.

I tend to write longer stories - novellas, novels. I suggest that what makes an erotic novel different from a slow-build stroke story, or a multi-episode “series”, is that it incorporates multiple overlapping arcs. One or more of them may be sexual, but others may involve the development of characters, relationships, and a multiplicity of other plot points. The overall structure of the whole story need not be structured principally around the fucking; in contrast to a stroke story (long or short), sex and large-scale structure need not coincide. A multiplicity of arcs – some sexual, some not; some major, some trivial – can make simultaneous appearances, combining, bouncing off each other, illuminating each other and the overall subject matter of the work.

One of my favourite instances of this, in filmed porn, occurs in the 1985 AVN-award-winning Good Girls Bad Girls, where the tough police detective, played by Joey Silvera, conducts his investigative interviews in a theatre, whilst in the background, on stage, a series of rehearsals-turned-orgies take place. At the same time, the murder victim’s best friend (played by the legendary Sharon Mitchell) reveals the truth about her dead friend’s secret sex life to her husband – intercutting, of course, with a remembered orgy scene featuring the dead wife. The observers and interlocutors end up getting hopelessly turned on by what they are hearing and/or watching: the husband gets a blowjob from the best friend, the detective gets a handjob from one of the actresses, and the policewoman listening in by radio sucks off her partner in the van. An absolutely stunning use of the possibilities afforded by a multi-arc story, it advances the complex plot whilst at the same time sizzling with sex. (I like to call this technique “concertato”, after the word used to describe the grand multi-layered Act One finales in nineteenth-century Italian opera.)

Another way of navigating this balancing act between "sex" and "scene" is to invert the usual “frontstage” purpose of sex and use it instead as background – thereby satisfying the desire of the readership to be turned on by the fucking, whilst obviating its tendency to stall the development. In filmed porn, I commend to you Radley Metzger’s 1976 masterpiece The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Apart from its tight script (think Pygmalion with fucking), excellent acting, and lavish production values, its cinematography uses background sex as a superb dramatic device. In the opening scene, a porn movie is playing on a Pigalle cinema screen while Jamie Gillis (as Dr Seymour Love) and Constance Money (as Misty) introduce themselves to each other. In the next scene, his attempt to persuade her to join him in his sexual research is intercut with a blowjob taking place at the other end of the room. And just about every scene at Love’s Rome villa is spiced with little fucks taking place in the background: every maid, waiter or butler is busy licking pussy, sucking cock or fucking, even as they serve drinks or open car doors. Thus the entire movie sizzles with sex, allowing quite sophisticated plot-points and dialogue to unfold in the foreground without either the story or the eroticism ever flagging.

One example of this sort of technique in written smut which I adore comes in Jaymal's magnificent story Gabrielle and the Devil, in a scene where the eponymous heroine is being seduced by her satanic opposite number at a fancy-dress garden party. The seduction takes a long time, but the reader is kept titillated by a series of crazy background snippets featuring cosplay couples fucking around the gardens: a “young witch-waitress,” her “corset popped open so that her breasts tumbled forth… being mauled by the pirate-king”, “outpourings of anguished female bliss… met with ecstatic male profanities, as Adam presumably spurted deep inside his Eve”, “Gabrielle’s hostess… her dress lying down round her waist so that her breasts stood out proudly while she vigorously sucked his cock”, “a cute fairy… offering her ass to a pumpkin-headed scarecrow sporting a large erection” – all these have the added effect of paralleling Gabrielle’s desperate, though unwitting descent into debauchery.

I try to use these techniques in my writing. Violet_Vixen refers kindly to what she deems my “talent for writing juxtaposition” – which compliment I am grateful for. If interested, try having a look, for example, at Chapters 7 and 9 from my novel Alison Goes to London, both of which contain a great deal of very filthy and irreverent fucking - but possibly no "sex scenes" as such, because the sex, like in Misty Beethoven, interweaves with some very serious and important dialogue and character and plot development. As Violet says: "Often dialogue is used to ease the heaviness of the narration, but here you use the filthy narration to give the audience a breath of whiteshit-filled air in between serious dialogue. I’m really enjoying your style." For which, again, thanks!

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Partly because the passage of time kind of disappears for the people involved. An hour can go by before you know it. Setting a timer on it, if you're in one or more of the character's heads, doesn't work with that.

I just try to show the progression of it. Not every single time somebody moves their arm or each flick of a tongue (though, sometimes), but it's an action scene, it should move. And not just back and forth or in and out. I think if you get the progression right, the actual time involved isn't very relevant.



What makes each scene unique is the context and what is going through the heads of the characters. It might just be the old in-n-out, but it's different in a bed than it is in a car, or on a picnic bench in broad daylight, or in her parents' house while they're sleeping just down the hall. Slow and romantic is different from a hate-fuck is different from complete strangers hooking up, even if they're all the same basic positions. Trying to get pregnant is different from trying not to.

The sex isn't the story, it's an event within the story. Too often, stories here seem like they go on pause while the characters do the deed, then it picks up after. Or it just ends there.

I agree with this. I think when there's more than just sex going on, it seems longer than it actually is; going in on the emotions and such, like you said in that other paragraph. The most boring of sex can be made interesting.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Does anyone have any good sex scenes I could read?

If you don't mind incest, I think Falling In Love With Mom has some good scenes. Not just with the mom, but the stepmom and cousin, too.

 

[DanDraper]

My most recent story 'Visit from the Ex-Wife' has one of my longest sex scenes. Not as long as some others you may read about, but I was told it was a pretty solid scene if you want to check it out from the link to my stories below.



....

 

[intim8]

Does anyone have any good sex scenes I could read?

This is one of my better ones. At least I think so. Two of them in this one. No, wait, three. With lots of story around them.

The implication in the story is that it takes all afternoon and evening, but I don't explicitly mark the passage of time during each scene.
Aces Pt. 04 - Brian enjoys the company of three sorority sisters