Writin’ dirty: The impossible task of satisfying everyone

[Rustyoznail]

FYI - An Australian author, John Purcell, has written an article for the Melbourne Age newspaper about writing explicit sex scenes for novels. It's worth a read.

https://www.theage.com.au/culture/b...en-you-write-a-sex-scene-20220523-p5anum.html

 

[HeyAll]

Interesting article. Mostly I agree.

I focus on actions, the usual stuff.

But the secret is the inner conflict and explaining why it's taboo. If you do that, it elevates the scene.

 

[Blind_Justice]

Nah. Publishers don't want to miss out on money. So everything even remotely able to rock the boat will be edited into nonexistence. The US is a huge market and they are still in the grasp of the fundamentalist Christian value set. I'd like to see the opposite proven, but as any author here trying to get published knows, getting stuff with our usual level of smut into the mainstream is nigh impossible.

My latest attempt to get "Express Delivery" published ended with a "Ummm, could you maybe edit out the sex scenes?" from a Sci-Fi publisher. I had sent him the first 10,000 words and apart from a bit of action in a strip club, it was all story. "It's way too sexual. I can't publish something like that." When asked why, he said "It's just how it goes." I did not edit my story because - as usual - my sex scenes are part of the plot - and as a result, didn't get published.

On another note, trying to satisfy everyone is a murderous headache in the making. I'd rather please a chosen few properly than trying to cater to the widest majority half-heartedly.

 

[Auden James]

I'm not sure what to think of the linked article. Going by its concluding line, the author, some Australian novelist I've never heard about nor read anything from, seems to argue that it's prudent for a (career) writer to exlude sex scenes from her writing so as to avoid a "meteor shower of one-star reviews" on online bookseller sites.

Well, that may be so, but what I find strange is that at the same time said Australian novelist seems to miss the times when sex scenes were more abundant in (mainstream) literature, which—apparently—was the case at the time of his parents' golden reading age (presumably sometime in the 1970s?). Now isn't that a tad bit hypocritical? To lament the disappearance of sex scenes from (mainstream) literature and at the same advice aspiring novelist today to cut any and all sex scenes from their novels so as to boost their reader ratings online?

Apart from that I found the Lee Child quote in the article rather chucklesome:

Writing sex scenes is by far, the hardest and most ridiculous thing a writer can ever do. It’s virtually impossible to get it done with any plausibility.

 

[SimonDoom]

It IS an interesting issue. It's 2022, and yet we still seem to have a difficult time incorporating one of the most important, wonderful, and thrilling aspects of human existence--sex--into art. We still get wrapped around the axle over silly questions like "Is it porn or is it art?" Why can't it be both? I don't know about you, but when I've experienced sexual activity, it's explicit, dirty, and hard-core, and totally great because of all of that, and why shouldn't art capture that?

I came of age as a reader in the 1970s, and I remember reading a lot of trashy fiction, and back in those days it was almost obligatory for trashy novels to have a few salacious episodes, and it was my first exposure to sex scenes in writing. It was thrilling for a teen boy. I would have thought, at the time, that we'd keep moving forward, but in some ways it feels like we've regressed. We're more freaked out about sex than we were 30 years ago. It's part of what motivates me to write sex stories. I feel like I'm doing the Lord's work, trying to roll the ball forward, inch by inch, with my little stories.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

This part sums it up best, the quote from Ms Fox.

“I think your job as an author writing a sex scene,” Fox replied, “is to set it up for the reader to want these two characters to bang. They have to have chemistry. There has to be tension. Then when they get together you have to make sure you don’t spoon-feed the reader your own sexual fantasy because they’re just as likely to love it as they are to be sitting there going, “Oh God, I hate it when a man does that.”

Everybody (read: every reader) has their own ideas about sex, different turn ons and different expectations. This topic of 'what is realistic' was covered well in another thread here last week. The same applies here. When the sex happens in your writing, whether the reader 'likes' it or not really is only determined by whether or not the reader's expectation of how it should play out matches what you wrote (and it helps if you hit one or more of their kinks). If not, then they will probably hate your scene, no matter how well you wrote it. On the other hand, the next reader's expectations might match what you wrote very well and absolutely love it. Literotica writers should know this well by all the love and hate comments that they get on their submissions.

The bottom line is, it is indeed impossible to please everybody, so write the scene how YOU think it should play out, and if anyone doesn't like it, fuck 'em. That's their problem. If someone thinks that you didn't write it correctly ("that's not what a woman would do!" or "how dare you misunderstand my kink!") then they can write their own scene any way that they want.

 

[Lifestyle66]

I like the article's point; "The writer doesn’t need to convince the reader they know what all sex is like, they only have to convince us they know what sex is like for their characters."

Yes. That's the point of building the characters in longer stories; provide context for why they behave the way they do. But even when we do explain the characters, we continue to get the haters 1-bombing our stories merely because they disapprove of the sex attitudes they believe are wrong (think Loving Wives haters 1-bombing "extra-marital fun" stories.)

The haters are those judgmental types who can never appreciate the art as art. They insist everyone think as they do, OR ELSE!

So, if you are looking to expand a story for broader appeal when selling a book (making money), publishers would want such touchy scenes downplayed and obfuscated.