The Sex Scene

A writer friend and I were discussing sex scenes in novels. These tend to go three ways:

1) PG-13 fluff, man and woman kiss, maybe go so far as to collapse together in a bed, cut scene before anyone gets naked;
2) trashy romance novels, rippling muscles, heaving breasts;
3) smut-books, oh-baby-god-yes with screaming profanity.

In her endearingly blatant way, my friend brought up that people either fear any form of romantic involvement between characters (oh dear, high schools can't force their apathetic students to analyze your novel), they read Fanny Hill as a teen and think anything vaguely erotic has to contain enough nearly-archaic words to make the reader forget what is going on as they research a dictionary (example: "lo, a turgid passion did throb in the weapon of his manhood as, through the revealing casement, he beheld the swathes of virescent and rufous chenille tumble off the junoesque ingénue, disclosing her swart opulence, as her limpid orbs gazed wistfully into the hesperian blush of the gloaming welkin"), or they are oversexed (or even more likely, undersexed) slash wannabes who believe every moan of the porno business, that sex really can't be good unless it involves oral, vaginal, and anal sex with a cum shot and lots of vulgarities. Androgynous boys and lesbian twins help, too. And fetishes. Lots of fetishes.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but the last thing I want to hear as I experience utter physical bliss is a guy yelling "oh f***, yeah, you b****, I f***ing love how you f*** my c*ck." Just ... no!

In the book I'm currently working on, more than in any other serious project, I'm faced with many explicit scenes as my young main character discovers love in its many forms, from cute teen love with fears of loss of virginity, to endearing romance and walks along the beach, to the persistent jerk who only wants a wife, to total WTF oddities only possible in the realm of science fiction. Therefore, I've been experimenting with how many ways to present the trouble of a love scene.

I've already had my husband tell me to tone down one scene, and for my own defense, I knew it was over the top, reaching into Category 3: the smut novel. It was an experiment in writing, done mostly because I wanted to see if I could write that graphically. I got it out of my system, yay me, time to get serious again and at least tame it to rated R. After all, I want Barnes and Noble to be able to sell this book, not Fanny Hill's Bordello of Books.

I've also gone so far as to write a whole love scene in which I say very little about what the two characters are doing, but by describing what is going on around them (sex on the beach is very nature-filled) I show the reader precisely what is going on in my own roundabout way. And yes, there are many cutaway scenes, nothing more than pulling toward the bedroom, then cut to the next morning. After all, a reader doesn't have to be told the gory details every time a couple copulates or the intensity of the scene vanishes into blasé acceptance. Ho hum, she's at it again.

One thing I aim for in any lovemaking scene is the "love" part, an element too often missing in novels these days. Even if it's with a total stranger or friend-with-benefits, there has got to be a reason, emotions the character feels. I don't want to be Lady Chatterley's Lover and spend ten pages delving into his/her emotional mindset, not when it'll probably take the reader longer to read all that emo-tripe than it would take them to have the ride of their life, but I think a reader deserves to know just why Johnny and Susy are playing hanky-panky in the backseat of a Buick.

Crude? Verbose? Coy? The nice thing about this current project is I have 800+ pages already (yeah, major editing needed) to experiment a little with it all, from the adorable to the abnormal. And if it's too much, that's what editors are for. I'm sure, like my husband, someone's going to tell me to take it down a few notches.