Know What You're Doing When You Write Sex

Sex can be the most magical thing in the world and it can be the ugliest, but it’s the most intimate form of communication between two people, whether the communication is about love or about terror.

It can say wonderful things about your characters and it can say terrible things about them.

Sex should never be gratuitous in your stories―it should be used to reveal character in the people who populate your literary landscape.

Sex Should Reveal Character

The way we have sex reveals how we feel about life, about other people and about ourselves, and the way your characters have sex will depend on how well you know them. If your characters are real, when you put them in the sack with another human being, they’ll have sex the way they would in real life.

Get into the minds of your characters while they’re having sex. Exploring the interplay of thought between two people in the throes of ecstasy (or boredom) can be a brilliant source of humor, drama, or irony.

For instance, the interplay between a woman and man on a one-night stand―and they both know it. He’s saying “I love you” to a woman he met an hour ago. During hurried and awkward sex, he’s thinking: “Let’s get this over with so I can put another notch on my conquest meter.” She’s thinking: “Let’s get this over because I haven’t been laid in a month and I need this, but I also have to get up for work tomorrow.”

If your character is violent and self-absorbed make sex with that person something painful and unfulfilling for the partner (unless, of course, the partner is someone who gets off on violent and self-absorbed lovers).

One of the best examples of this is the movie American Psycho. In one scene, the lead character (a self-centered sociopath) is having sex with two women. His room is lined with mirrors and he’s watching himself during the entire sex act. He’s basically using the women to masturbate on fantasies of himself. One of the women has to be hospitalized. It wasn’t a joyful thing for her. This scene says more about the lead character’s complete lack of feeling for other human beings than the scenes in which he brutally kills them.

At the other side of the spectrum, don’t have a prudish character suddenly having torrid sex unless you’re going for humor, or you’ve set the character up for this with the occasional erotic daydream or a quick flash in the character’s eye when a member of the opposite sex walks in, and the flash reveals something stirring inside, like a repressed sexual dynamo waiting to be loosened.

I remember watching pornographic movies with the guys in college. For the most part everyone laughed. Your sex scenes should make people think or understand, not laugh (unless you’re writing comedy). If the sex in your stories isn’t saying something about your characters, then it’s gratuitous, and possibly pornographic, or maybe it’s just boring.

The key to writing about sex is to not force it. Let it flow through you from the characters you’ve created. And don’t be afraid to experiment. If something seems a little over the top or perverse, but that’s the direction your writing is taking, go with it. You can always edit or toss it later. On the other hand, you may have found that you’ve written something beautiful, even if perversely beautiful.

Try This

Write a two-paragraph description of two people having sex. Use only their thoughts, no physical description (i.e. the bed, the room, etc.) unless it’s coming from the thoughts of the character. Write quickly and just let the words flow.

How Much Sex Should Your Character’s Have?

How much sex is right? That’s completely up to you and your characters. They might be able to get through a 400 page novel without once having sex, or as in Susan DiPlacido’s steamy chic lit novel, 24/7, they might not be able to get through four pages without sex.

If you find yourself putting a lot of sex into your first draft, keep it there for the time being. You can edit out the gratuitous stuff later, asking yourself, does this make sense? Is this real? Is this what these people would do?

Again, let the sex come from the characters you’ve created. If you’ve done your work on them before you started writing, then trust them to have the kind of sex they want to have. Don’t try to manipulate them. Write mindlessly, following the feelings your characters invoke in you. The sex they have may change them. Let them change.

In this light, if you’re writing erotic fiction, make sure your characters are erotic. Build them around their sexuality. Give background to their sexuality. Give the reader flashbacks to their first sexual acts. Give the reader their daydreams and fantasies and then make those daydreams and fantasies come true.

But also give them lives outside their sex lives. Make them real people in every facet of their lives and then put real people into the sack with them.

Do this, and two or three chapters into your book, your characters will let you know how much sex they should have.

How Do You Balance Sex Between Pornography and Eroticism?

Sex scenes don’t have to be graphic with descriptions of wildly flailing bodies and graphic close-ups of genitalia. If the sex is violent, you might describe bruises and grunts and facial expressions more than sexual contact. If the sex is humorous, you might focus most of your description on props like clothing, condoms and a leaky waterbed. You might even describe anything but the people. The entire scene can unfold as the description of a flower blooming, incorporating the sensual movement of petals as they tighten and then unwind and finally burst into color.

You might describe everything that’s going on in the character’s life, incorporated right into the sex act. The best example I’ve ever seen of this is Molly’s sex scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it hardly says anything about body-to-body contact.

However, if you’re writing erotica, you’ll want your sex scenes to be more explicit. But erotica is not pornography, and two bodies just pounding away at each other without any kind of build-up or reason isn’t going to create great eroticism. You need to arouse your reader. You need to give your reader a little literary foreplay, getting into the minds of your characters and exploring their wants and expectations.

Pornography turns people into sex machines, indulging in sex for no other reason than to go through the motions. In fact, pornography dehumanizes people to the point where they become little more than plastic sex dolls. It’s demeaning to both parties.

Erotica gets into the minds and bodies of your characters and makes your readers feel what they’re feeling. It’s a beautiful exploration, and if you can incorporate the rich experience of your character’s life into the act of sex like Joyce does, then you’ll be giving your readers a glimpse into your characters’ souls.

Romance, is generally much less explicit, with the focus on love or a relationship built on much more than sex.

Try This

Write one paragraph of pornography. Then turn it into one paragraph of erotica. Then turn your paragraph of erotica into an act of love. Let yourself go on this exercise. You can destroy it as soon as you've written it so that no one else will see what you've written, but you should go beyond yourself in this exercise so that you understand the differences between the various approaches to writing sex.