Practice Novels: Not Just for the Start of a Writer’s Career

In my late teens and early twenties, I wrote three novels that I like to refer to as my practice novels. At the time that I was writing them, I didn’t realise that I was just practising. It was only after they were complete that I knew they weren’t good enough, they weren’t the genre I wanted to pursue and they were unlikely to ever see the light of day.

I published the sex scene from the last of them, Liberty’s Secret, in 2015 in conjunction with a blog post on writing sex scenes, mostly to demonstrate that I’m not very good at writing sex scenes. It was full of euphemisms, the highs and lows of waves and crashing, and an overblown sense of emotion. Certainly, it was completely devoid of accurate names for genitalia. (That’s one of the big no-no’s of the romance genre I was attempting to write in.) And I published the entire book chapter by chapter on this blog earlier in 2017, just because… well, why not? I hate wasting writing.

I thought that was the end of my practice novels. But when I sat down to watch the movie of Fifty Shades of Grey, despite its flaws, I realised these genres and sex scenes more generally aren’t going anywhere. They are popular. And if done well, they can be important components of plot and character development. So I could continue avoiding them in my writing or I could try to get better.

Yes, more than twenty-five years after beginning my writing career and after publishing three books, I decided to write another practice novel. I had no intention of attempting to publish it for profit, just to improve on this writing area.

There were a few conditions I set for myself:

*It had to be about sex. (Duh, obviously if I’m practising at getting better writing sex scenes, that was a given.)

*It had to have a sex scene in every chapter. (Go hard or go home, right? No pun intended. But there’s no point writing a practice novel to get better at sex scenes if there are only one or two in the entire book.)

*It had to have a plot. A good plot. (If it doesn’t have a good plot, then that’s not sex, it’s just porn. I don’t want to write and I have no interest in being good at writing porn. I’m sure a few people make an okay living writing porn but I don’t want to be one of them.)

*It didn’t have to be kinky sex. (One step at a time. I just wanted to write about regular people with healthy sex lives. There would be no stepsister-stepbrother relationships, no ménages a trois, no S&M, no dominants, no submissives, no tampon scenes, none of the various scenarios I found – and was slightly traumatised by – when I did a little research about what authors in this genre write.)

*It had to have a hook. (Whilst I didn’t want to write about all those sex scenarios that seem so popular these days, it still needed to be more than just a basic sexual relationship.)

So I started writing. It sounds funny to admit it now but the thing I spent the most time on was naming the two main characters. Fletcher Smith and Sadie Van Der Zee. (Yes, a man and a woman. I’m straight and I thought it would be easier on me not to have to try to imagine sex I have no experience with. I encourage everyone to write outside their comfort zones but I still think there is merit in a natural progression from the things you know towards the things you don’t. Like I said, one step at a time.) Fletcher sounded like the name of a middle class man with muscles who worked in an office during the week and on the construction site of the house he was renovating on the weekends. And I made his last name Smith because of the connotations of couples checking into hotels for some hot sex using the “Mr & Mrs Smith” monikers.

Sadie also sounded middle class but Van Der Zee upped her exotic quotient. It also means “by the sea” and I liked the idea of her using “Lady by the Sea” as her cover name when arranging her anonymous hook-ups. Yes, that was the hook. She liked anonymous sex. And Fletcher just happened to be the lucky soul she mistook for her latest conquest.

I wrote over 11,000 words and despite the fact that I love Fletcher and Sadie as characters, in the end I got sick of writing about sex. I think I improved my abilities to write sex scenes but I also realised that part of the reason I hadn’t pursued these kind of plot points in most of my other writing is that I don’t especially enjoy it. At first it was fun and exciting but eventually it was just tedious. I want variety in my writing, for my sake as much as for the sake of my readers.

Still, I’m pleased I had a go. Now if I need or want to add a sex scene to what I am writing, I won’t be so intimidated by the prospect of it. It won’t necessarily be the best sex scene ever written but maybe I’ll be able to do enough to avoid a nomination for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award bestowed by the British Literary Review.

If you feel like you need to practise something or you just want to have a go at something you haven’t written much of in the past, here are a few tips:

*You don’t have to be a beginning writer to reap the benefits of practising. It should be the goal of every writer to continue getting better, not just stagnating, and this is one way of potentially making it happen.

*You don’t have to just practise very specific or obscure things like sex scenes. It’s probably a good idea for all writers to practise the big three: plot development, character development and developing writing styles, too. Sure, you can practise on your actual novel or a related side project (think Four by Veronica Roth – originally released as prequel short stories to the Divergent trilogy) but sometimes it helps to practise on something entirely unrelated.

*You don’t have to write an entire novel. Aim for a short story instead to help maintain your sanity, avoid boredom and not get completely distracted from your real writing.

*If your practice writing turns out really well, don’t be afraid to pursue it even if it isn’t your normal genre or your normal style. It could be the beginning of a brave new writing world for you.

*****

Look out for the first two chapters of Sex with a Stranger on my blog next week. I actually wrote three-and-a-bit chapters but I feel like the first two were the strongest, probably because they happened before I started to get bored. I guess it’s up to you to decide whether I achieved what I set out to do. Perhaps a comparison with the sex scene from Liberty’s Secret might help. But be kind: I’m still practising.