The 12 Days of Liz: Day Four: First Person Intimate

The realization that I actually had a lot more words than I thought was a little grim. I want this book finished and cutting fourteen thousand words is not going to hurry that along. So clearly I need to step back and look at those scene sequences again. But in the meantime, I only have two scenes to rewrite to get this act done and one is the lousy sex scene I’ve been avoiding for months.

I thought about this a lot last night which always seems like not working, but if I don’t think about it, I can’t fix it, and this is a tricky one for me. I’m coming to see more and more that the juice in this story is Liz and Vince, that I’m just a ‘shipper at heart. So the fun stuff is Liz and Vince, it’s Liz and her mom, it’s Liz and Lavender, it’s Liz and Peri, it’s Liz and Molly, it’s Liz and her aunt. For me, it is not figuring out the puzzle. The puzzle needs to be there, Lavender’s death is integral to the book and vital to Liz’s journey, but this isn’t a mystery, it’s a journey book.

Which means that the first scene with Liz and Vince in bed, while it actually does move the mystery, has to be a lot more about confounding Liz’s expectations, about surprising Liz emotionally and psychologically. I’ve always known that the action in a sex scene is never what’s important (unless you’re writing erotica), it’s the impact on the people in the scene (well, that’s any scene), so that’s the key to this rewrite. But I’m still trying to figure out how to do this in first person.

The problem with first person in general is that the entire mood and pace of the book depends on that one voice, and that voice has to be in character or the book falls apart. So anything I write has to not only sound like Liz is saying it (voice), it also has to sound like Liz WOULD say it (character). And Liz is detached and sardonic and not emotional, and she would never give a blow-by-blow account of something she’d shared in bed. She’d see it as a betrayal. And yet, Liz has to talk about her night with Vince (and later her other nights with Vince) in order for the reader to know the impact it has on her.

So first I have to figure out the impact. I already have a good idea why they’re going to stick together like those magnetic salt and pepper shakers, I know the psychology, but that doesn’t help because psychology does not put emotion on the page. It makes the emotion you do put there plausible, but you can’t EXPLAIN why they’re drawn to each other, you have to show it. And that puts me back to first person Liz talking about what she and Vince did in bed.

Right now, I’m thinking she wouldn’t in any kind of physical detail. It’s just too wrong for her, that would be breaking character. But I think “detail” is key here; as always, it’s the significant details not the stereo instructions that matter, and I think what Liz selects as key detail, trying to explain the emotional turmoil the night caused while hiding it behind her usual detached snark, is probably the way to go. Except she wouldn’t talk about her emotions that way, it’s too on the nose, and again too intimate for Liz. Somehow, Liz has to talk about this without saying, “I felt . . .” or without giving a play by play. She’s a writer; she’d select the most interesting things by instinct, and she’d arrange them in story form, but she’d do it off the top of her head so there would be things she’d say that would betray deeper feelings without any on-the-nose analysis.

I think you have to do that in any intensely emotional scene, but sex scenes with all their attendant baggage, mean that you have to concentrate more closely on the moments that betray what’s really going on, the things that the characters won’t admit to themselves, the moments that foreshadow what’s going to happen later, all while satisfying the ‘shipper jones in the reader. I think sex scenes are much easier to write when they’re not about sex, they’re about what happens to two naked people in the dark (or light), trying to make a connection without losing too much of themselves. And I think in this case anyway, the juice is in the fact that they’re going to lose themselves in each other anyway, that even before they hit the sheets, they’re lost, they just haven’t seen it yet, and when they do, they don’t want it. I love that “Oh, hell, not you” plot; and I think that’s what I have to keep front and center here.

That and the sex. And cutting fourteen thousand words. Back tomorrow with paper blood on my hands.