You always remember your first.
I have always enjoyed writing a good love scene. Ok. Maybe “love” scene isn’t that accurate, but sex scene sounds like seventies porn music should be playing in the background. So, I’m going to use the L-word to describe one of my favourite parts of writing erotic romance. (Dialogue is also a lot of fun. Particularly the guy’s part. They can say shocking and hilarious things without being judged quite as harshly for some reason.)
Here’s how I got my start.
When I was around 13 my family moved to Southern Ontario and I would have to take the bus to school. The route meandered all over the county and took about forty minutes. My classmates and I were always looking to entertain ourselves on these trips. (Usually this involved someone being cruelly taunted for their questionable wardrobe choices. Yes, I was usually the one being mocked.) One of the things we would do was pass around books we considered pretty hot stuff. It seems tame now but we seriously thought The Thorn Birds and Flowers in the Attic were racy.
We didn’t actually sit around reading the entire books on those long, cold bus rides. No, we would just read the spicy sections. The objective was to shock and titillate each other but I think this activity also gave us a valuable education. I know it was an eye opener for me. The first time I heard about a woman performing oral sex on a man I thought it was a joke. Who would want to do that? “Gag me” was the universal response to that idea. (Remember, it was the eighties.)
Eventually we ran out of reading material. There were only so many paperbacks we could pilfer from our mothers’ collections without being caught and not many of their books met with our dirty requirements. So, we decided to write our own love scenes. The results of this experiment were mixed. One particularly disturbing example described the fictional couple dining on “dried cum” after sex. Like it was a delicacy or something. Yes, really. Not sure what kind of twisted world the author of that piece of fiction lived in but I’m pretty sure I was traumatized by the idea. (Thanks Alana.) For years I thought this odd custom would be expected of me if I had sex with a boy. Needless to say, I wanted no part of it.
Not all of the examples of amateur erotica were horrifying. There was, of course, a lot of flowery prose and bad grammar but at least a few of the girls could write. Then it was my turn. Writing assignments for teachers and for my own enjoyment were nothing new but this was different. I would actually get an honest reaction from my audience. Teenage girls can be so cruel, especially if they sense weakness and I was definitely an outsider. Being new and desperately shy didn’t help matters. I suppose I considered those girls my friends at the time but they were also my tormentors. I knew they would cheerfully crush me if they felt my effort was too naïve or too raunchy. I felt positively sick as I handed out the photocopies of my first “love” scene and waited for their reactions.
This is the part where you want to believe that I won them all over with my writing. Happy ending time. Yay! That would have been great. But no, it didn’t happen that way. But my fellow bus passengers didn’t call me Horny Helen either. (Yes, one unfortunate fledgling writer got saddled with that particular nickname as a direct result of our little writing experiment.) What did happen was that I got to witness people reading my work and genuinely enjoying it. None of them would actively admit it, but I could tell. It was good. I’d entertained them and that gave me more pleasure than reading any love scene from any book ever could.
That’s when I knew I would be a writer someday.
In some ways, I’m still riding that bus, anxiously waiting for a reaction from my audience and hoping, just hoping to give them what they want from a good book.
Here’s how I got my start.
When I was around 13 my family moved to Southern Ontario and I would have to take the bus to school. The route meandered all over the county and took about forty minutes. My classmates and I were always looking to entertain ourselves on these trips. (Usually this involved someone being cruelly taunted for their questionable wardrobe choices. Yes, I was usually the one being mocked.) One of the things we would do was pass around books we considered pretty hot stuff. It seems tame now but we seriously thought The Thorn Birds and Flowers in the Attic were racy.
We didn’t actually sit around reading the entire books on those long, cold bus rides. No, we would just read the spicy sections. The objective was to shock and titillate each other but I think this activity also gave us a valuable education. I know it was an eye opener for me. The first time I heard about a woman performing oral sex on a man I thought it was a joke. Who would want to do that? “Gag me” was the universal response to that idea. (Remember, it was the eighties.)
Eventually we ran out of reading material. There were only so many paperbacks we could pilfer from our mothers’ collections without being caught and not many of their books met with our dirty requirements. So, we decided to write our own love scenes. The results of this experiment were mixed. One particularly disturbing example described the fictional couple dining on “dried cum” after sex. Like it was a delicacy or something. Yes, really. Not sure what kind of twisted world the author of that piece of fiction lived in but I’m pretty sure I was traumatized by the idea. (Thanks Alana.) For years I thought this odd custom would be expected of me if I had sex with a boy. Needless to say, I wanted no part of it.
Not all of the examples of amateur erotica were horrifying. There was, of course, a lot of flowery prose and bad grammar but at least a few of the girls could write. Then it was my turn. Writing assignments for teachers and for my own enjoyment were nothing new but this was different. I would actually get an honest reaction from my audience. Teenage girls can be so cruel, especially if they sense weakness and I was definitely an outsider. Being new and desperately shy didn’t help matters. I suppose I considered those girls my friends at the time but they were also my tormentors. I knew they would cheerfully crush me if they felt my effort was too naïve or too raunchy. I felt positively sick as I handed out the photocopies of my first “love” scene and waited for their reactions.
This is the part where you want to believe that I won them all over with my writing. Happy ending time. Yay! That would have been great. But no, it didn’t happen that way. But my fellow bus passengers didn’t call me Horny Helen either. (Yes, one unfortunate fledgling writer got saddled with that particular nickname as a direct result of our little writing experiment.) What did happen was that I got to witness people reading my work and genuinely enjoying it. None of them would actively admit it, but I could tell. It was good. I’d entertained them and that gave me more pleasure than reading any love scene from any book ever could.
That’s when I knew I would be a writer someday.
In some ways, I’m still riding that bus, anxiously waiting for a reaction from my audience and hoping, just hoping to give them what they want from a good book.
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