On learning how to write depth (by writing porn)

This is the fourth in a series relating to how writing sex in fiction is beneficial to you as a writer. The previous post can be found here.

Last post I started talking about the ways in which research lends solidity to sensations we describe as writers, and I invoked the word ‘depth’. Depth is, essentially, the ability to draw a reader into the world of the story and forget the world outside exists. There’s a lot of contributing factors to it, but the rubric I’ve heard most recently is Dean Wesley Smith’s ‘try to invoke all five senses every 300-400 words’.

Depth is something you want. (Density is something else.) Getting an audience to visualise what’s happening with empathetic reactions draws them in, and that’s best done with descriptions which the audience can share through their senses.

(If you’re really unsure about what that means and how to handle it, I recommend WGM’s Depth workshop over here. It unfortunately costs money, but my co-author swears by it, and though I haven’t taken that specific workshop myself, I’ll swear by anything WGM puts out for a writer’s education.)

Sex is an extremely sensory act, which means to write it well a writer is going to have to describe the sensory impact on the characters. By definition this produces depth. And no, I’m not just talking about ‘wow mind-blowing orgasm much’, though describing orgasms can be really fun (and also get very difficult to do in new and unique ways after you’ve done it often enough). The intimacy of sex can involve kissing (not just the mouths), touching (hands in places they may not otherwise), cuddling (just being skin to skin is valid), breathing (these people are being very close), humidity (if it’s a sexy sex scene they’re presumably putting off heat), smelling (yes, the hair, and also who farted pls), and some really odd noises (rusty-gate moaning much?).

And those are without even taking into account the emotional impact. The fluttering heart, the fierce loving warmth, the struggle with fear of doing it wrong. A writer’s job, and delight, is to describe all of these as humanly as they can, and as sexily or emotionally or hilariously as they want.

Since sex represents an intensely intimate moment in time, it’s easy to practice limiting the scene to just that, and focus primarily on just the characters who are in the scene (whether it’s someone having sex with themselves, with a partner, with multiple partners). There’s nothing else that has to matter in the scene other than these people, what they’re doing with each other, and the sensations and feelings they’re experiencing. That frees the writer up to not have to think about anything else too.

This is great practice for when you want to take characters out of that closed intimacy, when they have to experience the rest of the world you’re building all around them; one which, more than likely, has a lot more variables in play … and a lot more interactions too.