On establishing character (by writing porn)

This is the fifth 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 week I talked about depth as a means of bringing the reader into the story, and brought up the act of getting readers to empathise with the characters. Depth is often about senses: but senses are also about the human element. A character who doesn’t seem to bleed, grieve or exhibit joy might be fun to read about on occasion and especially for some people — sometimes our means of escape includes investing in people who are genuinely too cool for school — but for the most part stories are about people.

Sensation is the first step in writing about characters as people. When you write about someone masturbating, you’re not just writing about self-pleasure: you’re writing them interacting with themselves. When you write about a couple, you’re writing about them interacting (or not) with each other. When you write about a threesome … and so on, and so on.

Interactions between characters are what make a story. Interactions between hero and villain, protagonist and antagonist, values and motives and needs are the story. (Yes, man-against-nature and man-against-society are also narrative conflicts, but my point stands. Society is carried by people and even when a character is alone in a story they’re still going to be interacting with themselves; and in many cases non-human elements become their own characters. It is a human function to apply motive to things which may not have them, and to tell stories about it.)

Like writing sensory depth, using the platform of sex in its intimacy and limiting intrusion from other story elements, is a good place to begin playing around with character interaction. The human element is where you get to play: this is where you decide whether the porn is about sex or about cuddling, whether it’s about carnal lust or about emotional intimacy. I’m using the word ‘porn’ loosely here, to be fair, but sex scenes are just as much about the decision not to have sex as they are about the decision to. Without the former, there is no latter: there’s just an assumption, which is inherently an abdication of control. Recognising the gap gives you leeway to step away from conventional perspectives on ‘insert flap a into slot b’ sex scenes and think about the humanity of the characters.

Your characters live in a society, and they are going to reflect their interactions with it. A man and a woman in a room aren’t just going to wind up having mind-blowing sex, unless you want the fantasy that sex only happens one way and between two sexes (which you might, and makes for a good starting point if you’re ignorant about other options). Make no mistake that that is a fantasy, however.

From a human perspective, a woman in a room with a man is going to be thinking about how safe she is, how much choice she has, whether she feels compelled to have sex with him or secure enough to say ‘no’ if she wants to. The way the man acts will determine her reactions; the way the man acts is determined by his upbringing, choices, societal influences, and his own desires.

What if she doesn’t want sex? What if, it turns out, she’s asexual? Tells him that? And he accepts it? Admits that maybe he doesn’t want sex either?

What if a man and a woman just cuddled all night, clothing optional, because they wanted to, because they didn’t feel the need for anything else?

What does that say about them as people? What does it say about their pasts, their fears, their desires? What are they likely to face when they step outside that room?

This is what I mean by the human element. Sex scenes do not have to be guaranteed sex: they’re about intimacy. They can be about the interactions of emotions and physicality in ways that don’t have to involve the satiation of lust. This is why fans ship people with intimate interactions in media; the intimacy is part of the sex appeal.

What if the man was in a wheelchair? What if the woman was? What if either of them had difficulty articulating their needs vocally? What if they were both men? What if they were both women? What if one of them was agender and dysphoric? What if one of them was still in transition? What if both of them were? What if one of them was wrestling with their relationship with their body? What if —

And so on.

When you’re thinking about sensory depth, there’s a point you start thinking about interactions between people and how those interactions cause sensations. If you’ve done some research and thought about how people interact, you’re also going to start thinking about the very different ways it’s possible for them to interact. About the impact of those interactions.

People are varied and different: thinking about them on a platform of intimacy in a closed room is the first step to thinking about them in the wider world, and how they might interact with it. When you limit yourself to that intimacy, you can also start developing an insight as to the world beyond them via their reactions to one another, both physical and emotional.

The world around your characters is important to who they are. Once you start getting that, you’ve begun establishing not just the characters of your protagonists, but the character of the world in which they live: and, by extension, the other people in it.