On mastering character emotion (by writing porn)

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

Previously I’ve talked about sensation in sex and using it to create depth. This week I’m talking about emotions. These aren’t unrelated. Sensation the way people conventionally talk about it is something exerted: like the breeze in hair, or fingers on skin (using our sexual context).

Emotions are the flipside of that. Emotions are sensation, but sourced from the inside, instead of sourced from the out. The last couple of centuries of society tends to cast emotions as namby-pamby airy-fairy things which can’t be defined and are pretty useless, but that demeans their physiological role. When you feel afraid, your gut clenches; when you’re spurred to act, your limbs tingle with adrenaline. We don’t like to acknowledge it a lot as a society, but emotions are physical things.

Luckily for the writer uncertain how to write emotions, that makes sex a good way to lead in. You can start with just focussing on the outside physical sensations: the pleasure, the pain, the tinglies. Sex scenes which focus mostly on the physical sensory aspects can be extremely fun, and is a valid technique when all you want is something titillating: but for our purposes it’s also a good springboard for moving from general sensation to emotional ones.

Also fortunately for the writer uncertain how to write emotions, most people are familiar with how emotions feel. We may not like them and we may not pay much attention to them, but emotional sensations are far easier to research than physical sensations. If you’re a writer who lacks a prostate and you’re writing characters who have one, you need to go out and find those descriptions to know what kinds of sensations you’re writing. On the other hand, everyone has emotions one way or another. Everyone knows how it feels to be nervous, or afraid, or overwhelmed. The part that makes them harder than physical sensation is that in order to ‘research’ them you have to be honest with yourself about what you feel and how you feel it. For some people, that makes writing them extraordinarily difficult.

As I’ve said before, sex scenes are a closed scenario. You can make them as limited or unlimited as you like. That means you can put your characters in a safe and consensual place and still have them be afraid or nervous. Thanks to our human desire to be accepted (and fear of being not), a writer can always justify letting a character have trouble with their emotions based on pretty much any stimulus (using stimulus in the broadest sense possible).

You don’t need to come up with a big reason for someone to be emotional about having sex. It could be their first time. It could be they really like this particular partner. It could be they put on weight, or lost it, since the last time they had sex. They don’t need to be facing something traumatic, whether in their memories or in the moment, in order to feel emotional about what they’re doing.

It is possible to make emotions overblown — that is, to create an emotional reaction which doesn’t match the circumstances. In the hands of an experienced writer, that can be a sign of a well-written traumatic character arc. In the hands of a less experienced one, it’s a learning experience on how to match the internals with the externals. Which one is the correct path is up to you and what your intent is for that character, or what you’d like to discover by following that potential. In my experience, it’s the fear of making emotions overblown which tends to hold some writers back, more than the act of casting fucks to the wind and having fun with the situation.

Focusing on these small, human foibles lowers the stakes and makes emotions easier to learn, especially when contrast to the physical sensations which may or may not be occurring in the scene. Since you don’t have to show your porn to anyone, you can feel free to experiment with just what those scales are, and what it can say about a character if they feel too much or too little. If that’s not what you want, then you can try again. (I don’t, as a habit, recommend ‘deleting everything and starting over’. If you always go back to the starting line, you’ll never progress down the track.)

For me, emotions are an intrinsic part of writing sex, because the intimacy and the vulnerabilities are part of the appeal just as much as the physical titillation. It makes sense to me that one should come with the other, so I encourage the exploration of both. Nail those, and you can start to bring emotional physiological reactions out of the bedroom (or office, or elevator, or wherever the sex is happening) and into your characters’ day-to-day lives.