On broadening character voice (by writing porn)

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

I’ve been talking a lot about a writer having words in their arsenal and making sure they aren’t afraid of any given word (even the ones they opt not to use for sensitivity reasons). That isn’t just in support of a writer’s choices being considered instead of fearful, or because of attitude. As with everything, the words we use define the story we’re telling.

In this instance, the words relate to character voice. A writer’s voice is a voice across stories: themes which show up again and again, character types a writer enjoys the most; phrases they revisit, or quirks they tend to focus on. Character voice involves similar things, but from the character point of view, and a character’s voice will not always match a writer’s voice. In fact, you don’t want them to.

If you’ve ever been worried, as a writer, about all your characters sounding the same, one of the simplest ways to start delineating one character from another is by the words they use while they’re the narrator. This can make multiple-perspective stories a lot easier than single-perspective ones, because it means you can assume a given character’s tone and word use whenever it’s their perspective; if there’s a character who is never a narrator, then you pretty much only have their dialogue to differentiate their voice. That makes the words they use more important.

To be clear here, I’m not just talking about specific words but how they use them. Writing out accents isn’t something I recommend just because it can easily get in the way of reading comprehension: but throwing in a lost ‘h’ (only for example) or writing someone who doesn’t use contractions is going to simply and easily mark one character from another. Punctuation, the way they run their sentences together, the words they avoid, the dialects of languages they use, are all instances of character voice.

So how does this relate to sex, and how does writing sex help with that?

Well, there’s only so many words in English, at least, for sexual terms, especially if you’re writing characters with female genitals, which have fewer elegant options than male genitals. (This might be different for other languages, but since I speak and write in English, that’s what I’m using as my example.) ‘Vagina’ has a vastly different tone than ‘pussy’. English has far more euphemisms for sex-related things than it does synonyms, many of which are products of their time and won’t ring the same to a modern ear (but could well be useful for a period piece, if that’s what you want). By ignoring some words as taboo (or too vulgar, or too clinical, or or or —), a writer is significantly reducing their descriptive options.

This is why it’s vital for a writer not to be afraid of calling a penis a penis or a vagina a vagina: if someone only ever writes from the perspective of dancing around the body parts they’re talking about and the acts that are happening, then all their sex scenes will have the overtone of a Victorian pearl-clutcher. If a sex scene isn’t important to a story, by all means, fade to black or gloss over the details: but if a writer is actively avoiding some terminology because they’re afraid of it, they’re almost certainly undermining who some of their characters actually are.

Some characters are going to call a penis a penis. Some characters are going to call a penis a dick, or a cock, or something else. Some may not want to call it anything, in which case sidling around is just fine. Some characters will probably call them different things depending on their maturity or education at a given time. And there’s only so many times a writer can use any one of those words in consecutive sentences, which makes generic descriptors (like the oh-so-useful ‘length’) pretty vital to any given character.

The dearth of synonyms for sex-related objects and activities just about requires a writer to get better about which ones they use when, and how to get their point across without unnecessary repetition. And that’s a useful skill to develop.

Writing sex with a full linguistic arsenal, writing sex in a way that isn’t just fearfully avoiding saying what you mean, results in a better awareness and understanding of word-use and better choices about when and how to use them, even outside of sex scenes. On a micro level, limiting some words to some characters, and other words to other characters, is one way of making your characters seem far more diverse, and gives them their own voices separate from yours as a writer.