On the shallowness of life or death stakes played straight

I came to the recent realisation how much I dislike narrative stakes which rely solely on life-or-death situations. This realisation was prompted by thinking about spoilers, and how I interact with spoilers.

That whole topic is a separate one, but this particular realisation involves narrative tension. Narrative tension is what keeps an audience in: it’s what makes the reader want to know what happens next. The narrative stakes are what create the tension: it’s the tool that manifests the tension that makes you invested. They go hand-in-hand; the nature of the tension is defined by the stakes involved.

When I think about stories I have felt betrayed by, or which I abandoned halfway through, or which made me the most anxious, it always came down to the stakes. More specifically, it very often comes down to whether or not the stakes are life-or-death.

Life-or-death stakes are the easiest stakes to think of. They’re probably the most common. They’re also, on the face and at their most basic level, arguably the most boring stakes possible to write about.

The most basic form of life-or-death comes down to one question: Will the characters survive?

Now, to be clear, this question, despite it being boring, doesn’t make a story boring. That question is a staple of tragedies and horror subgenres everywhere. In these instances, the reason for its success is because the point isn’t that the question needs to be answered; for a lot of genres which lean on it, the audience knows the answer is most likely ‘no’. The point here is that the audience already knows how the question will be answered; in which case the stakes become something else.

The stakes become ‘who will survive’; and ‘how will they survive’ and ‘how will those who die do so’.

Now, I’m not myself a fan of tragedies or horror. I don’t like reading about tragedy or death for death’s sake. I don’t have enough knowledge or trust to know which subgenres of horror actually keep people alive, let alone in good shape at the end of it (I can only assume there are some, purely because it’s an available option).

So I don’t engage in those genres. I have friends who do, however, and who have described the appeal as being a certainty. That the story happens as it does because it is these characters in this place at this time; that the tragedy is foregone because the characters are who they are. This description indicates that, by definition, the audience knows the answer to the question ‘will they’: the very point of these genres is that the question of ‘will they/won’t they’ is subverted, because the question is already answered.

(This, incidentally, is why a good writer does not write a Romance in which the main couple do not get together: it’s not being original, it’s betraying the reader’s expectations of the genre’s question. In most Romances, the question is not ‘will they get together’; it’s how. Anyone who writes otherwise has misunderstood the nature of the question as applied to the genre. This is also why love triangles are such a staple; the triangle is either a means to introduce tension while still telegraphing the ‘main’ couple, or a genuine orientation of the question toward ‘who will this character wind up with’, which is the closest you can get to ‘will they/won’t they’ without being willing to actively betray the audience. Notably, love triangles which go to the latter extreme are also among the most polarising pairings in a given canon.)

Now, take life-or-death out of tragedy and horror. Put it in genres where it didn’t customarily have a place. Do that for a few decades, during a time when some genres — science fiction in particular — were explicitly neutered from having reliably happy endings. Keep doing it, until there’s a predominance of apocalyptic narratives and an over-focus on grimdarkness calling itself ‘realism’.

A lot of the negative narratives we see today reflect — among other things — an assumption that, a, a life-or-death stake is a necessity for a good story; and, b, that life-or-death stakes are about ‘will they die or not’, rather than the adjacent and implied questions.

Playing that question straight might work for some people, but for me it is an inherently shallow and unwanted suspense. It distracts me from the story I actually want to experience. When I engage in fiction, I don’t want to know whether. I want that question already answered: that’s why, when I’m experiencing something a friend already has, do they live is my most asked question, alongside does it turn out okay for them?

I want to know people live, and I want to know things turn out okay. (Okay doesn’t mean the same.) These are the questions I want answered from the outset: and I have, far too often, begun stories which seemed to be about the hows and decided, seemingly at the last minute, that they were in fact about the wills.

Which is why I don’t trust writers very much anymore. Which is why I don’t read fiction sight unseen: because many modern writers think that a story demands only the surface level question, and ignore the potential of the rest.

The real questions I want answered are how things will turn out okay. Why they will turn out okay. These are the stakes I care about. A character’s life is threatened? I want to see how they get out of it, not whether they will.

‘Will they live’ is a closed question. There’s very little to expand upon once that question is answered. A good story might begin with that question: it doesn’t end on it. And this applies to any stakes-related question which begins with will. (See: Romance.)

‘How they live’ is an open question. There’s far greater depths to plumb there, narratively and emotionally, than there ever will be for the former.

On schedule disruptions and recreating habits

I originally planned to round off the ‘writing sex’ series (but couldn’t think of anything, so it’s probably done) or talk about spoilers (but I think that’s going to wind up being a bigger subject than I originally planned and I want to plan that out a little more). Instead I’m going to talk about something I didn’t get a chance to while talking about writing sex, because it seemed weird to interrupt that series.

Those of you who’ve followed me for a while have probably observed that my posting schedule has been kind of weird lately. (Those who are new, hello! Welcome! Thank you!) This is because I finally got a job after not having one for longer than expected. On the one hand, this means income and less financial stress. On the other hand, this means a complete (expected) bombing of all the habits I had going, and my start wasn’t exactly a smooth one even accounting for the shock of going back to full-time work.

As a result, I don’t have a lot of energy and I do have some trouble with figuring out how to get my systems going again with the majority of my time being monched by capitalism. I’m aiming to at least get blogs up by the end of the weekend (today is Sunday for me), so while the exact timing won’t be consistent at least there’s a solid range of posting.

Perhaps appropriately, I believe this week marks a year since I started writing a blog, which is a pretty decent habit; so if comes down to ‘posting a little bit late’ to keep it going, I’m happy with that. Here’s to another year. And reconstructed systems.

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.

On showing vs telling (while writing porn)

This is the ninth 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 wasn’t intending to write this post, but halfway through the previous one I realised that I was giving advice from a perspective of ‘showing’ very many details which may not be conventionally considered vital to a good sex scene. This is on purpose, because highlighting character humanity and small details are things that draw the reader into the story; but it’s by no means intended to be prescriptive, nor is it the only way to write a scene (and nor should it be).

Every writer starts out with ‘show don’t tell’. Most writers get given that phrase as their first piece of advice. It’s a vital piece of advice, and most writers who stick at it then go on to a phase in their development of ‘purple prose’. This, also, is a vital stage of writing, because it’s one of the places where writers actually learn to develop their own voice. Anyone can write too little; anyone can write too much. (And everyone, at some stage, will.) But one of the things which makes a writer’s voice individual is where they land on the scale in-between those extremes.

I’ve been using the word ‘porn’ loosely and tongue-in-cheek: but the fact is that my sex scenes are more like erotica. The main difference between them is that porn is just about the sex; erotica tends to have plot, emotion and character arcs. There’s nothing wrong with either, but in very broad strokes they can also represent the two extremes of ‘tell more than show’ and ‘show more than tell’, with a sexual medium.

Personally speaking, I don’t write sex just to be titillated. Or, I do, but part of the titillation involves the characters’ foibles and needs, their humanity (broadly defined given that not everyone writes sex between humans). For me a sex scene without those things might be hot, but it’s forgettable, and I’d much rather read the other.

For other people it’s going to be different. If a writer wants to focus on writing the sex, only the sex, with only the physical sensations and lacking the feeling or too much of the character emotion, that’s a valid choice. Doing so (and learning how to do so well, which is the important part) trains that writer how to write with less description, how to make every word count to get their point across successfully (in this case, their goal is most likely to titillate the reader, even if the reader is only themselves).

I do encourage people to write sex with a perspective as to the feeling, awkwardness and foibles of the participants, however, because that teaches the other side, and it’s easier to take out than try and fill in. What’s important to say? What’s too much? Where’s the line between making characters seem over-dramatic or just tightly wound? I mentioned in the post on writing character emotion that it’s possible to make emotions overblown: that is exactly this principle in action. It’s an over-description of its own, a form of lending too much weight to something which really doesn’t need it.

I started out this series from a position that the only way a writer can really be free to use the correct words is if they’re unafraid to use any word, as long as that use, or that lack of use, is conscious and considered. (A reminder: when I say writers ought to be unafraid of words, I’m not saying this means we have carte blanche to use them inappropriately and without regard for the impact on our audience.)

Writing with a focus only on the physical aspects of sex is valid, but if that’s all a writer ever writes, they’re holding back their own development. (And, of course, the reverse: a writer who only ever writes with a lot of description is ignoring the ability to write with fewer words.) Dean Wesley Smith once said something to the effect that a good writer will start out writing sparsely, go on to writing densely, and then many of the best writers will go on to writing sparsely again. The difference is that the second time around, they’re doing it on purpose.

Now, he was talking specifically about word-use (ie, how many words are actually needed to grab the reader and convey intention), but the premise is similar to both the development of author voice and the development of the skills needed to know how much focus is needed for a given scene.

Your author voice will turn out to be somewhere in the middle of ‘lacking description’ and ‘purple prose-y’. Thanks to all the different techniques you can focus on learning while writing sex, it’s a lot easier to figure out where you’re most comfortable on a level of focus. That is going to be your default, where you shine; your comfort zone. That’s the place where someone reading your work will recognise you, often before you even realise you have that comfort zone.

The skill, on the other hand, is a necessary tool to controlling the narrative and its tones. Do you want to focus on the awkward shenanigans, or do you want your characters to come off as suave and cool? Do you just want the sex, or do you want the emotions with it? Do you just want character-emotion porn, or are there going to be plot aspects? Your answer is going to change from scene to scene, story to story. There’s no one right answer, only a technique to develop and wield as you need it.

The first sex scene I ever read was plot-dependent, so it didn’t linger overmuch on the sex (half a page, maybe). The sex scenes I read next, in a different series by a different author, were pretty much gratuitous fantasy (pages long). Different stories, different needs, and those two things will hold true even if the author is the same. The point is that the author knows it, and can do it on purpose, and on levels which don’t just involve sex scenes.

On figuring out physical logistics (by writing porn)

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

Something I hear a lot from writers — well, something I observe writers saying a lot — is that they have a lot of trouble with fight scenes. I’ve got good news for them! Writing porn can help develop those skills too.

The thing about fight scenes is that there’s a lot of moving parts, and they involve people moving in ways or using tools the average writer might not be personally familiar with. Then there’s the setting consideration, the weather, the location — it’s a lot to keep track of at once when you’re not used to it. When you’re thinking with images in your head, it can be hard to forget that what you’re describing is the heaviness of a physical body in a solid location, and all that entails.

The physical logistics of sex is similar to a fight scene, but like I’ve mentioned in other posts it’s essentially a pared-down form. You can start with the most basic formula (bed, man, woman, missionary position, ie man on top of woman face to face) and expand slowly as you come to grips with what, exactly, any given position entails, and what kinds of efforts might be needed for it. (Yes, this means researching sex positions eventually.)

The basic ‘missionary’ is a stereotype, and you might think it doesn’t require that much thought, but every person is different and that means logistics which seem fine in theory might be a problem in practice. Using the aforementioned formula, a woman with asthma might have discomfort breathing if she’s flat on her back while having sex. And where does she like to put her legs — around her partner’s waist, or curled up next to her hips? Is the latter because she likes being parted and stretched, or because she finds it uncomfortable to be penetrated with her legs down?

And so forth. That isn’t even delving into characters who might have more severe physical conditions, whether temporary, chronic or permanent, and which may require substantially more research from people in relevant situations. The point is that starting from a position of stereotype makes it easy to think about the small nuances, the reasons why your character might prefer something one way instead of another, and expand from there.

The good thing about that basic formula — one on top of the other, face to face — means that any writer lacking partner, sexual experience or sexual desire can easily go and flop on their bed and act it out. No one needs a partner for that kind of research: just a willingness to feel a little silly while they test out where their limbs might go under what circumstances, and how it feels to be in any given position. It’s a little more difficult to do that with a fight scene between a gunslinger and a martial artist.

The main thing to remember is that bodies are physical things. They are, unfortunately, subject to gravity as well as physiology. If you’re not sure whether a body bends the way you want it to, get up and try it out. You’ll find soon enough whether it’s possible at your level of fitness and physiological capability, and can therefore judge whether or not it would be possible at a different fitness or condition.

Now consider the bedroom. Starting with the bed. How many pillows? Headboard or none? Big bed or small? Nightstand? Drawer? Condoms and lube available? Breakables on top that are going to go down if someone doesn’t look where they’re reaching? If they’re going to get wild, are elbows going to be smashed? Anything convenient to tie anyone to? Is it light or is it dark? A familiar place, or is someone liable to stub their toe if they need to get up? Are there windows? Is a voyeur kink in play? How thin or thick are the walls?

Setting is a vital part of physical logistics because people don’t move around in a vacuum: they move around in a set and limited space. And that limited space is bounded by the limited space outside the room, too: depending on the situation and how much development you want to give the sex, you can well assume your characters might be noticed outside of their immediate visual area.

The good part about this, also, is that you can still use your bedroom as a medium. If you were going to have sex in there, what would be in the way? What would you want to be readily available? If your characters were going to have sex in there, what would they find in the way, or want to be readily available? Use the spaces you have to get a grasp of how the spaces you’re imagining might work.

And then extend that. Sex on the couch. Sex in an office. Sex in an elevator. Sex in the park. You don’t necessarily need to imagine people having sex in places you know, unless you’re feeling daring: just think about what ought to be found there. Tree bark is rough; grass smells. How annoying is it to have rain dripping off the leaves above you? How much more annoying is that for someone on their back beneath that tree being fucked in the rain? The world around you will also lend to the world in your head.

Learning how to contend with physical logistics by writing porn means you can use your body and your spaces as a reference point, without needing the martial or combat knowledge that fighters and soldiers do. That makes it easier to be aware of how bodies work, how they’re impacted by their surroundings, even if you yourself don’t have a lot of first-hand knowledge; and that, like most other things previously mentioned, will make it easier to bring that awareness to writing scenes outside of sex.

And then, once you’re solid on those nuances, you can start deciding when and where to gloss over or ignore those details for the sake of the cool factor (or titillation, if you’re still writing porn).

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.

Mini blog series update: returning next week

Thanks to a series of urgent coinciding events and insomnia, the next blog about the benefits of writing porn will be showing up next weekend. I would prefer to actually be capable of thought when I write it, which as it happens is apparently not something I get to be this weekend (as might be evidenced by the fact that this post is in itself late).

As a preview though, I anticipate three more in the series. The next one will almost certainly about using porn to learn how to write character emotions, followed by the element of physical logistics and developing character voice. If there’s anything specifically people were interested in reading about, let me know and I can see whether I have anything to say about it.

On nailing narrative dissonance (by writing porn)

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

When I was writing last week about characterisation and using private moments to invoke the character of the world, I thought my next post would be an (unplanned) commentary on using sex for worldbuilding. And, true, it’s still sort-of related to that. But while mulling over how I’d write that post, I realised that what I actually wanted to say is something tangentially different.

Narrative dissonance is related to worldbuilding the same way that establishing character is related to worldbuilding: they both rely on the structure of the world a writer creates, and how that world moves, and how you as a writer interact with it. The way you write your characters will indicate what kind of world they grew up in. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said about that. (I might be wrong.)

What’s more important to me about worldbuilding is handling what a writer wants from their world versus what it actually is. Narrative dissonance is when a character makes a claim (ie, that the usually-male love interest is a good guy) which is defied by the character’s actual actions (the love interest acts in abusive or discriminatory ways) and, most importantly, the narrative agrees with the former.

If you have a character who says they’re good, no, really, but then don’t act like it, and the narrative treats them as though they aren’t good, you don’t have narrative dissonance. You have a character who is an asshole, in a setting which may or may not validate them (and this is okay). If you have a character who says they’re good but don’t act like it, but the narrative acts as though they do, that’s when narrative dissonance comes into play. It fundamentally blends the setting with the narrative, by assuming that the character or setting (if the world built agrees with the character) is correct (even when they may not be).

There’s a saying that the best way to get a measure of a person is how they treat those they consider their lessers. This is essentially what happens when you write a character (or characters) in a moment of vulnerability, intimacy, or both; you’re reducing characters to their most basic fundamentals and instincts with regard to how they interact with another person who is also in a state of vulnerability. (Yes, I said ‘a’ character: self-hatred is a thing. A character alone interacts with themself.) Sex is nearly always ‘both’, which makes it a good scenario to test your worldbuilding-narrative cohesion.

Awareness of this concept is important to establishing character because you want how your characters act to match who the story claims them to be. (Not necessarily who they claim to be.) It’s important to worldbuilding because the world you develop is the setting which validates them or not. And it’s important to story because it is the narrative itself which proves or disproves that connection. You could have a man who claims to be good, but isn’t, and is validated by the world around him, and is also narratively described as bad. Such a story is making a commentary not only on individuals, but the society they live in, and can do so without trying to actively be a social commentary.

Narrative dissonance is very often most socially recognised in romances between men and women, specifically because we as a society generally have enough awareness of various kinds of sexist abuse to recognise it in fiction. Yet it isn’t limited only to these situations, and can still be very readily revealed in all sorts of intimate situations you may choose to write about, especially for readers who have relevant experiences.

So when you have an abled character who treats a disabled character indulgently and/or as if they’re lazy, they might be an (intentional or unintentional) asshole. If the disabled character believes them, or the society in which they live believes them, then you have a probably-abusive situation. These may be salvageable scenarios narratively speaking (though potentially unwise, if you have no experience with ableism, disabilities, and the disabled character is the only disabled character in the story.) If you then have the story act as if the abled character is accurate in their assessment, judgement, and correct in their choices and actions toward the disabled character, then you have a story which is ableist and hurtful, and you need to rethink what you’re doing.

Narrative dissonance is one of the things which turns representation bad. Just the existence of a (woman, person of colour, neuroatypical, nonbinary person, take your pick) doesn’t make their representation good. This is why it’s so important to establish your characters well, and establish them not only in relation to each other and their setting, but to the story itself.

Your characters aren’t perfect. As long as your story recognises that they aren’t, and intends to call them out when they aren’t, you’re going to write better stories. Starting from a platform of a closed room and physical intimacy, while thinking about depth and characterisation, forces you to consider what kinds of assumptions you might be bringing to the scenario. The vulnerability (or conscious lack thereof) of the characters opens the door to understanding exactly how you, as a writer, approach those vulnerabilities. And it gives you the opportunity to make the choice to go in another direction.

Instead of a man who assumes he has a right to a woman’s body, have him ask consent at every turn to focus on her comfort and safety. Instead of writing about someone being ‘trapped’ by a lover whose genitals doesn’t match their gender, allow the latter room to air their fears with a person who will accept them. The way you approach your narrative will validate or condemn the actions your characters take, and which actions you choose to validate can negatively impact your readers.

Learning to juggle the differences between character/societal action, character/societal belief, and narrative validation is very difficult and nuanced, not to mention an ongoing learning experience, but doing so is the mark of a really good writer.

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.

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.