Hey, all you writer types. Let's look at spicing up your genre (or even literary) stories with a little (ahem) action. How do you incorporate sexy time into your stories?
Let's say for you a publisher is open to spicy but not all-out erotica, how do you determine where to draw the line yet still keep the sexy actually, you know, sexy?
Elizabeth Donald: Sex is part of the human experience, to a greater or lesser degree according to a person’s personal drives. We don’t have to literally shine a spotlight on the penetrating moment in order for sexuality to be at the forefront of the story. A character may be consumed with deep need and powerful attraction - indeed, it might be the driving force of their actions and even the plot, without us actually following them under the sheets. It’s not censorship to construct a story about sex and sexual attraction without actually depicting the act; if you’re doing your job right with evocative language, the reader will feel all the things you want them to feel, regardless of the explicitness of your story.
L. Andrew Cooper: In the fiction I've published, at least, the sex I've described has always been horrific in some way, from attempts to conceive a child for sacrifice in Descending Lines to the relentless taboo-breaking of Alex's Escape. I guess some scenes in The Middle Reaches are steamy, but they're still weird. So mostly I don't have to worry about sexy... I have to worry about explicit description ("showing") parts and acts. I guess if I have to satisfy a prudish publisher, I describe less or cut more.
Chris Riker: Sex is a great time for internal dialogue. A writer doesn't have to re-invent the old Penthouse Forum; he just has to tell us what the sex means to the characters.
"Then, while I was still trying to plot her trajectory, she said, “I won’t do anything on a futon, Zebulon.” The futon was in good shape, only a few beer stains on its lime green canvas, but it was a futon, so, as the French would say, ‘non humpez vous.’
I said, “There’s a big bed. The sheets are clean. And call me Zee, please.” I was hoping. Really hard. She kept me waiting a solid minute, standing there, considering her options. Then…
“Zee,” she said my name that way for the first time and put her arms around my neck. “Take me to the big bed with the clean sheets.”
Yes, I remember how her pencil skirt slid off her hips by lava lamp and the way her voice rose in primal song as she taught me to please her and the smoothness of her skin and the way my lungs drank in the scent of her hair. I remember giggling together afterwards and not being able to stop or wanting to. And when at last Jing fell asleep in my arms, I remember lying awake and feeling… real." - Zebulon Angell and the Shadow Army
Sean Taylor: I love to focus on the after or the before. I think there's a lot of magic to be covered there in the buildup or the afterglow. People get real then. Case in point, in this scene, Rick Ruby is visiting one of his, ahem, informants, a nightclub singer named Donna:
Rick Ruby screwed his eyes shut and let the colors swirl so tightly he couldn’t distinguish one from another. “Ave Maria” skipped like a broken record in his head. His body lurched like a falling boxer. His legs gave out. Then the rest of him did the same.
“Heya, Donna,” he said between heavy breaths.
Rick felt the blonde dancer’s weight shift above him.
“Heya yourself, Rick.” Then again, as usual, he had done most of the real work, not that he minded.
“That was nice.”
“Always is, Rick.”
“Think you can do it again, you know, that thing with the—”
She slapped his chest, then twirled the red hairs there between her fingers.
“No time. I’ve got to see Eddie in an hour.” Her smile fell just a little in spite of the way she tried to hide it. “We’ve got an… appointment.”
Let's say for you the sky is the limit, are there still ways you self-censor or listen to the "rules" and "guidelines" of your chosen genre to bring the sexy in a way that rings true to your story?
Mari Hersh-Tudor: In the book Holiday Faever, published by a bunch of us a few years ago, we were tasked with writing absolutely the smuttiest smut that ever smutted. We developed a base scenario and a premise. Since most of the authors were game-adjacent fantasy or traditional fantasy authors, that was our genre setup. I also challenged myself to take a modern scenario and make it traditional fantasy. An off-color joke of mine became the premise. Familiar with traditional fantasy, I read up on fantasy-based Fan Smut on AO3 and a couple of other sites to get an idea of what readers expect. Under the pen name JJ Gerisou, I ended up with 10,000 incredibly smutty words.
My creative method was to try to out-porn the porn industry. And here I think we have a partial answer to #5: book smut is viewed as porn, not literature. And somehow that’s bad.
Interestingly, I kept getting distracted by plot while writing smut, and my kids are still laughing about it. The smut I wrote as an experiment contains some solid kernels of a good book, and remains in my idea file for a complete rewrite.
Elizabeth Donald: Assuming that a positive expression of sexual desire is the emotion I am hoping to draw upon, I stay away sexual assault and especially from that awful 1980s trope of the nonconsensual sex that becomes “hot” because really she wanted it anyway, right? I am not one who believes that rape should never be included in fiction, because that policy whitewashes away the reality of women’s lives (and not a few men), more than half of whom have experienced attempted or completed sexual assault. But it should never be for titillation or trying to turn an act of violence into something “sexy.”
Ef Deal: There are some things I consider sacred, one being the sexual relations between two people in love. My task is to show that they love one another, and many meaningful discussions take place "in the afterglow" (a phrase I use often in my steampunk series) that reveal that love far more than a detailed description of their activity.
L. Andrew Cooper: After publishing Alex's Escape, I can make no claims about self-censorship. I don't like being smutty, though. I like giving even the most outrageous acts an aura of respectability.
Let's say that for you, there's a hard line against anything overtly sexy (be it you, the market, the genre, or your publisher). What are some of the sneaky, subtle ways to weave adult relationships into your fiction?
Ef Deal: One of my favorite non-smut lines is in Laurie King's Mary Russell series, which says, "we enjoyed the privileges granted by that piece of paper."
Elizabeth Donald: This is a hard one, because “hard lines” would mean my publisher is afraid to confront real issues in fiction. That means it’s a bad place for me. As I mentioned earlier, there are many ways to work in sexuality without depicting penetrative sex - in a very early story of mine, the protagonist’s girlfriend reaches past him, and her breast presses briefly against his arm. This immediately causes half the coherent thought to vanish from his mind. He’s not grabbing her into the back seat for a quickie; it just occupies his thinking brain for a moment. I intended it for wry humor, but it’s funny because it’s true: random sexual thoughts distract us even in the most inappropriate environments. For characters to walk around pretending they have no sexual thoughts, no desires and needs, makes for a very boring story and one that doesn’t encapsulate the human experience.
Sean Taylor: The movies are full of euphemisms for sex that are tried and true -- rain, fireworks, doves being released, a train entering a tunnel, diving into a pool -- and they're all still valid and useful, but not always as useful in books as they can be for visual metaphors. Personally, I used comparisons to church, to painting, to listening to music. One of my favorites is about a married couple that tries to turn classical music into a sort of sexual tone poem (for the record, Suppe's "Poet and Peasant Overture" is their favorite).
Because names mean something, is there a difference between the use of words like porn, smut, erotica, etc.? Is it just marketing, or is it a way to validate one type of writing and invalidate another?
Elizabeth Donald: My first few books were written for a publisher that trademarked the term “romantica,” which my spellchecker does not approve of to this day. They explained it to me that erotica used frank, specific terms including four-letter words to describe sex, but was usually pretty light on plot and character; while romance relied heavily on convoluted plot but used elaborate metaphors that were sometimes frankly hilarious to describe what’s going on. The example I used to use was, “His purple-headed warrior speared her love pudding.” I said that on a panel once and I think I nearly killed one of my fellow panelists -- he couldn’t breathe for whole minutes. They wanted a mix of the two: the plot and structure and happy endings of romance, but killing the purple prose in favor of specific and grounded language describing what was going on under the sheets.
So there are differences in the varieties of sexually-themed writing. I tend to accept my former publisher’s definitions that pure erotica is about the sex, and very little to nothing but the plot. Romance, on the other hand, is a complex story with more aboutness and character-plot constructions, but the driving force behind it is the love story, if not the sexuality, and it requires a happily-ever-after or at least happily-for-now in order to satisfy the romance reader. I tend to think of smut as an all-encompassing word for material that has explicitly described sex, but I know in some discourse it has come to mean sexual writing without much literary value, and I’m hoping to reclaim it as a positive term. (I generally think of porn as primarily a visual medium, and thus outside my purview, but opinions may vary.)
L. Andrew Cooper: Porn is the depiction of acts with little or no context, while smut has higher context and perhaps a tendency to focus on trash aesthetics. Erotica tends to have a least a bit more context than porn, which adds to its elevated status. It's classier than porn and smut because it uses prettier language and romanticizes acts rather than reveling in raunch. Those are my senses.
And finally, based on your experience, what do you believe the hang-up is regarding sex in fiction?
L. Andrew Cooper: People are afraid of sex (which is part of their obsessive fascination with it). This problem has been particularly bad since the nineteenth century, when repression and interest skyrocketed simultaneously. The best form of repression, many think, is erasure. If it's not in the book, it won't prompt those nasty thoughts, will it? So you don't want it in the book... but you want to know about books that have it... you want to know everything about them... so you can warn others... and stand up and fight... yes... that's how these things work....
Elizabeth Donald: My first published novel was a horror romance about a serial killer operating in a vampire sex club. My publisher took us to Dragoncon, and at one point a man walked up, picked up my cover card, read the back and said, “The only difference between this stuff and Penthouse is the words, ‘I never thought this would happen to me.’” Then he walked away a few steps and dropped my cover card on the floor. I wanted to go after him and yell, “Those cost me money!” I was really floored by the outright antipathy many people -- especially in the SFFH community -- had when paranormal romance exploded a few decades ago and suddenly there was sex in their genre fiction. Now, I’ve been to the cons, and I know SFFH fans like sex. So why the hangup?
To a certain extent, romance gets some of the criticism fairly because of its dependence on formula and strict rules, including the requirement of the ending. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t stay in romance, as I have no objections to sex and love, but I wanted more freedom to play with my plots and break my characters’ hearts. But romance readers know there’s a huge diversity and creativity even within the restrictions of the genre, which is why romance is forever a bestselling fiction genre and is pretty much holding up the entire publishing industry at any given point.
We Americans in general have a stupidly Puritanical attitude toward sex in general, and you have only to look at the absolutely insane level of book banning we have going on the last five years to see how out of control it has become - particularly involving sex deemed outside the conservative-religious morality. Of course all of that spills over into the publishing industry, as Americans are simultaneously obsessed with sex and bizarrely repressed about it. But I feel it has more to do with the gender gap in writing sex than any other factor, and I don’t know how we fix that, especially in these times.
Sean Taylor: Call me old-fashioned, but I still think it hinges on our inherited religious culture that somehow wove into our DNA as a country that talking about sex is bad, that even if we could admit that behind closed doors it was a good thing, it just wasn't the kind of thing you talk about in public. And sadly, books are public. One of the older women in my family wouldn't even say the word sex without titling her head away slightly and whispering it.
I need a cigarette... and I don't even smoke.
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