Web site of Biff Mitchell, author, humorist, smartass and not-poet.

This is the page for the Muse Online Conference workshop called Sex, Violence and 4 Letter Language: They Don’t Have to Be Gross. Or something like that.

Sex

Sex can be the most magical thing in the world and it can be the ugliest, but it’s the most intimate form of communication between two people, whether the communication is about love or about terror.

It can say wonderful things about your characters and it can say terrible things about them.

Sex should never be gratuitous in your stories … it should be used to reveal the characters of the people who populate your literary landscape.

Part 1 – Sex Should Reveal Character

The way we have sex reveals how we feel about life, about other people and about ourselves, and the way your characters have sex will depend on how well you know them. If your characters are real, then when you put them in the sack with another human being, they’ll have sex the way their characters would in real life.

If you’re writing about a shallow relationship between two people, you can become explicit … or you can still reach into the minds of your characters. For instance, the interplay between a woman and man on a one-night stand. And they both know it. He’s saying “I love you” to a woman he met an hour ago. The sex may be hurried and awkward. He’s thinking: “Let’s get this over with so I can put another notch on my conquest meter.” She’s thinking: “Let’s get this over because I haven’t been laid in a while and I need this, but I also have to get up for work tomorrow.”

Don’t be afraid to get into the minds of your characters while they’re having sex. Exploring the interplay of thought between two people in the throes of ecstasy (or boredom) can be a brilliant source of humor, drama, or irony.

If your character is violent and self-absorbed make sex with that person something painful and unfulfilling for the partner (unless, of course, the partner is someone who gets off on violent and self-absorbed lovers).

One of the best examples of this is the movie American Psycho. In one scene, the lead character (a completely self-centered psychotic) is having sex with two women. His room is lined with mirrors and he’s watching himself during the entire sex act. He’s basically using the women to masturbate on fantasies of himself. One of the women has to be hospitalized. It wasn’t a joyful thing for her. But this scene says more about the lead character’s complete lack of feeling for other human beings than the scenes in which he mercilessly kills them.

At the other side of the spectrum, don’t have a prudish character suddenly having torrid sex, unless you’re going for humor, or you’ve set the character up for this with the occasional erotic daydream or a quick flash in the character’s eye when a member of the opposite sex walks in, and the flash reveals something stirring inside, like a repressed sexual dynamo waiting to be loosened.

This reminds me of the porno movies one of my roommates used to watch in college. In one of them, several men enter a reception room where a beautiful, but shy and conservatively dressed, receptionist sits at a desk. She said they would have to wait a while and one of the men asked what they could do while they were waiting. Less than a minute later, everyone was naked and spewing all over the office landscape. The reaction in the audience (consisting of a gang of first year college boys)? Drunken laughter and obscene comments.

Your sex scenes should make people think or understand, not laugh (unless you’re writing comedy). If the sex in your stories isn’t saying something about your characters, then it’s gratuitous … it’s pornography, or maybe it’s just boring.

The key to writing about sex is to not force it. Let it flow through you from the characters you’ve created. And don’t be afraid to experiment. If something seems a little over the top or perverse, but that’s the direction your writing is taking, go with it. You can always edit or toss it later. On the other hand, you may have found that you written something beautiful, even if perversely beautiful.


Writing Exercises

Write a two paragraph description (under 200 words) of two people having sex. Use only their thoughts … no physical description.

Write the same scene using only physical description.

Write the scene a third time … with the bed as the narrator (i.e., observer, commentator, whatever you want).

Feel free to post your responses on the board for this workshop.


Discussion

Much of how we feel about sex comes from our childhood, from the attitudes of our families, our churches, and our friends. For some it may come from what we read, the movies we see, and the fantasies we have.

Where do you think our strongest feelings about sex come from?

Part 2 – How Do You Balance Sex Between Pornography and eroticism? 

How Much Sex Should Your Character’s Have?

How much sex is right? That’s completely up to you and your characters. They might be able to get through a 400 page novel without once having sex, or as in Susan DiPlacido’s wonderfully steamy chic lit novel, 24/7, they might not be able to get through four pages.

(BTW, Susan handles sex scenes better than anyone else I’ve read. You’ll do well to read some of her books.)

If you find yourself putting a lot of sex into your first draft, keep it there for the time being. You can edit out the “gratuitous” stuff later, asking yourself, does this make sense? Is this real? Is this what these people would do?

Again, let the sex come from the characters you’ve created. If you’ve done your work on them before you started writing, then trust them to have the kind of sex they want to have … don’t try to manipulate them. Write mindlessly, following the feelings your characters invoke in you. The sex they have may change them. Let them change.

Now …

Think about this. The man has had all his clothing taken from him. He has no wallet. The bad guys have it. His heroine is in the same boat. She’s just met the hero a day or two earlier, but it’s the end of the movie, the bad guys have been vanquished and there he is in a raft in the middle of the ocean with the heroine and they’re having sex. Now, in this situation, does James Bond have a condom?

Bond is a character from another era … long before the AIDS epidemic. Today, random sex can be deadly. Unprotected sex can be deadly. If you have a hero or heroine who jumps from one partner to the next throughout your story in a skin-to-skin death wish, don’t expect the reader to think that your character has much saved up in the brain bank.

Unless you’re writing a b-grade sex book to make a few fast bucks (and likely with a fictitious author name) try to make your sex scenes believable. James Bond wouldn’t last more than a few years today.

So … how much sex should your characters have? Let that come from your characters. If you’ve done your work on creating them before you’ve started writing (best book you can get on this is The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray) then they will tell you how much sex they should have. Never force them into a sex scene because you have some sex quota agenda for the story.

 In this light, if you’re writing erotic fiction … make sure your characters are erotic. Build them around their sexuality. Give background to their sexuality. Give the reader flashbacks to their first sexual acts. Give the reader their daydreams and fantasies … and then make those daydreams and fantasies come true.

But also give them lives outside their sex lives. Make them real people in every facet of their lives … and then put real people into the sack with other real people.

Do this, and two or three chapters into your book, your characters will let you know how much sex they should have. They’ll even tell you whether or not they’re willing to take a chance on not wearing a condom.

How Graphic Should A Sex Scene Be?

Sex scenes don’t have to be graphic with descriptions of wildly flailing bodies and graphic close-ups of genitalia. If the sex is violent, you might describe bruises and grunts and facial expressions more than sexual contact. If the sex is humorous, you might focus most of your description on props like clothing, condoms and a leaky waterbed. You might even describe anything but the people … the entire scene can unfold as the description of a flower blooming, incorporating the sensual movement of petals as they tighten and then unwind and finally burst into color.

You might describe everything that’s going on in the character’s life, incorporated right into the sex act. The best example I’ve ever seen of this is Molly’s sex scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses … read the last two or three pages. It’s probably the most beautifully written sex scene in English literature. And it hardly says anything about body-to-body contact.

However, if you’re writing erotica, you’ll want your sex scenes to be more explicit. But erotica is not pornography. Erotica is just that erotic, and two bodies just smashing away at each other without any kind of build-up or reason isn’t going to create great eroticism. You need to arouse your reader. You need to give your reader a little literary foreplay, getting into the minds of your characters and exploring their wants and expectations.

Pornography turns people into screwing machines, indulging in sex for no other reason that to go through the motions. They might just as well be the life-size plastic dolls you sex in sex shops. Erotic gets into the minds and bodies of your characters and makes your readers feel what they’re feeling. It’s a beautiful exploration, and if you can incorporate the rich experience of your character’s life into the act of sex like Joyce does, then you’ll be giving your reader’s a glimpse into your character’s souls.

Writing Exercise

Write one or two paragraphs of pornography. Then, turn it into one or two paragraphs of erotica. Then, turn the one or two paragraphs of erotica into an act of love.

Discussion Topics

Where is the boundary between pornography and eroticism? Let’s hear YOUR opinion.

We’re a consumer society with very few human values and sex is pandered to us through marketing departments and b-grade television shows that toss in hot steamy sex scenes just for the hell of it.How does our social milieu affect the way we approach sex?