On Writing Sex Scenes
I have written most of my fiction for young adults. Romance is minimal and sex is nonexistent. Subconsciously, however, I recognized my characters were sexual beings, and I still had to consider their sexual origin stories, even if they were not having sex on screen.
A few years ago, I started writing a novel about a male sex slave. I do not know where the idea for this story came from, but it emerged, as most of my stories do, from a series of random images and scenes that had been popping into my head for several years.
I completed the second draft and sent it off to some beta readers. After a few rounds of edits, I felt I needed some extra training in writing sex scenes. Considering this story deals with sexual exploitation, abuse, and trauma, and considering sexuality plays a huge role in the story’s thematic development, I wanted to write these scenes well. I wanted to do justice to the experience of those who’ve been exploited and abused.
So I googled, “Classes for how to write a sex scene.” I found a few options and settled on a course for writing sex scenes in literary fiction (my writing is a hybrid of genre fiction and literary fiction).
From the very first module in the course, I exploded with excitement. I loved the exercises, the bonus course material, and the questions the course suggested for developing characters. In literary fiction, sex scenes support the story the way every other scene supports the story: by developing character and propelling the story forward.
If the sex isn’t functioning in these two ways, the course suggests cutting it, or at least, minimizing it.
One exercise was writing your characters’ sexual origin stories. When did they first discover themselves as sexual beings? When was their first sexual encounter and with whom? I did this for a couple of my characters and unearthed a lot about who these people are by discovering what shaped them. I’m planning to go back and do this for all the characters.
Another exercise was to take a sex scene you’ve written and write it missionary style (my words). No graphic language or description—just focus on what’s in the characters’ heads.
The next step was to take that same scene and write it porno-style. This step took me four hours. When finished, I stared wide-eyed at my screen while I nursed my watered-down whiskey sour.
I had no idea all that was inside of me.
I can now add, “writing porn” to my resume skills. I will get many jobs.
While I enjoyed the challenge of this class, I observed most of the examples given of “sexual discovery” were actually sexual abuse. They were situations where men were dominating women and the women were trying to figure out how they felt about it.
I’m sure you’ve picked up on this, but a scene where a man is using a woman for his sexual gratification and the woman is trying to decide if she’s okay with it is not sexual discovery. It’s not sexual liberation or sex-positivity. It’s abuse. Sometimes, it was straight-up assault. I kept waiting for a healthy, powerful, and intimate scene. But it didn’t surface. Maybe because these sorts of scenes do not create conflict? Maybe they would not serve to develop the character or further the plot?
I recalled the two most graphic examples of sex-in-books I could think of: Outlander and Fifty Shades of Grey. While scintillating, these sexual encounters are really toxic. Even abusive. I tried to think if I’ve ever read a sex scene in a book that didn’t have some level of toxicity involved. If I have, I can’t remember any, so they must have lacked the oomph to remain with me later.
Does this mean non-toxic sex is uninteresting for the page?
This is a question I’ll continue to explore. For now, my path to writing sex is a journey toward securing as much character development and emotional stimulation in the fewest words. This matches the rest of my writing style. I have never been one for long, drawn-out descriptions, and my scenes tend to move pretty quickly from one moment to another. I love dialogue in the books I read, so dialogue plays a huge part in what I write.
Integrating sex into my stories has been an intriguing challenge, and I hope to create these scenes with the same enthusiasm and care as all my work.
Photo by Alif Caesar Rizqi Pratama on Unsplash