Guest post: Secrets to Writing Good Sex Scenes by Sarah Clare

Tonight’s guest blog post is brought to you by Sarah Clare.

Secrets to Writing Good Sex Scenes

A well-written sex scene can make your story sizzle. Several steamy sex scenes can make your novel an international bestseller (ahem, 50 Shades of Grey). Depending on how they’re written, sex scenes can either be the downfall of your novel, relegating it to the dime-novel romance bin, or they can help to propel your story forward, keep your reader engaged, or even tell something about your character. In some cases, sex scenes can be pivotal to the plot and theme of the story, like in the short story (and movie adapted from it) Brokeback Mountain.

Sex doesn’t have to be smut. Learning how to write good sex scenes can help you use them to your advantage without risking them weakening your story. Here are a few tips for you can write better sex scenes:

Avoid Cliché

How many times have you read about a character’s “throbbing member” or “heaving breasts?” And how many times have one of those characters been “hot with desire” or “raging with passion?” Clichés like these can weaken a sex scene and make it seem silly and tawdry. Avoid clichés when writing about sex and you will instantly improve the quality of the writing in the scene. (A good rule of thumb for any writing.)

Less is More

What we don’t say can tell us so much more than what we do. Focus on the power of suggestion rather than overt descriptions of what is happening. You can do this by describing the senses, such as the scent of the nape of a neck, or the sight of a bare thigh, or feel of the small of the back. Avoid direct descriptions of genitalia, as these can sounds too pornographic or too gynecological.

Use Metaphor

When you can’t say what you want to say directly without sounding clumsy, use metaphor. By using metaphor, you can create a much more powerful image through imagery and suggestion. You can also add more depth to the scene by creating emotional weight and greater meaning.

Focus on Emotion

Sex is about much more than the physical act. Make your sex scenes more meaningful by focusing on the emotion behind them. Obviously, there is lust, but this is so basic as to be almost not worth mentioning. What is more interesting is if there is anger, or fear, or trepidation, or manipulation. What is it that your characters are thinking and feeling as they move through the act? This is what will bring your scene to life.

Make the Scene Do Double Duty

Everything in your story should happen for a reason — even when your characters are having sex. What does the scene do for the story? Does it reveal something about your character? Does it move the plot forward? Always make sure that your sex scenes are doing more than just showing your characters having sex. Maybe the scene triggers a flashback about a pivotal event. Or maybe it provides the impetus for your character to do something bold and unexpected. Explore how the scene can help you to do more for your story.

Sex scenes can be the spice your story needs, or they can be the clunky weight that brings it down. Follow these tips and you can write better sex scenes that work for your story and help to engage readers.

What are your tips for writing better sex scenes? Share them in the comments!

Morgen: Less is more – absolutely. I’ve just started reading ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ out of curiosity (and because the British Red Cross shop had a buy one get one free sale and I needed a second book!) and I’ve got to page 80-something (nothing happens until page 66) and if I read ‘my inner goddess’ once more it’ll fly across the room. Thank you, Sarah!

Sarah Clare is a writer and oversees the site http://projectmanagementsoftware.com, where she has recently been researching online project management. In her spare time, Sarah enjoys cooking and scrapbooking.

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If you would like to write a writing-related guest post for my blog then feel free to email me with an outline of what you would like to write about. If it’s writing-related then it’s highly likely I’d email back and say “yes please”.

The blog interviews return as normal tomorrow morning with non-fiction author and poet Dorothy K Fletcher – the six hundred and thirteenth of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, bloggers, autobiographers and more. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further. And I enjoy hearing from readers of my blog; do either leave a comment on the relevant interview (the interviewees love to hear from you too!) and / or email me.

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As I post an interview a day (amongst other things) I can’t unfortunately review books but I have a list of those who do, and a feature called ‘Short Story Saturdays’ where I review stories of up to 2,500 words (and post stories of up to 3,000 words), or posted for others to critique (up to 5,000 words) on the new Morgen’s Online Short Story Writing Group. Alternatively if you have a short story or self-contained novel extract / short chapter (ideally up to 1000 words) that you’d like critiqued and don’t mind me posting it online in my new Red Pen Critique Sunday night posts, then do email me. I am now also looking for flash fiction (<1000 words) for Flash Fiction Fridays and poetry for Post-weekend Poetry and Morgen’s Online Poetry Writing Group.

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• Morgen’s Online Novel Writing Group (http://novelwritinggroup.wordpress.com / http://www.facebook.com/groups/508696639153189)
• Morgen’s Online Poetry Writing Group (http://poetrywritinggroup.wordpress.com / http://www.facebook.com/groups/388850977875934)
• Morgen’s Online Script Writing Group (http://scriptwritinggroup.wordpress.com / http://www.facebook.com/groups/319941328108017)
• Morgen’s Online Short Story Writing Group (http://shortstorywritinggroup.wordpress.com / http://www.facebook.com/groups/544072635605445)

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Author interview no.583 with erotic writer and marketing adviser Lucy Felthouse

Welcome to the five hundred and eighty-third of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, biographers, agents, publishers and more. Today’s is with erotic writer and author marketing adviser Lucy Felthouse. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further.

Morgen: Hello, Lucy. Please tell us something about yourself, where you’re based, and how you came to be a writer.

Lucy: Hi Morgen. Thanks so much for having me on your site! I’m Lucy Felthouse, I’m 27 and I’m based in South Derbyshire in the UK.

Morgen: Derbyshire is a beautiful part of the country. I’m only a couple of hours south yet I go too rarely. Note to self: go to Derbyshire more often.

Lucy: I’ve always written, as long as I can remember. When I was a child I’d announce I was going to be an author, but as I got older I realised it wasn’t as simple as sitting down and writing a book and people throwing money at you. So I tried to figure out what else to do. I finished college and still had no idea, so I decided to buy myself three more years by going to University to do a degree in Creative Writing. It was then I started writing erotic fiction, as a dare. I left University and started working in PR & Marketing and continuing to write on the side. Now I work for myself and my days are a combination of running my PR & Marketing business (Writer Marketing Services (http://www.writermarketing.co.uk) and writing.

Morgen: And don’t the days go quickly, but I bet you enjoy yours as much as I do mine. What genre do you generally write and have you considered other genres?

Lucy: I write erotic fiction and erotic romance, and lots of sub-genres within that. I haven’t yet tried any other genres. I have too many erotica and erotic romance ideas still bouncing around my head, but perhaps once I’ve exhausted them I’ll try my hand at something else.

Morgen: You have the same ‘problem’ as me; more ideas than time. What have you had published to-date?

Lucy: I have 16 single-author short stories, one novella, over 30 anthology appearances and four anthologies I’ve edited or co-edited.

Morgen: Yay for short stories, my favourite format. Have you self-published? If so, what lead to you going your own way?

 

Guest post: Writing sex scenes by crime novelist Quentin Bates

Tonight’s guest blog post, on the topic of writing sex scenes, is brought to you by crime novelist Quentin Bates. You can read my interview with, and spotlight on, Quentin and his previous guest post (on the topic of incorporating food into your writing) here.

Sex

There. I thought that would grab your jaded attention. What’s there to say about sex? To start with, I’m given to understand there’s a lot of it about. We humans (men, anyway) are supposedly hardwired to think about it every nine seconds, and something like seven-eighths of the internet seems to be devoted to various aspects of it. Sex, and its more respectable sidekicks, love and romance, are fairly central themes of fiction all round. There’s not much these days that doesn’t feature one or the other, or both, or all three.

It’s a good while since I came to the decision that too much sex is normally best left out of the work in progress. It’s not that I have a problem with a bit of horizontal jogging in my fiction, I’m no prude in that department. It’s more that it’s just so hellishly tough to strike the right balance and write about sex in a way that doesn’t raise a laugh or an embarrassed groan – or both. One reader’s sizzling seduction scene is another’s custard pie slapstick, and there’s a difficult line to tread between the two. There’s a lot to be said for those three dots indicating it’s time for the reader’s imagination to take up the slack.

My arrival at crime fiction was by a roundabout route that certainly wasn’t headed that way to start with and I’d looked carefully at other things on the way before deciding to head for the then relatively sparse uplands of Gloomy Nordic Crime Fiction. Fortunately, or unfortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, I was tapping out my first (published) novel just around the time that Stieg Larsson’s was making its arrival in Sweden, so my arrival on the bookshelves was somewhat behind his – and since then Nordic Crime Fiction is everywhere. That’s no bad thing, as far as I’m concerned, the more the better.

A couple of years ago I asked an editor what I should be writing, wondering what the next big thing would be. Scandi crime fiction was already here (hopefully, to stay) by then and vampires were starting to take over the world, not for the first time – so it was already too late to join that particular party.

‘Not sure, darling,’ this editor mused, describing the forays into gay erotic vampire fiction that she had been working with and unexpectedly predicting the return of the old-fashioned bodice-ripper as the coming thing.

Well, she was partly right. Bodice ripping appears to be back with a vengeance, but not in a way that anyone suggested. Three bodice-shredding volumes of Fifty Shades of Grey are all over every airport bookstall after a new twist on rumpy-pumpy (as British tabloids so coyly refer to sex) is here, spiced up with some spanking and made commuter friendly by your e-reader and branded as erotica rather than whatever you might want to call it.

Other publishers are tripping over themselves in indecent haste to join the party. It’s remarkable that the publishing business as a whole that really doesn’t like to be taken by surprise, and which likes lead-in times on a practically geological scale between a writer handing over a manuscript and the finished article appearing on a bookstore shelf can actually do things quickly when it’s time to keep up with the Joneses.

Fifty Shades of Grey appeared from nowhere, taking mainstream publishing by surprise by sneaking unnoticed along the wing and becoming one of those word-of-mouth successes that come along every few years. It’s already been dismissed as badly-written mummy-porn. I haven’t read it and I’m not going to judge it, but there have been plenty of unfriendly pastiches and sour criticisms. In fact, it’s always easy to sneer at something that becomes a money-spinning mainstream success; Dan Brown’s stuff, the overblown later Harry Potter books, Jeffrey Archer’s clunky stories.

But the fact remains that EL James’s much derided venture has made something hugely successful out of good ol’ fashioned sex. It’s at #1 in the Kindle chart and has spawned a publishing boom of its own, complete with detractors and imitations. ELJ has managed to snaffle the jackpot by doing the right thing at the right time, tapping into a demand for erotica of a kind that appears to be aimed squarely at the ladies.

It’s a bizarre business and getting lucky in the way that EL James and JK Rowling did is largely down to chance. While it’s possible to sell ice cream to Inuits with the right kind of smart marketing, runaway success on this scale isn’t something that can be engineered.

Or can it? Is there a market there for a series featuring an irresistible Nordic crime-fighting vampire who pings the buttons off well-filled bodices with a single smouldering glance? Do bodices have buttons?

I may be some time. There’s some bodice-related research that needs doing and then I may have a proposal and some sample chapters to write.

Why shouldn’t we have fun while we’re working. Thank you, Quentin!

Brought up in the south of England, Quentin Bates took the offer of a gap year to work in Iceland in 1979 and found himself spending a gap decade there. During the 1980s he acquired a family, a new language and a new profession, before returning to the UK in 1990. He has been, among other things, a trawlerman, truck driver, teacher, factory worker and a journalist.

Frozen Out and its sequel, Cold Comfort, are born of the author’s own intimate knowledge of Iceland and its people, along with the fascination of the recent upheaval in Iceland’s turbulent society. He and his wife regularly return to their friends, relatives and alternate home in the north of Iceland.

Frozen Out and Cold Comfort are published in the UK, US, Germany and Holland. And Quentin’s next book, Chilled to the Bone, is scheduled to be published in the UK in April 2013 and is already listed for pre-order on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

    

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If you would like to write a writing-related guest post for my blog then feel free to email me with an outline of what you would like to write about. If it’s writing-related then it’s highly likely I’d email back and say “yes please”.

The blog interviews return as normal tomorrow morning with cosy murder mystery writer Sharon McGee – the five hundred and forty-second of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, bloggers, autobiographers and more. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further. And I enjoy hearing from readers of my blog; do either leave a comment on the relevant interview (the interviewees love to hear from you too!) and / or email me.

You can sign up to receive these blog posts daily or weekly so you don’t miss anything. You can contact me and find me on the internet, view my Books and I also have a blog creation service especially for, but not limited to, writers.

Unfortunately, as I post an interview a day (amongst other things) I can’t review books but I have a feature called ‘Short Story Saturdays’ where I review stories of up to 2,500 words. Alternatively if you have a short story or self-contained novel extract / short chapter (ideally up to 1000 words) that you’d like critiqued and don’t mind me reading it / talking about and critiquing it (I send you the transcription afterwards so you can use the comments or ignore them)  on my ‘Bailey’s Writing Tips’ podcast, then do email me. They are fortnightly episodes, usually released on Sundays, interweaving the recordings between the red pen sessions with the hints & tips episodes. I am now also looking for flash fiction (<1000 words) for Flash Fiction Fridays and poetry for Post-weekend Poetry.