Category: sex

In the spirit of the day, here’s a quick, odd idea I bounced off someone a while back.

Underwear choices say something about us. 

I mean, think about it. Who’s going to see my underwear? Who’s going to know about it except me? Sure, a lot of us may have that special someone in our lives, and they’ll get to see it, but for the most part our underwear choice is a little, personal secret, like a password that changes every day. Hopefully.

In a way, underwear is kinda like a tattoo—it’s something we get more for us than for anyone else. Depending on what else I’m wearing some other folks may see my tattoo, and they might enjoy it or be scandalized by it. But that’s not why I got it. It’s a very personal choice.

Some folks spend the bare minimum on their undergarments. Others spend a lot. Some might want to spend more. There are people who wear incredibly sexy underwear every day and some people… okay, look, there’s only a couple holes. It’s good for at least another wash or two. Sometimes it’s a style choice, sometimes it’s about comfort, and sometimes it’s just about what’s at the top of the drawer because who the hell puts any real thought into that sort of thing.  I’ve known people who’d be horrified by the idea of going commando or braless and others who wouldn’t think twice about it. 

Goofy as it may sound, think of your latest cast of characters.  Picture them all in their underwear. What are they wearing? Why? Boxers or briefs? Thongs or bikini? Mens or womens? Cotton or silk? Fancy or bulk-pack? Would they care if someone else saw their underwear? Whether or not they were in it?

Now, just to be very clear—none of this means I need to talk about underwear choices in my story.  If I’m introducing Wakko, there’s not too many circumstances where we’d have to know what he’s wearing under his jeans.  Or not wearing. I don’t need a random scene of someone changing in a locker room or walking around their apartment without pants.

But—like a lot of character details—it still might be a good thing for me to know. It gives me a sense of what kind of person they are. How they think and how they might act and react to different situations. And that’s all good stuff to know, because it help make this person more real in my head. Which makes it easier for them to be real and distinct on the page.

No matter what they’re wearing.

And speaking of characters, next time I’m going back to the A2Q to talk about characters.

Until then… go write.

I’m having a really crap day, but fortunately for you, this was already pretty much done. And maybe blabbing on about writing will make me feel better about stuff.  Probably not, but what the hell…

I’d like to babble on about another one of those “this is so self-evident why are we wasting time on it” ideas that… well, seems to come up a lot. 

As writers, we get cursed with ideas. Tons and tons of them. Books, comics, movies, epic television franchises, soooo many ideas. And, naturally, we want to use as many of them as we can. Cause they’re all friggin’ fantastic, right?

But, as I’ve mentioned here once or thrice before, that’s not always a good thing, no matter how fantastic my ideas are.  More isn’t always better. Sometimes stories get cluttered with ideas. I want to create a certain kind of character, use this cool idea I saw in a Gizmodo article, explore a few different themes, develop this awesome backstory I came up with, and then wait until you see all the stuff in chapter two!

We’ve all done this. Be honest. If I think I haven’t done this, it probably means I don’t realize I’m doing it right now in my current work.

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having a lot of stuff in a story.  My book Dead Moon touches on zombie horror, body horror, sci-fi, action, mystery, and comedy. There’s a lot of talk about sex. There’s some politics. There’s some questions about self-worth and finding your place in the world (or the solar system).

But if you asked me… I’d tell you it’s about zombies on the moon.  Horror and sci-fi.

Let me give you a less personal example. I watched this geekery movie recently that was… okay, let’s just say it was about AI (or was it?  Maybe cloning? I’ll never tell). Anyway, there was a lot in it about the ethics of creating an intelligence solely for a specific purpose (is this slavery??). There was also stuff about the morality of assassination. Plus a lot of assassination-related action scenes. Then questions were brought up about the possible ethical issues when the scientist starts having sex with this thing she created. More so when it turns out the body said scientist made for this AI is the spitting image of her dead husband. Plus there’s a heist element as they plan to rob the CEO of the company. And some torture porn. Arguably some parenting, nature-vs.-nurture aspects, corruption of the innocent bits, too.

Now, all of these could be cool things to bring up in a movie. Hell, any one of them is probably a story in and of itself.  There’s a lot of fascinating character moments that can happen with almost any of these.

But again… what is this story about?

’Cause this AI movie made it about everything. The filmmakers gave every one of these elements equal weight. It was the ethical AI-assassination morality-action-sex issues-heist-torture porn-corruption movie we’ve all been waiting for. Just search for that category on Netflix.

(it’s not on Netflix—the category or the movie)

Is something just a conceit for the story?  Cool.  But to be clear… what’s my story then?  If I’m using clones to tell a long-distance love story, that’s cool.  Super clever. One of you should take that and run with it. But if that’s the case, I probably shouldn’t spend half the book talking about the science behind the cloning.  Likewise, if I’m writing a taut thriller about cloning assassins… maybe there shouldn’t be 250 pages of clone-love in there.

Subplots? Great.  Parallel plots?  Fantastic. Twiststhat subvert the plot? SOOO COOL! But what is this book about? What’s the dominant idea here? What aspect of the story are we spending the most time with?

Here’s a way to think of it.  There’s a Hollywood term you may have heard—the elevator pitch. It basically means I should be able to explain my story in one or two sentences, the length of an elevator ride. It comes from the awful idea that I should leap at people when I find myself alone in elevators with them. Because who doesn’t respond positively to that?

Anyway, if I got a chance to elevator-pitch the AI story above, how many of these things do I mention and explain? How many would I leave out? When I’ve only got thirty seconds to tell my story, what parts of it do I not bother telling?  It’s not going to be 100% accurate, sure, but it’s a safe bet my elevator pitch is going to make me really focus on the key things in my story.

And if I can’t focus on them… well, that’s probably telling me something.

Y’see, Timmy, it shouldn’t be that hard to explain what my story’s about.  It can have lots of elements—and hopefully it does—but there should be an overriding idea I can point to and sum up in a few lines.  “It’s about an android assassin who starts to question the morality of his existence, especially when he learns more about his creation.”

Which, alas, is not what that movie was about.

Next time, let’s talk about winding things up.

Until then, go write.

A few weeks back, a superhero movie kinda came and went in the world. No, not that one. That one’s still doing fine.  The other one, that came out two weeks before it. I admit, I didn’t see the other one. I’m not against reboots or remakes, but it felt like all this had going for it was… it was R-rated.  So the protagonist could swear.  And the filmmakers could show more gore.  And maybe a butt or a boob or something.  Again, didn’t see it.

Thing is “profanity” isn’t really much of a selling point once we’re past… what, ten years old? Blood and gore usually just draws attention to it vanishing between scenes. Seeing a naked butt on screen lost a lot of its appeal once the internet became a thing. I guess you could make an argument for whose butt it is, but even that’s only going to get you so far…

We’ve all known for a while now that this sort of stuff doesn’t make a good movie.  It doesn’t automatically mean my movie is bad, but if these are the only elements I’m pushing to say my movie is good… well, I can’t be surprised if I don’t do well at the box office.  As A. Lee Martinez noted a few weeks back, ”I never trust a story that wants to impress me with its gore and vulgarity. I have enjoyed many a story with gore and vulgarity, but never one that was sold to me that way.”

I think this is true of most storytelling. There isn’t much we’d consider taboo in stories anymore.  And there’s an audience for almost everything.  There are sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and when you go deep enough pretty much anything goes.

Because of this, though, I think sometimes writers get caught up in the idea of just showing everything.  All the gore and sex and violence they can manage, all written out in long, elaborate detail.  I mean, it fills up the page and, hey, check it out.  Bet you’ve never pictured someone getting split in half that way before, have you?

We need to understand, though, that these excessive and explicit moments are very rarely part of the story or plot—they’re just descriptions.  If Bob dies, it rarely matters if it took me one sentence or seven pages to kill him.  In the end, Bob is dead and it kinda boils down to how much of this actually advanced the plot, and how much of it my readers could just skip over with a yawn.

And yeah, sure, sometimes there’s a point to it.  There’s a narrative reason I need two pages of gore or three pages of sex or a character who drops f-bombs in every sentence they speak or think.  Nobody would say otherwise (nobody you should listen to, anyway).  But this is a lot like adverbs, adjectives, or exclamation points.  The more I use them, the weaker they get.  They start to clutter up the page.  So I want to be a little conservative with them.

Here, lemme give you a very non-conservative example….

My friend Autumn Christian wrote a wonderful book called Girl Like A Bomb. The main character (and narrator), Bev, discovers she’s got an unusual superpower. When she has sex with people, they get… better. They clean up. They get focused. They become the best, self-actualized version of themselves.

Now, you might guess sex is a big part of this book, and you’d be right (consider that your warning if you decide to pick it up). The first few times Bev has sex—like any teenager—it’s a wild ride and it’s very explicit. It’s an all-new experience for her, she likes it, and she is, as they say, DTF.

But after those first few encounters—and one much more violent one (consider that your other warning)—Bev becomes all-too-aware of the effect her gift is having on her partners. It’s still fun, but it’s also a responsibility, and this shows in her narration.  Less than halfway through the book, her various encounters becomes a quick sentence or less, sometimes coming across as more of an annoying obligation or burden.  Because while the story involves sex, it’s not really about sex—it’s about what Bev can do with her superpower. So that’s what Christian focuses on.

And this holds for everything.  If I push any story element up to ten for my whole book—sex, action, violence, gore, cool lines—it’s going to get boring fast.  Sure, there’s a small percentage of readers that’ll be thrilled, but it’s reeeeeeeeeeeeeally tough to find any sort of wide appeal that way.

Plus… in a way, all this extensive description is me feeding everything to my reader.  I’m telling them everything instead of showing them everything.  And, yeah, I know that sounds weird but…

Okay, look… I’m going to let you in on a secret.  This is one of the six Great Secrets of storytelling that you can only learn from a crow after they eat 169 peanuts in a row from your hand.  It’s the first and easiest of the secrets to learn, but I’m just going to give it to you for free…

You’ve probably heard people talk about showing vs. telling all the time, but we rarely bring up the obvious.  We haveto tell.  That’s all we can do. I’m typing words for you to read, telling you what the characters see, hear, feel, smell, think, whatever. On the surface, telling is pretty much it for us as writers.

When we talk about showing, we’re talking about making images appear in the reader’s mind. And the longer it takes for those images to form, the less effective they are at creating some kind of emotional response. So, to speed things up, we want the reader to do some of the work for us. We want them to tell them just enough—just the right things—and have them fill in the blanks.  They supply the horror or the excitement or the disgust so it’s instantly summoned to their mind, rather than waiting for me to spell it all out. It’s the difference between me telling you a joke that you immediately get and me having to explain the joke to you (“Because, y’see, the last guy was hiding in the refrigerator, so when they threw it over the railing he ended up…”).

That’s what showing is.

See, when I wrote out that little bit of dialogue, you got that.  Even if you didn’t recognize the joke, you understood the situation of having to spell out the punchline for somebody.  You filled in everything around that sentence fragment.

Truth is, the big majority of readers like doing this. They enjoy it when we trust them enough to understand things. When we don’t spell everything out for them.  In graphic detail.  Billy Wilder used to say you could let the audience add 2 + 2 now and then and they’d love you for it. Heck, I’ve got a whole loosely-scientific theory about how this kind of writing sets off the pleasure centers of our brain.  No seriously.

So y’see Timmy, I don’t need to wipe every single one of these excessive, over-described bits from my manuscript.  But, like adverbs, if I’ve got a bunch on every page… ehh, I might want to stop to reconsider some of my choices.

Next time, I’ve got a few more ideas to bounce off you.

Until then, go write.

           I’m posting this one a bit early because… well, hopefully you’ve all got other plans for tomorrow.  I know I do.  Alita: BattleAngel is finally out.  And also some book about zombies on the moon…

            Oh, yeah, and it’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow.  With all the fun activities we associate with said holiday.  And that’s kinda what I wanted to talk to you about…

            Look, you’re getting to that certain point in your writing career.  Your voice is developing.  Your body is changing.  Your facial hair is growing out nice and thick, which is probably a big change for most of you women.

            Anyway, I figured it’s time we sat down and talk about… well…

            Writing sex scenes.

            Yeah, this is going to be a little awkward for all of us.

            Like sex itself, a lot of this is going to come down to our own personal preferences, comfort zones, and what works in a given situation.  As such, it’s going to be really tough to offer any specific advice about when and where and how these moments should happen in your book.  I’ve tossed out some general suggestions in the past if you really want them.

            What I wanted to talk about here is more of the act itself, so to speak.  Writing sex scenes is a tricky skill to master.  It’s a constant balancing act of too much and too little, exciting the reader or maybe horrifying them, and it’s ridiculously easy to make people roll their eyes (not in the good way).
            So here are three big things I think should be in mind when writing a sex scene.

            Firstis that we don’t always need to show sex happening in order for sex to have happened.  Subtlety and nuance are a huge part of sexiness—on the page and in real life.  If we know Wakko and Phoebe sneak off to the supply closet for half an hour during the office party, we can make an educated guess what they’re probably doing in there.  Especially with the appropriate context around them sneaking off and how they sound/look/act when they come back. 

            So depending on the overall tone of my story, maybe I don’t actually need to write out my sex scene—I can just let my reader fill in the blanks themselves.  And again, like so many well-done subtle things, this can end up being much, much sexier than actually showing stuff.  As an artist friend of mine once pointed out, “nudity isn’t sexy.  It’s what you don’t see that gets you turned on.”

            There is one small pitfall to doing things this way.  If I’m too subtle, people might not get what I’m implying.  Their assumptions may go much too far, not far enough, or maybe end up on that awkward balancing point where they try to figure out what just happened.  Or if anything happened.  I don’t want to knock my readers out of the story with a confusing “did they or didn’t they”—unless that was the whole point of my fade to black.

            Second, if I’m definitely going to show my sex scene, I need to remember that sex is… well, action.  I don’t mean it needs to be wildly enthusiastic, just that this is a case of actual, physical things happening.  And any sort of action can get boring fast if it’s written poorly.

            I’m a big believer that most action shouldn’t take longer to read then it would take to happen, especially when we’re in the moment.  A punch shouldn’t take three paragraphs to describe.  A car crash probably shouldn’t take two pages unless it’s some massive, seventeen-car pileup

            Likewise, if I’m telling you these two people are ripping each others clothes off, but it’s over six pages of description…  you’re probably going to start skimming.  And that’s never good.  I don’t want to slow down action—any kind of action—by stretching it out with too much description.

            And talking about describing all that action…

            Third,if we’re going to be writing things out, brings us back to personal taste.  I think the catch with explicit sex scenes is they essentially become porn.  Porn, as a friend from work once pointed out, is when we see everything.  And after a certain point, that’s pretty much exactly what we’re talking about with any written-out sex scene.

            And some people like porn, some don’t.  No judgment either way.  That’s just a simple truth.

            But there’s more to it than that.  Even the people who do like porn don’t all like the same kind of porn.  This particular act really turns me on, but you find it kind of quaint and almost routine.  That might weird me out, this might be a complete non-starter for you, and that… okay, that seriously disturbs both of us on a number of levels.  So it’s a pretty safe bet that the more explicit/niche my sex scene becomes, the less  people it’s going to appeal to.  And the more people it’s going to repulse.

            Y’see Timmy, this is where empathy is going to be really important, and also a very clear, honest sense of who my audience is.  The people who pick up a thriller aren’t expecting the same kind of sex scenes as the folks who buy romance novels, and I’m thinking neither of them are expecting five pages of hardcore, strap-on orgy action.

            And if that last sentence made you a bit squeamish… you get my point.

            So go forth and write your sexy moments.  But think about if you really need them.  And how they’re paced.  And who you’re writing them for.    

            Hey, speaking of sexy things, I’ve got a new book out tomorrow, exclusively through Audible.  Have I mentioned that recently?  Dead Moon is a fun little zombie story set… well, you can guess where.  And it’s also set in the Threshold universe, so there may be some other things in there that appeal to a few of you.  Please check it out so I can keep buying cat food and rum.

            Next time…

            Well, okay, look.  I’m in the last few weeks of finishing up another Threshold book, so I don’t have a lot of time.  Truth is, I’m probably going to take the next week or two off to focus on that.  If you want to use this time to toss out a few suggestions for thing you’d like me to rant about, that’d be fantastic (thanks in advance).

            And one way or another sometime very soon, I’ll be revisiting the whole outlining thing.

            Until then, go write.

            Happy Valentine’s Day.