Category: sex

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.

            Well, it’s that time of year again.  Time to cue up that playlist of holiday music and pick out your stack of favorite movies.  Maybe you go a little more unconventional with your choices, maybe you stick to the classics, but whatever your flavor is, I’m sure there’s a lot of them.

            Hell, holiday movies are pretty much a solid, dependable genre at this point.  Just between Hallmark and Netflix, I think there’s forty or fifty new ones just for this year alone.  I worked on one ten years ago and it still gets heavy circulation.  People go nuts about the “plague” of superhero movies, but seriously—Christmas movies are the real machine.
            Anyway…

            We laugh at a lot of these and roll our eyes because they often feature some kind of painful romance.  And that’s what I wanted to talk about.  Where that awkwardness comes from and why these stories kinda keeps us at arms length rather than pulling us in.
            The standard Christmas movie goes something like this.  A young woman (it’s almost always a woman) falls for a guy who’s a few weeks away from getting engaged, married, etc.  The two of them have chemistry, while his girlfriend/ fiancé rages away at her job or as a larval Bridezilla or maybe just as a generally awful, awful person.  Eventually the guy comes to see the error of his ways and our two impossibly good-looking people end up together just in time to kiss on Christmas Eve.

            I’ve talked about this general type of romantic triangle once or thrice before, and before we dive in at might be worth going back and glancing over that real quick—it sums up the ground rules of how and why these triangles work.

            Y’see, there’s a really basic flaw in how a lot of these holiday movies set up that triangle.  It’s why they always come across as a bit weird and the protagonists always seem a bit… well, wrong.  And I think it’s one of those things that’s really easy for me to avoid once I see it all laid out

            Let’s use that basic structure up above for our example.  Our test story, so to speak.  Amy (A) has a meet-cute with Bob (B), who is in a relationship with Kat (C, just to keep you on your toes).  Amy and Bob have chemistry, Kat is bordering on (if not openly) awful and clearly wrong for Bob.  And it’s Christmas because… y’know, that’s when this always seems to happen.

            Now, normally in a romantic triangle situation like this, our protagonist would be Bob.  Bob, after all, is the one who needs to make a choice here, right?  He needs to be active and decide if he wants to be with Amy or Kat.
            But…

            Our protagonist is Amy.  And the only way I can make Amy active in this situation is to make her… well, kinda unlikable.  If she does anything to improve things with Bob—all those standard romance bonding moments like long talks and quiet dinners and heartfelt discussions about shared passions—it kinda means she’s undercutting Bob’s relationship with Kat.  Which is a little rough, morally, no matter what we think of Kat.
            And geeeeez, if things get physical to almost any level, well, now they both look bad.  Amy’s making moves on somebody in a relationship.  Bob’s in a relationship and hooking up with someone else.  I mean, how bad does Kat have to be for us to be cool with Bob cheating on her?  And if she’s not that bad, then… well, yeah, he’s a jerk.

            And, yes—sometimes odd things happen between people in really specific situations.  Everybody reacts differently to stress and fear and all that.  Firm embraces may happen.  Maybe even a kiss or odd proclamation.  But that’s a reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally fine line.  Scary fine.  It’s so easy for that situation to go from understandable and excusable to what-the-hell inappropriate.

            Y’see, Timmy, when Amy’s this point in the triangle, she isn’t the one with a choice to make. Not a real one, anyway. She has two options. She can do nothing (which ends the story pretty quick) or she can try to disrupt Bob and Kat’s relationship. Those are her only paths, as far as our plot goes, and neither of them is a great one from a storytelling point of view.

            I think when writers do this, they’re confusing the outcome with the choices that lead to it. We’ve all heard “the ends justify the means,” but this tends to ignore the fact that the means I use also determine what kind of end I get. There are tons of ways Amy and Bob can end up together, but a lot of them can be paths that make one of them—or both of them—characters we don’t really like or care about. In some cases, we may even be actively rooting against them. Cause they’re horrible people.
           Don’t worry about outcomes. Outcomes are the conclusion of a story.  Think about the path to that outcome. The choices my character has to make in order to get there. 

            Because those choices are my story. They’re my plot.  And if there aren’t any real choices, or they’re all being made by supporting characters, or they’re the wrong kind of choices, or they’re just all bad ones… well…

            I shouldn’t be too shocked if people think it’s a bad story.

            Speaking of stories, here’ s one last reminder that books make fantastic holiday gifts, and to maybe check this out if you’re having trouble affording things this year.

            Next time, I wanted to talk a little bit about time.

            Until then, go write.

             Yes, it’s that time of year again.  The time when a young writer’s fancy turn to thoughts of…

            Well, getting published, usually.

            But, that aside, there’s romance in the air this weekend.  And everyone loves a good romance because, pretty much across the board, we’ve all either been in love, are in love, or want to be in love. It’s a wonderful feeling.  Heck those first few months of giddy romance are just fantastic, aren’t they?

            Love is great because we can relate to it.  We believe in it.  For the most part, we enjoy seeing other people in love.

             (except when Wakko started dating Phoebe… those jerks… hate them so much…)

            If those three traits sound familiar—relatable, believable, likable—it’s because I’ve mentioned them two or six times as the traits of good characters.  So a good romance can be a powerful tool in a story, because it immediately grounds one or two of my characters.

            However…

            Have you ever read a book or watched a movie where, with no warning, two characters start professing their mad love for each other?  No preamble, no chemistry, they just suddenly  start flirting and making long-term plans.  None of us likes emotional fakery, and few things can sink a story faster than a pasted-on love interest.  It makes us roll our eyes while reading books and laugh while we’re watching movie.

            So, let’s revisit a few simple rules that can help craft a love story for the ages…

            The First Rule—  Okay, like I was just saying, love needs real emotions, and I can’t have real emotions without real people.  And real people, oddly enough, act in realistic ways.  Note that I said realistic—not rational.  Love is one of the most bizarre, irrational things most of us will ever encounter in our lives. 

            If my characters are real, though, they’re going to have needs, desires, plans, and tastes.  And it’ll stand out if they make choices that go against those traits.  Yes, opposites attract—they even have a lot of fun together—but if we’re talking about real emotions, odds are these two are going to have more in common than not.  To put it another way, the career-minded Army officer probably isn’t going to make serious long term plans with the quirky socialist musician.  Although… maybe she used to play guitar or violin, and he reminds her of another path she could’ve taken.  Having past conflicts and secrets can make a character seem real, too.

            Even then, how far and how fast they take things should be consistent.  Some folks schedule every hour of every day, others live in the moment.  People can be confident or nervous, experienced or awkward.  For some folks it’s a huge moment to have that first cautious, fleeting kiss on the third date, and other folks are in the parking lot tearing each others clothes off half an hour after they meet.
           Simply put, my characters need to be believable if their relationship is going to be believable.

            The Second Rule—  Quick show of hands.  Who’s ever been in a situation where someone’s been trying to push you into a relationship?  Maybe it’s friends or coworkers.  Could be the person you’ve been on one date with.  Hopefully it’s not relatives, because that’s always kinda… weird.

            Regardless, the result is it makes us want to get away from the object of our potential affection.  Nobody likes feeling forced into something, and so we don’t enjoy seeing other people forced into things.  That’s just human nature.

            Now, for the record, “someone” includes me, the writer.  Characters need their own motivations to get into a relationship.  I can’t just have them do things for the convenience of the plot.  If I’ve based my whole story around the folklorist and the soldier saving the villagers because of their mutual respect for each other, then I need a real reason for them to get together, because they’re real people (as mentioned in the First Rule). 

            And no, the reason can’t be something like “because they need to face Demosthenes the Elder-Lich in the third act.”  It also can’t be “I need a sex scene to hold people’s attention.”  If this is the basis of Wakko and Phoebe’s relationship… well, they probably won’t be celebrating any major anniversaries.  Not with each other, anyway.

            People get together because they want to get together, not because other folks think they should be together.

            The Third Rule – This one could actually count as real-world advice.  Don’t confuse sex with love.  There are lots of points in a story where it might be completely acceptable for two characters to have sex.  We’re all mature adults here (well, mostof us) and I’m willing to bet most of us have had sex with someone we weren’t madly in love with at that moment.  Or at any point later.  Simple fact—sex is fun.  It’s a stress-reliever.  It lets us avoid thinking about other things.  Heck, it can even keep you warm.

            However… sex doesn’t always translate to love.  In stories or in the real world.  If my two characters fall into bed (or onto a couch, up against a tree, on a kitchen counter, etc), I need to make sure I’m clear what it means for both of them.  Forcing something casual into something serious will just read as forced (refer back to the Second Rule).

            So… sex and love are not the same thing.  Don’t forget it.

            The Fourth Rule— This is a tough one, because Hollywood keeps trying to tell us otherwise.  How often in movies can you immediately spot “the love interest” as soon as s/he is introduced?  It doesn’t matter what kind of film it is or what’s going on, it’s easy to pick out him/ her the first time we see them.  You may have heard this moment called the “meet-cute,” usually in screenwriting circles.

            Y’see, Timmy, the simple truth is…  romance doesn’t always fit in a story.   Someone could be fighting for their life, painfully wounded, or so scared they’re a moment away from a heart attack.  Maybe they’re already in a relationship with someone else.  Maybe they just have no interest in a relationship—emotional or physical.

            Forcing a relationship in these situations also risks making one or both characters seem very unlikable.  There was a television show a few years back where a police officer was presumed dead and in hiding, but kept sneaking off (in his new identity) to check on his wife and son.  Thing is, he was also spending a lot of time with this sexy blonde contortionist (no, seriously) and there was a lot of, shall we say, tension between them.  And chemistry.

            Thing is, this made the officer a very hard-to-like character.  Is he cheating on his wife?  Or has he moved on and found something new?  Is he sympathetic or a heel?

            Similarly, I read a screenplay once where the two protagonists start feeling strong urges toward each other while they’re searching for the woman’s abducted daughter.  Not years-back abducted, mind you—four hours ago abducted.  But, wow, doesn’t this private detective have great arms and his eyes are soblue…

            In ten words or less—sometimes it’s just not going to happen.

            So there are the rules.  Now go forth and spread the love.

            Where appropriate.  Don’t be that guy.  Or woman.

            Oh, and before I forget, this Sunday is the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies in Burbank.  If you happen to be in the Los Angeles area, please swing by and join us as we talk about writing, publishing, and all the different areas they overlap.

            Next time we’re back here, I’d like to talk to you about a couple of ideas I’ve had.

            Until then, go write.