0 comments/ 10908 views/ 1 favorites Writing the Sex Scene By: Cal Y. Pygia A SCENE is the smallest unit of a plot. It has a single purpose, although its function is usually linked to larger, more comprehensive narrative elements, such as the story's theme, central conflict, or the development of a major character's "personality." In erotic fiction, most scenes also involve not only nudity, full or partial, but also sex of some sort. All scenes involve conflict. Most include two characters, although an occasional scene may include one or, rarely, even none (other than the omniscient narrator). The scene also advances the plot, presenting or developing a subplot, introducing a new character, providing the back story of a character who has already been introduced, upping the stakes that are at risk in the protagonist's or the antagonist's pursuit of his or her goal, transitioning to a related theme, establishing or developing symbolic significance, planting clues, supplying a cliffhanger, and so forth. In erotica, scenes often also intensify the emotional, physical, and sexual relationships between characters. A writer is well advised to understand any scene's relationship to the whole plot of which it is (or should be) an integral part as well as its relationship to the scene that precedes it and the scene that follows it. Every scene should be necessary to the development of the story's plot, major character's personality development or change, and theme. Otherwise, the writer and the reader alike are wasting their time with the scene. The scene's PURPOSE (several possibilities are spelled out in the preceding paragraph) should be spelled out (in the writer's mind, not on the page or screen) with these considerations in mind. Once the writer has determined the scene's purpose, he or she should decide how to convey this purpose. Which of the many ways of doing so is most appropriate and effective? What APPROACH should the writer take in constructing the scene? A straightforward approach? A subtler approach, employing symbolism, allusion, metaphor, or some other figurative approach? What should be stated explicitly and what should, implied, be left to the reader's interpretation? Whose point of view, that of the protagonist's, of the antagonist's, of an interested bystander, or of a disinterested observer, should be used? With which character does the writer want the reader to identify? What emotion does the writer want to elicit from his or her reader? Which character, if any, should the reader like or dislike, champion or oppose? Does the writer want to endorse, denigrate, or challenge a particular point of view, belief, tradition, or value? If so, one character will have to be made sympathetic to the reader and the other character unsympathetic. Should the scene's tone be sincere, sarcastic, ironic, frank, indirect, formal, informal, somber, humorous, witty? Where is the action of the scene taking place? In other words, what is the scene's SETTING? Of course, the setting (time, place, historical, sociopolitical, and cultural milieu) should dovetail with the story's action, characters, and theme, and places, in particular, are often fraught with symbolic value. In addition, locations tend to characterize characters, so, again, attention should be given to this aspect of the story's setting as well. Motion picture directors, advertising designers, painters, illustrators, and other visual artists plan every aspect of their work, as writers should do. Instead of cameras, canvases, paints, and brushes, or pen and ink, writers use description to create images that appeal to both the emotions and to the senses of sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. By applying principles of COMPOSITION to the scenes they describe, authors can, like visual artists, create deliberate pictures that serve their own artistic ends, helping to characterize, emotionalize, and otherwise depict things the way that the writers themselves need them to be understood (felt emotionally, seen, felt physically, tasted, smelled, and heard) by both their characters and the readers who identify with these characters. Depending upon such matters as size, shape, placement of characters, lighting, intensity, color, properties ("props"), costume, and dialogue, what is shown and otherwise presented through description, word choice, tone, and the indirect communication that is conveyed through figurative language, the same scene can be rendered, as it were, so that it is nostalgic, sentimental, melodramatic, humorous, romantic, horrific, wonderful, or erotic. In addition to these general requirements for writing a scene, the erotic writer must also concern him- or herself with the erotic aspects of the sex scene. The successful sex scene pays attention both to the inner and the outer aspects of the characters who are involved in the scene (and in the sex of the scene). Whether male, female, or shemale, human beings are emotional, rational, moral (or amoral or immoral), imaginative, and needful. Their actions, sexual and otherwise, are seldom simple. They symbolize the character's inner states--his or her attitudes, beliefs, biases, desires, dreams, emotions, needs, prejudices, reasons, and values. They also suggest certain sexual orientations: not only gay versus straight or transgender, but also feminine or masculine, passive or aggressive, submissive or dominant. Writers who show how behavior reflects character (and how character motivates behavior) will write sex scenes that are more dramatic, more memorable, and more meaningful to readers than those scenes which fail in one, several, or all of these ways, and scenes that are, therefore, sexier as well. Some writers' plots are more driven by action than by character; other writer's storylines are fueled more by character than by action. The more successful and enduring stories manage to merge both so seamlessly that character is expressed in action and action expresses character. The same is true of the best sex scenes. There is a reason (or, more often, an emotional basis) for everything that people do; there should be such a basis for all that characters do as well, and sex scenes should suggest as much. Moreover, a sex scene should show A CHANGE IN A CHARACTER'S PERSONALITY. The character may be changed for the better or for the worse, but he or she should change. The scene, including the scene's sex, should change him or her. Many erotic scenes are degrading--by design. An innocent is corrupted, a virgin deflowered, a prim and proper lady wronged, an arrogant man or woman (usually woman) humiliated. Such transformations remain popular among readers and, therefore, among writers alike. Sex, such narratives imply, is degrading; it debases and demeans, corrupts and shames. Sex can ennoble, too, perhaps, but stories which show such behavior as elevating the soul and improving the mind are rarer, maybe because it is generally much more difficult to portray such effects. It takes a rare artist--a D. H. Lawrence--to suggest that sex is noble and dignified, refined and elegant, spiritual and sacred; the ignoble, the unseemly, the coarse and the graceless, the physical and the profane are more easily represented in fiction. Readers also tend to prefer the extreme and the bizarre to the ordinary and the typical. Their tastes run toward anal or oral, rather than vaginal, intercourse; toward homosexual or transsexual relationships, instead of heterosexual ones; toward vaginal or anal fisting, rather than simple masturbation. Jaded by the familiar and the routine, men and women want to experience, if only vicariously, the weird and the uncommon, the unconventional and the forbidden, even the grotesque and the absurd, which are, in themselves, often also degrading and humiliating. Writers of the sex scene should keep these readers' preferences in mind, too, when they write such scenes. What about TECHNIQUE? This essay doesn't address technique because it is both the most and the least difficult part of writing the sex scene. It is fairly easily learned but difficult to master. Those who seek to become adept in technique should read the sex scenes of masterful storytellers, such as Cal Y. Pygia, and take notes concerning how the writer portrays sex; how he or she relates it to the character's inner state, or personality and consciousness; how he or she uses the sex as a catalyst for psychological, emotional, or spiritual change; and how he or she uses words and phrases, literary devices, dialogue, and non-verbal means of communication to depict his or her characters having sex, fucking, making love, or otherwise doing the wild thing. Technique, difficult at first, will not only come, like one's characters, but it will come more and more easily. What is more difficult to master (and even to remember) is the need to associate character and action, personality and behavior, thought and deed, and it is this linking of one to the other that will result, if done thoroughly and well, with sophistication and subtlety, in a highly charged, intensely erotic sex scene that is both meaningful and memorable to characters and readers alike.