Adding sex appeal

Given that sex in novels is currently selling so well (and if you haven't heard of  Fifty Shades of Grey  where have you been?) maybe we should all be adding sex scenes into our stories. That's assuming you write stories. It's hard to add sex to crochet although it has been done (NSFW); if your hobby is photography then the answer is obvious; if it's astronomy or quantum physics then I have no advice for you here.

It might be hard to find an angle that hasn't been tried yet. Indie Reader has an amusing (and NSFW) article on current erotic bestsellers, many of which apparently started life as Indie books.

So sex is clearly the way to go if you want to make money from writing. My problem? I just can't do it. I was going to write a spoof of Fifty Shades but when it came to it, I was cringing and laughing too much to get words on the page.

What about you?

It's that time again

It's time for the Bad Sex Awards again; you can read passages from the winning author over at The Guardian.

I'm wondering whose point of view the episodes are written from and thinking that they might be entirely appropriate in context. Guterson was lambasted for his use of coy phrases even though within the book he explains that

(those were the quaint, prudish terms of her girlhood)

It's such a matter of individual judgement and taste. I wonder if the awards put authors off from writing about sex because it's difficult enough anyway, without someone looking in judgement over your shoulder as you type.

There's always the worry that readers will think that what you're describing is your own experience. I'm reminded of Rachel in Friends who suggests toes as an erogenous zone and then backtracks with, "For some people" and fools no one.

So I can't decide if the Bad Sex Awards are just a bit of fun, or harmful to writing. What do you think?

Bad sex

The winner of the Bad Sex Award 2010 as his "winning" speech said

There's nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of a nation, I thank you

I thought that was a rather gracious response to receiving an award that no one wants to win.

I was intrigued to learn that his story is

about how the scars of childhood abuse affect later relationships and it's based on two people's real experience

and I wonder how the lines that have been so often quoted would appear in context. I may have to get hold of the book to find out, so it's true what they say about publicity.

The article by the award winner is here. If you're at all interested in writing books then it's worth reading.

No more sex?

Photo by kainr

The Guardian is claiming that sex is out of fashion in literary works. Now, I agree that it's very difficult to write well about sex and I've already talked about that here, here and here.

It's not that I've got anything against writing about sex in theory, it's just that in practice it can often end up sounding rather silly. I tend to take the same view as Hilary Mantel:

If you can make your reader's imagination work, that is much more powerful than saying, he put his hand here and she put her hand there. That just makes the reader think, are these people contortionists and could I get into that position?

If, as Martin Amis claims, it's impossible for a novelist to write about real sex, then that would let me off the hook. I'm not entirely convinced though. What do you think?

Talking about sex

I can’t imagine understanding the characters without understanding what they do in bed. In fact, I would say this about real people too.

from The most erotic organ is not the brain by Russell Smith.

If I need to know all about my friends' sex lives in order to understand them then I'm stuffed. I don't know about you, but I don't talk to my friends about what I do in bed and they don't tell me what they get up to either. (I was going to say, "they don't give me a blow by blow account" but I thought better of it.)

I wonder if it's true of our characters. I tend to let my characters shut the bedroom door on me before anything interesting happens mostly because it's so hard to write a good sex scene. In real life there comes a time when the words just fade away and it's all about experiencing. I suppose the mark of a good writer is being able to find words for wordless experiences. I am not that writer.

What do you think? Do you need to know what characters are like in bed to really understand them? And is that also true in real life or was Mr Smith using just a smidgen of hyperbole there to get us interested in reading his book?

Have you had sex?

Whether or not you've had sex depends on how you define it. And people have some pretty funny definitions according to Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

What struck me was the statistic that

95 percent of respondents would consider penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) having had sex

What on earth did the other 5% think they were doing?

I also found the first comment very funny; human rationalisation knows no bounds. You can read all about it here.

Sex education in the 60s - allegedly

Click on picture to enlarge

I came across this alleged extract from a 1960s sex education text over at Our-Local. (They're a great bunch of people over there but don't visit if you're easily offended.) You'll have noticed that the explanatory text is part of the picture, so clearly this isn't the original page. But is the text genuine? Some people think that it is but I don't agree.

I was born in 1954 so I was young in the 60s and my memory of how people talked about sex then is that they didn't!

As I remember it, advice for young girls was mainly about periods. Oh, and washing your stockings every day. I don't remember any advice on marriage, except possibly "wait until you're married". No one said what you were meant to wait for, because that kind of thing wasn't talked about.

Human reproduction was covered in biology lessons and booklets. The two-dimensional diagrams of male and female reproductive organs didn't really explain how people had sexual intercourse (as it was called) let alone why they would want to do so.

Open2.net says in A Brief History of Sex Ed:

Anecdotal accounts of lessons on the reproductive systems of rabbits, or the pollination of flowering plants, suggest that much school sex education in the UK in the 1950s and ‘60s, was carried out through the descriptions, though not the observations, of the reproductive habits of plants and non-human animals.

At least we were told about humans.

The alleged text book article strikes a very different note. It just doesn't ring true to me and I actually find it much funnier to read it as the spoof it undoubtedly is.

Do you agree?

Bad sex writing

It's a pity they didn't have the Bad Sex Award back in 1968. I've just come across a gem in the Pop Sensation blog. Scroll down to the excerpt from page 81 and you'll see what I mean.

I tell myself that nothing I write is ever going to be that bad.

Writing about sex

I'm still reading Garbadale (see previous post) and I'm struck by how well Banks handles writing about sex. He's very witty, for example when writing about the main character (aged 15):

He hadn't seen much porn, but he was damn sure the way to instant sexual success wasn't becoming a plumber or a pool technician.

He also manages to describe sex in words appropriate to whoever is the Point Of View character at the time, so we get

rubbing her through her jeans

where the first "her" stands in for a more explicit description, through to the use of words like "fuck" and "penis". He does it beautifully.

I have to say that I find scenes which use indirect words can be very erotic, as a misplaced "clitoris" can pull me right out of the story. I need the characters to speak in their own voices, otherwise it sounds like a visit to the clinic.

I think I said much the same thing about the use of strong language generally. Is that the secret of good writing: get into your character's heads?