Even successful writers have trouble writing sex scenes. It's so daunting to some that they don't even try. But there's a secret to writing erotica.
Part of the secret is that on a physical level, we don't know the difference between fantasy and actuality. Imagine right now that you're on a rooftop in New York City on a warm spring day. The sun shines on your head, warming your face; you can hear the drone of traffic from far, far below. Horns bleat like sheep lost in deep canyons. As you walk over the roof toward the edge, your feet sink a bit in the warmed surface; the faint smell of tar rises like a taste on your tongue. You come close to the edge and the wind curls up the side of the building, tossing a torn newspaper page against your shoulder. You catch it, crumple it in your hand. The page feels gritty against your sweaty palm. Slowly you walk right up the very edge of the building and look down to the street fifty storeys below.
If you imaged up this scene while you read it, not only would you have heard and smelled and tasted and touched and seen the world I described, but you might also have felt your hands getting clammy and your heart beginning to race. There's a reason for this: it's absolutely impossible to have an image in our mind's eye without having a concomitant emotional response. I call this the image-emotion coin, and it's the basis for my movies in the mind techniques that I describe at length in my book, Movies in the Mind: How to Build a Short Story. For the sake of this article, though, the important element is this: if you imaged up the passage above as a movie in the mind, your body participated.
Now isn't that the key to writing fiction? We want to pull readers in as participants. We do that through well-chosen details, of course. But the trick to getting the right details is to have the movies in the mind so vivid that all you have to do is chronicle them: simply record what you hear, see, taste, touch, smell, and feel in your mind's eye.
Writing a sex scene then requires that you do the same thing, which is maybe why sex scenes can be difficult to write. They can make us feel as though we're voyeurs, peeping through the keyhole at others' erotic moments.
There's a way around that, though, and that's what I call writing from the inside out. Instead of being the voyeur, you need to enter into the emotion of the moment and into the body of your character. I'll talk about each in turn.
First, entering the emotion: that's an easy thing to do as you saw above. Because it is impossible to experience an image without experiencing an emotion, all you have to do to enter the emotion is image.
Try this: imagine that your character is licking honey from a lover's fingers. Did you feel anything in your body when you vividly imaged that up? If you did and if you wrote while you were feeling that feeling, it would color the rhythm of your words, the choice of your verbs and adjectives, the selection of your images. In short, your words would convey the emotion you were feeling if you were feeling it as you wrote. And that alone would draw your readers in as participants; they would experience the scene as if it were happening to them.
I've developed a technique that makes it easy for you as a writer to draw your reader in as a participant. I call it Method Writing because it grew from the acting technique of the great Russian director, Constantin Stanislavski. In Method Writing, you image up the movies in your mind so vividly that you experience emotions in your body. And then, with the emotion in your body, you write. The trick is that if the emotion leaves your body, don't write. Stop, image the scene again, and when the emotion returns, then write. Right now, I want you to do a little Method Writing.
To do it, you need to remember a time in your life when you were more turned on then you've ever been. Remember it vividly, recreating as many of the details as you can in your mind's eye.
What did it feel like? Where did you feel it in your body. When I ask this question of participants in my erotic writing workshop, I get answers like this: "I felt a breathlessness in my throat" or "It moved down my arms and felt like a body rush" or "Almost electricity. Like an energy rush" or "I felt that my skin's like an organ itself responding to touch" or "The hairs on my arms were standing on end."
The point of naming the experience is that it creates a mnemonic that we can then use later to get back to the image. Remember -- it's a image-emotion coin, and that means you can start with either the image or the emotion; it doesn't matter which.
Now I want you to do some Method Writing. Take out some paper and a pen and sit in a nice, quiet place where you won't be interrupted. Once you're comfortable, image up the scene again (starting from either image or emotion), and when you experience it vividly in your mind's eye and feel it as an emotion in your body, then and only then do I want you to chronicle the movies in your mind. That means record the scene you see, hear, touch, taste, smell; just get down the details. But the key is to do it only when you're feeling a feeling in your body. If that feeling goes away, stop and wait for it to come back before writing again. Do this for fifteen minutes. And don't worry about making it perfect -- that's something you can always do later. Right now, you just need to get it up from the well.
During a workshop, one participant wrote this when she was writing from excitement: "The fish were big, bigger than the little ones on the reef, even bigger than the small sharks on the reef. She didn't know what they were. Maybe barracudas or jags, she thought the guys called them, but there were dozens of them, six feet long or longer, hanging in the water. She wasn't afraid. Maybe she should have been."
Even though the scene isn't overtly sexual, it comes across that way because the writer wrote from her emotion. We capture our own excitement and through the alchemy of words and images, we convey it to the reader.
The second part of writing from the inside out is entering the body of your character. By this I mean that you slip yourself like a hand into the glove of your character's body. If you have any doubt you can do this, here's an exercise you might find worth doing.
Imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror. You're looking at your own face. Now imagine that your character comes to stand beside you. Can you see his or her face in the mirror? Examine it as closely as you can. How would you describe it?
Now close your eyes and imagine yourself slipping into the body of your character (it might be a tight squeeze if you're bigger). Once you're firmly ensconced, open your character's eyes and look at "you" in the mirror. You are your character looking at his or her body through "your" eyes.
When I have people do this, they're often surprised that they would describe what they saw differently if they were describing it from the character's perspective rather than from their own. This is an important exercise because it shows the ability we have not just to walk in our character's shoes, but to walk with their feet as well.
When we're writing from the inside out, we don't have to worry about being voyeurs. We're not. We're participants. We feel our characters' feelings; we enter into their bodies. Here's another exercise I'd like you to do right now: Enter into the body of your character when he or she is making love. Feel the feeling? Now write it from the inside out, chronicling the movies in your mind.
When you can get into a character's body, surprising things will pop from your pen. Often you'll find yourself saying, "Wow! That's so good! How did I come up with that?" The answer is you didn't; your character did. You were just smart enough to get out of your own way and chronicle the movies in your mind.
Here's an example of what can happen when you write from the inside out. In Law-Yone's erotic short story "Drought" the main character is a 15-year-old who lives in Indonesia somewhere on some small island. It's a war situation, and a Caucasian pilot crash lands on the island. Because the girl was fathered by a Caucasian, the villagers bring the pilot to the aunt's house where the girl lives, thinking that she will be able to relate to him. As she studies him, there is this: "Once more I was struck by the expensive color of those eyes, the color of a ring I'd seen on a Chinese merchant. A pale sapphire."
We feel like we're inside this Indonesian girl seeing eyes that color for the first time because the author was inside when she wrote it. That's the kind of thing we can't "think to"; it comes out full-blown like that.
But here a note is important. I'm not saying you can't revise what you do: I'm not of that school at all. But when we revise we go back to the same place -- into the body of our character. In the first draft of my story "Miami Beach," I described my character's dress "as tight as a proverbial glove." When I got back into my character -- who was very much on the prowl and hot to trot -- and had her describe her dress, it came out like this: "It was a black spaghetti-strapped crushed velvet of some remarkably stretchy material that fitted my body like a condom." Much better!
So the secret to writing sex scenes is basically to let your characters do it for you. That's the beauty of writing from the inside out. If your character isn't the sort to use a euphemism but prefers the good old Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, you're not going to blunder by making them sound like they just came out of a romance novel. They won't let you.
Writing from the inside out also gives us the rich sensual detail that's essential in all writing, but even more so in erotic writing.
In Assumed Identity, David Morrell wrote one of the sexier passages I've ever read. The man and the woman are uncover agents, posing as a husband and wife.
"Both he and Juana had known the dangers of becoming involved with an undercover partner. They had tried to make their public gestures of affection strictly professional. They had done their best not to be affected by their enforced private intimacy, eating together, combining laundry, using the same bathroom, sharing the same sleeping quarters. They didn't have intercourse. They weren't that undisciplined. But they might as well have, for the affect was the same. Sexual activity was only a part -- and often a small part, and sometimes no part -- of a successful marriage. In their four months together, Buchanan and Juana portrayed their roles so well that they finally admitted awkwardly to each other that they did feel married. In the night, while he listened to her softly exhale in sleep, he had felt intoxicated by her smell. It reminded him of cinnamon."
What makes this so sexy is those wonderful lines -- "he had felt intoxicated by her smell. It reminded him of cinnamon." All of a sudden, I'm a participant because Morrell's evoked my senses. And when it comes to writing sex scenes, too many writers neglect our sense of smell. Smell is arguably the most sexual of the senses and one worth incorporating into all your sex scenes. Here are a couple examples from my "Miami Beach":
And then the hair on my neck stood to attention as breath whispered into my ear. "I could smell you from over there."
That got me wondering how I could smell like much of anything since I hadn't worn perfume and the hotel had given us Ivory soap. "What do I smell like?" I asked.
"Sex," he said. "Or maybe it's me."
Now is that a line or what? This guy should give lessons. None of this "do you come here often?" crap.
and
He slipped my jacket off my shoulders enough so that it bared them, and he stroked my arms in long languid strokes as though he were smelling me through his hands.
We know the musky smell of sex even though we'd have a hard time describing it. In A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman talks about the link between musk and sexual arousal:
"Because animal musk is so close to human testosterone, we can smell it in portions of as little as 0.000000000000032 of an ounce. Fortunately, chemists have now designed twenty synthetic musks, in part because the animals are endangered, and in part to ensure a consistency of odor difficult to achieve with natural substances. An obvious question is why secretions from the scent glands of deer, boar, cats, and other animals should arouse sexual desire in humans. The answer seems to be that they assume the same chemical shape as a steroid, and when we smell them we may respond as we would to human pheromones. In fact, in one experiment conducted at International Flavors and Fragrances, women who sniffed musk developed shorter menstrual cycles, ovulated more often, and found it easier to conceive. Does perfume matter -- isn't it all packaging? Not necessarily. Can smells influence us biologically? Absolutely. Musk produces a hormonal change in the woman who smells it."
A student of mine who'd just come back from San Francisco was remembering what North Beach was like when he was stationed at the Presidio in World War II. He was talking about the B Girls -- the women who made commissions on the drinks they sold -- and he said the ones who wore the same perfume that his girl back home wore were the ones who got his business.
Marilyn Monroe knew the power of musk says Ackerman: "When [she] was asked by a reporter what she wore to bed, she answered coyly, `Channel No. 5.'"
So use smell -- not just the smell of sex, but sexy smells. And use sounds and textures and visual stimuli. And don't forget taste! Not just honey on fingers -- FOOD! Remember Tom Jones? A friend of mine says he thinks you can tell how someone makes love by watching them eat. How do your characters' eat? Get into their bodies and chronicle it. It may turn into the sexiest scene you've ever written.
© 1996 by Colleen Mariah Rae
