Chapter 6 is out HERE (Nifty) and HERE (Literotica)
Writing Sex is HARD (weak pun intended)
So, I do really regret the delay, but it couldn't be avoided. Two things really got in the way, simultaneously, which was a nightmare. I feel as though I am equal to all challenges, but I can only deal with one at a time, and I had to prioritise.
The first is that I was rushing to meet the deadline for this short story submission call for a paying publication, and the other was that I had a complete identity crisis in regards to my ability to write about sex.
The former, unfortunately, I've just gotten some bad news about. They will not be accepting my short story, as it wasn't a good 'fit' - which, to be honest, I knew was a long shot. I didn't exactly fully 'get' the brief, and I was unsure the story met it properly once I wrote it. However, I'm happy I wrote it, and I still think it's a good story. And now I have something to bounce around to other publications - maybe even ones that pay better.
The latter - writing about sex - was a lot to deal with. Especially just in terms of my confidence in my own abilities. I've written out most of One More Year already, and that includes most of the sex scenes, but when I got around to editing this one, it just felt so flat and mechanical.
So, I've consulted the wisdom of the ancients - primarily, The Joys of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict, and a whole bunch of posts in the resources section of Literotica, for balance. (Apologies to anyone in that group who's offended by the designation 'ancient' - I'm sure they're all still brimming with youthful vigour.)
And... I guess it came out better? I'm really not sure. My confidence is still in shambles. But hopefully they're well liked, and I can rest easy this week. (And the next, because I might need a few days to take a break, and a few more days to focus on some heavy admin before I can start editing again. And Chapter 7 will have sex scenes I need to rewrite.)
Another short story call has also gotten it's teeth into me, and the concept is great, so I might also have to run with that idea. That might be more of a problem around Chapter 9's release, but we'll see. Hopefully I've learned to better manage my time by now, and I'll only be facing one problem at a time then.
Notes on Differences: (OMY vs. AD)
Okay, this Chapter is completely different from anything I had in Another Day. I think in AD Chapter 5, Eric just sort of showed up at Jay's house, and they went for a walk, and then Eric came to dinner with the family or something. And in 6 they woke up together, because while I was perfectly willing to ruin my fan-fiction with bad sex scenes back in the day, I preferred to just do a fade-to-black in the stories that meant something to me.
I just thought Jay and Eric deserved a first date, and Jay enjoyed a memorable first time, and hopefully I've achieved that. Obviously, I also tried to write both things to mean something in the greater sense of the story, so hopefully that comes across. But I guess we'll see.
Beta Readers:
My first sex story was actually a fan fiction for Twilight. I got pretty upset that Stephanie Meyers faded to black for Bella and Edward’s sex scene (because who doesn’t want to know how a bed got destroyed in the process???) so I though fuck it, I will write the scene myself. It was also an interesting exercise in that I had to match up the start and the end to what was consistent in the book, so I had targets I had to hit, which was both challenging and rewarding. As far as the sex goes, I think you have decide up front how raunchy and vulgar you are willing to go and then write within those boundaries. You can undo all the sensitivity and poignancy of the work you’ve done so far by one unfortunate bukkake scene 😂 but whether you go hardcore or softcore, there are always ways to make the scene hot. Pacing is important. It needs to play out to a satisfying length, but not be too long that it overwhelms the rest of the story. You need to represent the five senses, include dialogue as well as thoughts and feelings. And every writer of erotica needs to build a synonym database. It gets very stale if you’re using the same words over and over again. Vary sentence structures is important too. A sex scene is too mechanical when written like “John did this, then Josh did that. Then John did this and Josh did that…” and you’d be surprised how many writers fall into that trap. If you’re on iOS, check out an app called Companion Synonyms. It’s brilliant! It’s like a thesaurus on steroids.
ReplyDeleteI've been writing sex scenes forever - I too used to do a lot of fanficiton, with my primary motivation being "Hey, this book/tv-show/movie/video-game isn't GAY enough." and would - justly so - come up with some gay relationships, with steamy scenes included.
ReplyDeleteBut my writing has improved a lot since then. I'd actually already written out all the sex scenes for One More Year (or most of them, anyway) - I did it while I was writing the rest. It's just that when I got around to looking at this one, with my critical editors-eye, it seemed like it wasn't quite keeping pace with the rest of the story - like I'd improved in all the other aspects of my writing, but not in writing about sex. So I had some bootcamp to do.
But I think (hope) I've done okay. Chapter 6 is doing pretty well in the Literotica ratings, so that's something, at least. Elizabeth Benedict's book about it is a fantastic resource on how to do all sorts of interesting things when writing sex scenes. (Including - but not limited to - how to make them steamy.) I'm glad someone pointed me at it, and I hope I've been a good student of her work.