Anatomy of a Sex Scene
When I began writing my newest novel, Palimpsest, I found myself faced with a frightening task: I was going to have to write sex scenes.
But wait. That's not scary, right? I mean, everyone's doing it. No one would think any less of me. Come on, baby. Just one scene. Just one little description of your main characters rolling around a tawdry bed, or on the floor, even. If you fade to black, you don't really love your book.
But I'd never done it before. My last novels had been fairy tales. Dark ones, violent ones, old school folklore with blood and witches and horrible things being done to very young children. The way fairy tales ought to be. But the thing is, writing fairy tales is an automatically respectable activity, like volunteering at a local animal shelter or recycling. You are Contributing to the Folkloric Tradition. Parents will bring their kids to your readings. The kids, bloodthirsty wee goblins that they are, aren't bothered by a little cannibalistic witchery. They were weaned on Hansel and Gretel. They'll dress up as your most bestial characters and pass out in an orgy of cocoa and graham crackers, snug in the knowledge that their mothers love them and would never leave them in a dark forest at night. It's good family fun. Fairy tales are all about sex but do not contain it--it's all in code, a dogwhistle for adults. Sex is subtext; the text is candy, or magic, or even marriage.
And because of that textual play, it's easy for an author to hide in fairy tales. I can write down my whole life and so long as I put a wicked queen and a magic mirror in, no one would ever guess that I'm being naked and intimate with them. The fourth wall is robust and muscular. But as I wrote Palimpsest, very conscious that I had made the choice to write a book about sex, I knew the jig was up. No more kids at readings, no more parents happy to entrust a sliver of their little ones' psychological development to my imagination. No more automatic respect as a Soldier of the Grand Tradition.
But that's not what scared me. The nakedness involved in writing sex scenes--the good ones, the ones that make you shiver--is just so overwhelming. And I don't mean describing body parts or caught breath or eruptions of various kinds. A writer can't help but bring her experience to bear on everything she writes, and writing about sex is like laying your entire sexual being out in front of a reader, all your kinks, all your nights, ugly and beautiful and awful and perfect. Its an unbearable bareness, and even if there's a wicked queen and a magic mirror, the minute the queen shrugs off her black gown and kisses her huntsman, there is no escaping the essential intimacy of what is about to happen: the author is whispering her deepest notions of sex and self and skin and suffering to the reader, and to me, that is hardly more intimate than sex itself. Its leaning out of the page and saying: come into my world. This is what it looks like. This is what it feels like.
And that's a terrifying thing to me.
But it's the key to a good sex scene. A Venn diagram of raw, close-to-the-bone intimacy. Author-character-reader. The author brings their sexual experience to bear on the content of the scene (and the unspoken law of exchange is that the wider the author's experience, the richer the sex they write becomes--but that's an even more frightening thing to address in our conflicted culture, where writing erotica is more acceptable than reading it, and both are morally superior to watching it), the characters are stripped literally and metaphorically, shown at their most vulnerable, at their most naked and unguarded and helpless, and the reader is carried along through it, experiencing a single sex act through a multitude of lenses.
Hell, I've had lovers who haven't seen me as naked as my readers will when this book comes out.
For all the snickering and arguments about legitimate literature, I think writing about sex is an act of fundamental bravery. My readings will be more uncomfortable places next year, while I read these scenes out loud and listeners look at their shoes--because its hard to admit that it's not just words, it's not just a book, its blood and bone and life and a mess of personal history, and that's why we look away, not because we don't want to see, but because we want to stare, and it's almost impossible to believe that's allowed. Writing about sex is an invitation to stare, and while it takes spine and spleen to take the invitation, to extend it has been one of the scariest and most exhilarating actions of my young life.
Step into my parlor. Everybody's doing it. No one will think any less of you.