Musings on sex scenes ....
I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted. I'm never prolific, but I've rarely gone this long without posting since I started on LJ ... and it feels like longer, because it's been such a busy few weeks. The reason, I think, is a combination of extensive travel over the past few weeks (Escapade, which I haven't written about but maybe will, followed by a long ski trip), RL busy-ness (including Conan the new kitten, who is a holy (but adorable) terror, about whom more in a later post!), and a combination of occurrences that sort of deflated me and threw me into a bit of a fannish slump.
And now, of course, I have that horrible non-posting inertia: how to get started after a long absence. I feel like I have nothing to say, but that might be because I've fallen out of the mode of thinking in terms of what I might want to post. And the longer I wait the harder it gets. So I figure I'll pick something recent that interests me (Pros! and sex! how can I go wrong?! :-D) and see where I go ... maybe it'll be just a short post. (Yeah, and maybe pigs will fly!)
shooting2kill had a great post recently collecting some of her favorite lines from Pros stories. There is just about nothing I love more than talking about stories - not so much from an academic/critical point of view as from a "fannish" point of view, if that makes sense. But it's difficult to do online, I find - the problem is that everyone isn't reading the same thing at the same time. So sometimes when someone posts about a story, I may have read it before, but my head isn't in the story, and the story isn't fully in my head, at the time of the post, and I don't feel able to intelligently discuss it at that moment. And then the moment passes, and everyone moves on ... plus there's the fact that I find "group" conversations, like on a list, sort of unsatisfactory; people go off on tangents, and I'm always thinking of something else I want to say that I forgot to write, and it's hard to really engage...
But still, I absolutely love story-related posts, even if I don't end up commenting or responding. I love knowing that people are feeling the same things when they read fanfic that I feel when I read - and by this I mean not so much the appreciation of a fine piece of writing as the incredible, intense, difficult-to-articulate fannish feelings, and more specifically, slashy fannish feelings - longing, obsession, that ache, impossible to describe but, I think, familiar to every slash fan. What triggers those feelings can be very individual, but the feelings themselves are the same, or similar enough. Many of shooting2kill's favorite quotes, for example, don't affect me the same way, and some of them even have the opposite effect on me (mostly because they're from stories that I don't like, and I can't separate them from their context), and I'm sure she'd feel the same about any list I assembled - and yet she posts that list of quotes and I read it and relate to it totally and utterly, know and can myself feel the way those quotes make her feel, even if those aren't the particular quotes that make me feel that way. The specifics are so beside the point; it's the similarity of the reaction that binds us. Which I think is just so cool.
Anyway, in the back of my mind I've always toyed with the idea of doing what she did, of keeping a sort of "journal" with my favorite phrases, lines, scenes, paragraphs, and the stories they're from, but like many of my millions of ideas (all of which tend to be of the organizational rather than creative sort - wouldn't it be great if I could assemble x, y, or z all in one place, ordered and accessible and maybe even searchable?! *g*), it hasn't happened and is unlikely to. I generally have lots of story phrases floating in my mind and can remember and refer to them easily - except, of course, when I actually sit down and try to remember them; then my brain turns into a sieve. It's kind of like choosing a quote for the yearbook, or a sig for emails - I know there are plenty of quotes that I love, but when it's time to actually remember and choose one, my mind goes utterly blank.
Plus of course there's the context problem - some of my favorite bits of language from stories are gorgeous and memorable to me because of where and how they are placed, and they lose much of their impact when read in isolation, so I'd end up quoting enormous sections of stories!
So anyway, I've never done it myself, but I was glad to see someone else doing it.
And reading the post got me thinking about one of my favorite fannish subjects: smut. Or, if you prefer, sex scenes. I noticed, and someone pointed out in comments, that most of the quotes she listed were from sex scenes, and I realized that if I were ever to put together my own list, the same would probably be true of the majority of my most memorable lines and passages.
I've thought a little bit about why this might be. I think it has to do with why I read slash: for those intense fannish feelings I was talking about, which for me arise from the relationship between two men. As I wrote recently in one of my interminable Why I Love What I Love posts, for me it's all about the love, the passion between them - what byslantedlight described in one of her comments as "the deepest, most amazing, throat-catching emotions." That's what I'm in it for: to see, to feel, the depth of that attachment, the intimacy, the vulnerability, the ache and the anguish, the transcendent glory of the bond between these two men.
Which, inevitably and ineluctably, brings me to sex. In really good (to me) slashfic, everything that happens is ultimately about that bond, and a good author can make me feel those feelings throughout, even, as byslantedlight also said (she's my muse!! *g*), with something as simple as one character making a cup of coffee for the other.
But sex is, or can be, the deepest intimacy, and therefore a well written sex/love scene (to me, in a good slash story every sex scene is, to a greater or lesser extent, a love scene in some way, even if it's something else entirely on the surface) is most likely to make me feel the fannish ... yearning, the longing, the exquisite ache. A sex scene is most likely to convey the intimacy, the intensity, that most moves me, that I read fanfic for, and therefore is most likely to be the source of my favorite passages.
But ... that's only a good sex scene. Sex scenes can also be the most trite and uninteresting bits of a story (though a story with trite and uninteresting sex is unlikely to have non-sex passages that really grab me, either; the authors who write the passages that most move me aren't likely to write trite and uninteresting scenes of any sort, though sex scenes may not be their greatest strength, or they may choose not to write them). Interestingly, I think that the lines that kill me with their beauty and the lines that just ... kill me; the ones that most make me ache in that good way and the ones that are just the most painful, are both most likely to come from sex scenes!
So then, what makes a "good" sex scene? Some authors - resonant8 comes to mind, though not, sadly, in Pros! - are almost universally regarded as superlative writers of smut: what is it that differentiates their sex scenes from others? I've thought an awful lot about why smut is such an integral part of my enjoyment of slash - and one of these days I'll put it all together in a single post - but I've never attempted to really analyze or understand precisely what makes a sex scene really work for me. I "know it when I see it," but I've never thought it'd be possible to articulate why.
But then I came upon the most fabulous post by cupidsbow - her Formula for Writing Sex Scenes.
I have to stop for a moment to explain here that writing - writing stories, I mean - is something that I've always viewed as deeply and utterly mysterious. I don't mean mysterious to me because I don't understand how it's done (though obviously this is true!!) - I mean it is by its very nature a mysterious thing, even to the writer. It's like the question where do ideas come from - there's no real answer; if you have them you have them, and the process by which they're generated in you're head is mysterious; they come from a "black box" whose inner workings are unknown and unknowable. That's how I've always thought about the writing of stories, too: I've always understood "creative" processes to be entirely distinct from "technical" processes; they just "happen" and are not governed by logic or rules or susceptible to analysis.
I'm not talking about grammar here. I know grammar has rules that can be learned - it's not "mysterious" - but those rules apply to all language, all writing, and they pertain to words - how words can be combined to create sentences and how they relate to each other structurally. I'm not even really talking story structure, big picture - plot, resolution; I can see how those things follow patterns. I'm talking instead about the way the specific author relates the story that's in her head. She imagines a story that involves a sex scene; now she has to actually tell that story: how does she do it, what words does she write and where, how does she describe/relate that sex scene so that it serves the purpose she wants it to serve, has the effect she wants it to have, to in the story?
(Does this make any sense? I mean, I have a strong sense of the distinctions I'm trying to make, but I can't seem to pinpoint them as clearly or precisely as I'd like, which may mean I'm just blowing smoke! Or maybe I just lack the vocabulary...?)
Maybe I'm slow, but it just never occurred to me until I read cupidsbow's post that there might be formulas, technical rules that an author could follow to increase the effectiveness of her storytelling! Reading this post was amazing to me - it was an epiphany, and major viewpoint shift, to imagine that it's not all the mysterious product of an inborn gift that some people have and some don't and that no one can explain or deconstruct! Oh my god - can it be that you can learn the rules of fiction writing, just as you can learn rules of expository or persuasive writing?? (I don't know why this should be so surprising to me, but it is!)
And yes, I know that following rules isn't enough to make a great fic writer - following technical rules isn't enough to make anyone a great anything; greatness is that spark that goes beyond rule-following, and includes knowing - "feeling" - when to break rules. But ... it could make you a good writer, a competent one, or at least a better one.
Anyway, I thought the post was absolutely amazing. I see people spouting broad prescriptive "principles" of good writing all the time - I do it myself. But that's like my trainer saying "make the horse round" - if I knew how to do it, I'd be doing it, believe me, and I wouldn't need lessons! Though I'm quite sure it's been done, I've never seen someone actually break it down into simple (not easy!), logical rules, demonstrate precisely how to do it: look, it's not magic after all; anyone can make her sex scenes better (though of course some will be able to make them more better than others; I do that think natural talent plays a huge role in writing, and that inspiration and mode of expression are to a large extent products of the black box).
And the rules she described for writing sex scenes struck me as spot on - my neck got sore from nodding. Her premise is that sex scenes aren't in some special category all their own - they're really just a particular type of action scene and so should be governed by the "rules" that govern all action scenes. I didn't understand at first why she was drawing a distinction between writing action scenes and writing other types of scenes, but eventually I got it: with an action scene you're trying to describe in words, to convey to the reader with words, something that is a physical experience for the characters, as opposed to something that is an intellectual or emotional experience for the characters.
She sets out three pretty important rules for writing action/sex scenes, with lots of illustrations. I kept reading her "before" and "after" examples; the "befores" are things you see all the time in fanfic - for example, a scene that reads like this (I'm quoting directly from her post):
Rodney made a strangled sound in the back of his throat, and John was about to drop to his knees and blow him when Rodney beat him to it. Gripping John's waist hard for support, he landed on the floor with a dull thump. John curled his hands around Rodney's head and jutted his hips forward.
In the past when I read something like this I'd know that it wasn't particularly effective, that it did nothing for me as sex scenes go, certainly didn't evoke any of those fannish feelings I described up above. But now I understand why it doesn't work, and what could be done to make it better.
Man, this almost - almost! - makes me want to go out and write a sex scene of my own! *g* I'm not going to do that, but I like knowing this stuff, I like understanding, even if it serves no immediate practical purpose: this may reveal me to be totally pathetic, but the truth is that it gives me a warm little happy squirmy feeling to understand, to know the rules, to be able to break things down (it's no mystery why I love programming!!). Though it does occur to me from a practical standpoint that knowing this stuff would certainly make me a better beta/editor, and that's something I do like to do. I mean, it's not like there's a foolproof template for story-writing, and every author's style is different, but it's nice to think that if I read a sex scene that does nothing for me, I might be able to understand why and to make some suggestions for improving it.
Anyway, maybe not everyone will get the same practically orgasmic thrill out of it that I did, but I highly recommend this post.... Though I have to confess (not that it should be a surprise!) that this recommendation is not entirely free from self interest; smut is one of my favorite things about slash, so I have a definite goal in mind: namely, lots of really good sex scenes - Pros sex scenes - for me to read!!
But also, I really would be interested to know how the writers among you feel about this way of looking at and analyzing writing. I mean, it's fun for me from an analytical perspective, but does thinking about rules "get in the way" of free expression?
Okay, I suppose that's enough blithering for now ... but it feels good to be back in the LJ swing! Plus, spring is coming; the daffodils are blooming, and that always gives me a lift ....
And now, of course, I have that horrible non-posting inertia: how to get started after a long absence. I feel like I have nothing to say, but that might be because I've fallen out of the mode of thinking in terms of what I might want to post. And the longer I wait the harder it gets. So I figure I'll pick something recent that interests me (Pros! and sex! how can I go wrong?! :-D) and see where I go ... maybe it'll be just a short post. (Yeah, and maybe pigs will fly!)
shooting2kill had a great post recently collecting some of her favorite lines from Pros stories. There is just about nothing I love more than talking about stories - not so much from an academic/critical point of view as from a "fannish" point of view, if that makes sense. But it's difficult to do online, I find - the problem is that everyone isn't reading the same thing at the same time. So sometimes when someone posts about a story, I may have read it before, but my head isn't in the story, and the story isn't fully in my head, at the time of the post, and I don't feel able to intelligently discuss it at that moment. And then the moment passes, and everyone moves on ... plus there's the fact that I find "group" conversations, like on a list, sort of unsatisfactory; people go off on tangents, and I'm always thinking of something else I want to say that I forgot to write, and it's hard to really engage...
But still, I absolutely love story-related posts, even if I don't end up commenting or responding. I love knowing that people are feeling the same things when they read fanfic that I feel when I read - and by this I mean not so much the appreciation of a fine piece of writing as the incredible, intense, difficult-to-articulate fannish feelings, and more specifically, slashy fannish feelings - longing, obsession, that ache, impossible to describe but, I think, familiar to every slash fan. What triggers those feelings can be very individual, but the feelings themselves are the same, or similar enough. Many of shooting2kill's favorite quotes, for example, don't affect me the same way, and some of them even have the opposite effect on me (mostly because they're from stories that I don't like, and I can't separate them from their context), and I'm sure she'd feel the same about any list I assembled - and yet she posts that list of quotes and I read it and relate to it totally and utterly, know and can myself feel the way those quotes make her feel, even if those aren't the particular quotes that make me feel that way. The specifics are so beside the point; it's the similarity of the reaction that binds us. Which I think is just so cool.
Anyway, in the back of my mind I've always toyed with the idea of doing what she did, of keeping a sort of "journal" with my favorite phrases, lines, scenes, paragraphs, and the stories they're from, but like many of my millions of ideas (all of which tend to be of the organizational rather than creative sort - wouldn't it be great if I could assemble x, y, or z all in one place, ordered and accessible and maybe even searchable?! *g*), it hasn't happened and is unlikely to. I generally have lots of story phrases floating in my mind and can remember and refer to them easily - except, of course, when I actually sit down and try to remember them; then my brain turns into a sieve. It's kind of like choosing a quote for the yearbook, or a sig for emails - I know there are plenty of quotes that I love, but when it's time to actually remember and choose one, my mind goes utterly blank.
Plus of course there's the context problem - some of my favorite bits of language from stories are gorgeous and memorable to me because of where and how they are placed, and they lose much of their impact when read in isolation, so I'd end up quoting enormous sections of stories!
So anyway, I've never done it myself, but I was glad to see someone else doing it.
And reading the post got me thinking about one of my favorite fannish subjects: smut. Or, if you prefer, sex scenes. I noticed, and someone pointed out in comments, that most of the quotes she listed were from sex scenes, and I realized that if I were ever to put together my own list, the same would probably be true of the majority of my most memorable lines and passages.
I've thought a little bit about why this might be. I think it has to do with why I read slash: for those intense fannish feelings I was talking about, which for me arise from the relationship between two men. As I wrote recently in one of my interminable Why I Love What I Love posts, for me it's all about the love, the passion between them - what byslantedlight described in one of her comments as "the deepest, most amazing, throat-catching emotions." That's what I'm in it for: to see, to feel, the depth of that attachment, the intimacy, the vulnerability, the ache and the anguish, the transcendent glory of the bond between these two men.
Which, inevitably and ineluctably, brings me to sex. In really good (to me) slashfic, everything that happens is ultimately about that bond, and a good author can make me feel those feelings throughout, even, as byslantedlight also said (she's my muse!! *g*), with something as simple as one character making a cup of coffee for the other.
But sex is, or can be, the deepest intimacy, and therefore a well written sex/love scene (to me, in a good slash story every sex scene is, to a greater or lesser extent, a love scene in some way, even if it's something else entirely on the surface) is most likely to make me feel the fannish ... yearning, the longing, the exquisite ache. A sex scene is most likely to convey the intimacy, the intensity, that most moves me, that I read fanfic for, and therefore is most likely to be the source of my favorite passages.
But ... that's only a good sex scene. Sex scenes can also be the most trite and uninteresting bits of a story (though a story with trite and uninteresting sex is unlikely to have non-sex passages that really grab me, either; the authors who write the passages that most move me aren't likely to write trite and uninteresting scenes of any sort, though sex scenes may not be their greatest strength, or they may choose not to write them). Interestingly, I think that the lines that kill me with their beauty and the lines that just ... kill me; the ones that most make me ache in that good way and the ones that are just the most painful, are both most likely to come from sex scenes!
So then, what makes a "good" sex scene? Some authors - resonant8 comes to mind, though not, sadly, in Pros! - are almost universally regarded as superlative writers of smut: what is it that differentiates their sex scenes from others? I've thought an awful lot about why smut is such an integral part of my enjoyment of slash - and one of these days I'll put it all together in a single post - but I've never attempted to really analyze or understand precisely what makes a sex scene really work for me. I "know it when I see it," but I've never thought it'd be possible to articulate why.
But then I came upon the most fabulous post by cupidsbow - her Formula for Writing Sex Scenes.
I have to stop for a moment to explain here that writing - writing stories, I mean - is something that I've always viewed as deeply and utterly mysterious. I don't mean mysterious to me because I don't understand how it's done (though obviously this is true!!) - I mean it is by its very nature a mysterious thing, even to the writer. It's like the question where do ideas come from - there's no real answer; if you have them you have them, and the process by which they're generated in you're head is mysterious; they come from a "black box" whose inner workings are unknown and unknowable. That's how I've always thought about the writing of stories, too: I've always understood "creative" processes to be entirely distinct from "technical" processes; they just "happen" and are not governed by logic or rules or susceptible to analysis.
I'm not talking about grammar here. I know grammar has rules that can be learned - it's not "mysterious" - but those rules apply to all language, all writing, and they pertain to words - how words can be combined to create sentences and how they relate to each other structurally. I'm not even really talking story structure, big picture - plot, resolution; I can see how those things follow patterns. I'm talking instead about the way the specific author relates the story that's in her head. She imagines a story that involves a sex scene; now she has to actually tell that story: how does she do it, what words does she write and where, how does she describe/relate that sex scene so that it serves the purpose she wants it to serve, has the effect she wants it to have, to in the story?
(Does this make any sense? I mean, I have a strong sense of the distinctions I'm trying to make, but I can't seem to pinpoint them as clearly or precisely as I'd like, which may mean I'm just blowing smoke! Or maybe I just lack the vocabulary...?)
Maybe I'm slow, but it just never occurred to me until I read cupidsbow's post that there might be formulas, technical rules that an author could follow to increase the effectiveness of her storytelling! Reading this post was amazing to me - it was an epiphany, and major viewpoint shift, to imagine that it's not all the mysterious product of an inborn gift that some people have and some don't and that no one can explain or deconstruct! Oh my god - can it be that you can learn the rules of fiction writing, just as you can learn rules of expository or persuasive writing?? (I don't know why this should be so surprising to me, but it is!)
And yes, I know that following rules isn't enough to make a great fic writer - following technical rules isn't enough to make anyone a great anything; greatness is that spark that goes beyond rule-following, and includes knowing - "feeling" - when to break rules. But ... it could make you a good writer, a competent one, or at least a better one.
Anyway, I thought the post was absolutely amazing. I see people spouting broad prescriptive "principles" of good writing all the time - I do it myself. But that's like my trainer saying "make the horse round" - if I knew how to do it, I'd be doing it, believe me, and I wouldn't need lessons! Though I'm quite sure it's been done, I've never seen someone actually break it down into simple (not easy!), logical rules, demonstrate precisely how to do it: look, it's not magic after all; anyone can make her sex scenes better (though of course some will be able to make them more better than others; I do that think natural talent plays a huge role in writing, and that inspiration and mode of expression are to a large extent products of the black box).
And the rules she described for writing sex scenes struck me as spot on - my neck got sore from nodding. Her premise is that sex scenes aren't in some special category all their own - they're really just a particular type of action scene and so should be governed by the "rules" that govern all action scenes. I didn't understand at first why she was drawing a distinction between writing action scenes and writing other types of scenes, but eventually I got it: with an action scene you're trying to describe in words, to convey to the reader with words, something that is a physical experience for the characters, as opposed to something that is an intellectual or emotional experience for the characters.
She sets out three pretty important rules for writing action/sex scenes, with lots of illustrations. I kept reading her "before" and "after" examples; the "befores" are things you see all the time in fanfic - for example, a scene that reads like this (I'm quoting directly from her post):
Rodney made a strangled sound in the back of his throat, and John was about to drop to his knees and blow him when Rodney beat him to it. Gripping John's waist hard for support, he landed on the floor with a dull thump. John curled his hands around Rodney's head and jutted his hips forward.
In the past when I read something like this I'd know that it wasn't particularly effective, that it did nothing for me as sex scenes go, certainly didn't evoke any of those fannish feelings I described up above. But now I understand why it doesn't work, and what could be done to make it better.
Man, this almost - almost! - makes me want to go out and write a sex scene of my own! *g* I'm not going to do that, but I like knowing this stuff, I like understanding, even if it serves no immediate practical purpose: this may reveal me to be totally pathetic, but the truth is that it gives me a warm little happy squirmy feeling to understand, to know the rules, to be able to break things down (it's no mystery why I love programming!!). Though it does occur to me from a practical standpoint that knowing this stuff would certainly make me a better beta/editor, and that's something I do like to do. I mean, it's not like there's a foolproof template for story-writing, and every author's style is different, but it's nice to think that if I read a sex scene that does nothing for me, I might be able to understand why and to make some suggestions for improving it.
Anyway, maybe not everyone will get the same practically orgasmic thrill out of it that I did, but I highly recommend this post.... Though I have to confess (not that it should be a surprise!) that this recommendation is not entirely free from self interest; smut is one of my favorite things about slash, so I have a definite goal in mind: namely, lots of really good sex scenes - Pros sex scenes - for me to read!!
But also, I really would be interested to know how the writers among you feel about this way of looking at and analyzing writing. I mean, it's fun for me from an analytical perspective, but does thinking about rules "get in the way" of free expression?
Okay, I suppose that's enough blithering for now ... but it feels good to be back in the LJ swing! Plus, spring is coming; the daffodils are blooming, and that always gives me a lift ....