When I got home and asked my father what it meant, he said, “It means making love.” Then he told me not to ask any more questions.
When I was about seven, I heard the word fuck at school. So, I guess I’ve already been writing symbolic sex, to an extent, but it’s useful to reflect on the technique, in a more conscious way, and think about the possibilities across a variety of genres.How to make an essay about sex as lively as the act itself Blood drinking often takes the place of sex in vampire fiction (you could say the whole of gothic fiction is a pile of symbolic fears and desires) it fills a few different functions in mine.
Thinking about this, I realise that, even though I tend to write my sex scenes in a literal way, I just wrote a vampire novella with a bunch of trippy blood drinking sessions, full of symbolic fragments of the characters’ subconscious. Even if there are physical aspects, as well, it’s useful to broaden the possibilities for approaching these scenes, which can run the risk of being samey. It’s a more emotionally engaging approach than fading to black, if a writer doesn’t want to have a graphic scene but still wants sex to feature in the story.
Sometimes it’s fun to add a little variety. Sometimes it suits the emotional or narrative purpose better. Sometimes it suits the style of the story to aim for something less literal. Within a story, a sex scene can be important for all sorts of reasons. It was just him, and her, his fingers flicking against her like the hot light of falling stars, her touching him in the best way she knew to remind him there was no distance, no contradiction between the body he had and a boy called Samir.Īnna-Marie McLemore (2016), When the Moon Was Ours, p.183, Thomas Dunne Books: New York, NY She was shutting every window in this house and scaring them off with the light from Sam’s moons. This is a YA novel and I’ve found it’s not unusual to focus on thoughts and emotions in YA, but the writing style is particularly poetic in this one. This second scene is from When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore. Tanith Lee (1990), The Book of the Damn, p.37, The Overlook Press: Woodstock, NY She threw me down and down, into the caverns of the night, where sometimes, far away, I heard myself groan, or her murmuring voice like a feather drifting…. Her lips which had come to my throat so quietly, had begun to burn. Her coldness was warm now, like the snow. The erotic charge is there, but the physical aspects are intertwined with figurative language.Įcstasy was always near, it came and went, swelling, singing, widening, never finished, never begun. The way she uses language in this scene suits the style of the work and the intangible, changing nature of the characters. The style of this collection of novellas is quite overwrought and gothic (in a good way), with supernatural elements. This scene, in Tanith Lee’s The Book of the Damned, caught my eye. I’ve found a couple of examples from books I’ve read recently, to illustrate what I mean.
Other times, the metaphors and figurative language end up being just as smutty and visceral as a more physical account would have been. Sometimes, they can feel distant and floaty-maybe (especially in YA) the writer wants to focus more on emotions and less on the physical aspects. I’ve come across a few that caught my attention, whilst reading, that are much more metaphorical, figurative, poetic. Now, if I write a sex scene or erotic scene, I tend to write it in a fairly frank manner, but recently, I’ve become intrigued by sex scenes that are less literal. Writing and critiquing erotica broke me of that squeamishness. Once upon a time, I guess like a lot of writers, I found writing sex scenes embarrassing. It could just as accurately be titled Writing Poetic Sex. Here’s a little ponder about the craft of writing sex scenes. Sometimes a heart shaped lock is just a lock and sometimes it’s a not very subtle sexual metaphor.