8. Your characters are people, not robots!
At the beginning of this essay, I told you a secret about writing good sex scenes. Remember? Good writing is good writing.
One of the essential ingredients of good writing are strong, carefully developed characters. Characters with a personality. With strengths and weaknesses, with needs and dreams. With a past and a future.
That’s true for sex scenes, too.
Real people bring sex scenes to life.
If your characters feel like people, like real, living, breathing human beings, your sex scenes are much less likely to feel flat, mechanical or clinical.
What makes characters feel like real people in sex scenes?
Imperfections.
Real people don’t look and act like sex gods. Real people are self-conscious when they get nekkid with someone new. Real people bump noses and heads. Real people have morning breath. The bodies of real people make noises when they are having sex-apart from moans of desire you may hear the slapping of balls against her arse, or an unintended fart… Of course you don’t have to describe any of these details! But you can. And keeping in mind that real people don’t look and act like heroes and heroines in bed may help you add the one little endearing detail that brings your scene to life.
Histories.
Real people have a past (and a future). Real persons have a sexual history, and that will influence how they act, react and feel in a sexual situation. And if they are inexperienced that, too, will matter!
Imagine:
How will someone behave in a sexual encounter who has only ever had one partner… for forty years. Now he or she is with someone new for the first time.
Someone has a history of rape and abuse. How will those experience influence the way they act in bed, what they are willing to do? How they experience sex?
Three people, all with experience in threesomes, get together. How relaxed and experimentative do you think they’ll be?
Preferences.
Real people have preferences. Likes and dislikes. Out of bed and in bed.(And I’m NOT talking about the clichéd question ‘Does she swallow or not?’.)
Some men hate having their nipples touched. Some women are uncomfortable with cunnilingus. Lots of people aren’t keen on trying out anal sex.
Certain positions simply don’t work for everyone, even if they don’t demand that you tie your characters into a knot. Someone with a history of abuse and rape could be immensely uncomfortable with certain positions.
People are ticklish. Biting doesn’t do a thing for some people.
Women don’t come every time.
Couples don’t do everything that’s possible every time they get into bed together.
Men have their bad days, too.
Point of view and sex scenes
Another crucial point for how to nail characters (pun intended) is point of view.
Especially in sex scenes.
Head-hopping and switching the point of view in the middle of sex scenes can lead to unintentional hilarity (who is doing what to whom just now?). And the perspective of an omniscient narrator can get uncomfortably close to voyeurism.
To create a meaningful private experience for your characters that may aid the development of said characters and even further your plot, it’s much better to stick with one of the characters for sex scenes.
It also makes writing all those pesky details much easier! You have to concentrate only on one person to create a realistic, touching scene—what they can see, hear, smell, taste, feel, what will feel good or bad to them…including the problem of what to call the naughty bits. It’s much easier to find out what one individual character would call them than to find terms that always fit.
If you do want to shift POV between the characters involved in a sex scene, use ‘natural breaks’ in the scene to make the switch, for example between seduction and foreplay, foreplay and actually going to bed, or after orgasm and before the sweet aftermath of post-climactic bliss.
TIP!
- Try sticking with one POV for a sex scene. If you do shift POV, use ‘natural breaks’ within the scene to switch between characters.
- Avoid omniscient narrator for sex scenes. An impersonal POV hovering above your characters can make the readers feel like voyeurs.
- Write ‘real’ people! Write imperfections. Take into account their histories and preferences.