Writing Thought Process, or Does My Story Need a Sex Scene?
(But first… happy birthday, A.! You probably don’t want to be associated with this blog entry, but TOO BAD! HAHAHA.)
I believe in writing the scenes that serve the story. If I’m too embarrassed to try my hand at a scene that my story needs, then I’m writing the wrong story.
That said, sometimes I get so immersed in the worlds I create that I lose sight of what serves the story and what serves my own world-builder’s joy. I fall in love with secondary characters and accidentally communicate their journey at the expense of my main characters. I include stupid little details of history that nobody but me cares about. And… sometimes I ship my own characters.
Yeah, you read that right.
In what is possibly the most narcissistic vice one can have, I sometimes catch myself wanting to write fanfiction about my own original characters.
But, Sarah, you might ask once you’ve exhausted all the ways you can phrase “What is wrong with you???”, why are you calling that fanfiction? They’re your characters! Anything you could possibly want to write is canon to your own creation. Especially if it “actually happens” in the pretend-world you’ve made up!
Here’s the thing. Sometimes, when I’m working on a story, I’m pretty sure two characters would hook up. The figuring out if it “actually happens” in my made-up world is the easy part.
But lots of things happen in my made-up world that I don’t include in the story. I don’t write scenes of characters eating every meal, sleeping, or going to the bathroom, even though those things definitely happen because most of my characters are human beings with physical needs. I don’t include characters’ boring daily activities .
Even most of their life-changing moments don’t make it into the final manuscript, because a) that would be a super-long manuscript, and b) no matter how life-changing it was for my character to decide to pursue one career instead of another or take extracurricular classes instead of joining a sports team, it usually doesn’t matter to the different life-changing event I’m narrating.
So knowing my characters would hook up has nothing to do with whether I will include that hook-up scene (or evidence of that hook-up scene) in my story. It will always be in the back of my head for those characters, along with the other things that shape who they are, and if I’m doing my job right, some of it will bleed through whether I intend it or not.
(Also, word to Roland Barthes: the author is dead. Once my text is in front of you, my intentions don’t matter. The story you build up from what you read is just as canonical as the one in my head, and I am cool with that. There is nothing that “actually happens” off the page.)
Instead, for every new idea, what I need to consider is how the scene I’m thinking about writing will serve the story.
Right now, because I’m not really sure what sex scenes can do, I have the toughest time figuring whether they belong.
Sometimes the answer is easy: if the genre or POV is wrong for conveying a hook-up I know happened, then obviously, neither scene nor passing reference is going to make it to the story. If I’m writing a middle-grade novel, it’s not only inappropriate for the genre but also just plain doesn’t interest that readership and therefore probably isn’t even tangential to the plot I’m working with. If I’m writing a YA in which adult characters happen to hook up, I know that my teenage POV character doesn’t care and wouldn’t have any reason to know about them. It stays out of the story.
The difficulty is more when I’m contemplating a hook-up scene for main-ish characters in a genre where it’s OK and in a story where it actually could underscore themes of the plot. How can I tell the real reason(s) why I want to add this scene?
Possibilities:
1. I want my characters to be happy.
You’d be hard-pressed to know it from some of the stuff I put them through (I hope), but I do. I like my characters — otherwise I couldn’t write about them. I want them to be happy. In real life and in fiction, it breaks my heart when awesome people are lonely.
Obviously, there are more ways for characters not to be lonely than just sexual activity (and it’s no guarantee of banishing loneliness), but come on, don’t these guys deserve a break?
No. They don’t. Making characters happy is not my job. Telling a story is.
2. I want myself to be happy.
Sometimes, writing sexual scenes is fun. I am both a very deviously masked softhearted romantic and a sexual being. It’s so, so, so much fun to build up emotional narrative tension and then break it. Let’s face it: the form of dialogue that I love writing best is banter, which can pretty much always read as sexual tension. And breaking it doesn’t mean that I have to write an XXX pornographic moment. I can make it clear that sex has happened (or is going to happen) without changing my genre to erotica.
Case in point: was there any X Files: I Want To Believe screening at which someone in the audience didn’t cheer when the shot pulled out to reveal that Mulder and Scully were sharing a bed?
But here again, I run into the problem that scenes I’d have fun writing are not necessarily the ones that would make the best story. X Files: I Want To Believe was a pretty awful story, despite its YAY SHIPPERS WIN MSR 4EVER WOOOOOOOOOOO SUCK IT NOROMOS!!!!!!!!! moment.
3. It actually would serve the story… maybe?
See, this is the part that’s so difficult for me to call. As I mentioned above, lonely characters move me. So a lot of the characters I write about are lonely. Which means that a lot of the time, part of the story is them learning how not to be lonely. So scenes of intimacy — sexual, emotional, intellectual — can legitimately be part of the plot showing that character’s emotional journey.
But that’s just it. It’s intimacy that serves the plot, not necessarily sex. Because in life they often coincide, so much of the media I consume seems to conflate the two, but I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking the only way I can tell a story about intimacy is to tell a story about sex. So the question becomes: is sex (one of) the right kind(s) of intimacy to include in this story?
I don’t know. But I do have one last-ditch-effort way to find out.
I will (gulp!) write the sexual scene.*
I’ll read the story with the scene in it, and I’ll see if it works. If it does, I guess the story has a sex scene. If it doesn’t, then looks like I’m writing about different expressions of intimacy this time.
See, if I’m the writer, I don’t have to decide what’s fanfiction and what’s the “real” story right away. I get to play out a whole bunch of different scenarios and decide only after I see what works. I get all the chances I choose.
So I guess it’s time to blush furiously and live by my new writer’s credo: WRITE THE DAMN SCENE (see #8).
* You can thank Liz and Amanda for suggesting what should have been the rather obvious conclusion to my conundrum and saving you another 1000 words of whining.