What I learned from a Sex Scene – Beyond Any Story’s Details

bridge

The most useful writing insight that I ever picked up from the old “Should you write a sex scene?” question has little to do with steaminess. (Yes, that’s still a complex question that depends on the story and the writer.) Instead, this was a whole way of looking at fiction’s place in our lives–literally, as it’s about how to relate to what we’ve lived and what we haven’t.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

It started with a bit of advice that sidestepped all the usual questions about bedroom scenes; this “expert” didn’t talk about genre and audience differences, style, authenticity or character revelation versus the dread “gratuitous” scene. He just said that sexual descriptions were meaningless to readers that hadn’t had similar experiences–and unsatisfying reading to anyone who actually had.

In other words, if the scene isn’t crippled by “sorry, you had to be there,” it’s “been there, done that, bored now”?

That advice is just plain wrong, but not only because of how its two halves together would block off anything that could be written. It’s easy to seem profound by making a glib statement about writing having opposite perils… the real question is why a story does value both what’s “familiar” to the reader and what’s “new,” and how do they actually come together.

Looking at one side, could it be that what readers most want is that sense of newness? That writing should take them out of themselves and show them something else, if it can lead them through it right and make it entertaining? Possibly. Of course every story is different from the reader’s life, and that defines what it has to offer. (For that matter, listen to how any fan can get into how well they “know” their favorite characters, or the “mythology” of a modern story’s background.) So what if it’s only that each reader has different tastes for how far from home to go, whether it’s just “exploring” a bit deeper into ordinary family and work, or finding wild ways to save the world?

But we all know that’s only one side of it.

Familiar story elements aren’t just about the reader’s comfort zone, they always have their own appeal. We’re all fascinated by a character that has the same job or background we do, at least if we don’t hate how that’s handled. Or if there’s a particular thing we know, it’s easy to say “Yeah, I’ve got an embarrassment in the family too. Mine’s just an uncle I don’t see too often, not an in-my-face brother, but I’ve used some of the same coping tricks…”

So, does the familiar help to anchor what’s new in a story? It’s certainly helped some. Or is it that newness spices up a story with a familiar heart? I’ve seen both… but I think there’s more than either balancing the other.

I think the key is that writing should bring some familiarity into what it explores. In fact, it should not only help the reader understand that new territory but use that new perspective to make the everyday things clearer. –Yes, that’s a known moment in the Hero’s Journey, when the hero comes home with a new awareness of where he’s always been, even if it’s simply Dorothy’s “there’s no place like home.”

The key might be extending “familiar” plot elements into universal points and show how they apply to more than the story. A well-developed story should not only explain why those exact things happened, but let part of every reader realize how it’s similar to their own lives and what it has to say about them.

Of course that’s no more than what critics love to say about their favorite stories anyway, but there are ways to build that bridge right. A scene may be as specific as an embarrassing relative, and it could be

  • just a nod to those readers with the right background to think “No, don’t try to shut the guy up, I’ve seen it only makes him worse.”

but it’s better if it really makes a case for the reader thinking

  • “Yeah, maybe that kind of diplomacy (like my cousin always uses) is worth the effort after all… wish it was that easy with my boss or the cabbie I yelled at yesterday, but maybe…”

By taking the story beyond its own moment, with a more universal sense of why whole kinds of things happen that way and what people might do about them, we’re connecting it more with every reader and every issue they may have. And it may all come down to doing justice to those details, but seeing past them:

John Grisham’s The Firm doesn’t need us to be mobsters or lawyers to follow it. It lays the situation out so well we find ourselves in Mitch’s head, feeling how hard it is to resist going along with it, from a mix of ambition and because he’s already dug himself in deep. We may learn a lot about legal billing systems along the way, but it’s all bringing us to moments we’ve all had a taste of at any good job or temptation, or just any time we make a mistake.

Even Lord of the Rings carries its simple hobbits through Ultimate Evil by capturing the sheer grinding strain of the journey, and how their homey memories and loyalties sustain them through it all. It may be a cliché to think “If they dare to save the world, I can push myself through school” but that doesn’t make it less true.

Of course, we writers probably don’t need to convince our readers to defend the whole planet (though Tolkien partly was, as a World War I veteran writing in the midst of World War II), and most of us aren’t advocating any specific choice in someone’s life. But still, it’s something to keep in mind: the more distinctive the situation is, the more carefully we ought to build those bridges into to understanding it–and the more familiar it is, the more we should try to lead out into exploring further.

Exploring. Not just into something new, but into something more universal, more human.

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