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2002-10-15 - 8:02 p.m. The Dirty Dozen - A Fanficcer's Guide to SexWhen I was nineteen, I overheard my twelve-year-old sister ask my mother if it was true that you can get pregnant from kissing a boy during your period. I laughed. When I was thirty, a friend told me about the time her virginal college roommate sought to expand her knowledge of S-E-X by nervously asking, "The balls go in first, right?" I roared. I'm over forty now and I've been reading fanfic for about five years. I'm not laughing anymore. The misconceptions about sex and sexuality are simply too pervasive and too commonly accepted as truth to be amusing. So without further ado and with the assistance of my fellow zendomites, here are twelve things a fanfic writer ought to know when writing about sex but probably doesn't.
In fairness, I feel I should point out that a couple of zendomites expressed a certain fondness for this particular bit of verbal imagery, but it was a fictional encounter with yet another weeping cock that drove me to write this article. Please--I beg you--use a metaphor that isn't disgusting when interpreted literally. If you think that having a presumably straight male character enjoy having his girlfriend stick her finger up his ass is a clever way to signal his repressed homosexuality, forget it. All you're signaling is an overly simplistic view of human sexuality. And while we're on the subject, anal sex doesn't have to be painful. "[P]ossible, but uncommon--certainly not as common as most fic would have us believe." "When you're in love, losing your virginity (defined as penetration, for women or for gay men) involves no preparation, no lube, no pain (well, maybe a little, but it dissolves into wondrous pleasure), and you come about seventeen times. NOT. Almost nobody's first time was fun." If the character is a virgin, it is unlikely that he/she will experience: Other things people don't excel at on their first try: The following things happen to just about everyone at one time or another: The following things are best left out entirely: Rape and torture are common themes in fanfic, but slapping a "BDSM" label on those stories is false advertising. How can you tell if your story should be labeled BDSM? Ask yourself this: If someone were to burst in on the characters, would they see consenting adults engaged in sexual activity involving bondage, dominance, and/or sado-masochism? If your answer is "yes," congratulations! You've written BDSM. But before you say "yes," look at the question again. Consenting. Without consent, it ain't BDSM, especially if the hapless intruder would be morally and ethically obligated to take one of the characters to a hospital and turn the other over to the police. This is the age of the internet, folks--you can find pictures and detailed descriptions of everything and anything, so if you don't have personal experience, crank up Google and learn about the real thing. Here are a couple of websites that are jam-packed with information to get you started: Ambrosio's BDSM Site The soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm FAQ List By the way, reading fanfic isn't a good way to learn about BDSM or any other kind of sex--chances are you'll end up copying from people who got it wrong.
OK, let's assume you've done your research and you know that you can't get pregnant by kissing a boy during your period and the balls don't go in at all. Now it's time for the real challenge--making sex sexy.
Fanfic writers are notorious for switching POV often enough to give the reader whiplash, and the sex scenes are the worst of it. It's like that carnival game where the gopher heads keep popping up--it's his POV, it's her POV, it's the narrator's POV, it's the sex toy's POV, it's a flashback to some other partner and now we get this stranger's POV. Stop the madness! Pick a character and stick with him/her. This doesn't mean you have to neglect the other person. Surely the POV character will have some awareness of what the other is doing or experiencing--share that with the reader through the POV character's observations. Tricky, but doable, and well worth the effort. How's this for a story summary? Kirk and Spock are making love when they're taken hostage by a self-important, intimacy-destroying, spotlight-hogging vocabulary. For a humorous story maybe, but erotica? Nothing makes sex more artificial than the use of ten different words for penis and twenty for hot, especially if the words are obscure or esoteric. And if you're trying to show the scene from the POV of one of the characters (and I hope you are), this is not the time to demonstrate how "writerly" you can be. Writing should never call undue attention to itself and especially not during a sex scene. At the other end of the spectrum, avoid the raunchy terms. "[I]f you can find the word in porn, you shouldn't use it in fic." And while we're talking about terms to be avoided...Occasionally "quoting" a non-verbal outburst is fine, but don't overdo it. Dialog such as the following: "Arghh." "Awk!" "MRPH!" is appropriate only in cartoon speech bubbles. He groaned (or cried, screamed, moaned, whispered, grunted, or sighed) is simple, straightforward, and easy to spell. (In case you were wondering, "MRPH!" is the sound made by a heroine in a romance comic book when a big tough biker dude muffles her protests with an unwelcome kiss.)"[W]riting a story isn't the same thing as a minute description of a visual scene." (AnneZo's Coffee Break) Explicit isn't necessarily erotic, and even when writing about sex, less is frequently more. Know when to stop. As Diana Gabaldon (author of the "Outlander" books) puts it, "The white space is part of the picture." If your approach to writing a sex scene is to manipulate your action figures and then carefully describe their every position, then you're writing about dolls. Dolls don't have sex; people do. The emotional content is as important as the physical act, if not more so. It is what ultimately makes the sex important to the characters and therefore essential to the story. A friend told me that she finds herself skimming the sex scenes in fanfic. Paraphrasing her words: 'I don't skip them entirely because I might miss something important, like someone yelling out the wrong name when they come. But that almost never happens.' Give the reader (even a jaded one like me or my friend the sex-skimmer) a reason to read the scene. If the sex doesn't move the plot along or reveal character, what's it doing in the story, other than providing a pornographic interlude? (In this case, I define pornography as sex that adds nothing to the reader's understanding of the characters, their relationship, or the plot. It's meaningless. Even if you use a thesaurus when describing it.) There's more to erotic writing than body parts, no matter how lovingly described. Gabaldon again: "Use internal as well as external perceptions - by which we mean (mostly) mental perceptions, not sensations from the heroine's G-spot." The multi-orgasmic human male is a being so rare that I believe he may be nothing more than myth. However in some women, multiple orgasms are the rule rather than the exception. With that said, keep in mind that there are only three meaningful numbers when it comes to orgasms: zero, one, and more than one. Once someone has exceeded one orgasm in a given sex act, if she's capable of counting, then she isn't exactly "lost on a sea of storm-tossed pleasure," is she? Well, there you have it. A dozen tips that I hope will prove useful. For those of you who've made it this far, here's a bonus: The one word you can never use when writing erotically is 'erotic.' Trust me on this. I was right about kissing during your period, wasn't I? Jungle Kitty is the author of over 100 stories set more or less in the Star Trek Original Series universe. Everything she knows about writing, sex, and writing about sex was learned by doing, writing, reading, and listening to those who were generous enough to share their opinions and experiences.
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