Back on Serviceman 2. Writing sex scenes can sometimes be a profoundly unsexy experience.
If any of you who’re reading this ever bemoan your lack of capability at writing smut because it doesn’t feel sexy to you? Well. Yeah. Gimme a fistbump, brosis, and here’s the signup sheet for the club.
You know, let’s talk about the process of writing a sex scene. Nobody ever talks about that, do they? Well, here’s what I do: I start by imagining them going through the scene, and I write what I imagine them doing, like I’m taking down their movements step-by-step. I get partway through this, look at it and snarl, “This is boring! And also way too long!” (Because it turns out it really is a bad idea.) Then I go back, cut out a lot of that stuff in favor of ~feels~ and glossing over bits that don’t really need to be narrated (honestly, nobody cares about unbuttoning or unzipping unless something particularly interesting is going on there) and try again with what I have left.
Somewhere in or after attempt #2+, I look up at what I’ve got, and usually say to myself, “This is stupid and repetitive.” (It’s freaking hard to write sex without sounding repetitive.) I then go back through it with an eye to any point at which I find myself yawning, getting distracted, or going, “Eh.” At thos points, I look at what the characters are doing and ask myself three questions:
1: “Does anybody care?”
2: “What is going through their heads right now?”
3: “How does this actually physically feel to them?”
If the answer is 1, then I take it out and patch the hole. If 2 and 3, then I pick whichever one is more interesting and insert it to either replace or complement what I’ve got there. Sometimes I even use both.
Hopefully this process only takes a few passes. If it takes more, then by the end I feel like I’ve been slamming my head off a brick wall and I’ve lost any capacity to feel the least bit moved by what I’ve written. (By way of example, Stringplay was an easy write; I only needed two passes and I’m still proud of it. Dress Sense I’m still reluctant to look at too hard.) That’s the point at which I go beg a friend to beta read it for me and tell me whether it has any worth whatsoever (BE HONEST, I CAN TAKE THE PAIN).
Usually they say yes, despite my skepticism.
An alternative tactic is to shove the whole darn thing in a metaphorical drawer for a couple of weeks till I forget what I wrote, and then come back to it. For extreme cases, two weeks might be more like two months.
But yeah. Any initial sexiness is pretty much defunct after about the third time I have to read my own damn writing.