MHC Proclamation #49854980

[schmevil]

You should never need the word 'sex' in a smut fic.

Sex is vital, visceral and even when it's bad it there. Consuming your ability to reason, slicing your mind into messy bits before you even realise something's happened. Nerves fire that otherwise never get the chance to come out and play. Sensations blur until you're nothing but this one moment - even random memories blend into the melange of so hot, so wet, pain and pleasure, and more, NOW, curled toes, slick fingers, imperfect rhythm and god is this legal?

Sex is like breathing, so natural and bizarre that you can do it before you understand exactly what it is. Wonderfully simple and painfully complex.

"And then they breathed. Harry was a good breather, talented and highly inventive."

Fuck that. Make me feel it.

Write around the word, PLEASE.

Never, never, never use the phrase 'pure sex'. You're not allowed. *stamps foot*

Comments

[mark356.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I have to love your four-sentence ode to everything!

What would you replace those quotes sentences with, though!

[tanzy.livejournal.com]

that would require that the person writting the story to have actually experienced enough sex to accurately describe the feelings, wouldn't it? ;D

[cursive.livejournal.com]

I want to jump and down saying yes yes yes to this so badly that I have to check myself and ask about it. It's pretty damned hard to remember what I thought sex was like before I had any experience of it. That'd have to be interesting wouldn't it, to be able to see that? But in any case that's not the point.

I'll admit that a lot of times when I dump a fic as not worth reading further it is because the sex feels fake, improbable, boring (though god knows I've had boring sex so that isn't a realism filter)-- but it's not because you can't write sex if you haven't had sex. After all, when we write sex we don't just write from experience of sex, we write from experience of representations of sex, in fact more that than the sex itself. I'm positive that being a skilled writer is more of a qualification for writing sex scenes than being a great fuck.

I do hate certain ways of writing sex, but it's more about the cliches, more about the lack of ingenuity, and only sometimes about sheer ignorance of the acts involved. I know people who've never been on either end of a blowjob that can write it in ways that make me shiver a hell of a lot more than the experience of giving or watching one ever did.

So I'm not sure what to make of my desire to say "Yes, exactly!" to this.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

I'm positive that being a skilled writer is more of a qualification for writing sex scenes than being a great fuck.

I am so glad to see someone finally say this.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

After all, when we write sex we don't just write from experience of sex, we write from experience of representations of sex, in fact more that than the sex itself. I'm positive that being a skilled writer is more of a qualification for writing sex scenes than being a great fuck.

*nods* There are many examples of writers who have produced deeply passionate and visceral works, having never experienced the activity they wrote about. Erotic fiction in particular seems not to need experience of sex, so much as it needs experience of passion, rapture, or even a desire to feel such things. One can easily translate religious passion to sexual passion, for example and a longing for something greater than oneself is analogous to a longing for a physical connection to another human being.

Obviously a bad writer might produce absolute dreck, no matter what her experience is, but I think that even a bad author can articulate passion in certain instances. After all, many religious texts are vomitous in terms of prose and technical quality, but are still moving.

It's a hit or miss kind of thing, hinging on a mix of passion, skill and timing.

[cursive.livejournal.com]

I'd agree that one of the crucial things to inform a writer's "skill" at a sex scene might be a range of experiences, including yes passion of various kinds and certain ways of being aware of the body. But I think we also need to keep in mind that sex scenes are generically framed - in how we understand or own experiences and even more transparently in which representations of sex will be reocgnisable, seem valid and so on.

Something being done "well" often really means something being done in a way we recognise, and you can certainly learn the codes of recognisable representations of sex without having had sex.

I want now to come up with a really convincing example, but it's way too early to be up, let alone thinking.

Mmm, strawberries.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

*g* Strawberries are of the good.

I take your point about recognition and I agree, to a point. I do think there's room for new finding new ways of looking at things, or reviving old ones that have fallen out of fashion. So while recogniton of what is valid is important, it's not everything. But then what is?

because as you say, he's a control freak with too much ambition.

Yes, double yes.