Let's talk about sex.
Well, okay, not just sex. Sex in books and then of course the stuff before sex like kissing.
I started writing when I was 10 years old. I could not even say the word sex without blushing. So it was not something I really considered until I got to high school and found myself faced with two characters having sex.
Now, I went through a phase where I wrote only love stories that made the first kiss the be all end all of the story. I wrote the most dramatic first kisses ever and it took me a few years to look back and realize how unrealistic they all were. But oh so much fun to imagine a really dramatic kiss.
I know one of the reasons I was so obsessed with love stories and first kiss stories. I was a young teenage girl and I wanted more than anything to be in love. I was also incredibly naive about the whole concept but we'll come back to that. As a result of this, most of my love stories (all of them were bad and will never see the light of day) ended with the first kiss. I never had to deal with what came after the kiss.
Then I grew up a little bit and my senior year of high school, I wrote a love story that was about more than the first kiss. It was about how two people in love would react knowing one of them was going to die in less than a year. So as a writer I was forced to explore the realities of a relationship after the first kiss (Disclaimer: I did not at the time, nor had I ever before, had a boyfriend.)
This inevitably led to a sex scene. I had never written one and so I fell back on a cliche: I wrote everything up to the first piece of clothing being removed and skipped to afterward.
When I was revising, Black & Gold, I had another sex scene to write. This time, I was not going to take the easy way out and skip it. These were two people in love and I could not skip it.
Have you ever read a really hot and heavy sex scene in a book? Did it make you uncomfortable even though you knew no one else knew what you were reading? Or maybe you've been watching a movie with your parents and suddenly there's a sex scene and you're really, really embarrassed? No, just me? Cool.
Writing that sex scene, which was less than 500 words long, was the most excruciating thing I have ever written. AP essays, midterms, timed writes included. It took me close to forty five minutes because I would sit down to type and have to get up because I was so uncomfortable. Physically uncomfortable, like my skin didn't fit right. Then I'd manage one sentence and start hyperventilating.
Sitting in my Human Sexuality class (it's an actual psychology class, I swear), I started thinking about how uncomfortable a topic sex is. I started to think that if sex wasn't such a taboo topic, I would not have struggled as much as I did. Would that have made it better? I don't know. I do know the people who have read Black & Gold told me it was pretty well done. So I guess that's good.
I haven't had to write another sex scene since then but I know I will. Hopefully it will be easier this time but I seriously doubt it.
I mean, it's not like I can just type "He yanked off her pants and they started going at it like circus monkeys." That, while kind of entertaining, is not good writing.
Although I did manage to write it without any panic or anxiety so maybe there is hope for me. That or listening to my professor talk about blow jobs has raised my threshold for feeling uncomfortable.
