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The problem with sex scenes is they're almost always written very poorly, because it's more challenging to write a half decent sex scene than it is to write most of the other things that could conceivably be in a novel. I have a relative who used to work as an editor for a small print press that published, exclusively, gay erotic novels. This was back in the seventies and early eighties; the entire industry shut down with the advent of the VCR. I tell this story because I think it illustrates that generally speaking if you want tonget your rocks off, there are better media formats for that than the written word. Nobody was buying Hustler for the "it happened to me" letters. Net result, a writer can be a pretty good writer and still be incapable of writing a decent sex scene, and readers don't come to the written word for sex scenes anyway. Overall I prefer either a tasteful line of asterisks or metaphorical descriptions that leave things to the imagination, like Robert Jordan's sword forms. Horny writing is fine by me, no kinkshaming, but once it gets into the explicitly nuts and bolts as it were the execution usually drops off. There are a lot more writers who can block out a good chase scene or gunfight than can block out a good fuckin' on the written page. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 17:03
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Hieronymous, my friend, I need to hook you up with the well written erotica. It's out there and it's so much better than any visual medium. (Is this an example of the fabled "men like visual porn, women like written porn"?)
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Jan 30, 2024 17:09
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While I don't necessarily disagree with you, and don't hunt out books for sex scenes, the prevalence of sites like literotica and online smut roleplaying does show there is interest. It's just not really profitable, or maybe just hard to do well.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:09
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Not profitable? For a while wasn't Kindle erotica doing six figures a month for some authors?
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Jan 30, 2024 17:13
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It can be profitable, there's sites like smash words for smaller stuff and ku/regular Kindle for longer.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:14
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Oh I was just going off what Hieronymous said, I don't read KU erotica myself and didn't know.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:15
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I think it's just a specialized skill that a typical fiction writer doesn't have, which is why when there's a sex scene in the middle of a not-erotic story it usually sucks.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:18
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Smiling Knight posted:Just read KJ Parker/Tom Holt’s The Belly of the Bow. The prose is fun and character work is good, any scene with the Loredan family is great, but my entire enjoyment of the book was severely undermined by the farcical military plot. Did you read it in isolation, or after The Colors In the Steel? Not that being the middle book of a trilogy excuses anything, just curious. There was a time when I devoured everything KJ Parker wrote, but after the Fencer trilogy, the Engineer trilogy, and the Scavenger trilogy, I needed a long break from that worldview. In fact I'm still on that break.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:19
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StrixNebulosa posted:While I'm thinking about it, fwiw I'm totally cool with YA covering 'adult' subjects and being mature. It's part of why the Giver is so drat good. I'm just less okay with the weird... almost cutesy writing style modern YA has mixing with those adult subjects. Weird tonal dissonance for me. And I say this as someone who writes and reads fanfic. Totally. And the characters themselves being really immature is just as off-putting as the fanfic-like bad-bantery prose. If the characters are acting like teenagers, it doesn’t matter if the text claims they’re in their 20s—it still feels like reading about teenagers having sex and no thanks
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Jan 30, 2024 17:20
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General Battuta posted:Not profitable? For a while wasn't Kindle erotica doing six figures a month for some authors?
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Jan 30, 2024 17:22
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Matching up tastes in writing technique and genre is already sorting readers into bins, but adding the matrix of sexual preferences sorts readers into very small buckets. Erotica follows Sturgeon's Law just like everything, and there's tons of it, but finding a well written book in a style you like about your particular fancies is exhaustingly difficult. But then also, I have never found an online place to talk about erotica that doesn't get super judgy, very much including this place.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:24
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Did you read it in isolation, or after The Colors In the Steel? Not that being the middle book of a trilogy excuses anything, just curious. There was a time when I devoured everything KJ Parker wrote, but after the Fencer trilogy, the Engineer trilogy, and the Scavenger trilogy, I needed a long break from that worldview. In fact I'm still on that break. After Colours, yeah. And again, the actual character work was enjoyable, loved the big messed up family. I think I’m in a similar boat. Read a chunk of his books a couple years ago, had a good time but decided I needed a break from highly competent, cynical, amoral, lacking in friends or romantic relationship male leads. Needed something to read for a train ride and saw my library had Colours.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:27
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It's not directly relevant to this convo (because presumably people are reading romance/erotica to feel something like sexual arousal) but sex scenes can be in books for reasons other than arousing the reader/author. Like I don't get mad and want to kill when I write scenes of violence, they're there to play a role in the story.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:33
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^^ This. I do love books that can deal with adult themes in an adult way, and that includes not going “ewww” at actually well-written sex scenes.Slyphic posted:Matching up tastes in writing technique and genre is already sorting readers into bins, but adding the matrix of sexual preferences sorts readers into very small buckets. Erotica follows Sturgeon's Law just like everything, and there's tons of it, but finding a well written book in a style you like about your particular fancies is exhaustingly difficult. It is so exhaustingly difficult  That’s also definitely the reason you find books titles on Kindle include poo poo like “an enemies to lovers romance” cause romance readers seem to narrow their taste right down to the plot elements (which is kinda sad imo, but I’m not selling smut so…). Also I guess there’s a lotta maturity-stunted college age kids who wanna read about maturity-stunted college age kids boning, so unfortunately that poo poo sells enough to accidentally pick one up in the fantasy section and go, “Aw gently caress, not another aged-up YA.” At least now that I’m keyed enough to the writing style to be able to tell from page 1, I waste little time on it
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Jan 30, 2024 17:36
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If you want to read sex scenes in genre fiction, get into the romance genre and look for the (sadly not super common) genre fic there like Sweet Starfire. Romance novels (as a genre) aren't always explicit, but they do promise two people finding true love and being happy and sometimes that's more satisfying than any smut scene.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:40
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StrixNebulosa posted:If you want to read sex scenes in genre fiction, get into the romance genre and look for the (sadly not super common) genre fic there like Sweet Starfire. Romance novels (as a genre) aren't always explicit, but they do promise two people finding true love and being happy and sometimes that's more satisfying than any smut scene. It's funny just how explicitly they promise it! "Guaranteed happily ever afters!" 
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Jan 30, 2024 18:37
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It's literally in the genre, yeah. To the point where readers will be genuinely upset if it's not there, which means marketing won't include it in the genre.
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Jan 30, 2024 18:42
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I enjoy horny writing, but it's gross in YA because I don't like when a 40 something writes about how hot a 15 year old is.
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Jan 30, 2024 18:48
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From now on I require all books to specify if they provide HEAs.
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Jan 30, 2024 18:51
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silvergoose posted:It's literally in the genre, yeah. To the point where readers will be genuinely upset if it's not there, which means marketing won't include it in the genre.  gently caress Nicolas Sparks for real, I read romance for HEAs, and if they're not there I'm going to be sad.
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Jan 30, 2024 18:54
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I was sitting here trying to figure out which sex act HEA was meant to imply His Ejaculation Achieved? Her Endless Anal?
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Jan 30, 2024 19:02
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I mean I love Austen but if the cover to P&p said "don't worry they get married" something would be lost
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Jan 30, 2024 19:05
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Happy Ending, Aye? - 'dodgy Scottish registered massage therapist' I'm not going to check, but I bet that's at least a page of hits for those keywords on KU or a smut-fic site.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:06
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Learning all the latest publishing industry and/or kink abbreviations so I can get on an app ambiguously named "BINDR"
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Jan 30, 2024 19:10
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VostokProgram posted:I think it's just a specialized skill that a typical fiction writer doesn't have, which is why when there's a sex scene in the middle of a not-erotic story it usually sucks. Right, exactly. And as GB points out it also often isn't a skill that's appropriately applicable, because often the point of the sex scene is not primarily to be erotica. So even a skilled writer who is including a sex scene isn't necessarily even trying to make it erotic. Net result, an explicit sex scene in a book that isn't intended to be erotica is fairly unlikely to be good erotica. So usually it's better if it's just eluded and the asterisks do the talking. There are of course exceptions but . . .like , asimov, no, just skip. Skip. Next scene.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:11
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Read better works. You can write sex just as well as any other thing
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Jan 30, 2024 19:13
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Gaius Marius posted:Read better works. Sir, this is this SF thread
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Jan 30, 2024 19:17
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Overall I prefer either a tasteful line of asterisks or metaphorical descriptions that leave things to the imagination, like Robert Jordan's sword forms. Piers Anthony may be a sex weird, but one of his rare moments of genius was that the secret of making babies in Xanth is to take your clothes off, get into bed and hug until you see an ellipsis. An ellipsis is, of course, the tasteful line of asterisks that indicates a transition between scenes and is used in the more genteel romantic fiction as a literary fade to black when the couple get it on. As for the latter: back in the Usenet days someone on rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan wrote a hilarious parody piece called The Far Snows Dance in which the sex scene between Rand and Aviendha was described exclusively using sword forms.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:23
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hold up. asterisks???? a proper ellipsis is made of dots!!
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Jan 30, 2024 19:25
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Gaius Marius posted:Read better works. You can write sex just as well as any other thing The best example of this I've seen in sci-fi/fantasy is Rachel Bach's Paradox series. It's mostly an action-oriented space opera about a power armored lady kicking space lizards, but the romance in the story is well written, important to the development of the characters and the plot, and very goddamn steamy. It'd be a poorer book if the sex scenes just faded to black.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:26
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VostokProgram posted:hold up. asterisks???? a proper ellipsis is made of dots!! in our world yes…but in the fevered imagination of piers Anthony, such transgressive fantasies are possible…
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Jan 30, 2024 19:27
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Maybe it's partly because I read a lot of queer, horror-adjacent genre stuff, but I can think of a lot of books I've read recently where the sex scenes are 100% there to develop the characters/vibes of the story without really being erotic (some even absolutely anti-erotic), and those books would be worse off if the sex scenes were cut out. Like, I dunno, Walking Practice by Dolki Min has a lot of sex scenes that aren't at all erotic, but they're definitely a big part of making the central alien character alien. Also Walking Practice is just really good, more people should read it. e: be warned, the main blurb for Walking Practice that says it's like Squid Game is baffling. I'm convinced they only cited it because it also falls under "piece of media from Korea" - they have nothing in common otherwise DurianGray fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 19:40
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Pinterest Mom posted:It's funny just how explicitly they promise it! "Guaranteed happily ever afters!" This reads like the author decided that coming up with premises for six books was too tough -- easier to just recycle the same premise six times.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:43
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VostokProgram posted:hold up. asterisks???? a proper ellipsis is made of dots!! You know, like Kurt Vonnegut. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/WV1T6T6Yhg
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Jan 30, 2024 19:49
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DurianGray posted:Maybe it's partly because I read a lot of queer, horror-adjacent genre stuff, but I can think of a lot of books I've read recently where the sex scenes are 100% there to develop the characters/vibes of the story without really being erotic (some even absolutely anti-erotic), and those books would be worse off if the sex scenes were cut out. I’ve had this on my tbr pile for a while. Guess it’s getting bumped up
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Jan 30, 2024 19:57
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The dead (because racism) Romance Writers of America argued about a definition of romance novels years ago. The one element everybody agreed on was "must end happily ever after". If the leads wind up apart, or one of them dies, it's no longer a romance. And no, Rebecca and Wuthering Heights are absolutely not romance novels. A classic murder mystery winds up with the case solved, even if only the reader knows it. If it's a murder mystery and ends with "Gosh, I guess we'll never know who the Faceless Fiend was", mystery readers will be furious. It's the contract between murder mystery writer and their readers. In short: genre.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:58
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mdemone posted:I was sitting here trying to figure out which sex act HEA was meant to imply Happily ever after, implying a good ending
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Jan 30, 2024 20:01
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pik_d posted:Happily ever after, implying a good ending Is this ever just shortened to "happy ending"
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Jan 30, 2024 20:09
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Arsenic Lupin posted:If it's a murder mystery and ends with "Gosh, I guess we'll never know who the Faceless Fiend was", mystery readers will be furious.
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Jan 30, 2024 20:20
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Famous mystery novel The Eleventh Hour doesn't reveal the culprit in-story, but does reveal it in the appendix. The name of the swan is kept secret but an astute reader can figure it out on their own.
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Jan 30, 2024 20:30
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