on writing erotica
Feb. 5th, 2019 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://bit.ly/2Ga4DVO
(i hate how long i dithered about writing that word. i’ll see if i get shadowbanned for lemony text here. no i know better than to type the society-standard courtesy acronym. don’t worry this is meta, not actual lemons.)
I’m writing a sex scene and I mean, it’s going just fine, I’m not new, but I was just struck again by how fucking awkward it always is. It’s worse than any other kind of scene, though only really slightly worse than action scenes– there’s a constant battle between the part that wants to be flowery and metaphorical and the part that wants to be salacious, and typing it out always feels like hammering clumsy nails into a too-hard board and desperately hoping that you can go back and make some of them stick but some are definitely going to fall out and the whole thing is a mess and you’re going to have to revise and oh. You should probably have. Like. Punctuation at some point. How many times have I said the word “gasped”? Oh I’ve used the phrase “gone still” like five clauses in a row, whoops. And there’s a part of you that’s like this is art but definitely a bigger part that’s like this is irredeemable smut and then like the biggest part that’s like this is so incoherent no one else will be able to figure out whether it’s art or smut or something else entirely, and you’re like
how do word
and I’ve been doing this twenty years and I don’t think it really gets any easier.
I’m just documenting this because prior to this I was in kind of a dry spell of writing and I had been rereading a lot of my old stuff and was starting to feel sort of conceited, like, oh, I’ve written so much, look how skillful I am, and that’s because I wasn’t really writing, you know? so I guess that’s a mark of success, when you read the finished piece and you’re like oh that was easy because I can assure you, from deep in my current perspective, no it is not.
The actual sex scene is progressing fast enough but let me point out for the record that I wrote, without exaggeration, twelve thousand words that are completely extraneous and will be discarded, just to work up to writing said sex scene which was the entire point, and I’m not kidding, the finished piece will probably wind up at around 5-7k, most of which I haven’t written yet, and all of those preceding twelve thousand words will be boiled down to an in-paragraph summary and the rest discarded. Sex scenes are just difficult enough that your brain will construct elaborate multi-day wordvomit obstacles to keep you from starting them, is what I’m saying.
(Your picture was not posted)
(i hate how long i dithered about writing that word. i’ll see if i get shadowbanned for lemony text here. no i know better than to type the society-standard courtesy acronym. don’t worry this is meta, not actual lemons.)
I’m writing a sex scene and I mean, it’s going just fine, I’m not new, but I was just struck again by how fucking awkward it always is. It’s worse than any other kind of scene, though only really slightly worse than action scenes– there’s a constant battle between the part that wants to be flowery and metaphorical and the part that wants to be salacious, and typing it out always feels like hammering clumsy nails into a too-hard board and desperately hoping that you can go back and make some of them stick but some are definitely going to fall out and the whole thing is a mess and you’re going to have to revise and oh. You should probably have. Like. Punctuation at some point. How many times have I said the word “gasped”? Oh I’ve used the phrase “gone still” like five clauses in a row, whoops. And there’s a part of you that’s like this is art but definitely a bigger part that’s like this is irredeemable smut and then like the biggest part that’s like this is so incoherent no one else will be able to figure out whether it’s art or smut or something else entirely, and you’re like
how do word
and I’ve been doing this twenty years and I don’t think it really gets any easier.
I’m just documenting this because prior to this I was in kind of a dry spell of writing and I had been rereading a lot of my old stuff and was starting to feel sort of conceited, like, oh, I’ve written so much, look how skillful I am, and that’s because I wasn’t really writing, you know? so I guess that’s a mark of success, when you read the finished piece and you’re like oh that was easy because I can assure you, from deep in my current perspective, no it is not.
The actual sex scene is progressing fast enough but let me point out for the record that I wrote, without exaggeration, twelve thousand words that are completely extraneous and will be discarded, just to work up to writing said sex scene which was the entire point, and I’m not kidding, the finished piece will probably wind up at around 5-7k, most of which I haven’t written yet, and all of those preceding twelve thousand words will be boiled down to an in-paragraph summary and the rest discarded. Sex scenes are just difficult enough that your brain will construct elaborate multi-day wordvomit obstacles to keep you from starting them, is what I’m saying.
(Your picture was not posted)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 11:28 pm (UTC)It be hard.