These are the notes for a 1.5 hour lecture/tutorial I'm giving on writing sex and violence.
Writing
Sex and Violence
This
session will not look at writing erotica/pornography or gore-fest violence,
but will deal with the problems of writing sex or violence as part of a
plot. If you want to know how to
write the others, you only have to read a sampling of the genre, since the
markets positively encourage cliché - all you need to do is master
punctuation, vocabulary and
grammar and some fairly believable plotting skills and you're set - you'll
already be ahead of 75% of the writers in those fields.
Writing
sex or violence in a way that it is integral to a larger story, or even the
central feature of a story, without becoming overly sentimental, tasteless, or
cringe-making, however, is much more difficult - and it's a problem that just
about every writer comes across, sooner or later.
At
this point, there's a reading of a post from usenet. Since it's not my copyright, I can't put it here, but you can
find it at:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.callahans/browse_thread/thread/2a0210c8fe042efa/647f523abd7581ee?pli=1
It's
completely hilarious.
Whether
the scene is sexual or violent, you need to decide:
What's
the scene for?
-
To
shock? There are perfectly legitimate reasons for this - perhaps
everything has been going too well so far, and you want to bring your reader
up short.
-
To
advance the plot?
-
To
provide character development?
-
To
develop a relationship between characters?
-
It's
the whole point of the story - you can't have a murder mystery without a
murder (or a sexual thriller without sex)!
Whose
point of view will you see the scene from?
-
An
impersonal narrator?
-
One
of the participants in a sex scene?
-
The
victim in a scene of "intimate" violence (a crime)?
-
The
perpetrator in a scene of "intimate" violence?
-
A
participant in a scene of larger
violence (war, riot etc)?
Each
of these reasons and points of view offers alternative approaches, and matching
the answer to the first question with an appropriate choice from the second is
vital.
There
are some key rules that apply whatever you do, however.
-
Avoid
cute euphemisms - if you must use descriptive words for parts of the
anatomy, use ones that are actually used in speech. It's much better to talk
about an 'erection' or a 'hard-on' than someone's 'stiff member'. Blood is
blood, it's not 'heart's fluid'.
-
Shift
the focus - rather than simply describing 'bits moving in bits' or
'the agony of breaking skin and the crunch of bone' involve the
other senses - what are the sounds, the smells? Is the room hot or cold?
What is the colour of the curtains? Is the light bright or shaded?
-
Don't
overdo it, ever - don't describe every blow, every bullet, every
thrust. Even if your
intention is to shock, repetition of any shocking event dulls its impact.
Lingering description of blood blossoming from a wound is fine - once.
-
Seek
realism always - search in your own experience for what enhances
believability - What do people really say during sex?
How often is sex actually perfect (no cramp, no intruding elbows or
spare arms)? What does pain feel like, really? How does fear manifest
itself? Be cold, don't sensationalise.
Tip:
Read
accomplished writers in the field. Examples of what not to do are
everywhere, good examples are rarer. Graham Greene's "Brighton
Rock" is a wonderful case study in criminal violence. John Fowles
"The French Lieutenant's Woman"
or Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient" deal
effectively with sex. Bernard
Cornwell's "Sharpe" series has marvellous battle scenes.
To
shock
If
you are seeking to shock, you will probably want your scene to be explicit.
This is much more common in scenes of violence than sex, but there are a
couple of approaches that help here:
-
To
make a detailed description effective without 'squicking' your audience you
need to distance the reader from the actual scene.
In
"A Clockwork Orange" one of the most explicitly violent books you
can imagine, Anthony Burgess does this by writing in the first person
character of Alex, a violent teen, using an invented slang called "Nadsat".
The need to 'translate' puts a barrier between the reader and the actual
violence which simultaneously makes the acts bearable to witness, and allows
horror and shock to dawn slowly. While it may not be practicable for you to
invent a whole new language, you could have your perpetrator describe in a
casual, oblique way that allows the actual events to unfold slowly.
You
could have your victim recount the scene, to a friend, or better still a
police officer, counsellor or reporter. This
is likely to be done in short, cold sentences that simply recount the activity,
without any description of the pain felt, or the emotions at the time.
If you then wish to explore emotions or pain, it can be done through a
question and answer format. This is an especially effective way to deal with
sexual violence.
You
could have the violence reported by a paper, TV news, a policeman in court -
again, bare facts allowing the reader to fill in the fine detail for
themselves.
Rather
than describing the horror of a battlefield, you could have a protagonist slip
in blood, trip on a body - something brief, unexpected and frightening.
To
portray shocking sex, have one of your characters be shocked by it, describing
the effect the scene has on them, rather than the scene itself.
To
advance the plot
For
plot advancement, it is likely that all that really matters is that the scene
has happened, so here is where you would tend to use the impersonal narrator to
give a brief exposition.
-
He
cried, the first time he hit her, apologised, promised never to touch her again.
-
"She
woke to hear him snoring. "Oh no," she thought, "I couldn't have,
surely?"
-
He
looked along the street, taking in the burned out shop-fronts, the broken
windows, the cars overturned onto the pavements.
These
might seem like a cop-out, but if the description of the event itself isn't
essential, why waste words on it? Remember,
you want to make every word you use count.
For
character or relationship development
To
develop a character, or a relationship between characters, you should try to use
that character (or one of them) to describe the scene, or allow the narrator to
provide the thoughts of all involved. This can best be done in one of two ways.
-
As
the scene unfolds, describing the character's thoughts on each event as they
happen.
Concentrate
here on emotion, peripheral thoughts that drift into their mind, perceptions of
things outside the actual events that might seem irrelevant, but would, in
reality intrude - the sound of a car skidding outside a window, a crick in the
neck from a pillow slipping, the light cast on the wall by the sun reflecting
off a knife blade.
If
the character you are focusing on is the perpetrator of a crime, explore their
motivations, what they are getting from the experience, especially whether it is
giving them all the satisfaction they expected.
This
approach is the most immediate, but allows little time for reflection on the
character's part, as they are involved what's happening
If
you are developing a relationship, describe how each character perceives the
other in the light of what's happening. Avoid
extravagant generalisation in description. "A sudden rush of
tenderness", "An overwhelming disgust" and so on are the stuff of
pulps. Something like "I was surprised how boyish he seemed in the
half-light, and how protective that made me feel", or "Chris was
shocked by Andy's casual brutality, half-horrified, half-admiring" is
better -- couple the reaction with the stimulus, so that it makes sense to
the reader. Don't give your protagonists startling revelations during the scene
- epiphanies generally happen in hindsight, and in any case, they
get in the way of the action.
- In
retrospect, looking back and reflecting on the events.
Once
again, the concentration here should be on the effect of the events on the
emotions and thoughts of the character, rather than on the specific events.
Here, the peripherals are less intrusive, but the character will treat
things more analytically, considering why this or that behaviour prompted the
reaction it did, and on the changes in themselves that have arisen from the
scene. This could be straight exposition, a letter to a friend, a diary entry -
there are numerous possibilities.
The
removal of the need to react to events as they happen allows you to look forward
as well as back, but please avoid "She knew, after this, her life would
never be the same.
To
develop characters simultaneously, you could make the retrospective a
conversation between the characters involved, discussing what happened, how they
feel about it, and where to from here.
To
hang the plot on
Where
the scene is the lynch-pin on which your plot hinges, the most effective way
to treat is in bits. Throughout
your story, reveal a little more about the scene from one or other character's
perspective, referring to it when it affects how a character reacts, or
something happens to bring it to their mind.
Here, you can use all the techniques.
Start
with the bare, plot development description.
Later, perhaps, have characters discuss it. Later still, have a memory or a nightmare, where somebody
relives it, have a scene where a character reads a letter or a newspaper report
- you can choose, if you wish to have a final, full description, or to allow
your reader to piece it together from the elements you've dropped throughout the
story.
By
this time, a full description should serve as resolution, rather than a shock
tactic, as your reader should have a fairly complete picture of the scene in
their minds and your final exposition should just be dropping individual puzzle
pieces into place. Because they know pretty much what to expect, you can get
away with being a little more graphic and intimate, as you have telegraphed
the blow.