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(An excerpt from Write TIll You’re Hard)

If you’re writing about sex in the short form, it’s good to remember the basics. It’s easy for all of us to get distracted by the squishy naughty bits: the moaning and screaming and the tearing of clothes. After all, that’s why people are reading us right? They just want to get off. That may all be true, but I would insist that your story needs to be interesting even without the sex. How many times can you read about a penis entering a vagina? Sure there may be a few thousand positions, but at the end of the day we’re talking about friction. And this goes for mouths, hands, feet, eggplants, toys, and sheep. If you want to write for a science magazine then the mechanics may be all you need, but if you’re writing a story, there has to be something else.

So let’s try it. Think about a sex story you read recently and take out the mechanics of sex. Think about the last story you wrote and go from there. Do you care about the people involved? Is there a reason you want to know about their sex life? Did they experience personal growth? Did they attain complete and perfect enlightenment? Okay, that may be going too far, but you get the point. If the whole story vanishes once you take out the “insert object a into tab b” then go back and think about it some more.

The “non sex stuff” doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of space on the page, and it doesn’t even have to be very important. Even the most casual observations can add tremendous depth to an otherwise simple story. If your characters are getting drunk on wine before they fuck, what kind of wine is it? If they’re staring up at the ceiling what are they looking at? If one of them is moaning, what is he moaning? Does her body feel good, or is it the way her head fits perfectly into the crook of his neck? The details add flavour, but more importantly they tell us something about your characters, and if we aren’t interested in your characters we probably aren’t interested in the sex they’re having either.

In a short story (we’ll talk about novels later) you don’t have a lot of time for character development. There are no chapter-long backstories, no childhood memories that return at each major plot point, and it’s hard to keep track of more than two or three people at once. Which means your characters need small, but strong clues as to their personalities. Sometimes all it takes are a few simple words, a couple lines of dialog to make us feel like we’re reading about a real person.

“I want to fuck you,” tells us almost nothing about the person speaking.

“I want to fuck you until your husband comes home,” gives us a bit more.

“I want to fuck you until I’ve worked through all my childhood issues of abandonment and rejection,” probably tells us too much…