McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

How graphic do you like yours?

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GWiz:
I'm just curious.....I tend to be very graphic (good, bad, or otherwise).....it's fun for me as a writer, and from most feedback I've gotten so far, fun for my little group of readers as well. Not that, when I read, I can't enjoy less, and enjoy it more. For some reason, my descriptions are always pretty well.........uh, descriptive...... ;)

Murphy's Stunt Double:
I'll just say what my copy editor has told me....

"You lavish far too many words on your characters."


 ??? ??? ??? ???       ;D

Noey:
It's hard to answer your poll because different books are different things. I was horrified by the (click to show/hide)"pony rape" scene in the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey because it seemed so out of place in the dreamy My Little Pony with sparkly elves and ma-aaaa-aaaagic world of the Heralds, but take the drippy dismemberments away from Stephen King, and it's not the same. It all depends on what the author is trying to accomplish. What I do like is when the scene serves a purpose. In Succubus Blues by Richelle Mead, the sex scenes are about the character herself. Her thoughts, feelings, and actions in regards to what she's doing says a lot about her. There's a point to it that furthers the story.

To use an example of my own, I think of it this way. Say my main character is storming a house where someone has kidnapped and is currently threatening her family with harm up to and including death. I can say, 'She got very, very violent,' or, I can say, 'With blood on her eyes and on her hands, she tore the head off of one of the fresh corpses littering the lawn to send it rocketing toward the door because there's more than one way to ring the fucking doorbell.' The second one probably describes her state of mind better, and gives you better insight into her degenerated state of mind. Sex for sex's sake is porn, and blood for blood's sake is torture porn. That I don't like to read, but if there's something deeper there, I dig it.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
Depends on what the scene is for and what sort of book it is otherwise.

To take an example I expect we are all familiar with, I do not think the bondage scene in Death Masks would have worked offstage, because of the emotional weight attached and the specific things going on there.

Myself, I tend not to write explicit sex scenes because the moments of transition in realtionships between people that I am interested in are more about becoming friends, becoming confident in being found attractive, becoming closer, making decisions... once you know where the scene is going to go, there's no point in putting it in.

There are people, fictitious and real, for whom having sex with someone is a world-changing and relationship-defining experience.  There are other people, fictitious and real, for whom it's something nice to do of an afternoon when it's raining and there's nothing decent in the cinema.  I tend to write about friendships and relationships within which it's closer to the second once the friendship and relationship are solid, partly because it's closer to how I work myself so easier to get right, and partly because I have very little time for a lot of aspects of how romance is generally supposed to work in Western culture and have no desire to wite a book promoting them.

LizW65:
I'd have to go with "none of the above", as for me it all depends on context.  For instance, in the story I'm working on now, a murder mystery, I anticipate writing a fairly bloody denoument, but decided some time ago that the book's one sex scene will take place off stage.  Why?  Although it is necessary to the plot, the mechanics of it aren't all that important - what matters is that it happens between two particular characters at a particular time.
Sex and violence for its own sake (or because the writer thinks it will sell books) doesn't do it for me.  It can be used very effectively to help define character or drive the plot forward, but unless you're writing porn, it shouldn't be the be all and end all of the story.  IMO.

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