the main reason to put a sex scene in your book is to weed out the kind of person who demands there be must be a specific reason for there to be a sex scene in your book
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Honestly reading your books convinced me that the actual problem I had with sex scenes in books is that most of them are bad. Like if they're not going to write some proper smut I'd rather they just fade to black.
like, if what you are trying to get across is a night ending in passion, you don’t need a sex scene; implication works better
but if what you’re writing is people lost in lust, a connection made after false starts, hesitant exploration intimacy, or an interruption… then you want the scene
Also, to make it explicit (as I realise I hadn't): the way /you/ write them is the best I've seen sex scenes as part of a book done. And enjoyably written too!
I always put a sex scene in my novels so that when I do editing passes later, I have a set place where I remember to slow it down, take a break, and jork it for a bit.
Another Way to look at it is that sex scenes should have a purpose, and titillation is a valid purpose. Which fits with the idea that people are just sick of bad sex scenes.
My stance has always been, people are turned off by sex scenes because they've been exposed to decades of bad, boring sex scenes that completely tonally clash with their surroundings in the text, and that's part of what's responsible for creating the "shoved in" perception
In big-ticket film especially there's a lot of sex scenes that are just awkward naked massage solely to establish "these two characters are fucking", and a lot of times this feeling forced is downstream of the characters' entire romance feeling forced!
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i genuinely agree, and i think a big problem a lot of sex scene have is they occur in places where a face to black makes more pacing sense anyway
basically, sex scenes shouldn’t end chapters unless something momentum-changing happens during them, i think
but if what you’re writing is people lost in lust, a connection made after false starts, hesitant exploration intimacy, or an interruption… then you want the scene
i fade to black on their night because we know what happens
but the next chapter opens with their spontaneous, passionate, desperate sex the next morning, telling you how bad these two have it for each other
Also, to make it explicit (as I realise I hadn't): the way /you/ write them is the best I've seen sex scenes as part of a book done. And enjoyably written too!
Now, I write them but I dont feel the need to like...clinicly describe genitalia or anything. Trying to avoid the Ikea Erotica thing.
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