Thursday 26 September 2013

Erotic vs just sex

Writing erotica is not the same as writing about sex. Or writing about sex is not the same as writing erotica.

For instance let's consider the sex in GRR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I personally love these books, and as they're grown-up fantasy, their characters do have sex lives - rarely easy ones; Cersei and Jaime share an incestuous love that must not speak its name, Jon Snow falls in love (or lust?) but has to break his vows as a member of the Night's Watch, Tyrion the dwarf thinks he's found love but has actually found a whore who's worked out where her best prospects lie for the moment, and Daenerys, poor Daenerys, is married off by her mad as a snake brother to a barbarian who doesn't understand the possibilities of anything other than doggy-style in public. Blimey.

As you might expect from that summary, GRRM doesn't necessarily find sex a complete turn-on. More often, it's bound up with his characters' weaknesses and failures. This is what I love about his sex scenes; they're intensely in character - just another part of the world in which his characters live, play politics, lose friends or battles or in some cases their lives.

Iain Banks has one marvellous scene in Against a Dark Background which (I'm doing this from memory, so bear with me if it's not a hundred percent correct) Sharrow and her on-and-off lover have sex on a hotel room balcony - and a city explodes in the distance. Nice; because it's all linked in to the plot, it's all part of the incredible darkness of Banks's world view in this novel, and it's an acerbic take on a big old fireworks cliché, typical Banksian wit. Done very economically, too. No lubricious description. Just enough.

Whereas when you're writing erotica, though those links to plot and character are there and have to be there, that's not what your readers are primarily interested in. They're interested in the... how shall I put it? ... ins and outs of the action. You need to have enough imagination and enough character and plot to make it work, but the sex is important in a way that it isn't in Martin or Banks.

It's actually quite difficult to do. Some authors seem to work by numbers in rather a porn-film way; "have we done the anal sex yet?" It's like going through the Kama Sutra one position at a time. But you need an element of that, because otherwise, missionary position fifteen times is going to get a bit boring. I've found you also need an element of either humour, or danger, at least some of the time; whether that's "can they get it on without her husband finding out?" (Don Giovanni and Donna Anna, before the Commendatore bursts in) or "will they fall off the balcony?" or perhaps "what a time to find he'd put his boxers on back to front."

I suppose it all comes down to seeing the world with erotica goggles on. It's the same world, and erotica authors are doing the same job of telling a story; it's just a story with a rather different slant.