More research, and spending time with my characters

Picked up another book for research at the supermarket last night, 25% off. Yes! What a steal. This one was equally terrible, although for entirely different reasons. The set up was ridiculous, the characters not particularly believable, and the sex badly described. Plus the title sounded like a slave-sex porno. It seemed like the author had two plots she was considering, but neither one on its own was quite enough to flesh out to a whole book, so she combined them, meaning there were two couples pursuing happiness, related tangentially, but not really, through the plot. The more minor plotline was so different than the main one (the minor one involved an aging ex-stripper unsure if she could handle a relationship that went beyond the sexual, while the major one was about an ex-FBI agent who couldn't handle his attraction to a young woman he'd had arrested ten years before) that the transition between them was awkward.

I was like, pshawwww, my sex scenes are better than this. But I do need to spend some time working on my characters, because I'm still not very clear on which of the possible romance novel cliches are making them tick.

"Research" Reading

For "research" purposes (plus I was being lazy and wanted to lie brainlessly in bed) I read a really terrible romance novel today. The hero was blatantly a rip-off of Bill Gates, but made to look like Brad Pitt, romancing a widowed single mother on the isolated Mexican coastline. It was too pat for words. At least the more scandalous ones have a little bit more of a modern tone to them. In this one the one sex scene went like this:

"They made love all night, and then again in the morning."

If the sex is so bad you can't even describe it, why should I care to read about it? Then again, it's probably the Bill Gates side of the hero coming out in him.

Somebody once said . . .

. . . that most sex scenes in literature are laughably bad. This is true. In general sex scenes in literary novels just make you a little bit squirmy, or make you laugh---especially the ones that were *shocking* in their time, like Lady Chatterley's Lover, which is just ridiculous now, what with the simultaneous orgasms on the lawn beside the chicken coop, or whatnot.

The series I've chosen to try and write for is one of the romance series that's almost-erotica masquerading as regular old fiction, which means you have a high-concept plot that basically drives itself (nothing subtle about the setups, I mean; either you stick your characters who hate each other together in a broken elevator, to mention one I just read, or they're forced to work together due to some extenuating circumstance, or she's an FBI agent who has to capture him before he completely seduces her), but doesn't need too much time devoted to it; and then on that framework you hang a series of increasingly graphic sex scenes.

Remember that scene in Ten Things I Hate About You when Kat comes into the guidance counsellor's office and the counsellor (played by Allison Janney) is working on her own sexually graphic novel? And she's digging around for metaphorical descriptions of man-parts, and absolutely loves Kat's suggestion of "bratwurst?"

Thankfully it's not like that anymore. The word "penis" is not taboo, and rarely do you see "his member" (although "his shaft" would be an acceptable substitute). Her clitoris gets more than a passing mention (and more than passing attention from our sexually-adept hero). Sex in public places, copious oral sex, and non-standard (ie non-missionary) positions all get thrown in. Ten thousand words of a seventy-thousand word novel might be solely devoted to the act of sex, but half of the other words are one of the two main characters thinking about sex, or working up to having sex with the other one. If regular people had sex on the brain this much, we'd double the population of the world overnight with our copulating. I know, I know, men think about sex every three seconds on average. These guys are shorting that out to every third of a second.

As a pre-emptive strike at my own habit of getting bored with books before I really get into the meaty writing, I chose to start by writing the five or six required sex scenes, and building outwards from there. They're the most important parts, anyhow! I finished three in a sitting and it was kind of fun; basically just coming up with a scenario and descriptions of what I'd enjoy, and then popping the names of my characters in every now and then. Voila! Five thousand words of novel finished by the end of the first day!