I’ve written lots of books, hundreds of short stories and teach about sex and sexuality so I have both a breadth of knowledge and have played with lots of ways to describe a sexual-romantic encounter. What I try to do now is describe the sex that a certain kind of character is having rather than a sex scene for the sake of a sex scene. In writing a sociopath/psychopath, the lead character Free in the book I’m finishing, titled Free—-I wanted to explore multiple sexualities. Whether in Free himself or his father or other men of color—-they’re all trying hetero, bi, homo, skolio, trans-sexuality on. It was also important for me to explore female heterosexuality and the idea of incest from Free’s mother, Maya.
While I could imagine and have seen/read and written about male to younger female/male nicest, I’d never explored mother to son incest. Then I considered family lore (the best place I find to excavate dysfunction) in an older cousin sleeping in my aunt’s bed until he was 13 and she kicked him out in favor of an older man, Carlos. In reality, that then triggered my cousin being thrown out of the house at 13, him joining gangs, juvenile delinquency and eventually in and out of prison for 30+ years. Not only had he sexually abused me as a child but he expressed to my mother confusion at his sexuality all his life. I thought that was fertile ground to churn and consider and re-create.
What kind of sexuality would that 13 year old have? Not sure if he were hetero or homosexual but sexualized by his mother Maya (my aunt Naomi)? Free (and my cousin) became a sexual predator though in my novel Free and his mother tangle through their relationship because his father, her ex-husband is a drug kingpin that has given Free territory and Maya gets a healthy stipend. They are both beholden to Dom and Maya is still deeply in love with her ex-husband, it revealed at the end exactly why they separated. IN many ways she’s using Free as a proxy for his father because they look so much alike.
That was my in to the erotic-sex scenes between the two.
It had to be fraught with tension, confusion, flashes of anger and disgust and then as he gets older, Free begins to use it, taunt his mother spitefully. At his wedding reception he helps her into her room because she’s drunk and lays atop her, touches her inappropriately because his father has been there, emotions are high, she’s in a swirl of desirous confusion. Another time Free relays to his wife how his mother bathed him for years throughout his teens, as a nurse, methodically. Then Free’s wife Lena catches them in a compromising position (during her wedding reception) and understands the enmity Maya holds towards her—-she’s jealous of her. Further Free is sexually assaulted as a teen by gang members tricked by what could’ve been his first adult love. He’s experimented with girls and boys before but hadn’t settled so it’s completely normal to him to include his male lover Alyosha to his marriage to his wife, to set them up s that she accepts being in a triad.
In designing Free’s sexuality it would be purposefully messy, he would have streaks of violence and debasement inflicted upon him and then him upon others. There would be BDSM, violence, rage, shibari (rope tying) and pornography filming and publishing online. It would also include drugs and money and crossing of boundaries as I included “Carlos” (from my aunt’s reality) to meeting Maya. I considered my aunt would’ve been trying to get an appropriate, successful adult male marriage—-he turned out to be abusive-0—so I worked with why he was abusive and his abuse of Free. But then I always wanted Free, in his psychopathy, to be an inch more dangerous than those who think they’re going to abuse him. I treat his psychopathy as the capacity to cross lines that even abusers are hesitant so his sexual practices are intense, vicious, exploitative.
The Writing Itself
In writing the scenes I focus on simple things—-it’s not about long drawn out scenes of torture—-it’s instead about shocking flashes. I purposefully found 144 things, debasing things psychologically that someone like Free would do—-then I narrowed it to 12 and created scenes from there. My intent isn’t to overwhelm the reader entirety with his depravity but to instead introduce it and then continue on with other scenes. Like a shark surfacing and then diving deep—-the idea that Free is doing these things to himself and others is always lurking under dozens of other scenes. In many ways with in the novel all of the characters have subterranean elements of their characters that surface and harm then dive deep again so that the reader can sort of “forget” and then be shocked again that oh, that’s right Maya has a wholly inappropriate way of engaging her son, Carlos, her ex-husband and then Carlos’s son, Worthington.
It’s about 150 pages into a 500 page novel that I got that last sentence out in scenes and I realized—-Wow, it’s really shocking/depraved BUT at the same time in the writing, the sexual contact, crossing of boundaries, real affairs/love, messy ones, are all sort of understandable.
That’s what I’m trying to find in those scenes—-strong enough characters that the reader (and to some degree me as the writer) can understand why Maya has crossed these lines—-as she starts to realize, in a hotel room with Worthington (they regularly meet years after her break up with Carlos, as she realizes Free started a secret relationship with Carlos) how her projecting incestuous drama plus her absent father—-so she has no template for what to judge a good, healthy man by—-hence a drug dealer and Carlos an ephebophilic (someone sexually attracted to teens). She has no mature “picker” of men, even as she’s in this affair with a man in his twenties, her son’s age.
I think it’s important when characters do distorted, criminal, egregious things that their thinking be both explained and examined. It simply can't be she’s with Carlos’s son because he’s handsome, we have to see that her failed marriage, lack of father, abusive relationship with Carlos and messy relationship with Free—-of course! she’d get involved with the handsome, willing Worthington.
Then to Free—-of course! he’d choose the self destructive Alyosha and Lena—-who’ve had severe trauma in their pasts. And of course they’d choose him form their warped upbringings.
It all has to make sense.
So when I write about the sex rooms/dungeons that Free takes his wife and boyfriend into, it makes sense to the character. I can then castaway a line or two about the sex but what I’m really trying to convey, incept into the reader’s mind is not the blow by blow graphic actions but the rationality of it. I don’t want it so horribly shocking that the reader turns away, I want it shocking, a flash and the reader to both understand and imagine more. The sex scenes I write are incomplete as they are often ancillary to the feelings and thoughts and situations folks are having during the sex. Which if we could read the minds of people during sex—-and perhaps what we’re trying to do in watching pornography—-is get a glimpse into the multi-layered thoughts that a person is having during sex.
When you can achieve that this character has sex this way and it makes sense for them, then you’ve written a good scene. That has to include not simply passion, naked bodies, penetration—-but sometimes clothing, bindings, the setting, their drama and trauma, their confusion and the other person’s obliviousness or joy at exploiting someone, the singular or mutual anxiety alongside the physical descriptions. I also find that incongruity, people being at different speeds and modalities is optimal in descriptions because that is often reality.
- Why Maya is having sex with Worthington is different from when they start to months later.
- How Free has sex with the first adult he’s attracted to and seduces is different than how he exploits and uses Carlos, who thinks because he’s older, he’s in control.
- How Free has sex with his wife and male lover separately and when together and why he wants a trio-marriage is different than the sex games he plays with his mother.
Those complexities are how one writes new, fresh erotic scenes. The idea of the why not simply the what and how.
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