Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can’t do – like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
Martin Amis (via writingquotes)
do you ever feel like published authors should go read some fanfiction…
(via snickfic)
Clearly if three male authors (including one who has a legendary ego the size of a small planet) can’t do something well, it can’t be done? Pffft.
(via greatgreenbird)
The argument Amis makes here is so common, but it’s an endlessly strange and fascinating one to me. In all things other than sex, “succumbing to the particular” is seen as a best practice in fiction-writing, and indeed is generally considered the most successful way of reaching the universal in a way one’s readers will actually feel. Unless one is trafficking in philosophic parables, one generally wants to be grounded in the particularities of the characters’ visceral experience. Hence the useful simplification “show, don’t tell.” Hence, too, all those writing exercises where we work out what kind of breakfast our main character eats and what electives they took in middle school and why they want the things they want and why they fear the things they fear. The particularity of that kind of preference, that kind of detail, builds up the emotional reality of the characters, and readers only feel for and share in the struggles of characters who read as real. I mean this is… pretty basic, no? Fiction-writing 101 level stuff. The claim that sex works differently in this regard than literally every single other aspect of life seems to me to say more about the claimants than the inherent reality of the situation.
At this point I’ve read quite a bit of published “literary” fiction that does well with sex (Emma Donoghue’s Hood and Toni Morrison’s Beloved leap to mind, and Siri Hustvedt does a pretty good job in The Blazing World, too), and there are things I like better and worse about fanfic treatments versus top-tier published literary sex-writing. But I sometimes wonder if, in cases like Amis’s, the disconnect comes about because he somehow feels that for a scene to be “sexy” it shouldn’t also be “funny.” If “sexy” is this one-note category that is mutually exclusive of all other qualities and emotions, then yeah, that seems pretty difficult to put to use in an interesting and productive way. (Could this possibly actually be true for the real-life Martin Amis?? Can he really have only had one kind of “good sex”?? Poor man!) In an odd twist I think this literary prudery, this unwillingness to write sex because “it’ll never work” or “it’s something fiction can’t do,” comes from putting sex on a pedestal and being unwilling to look at all the ways it is absurd, and funny, and horrifying, and ridiculous, when it happens in real life; not to mention the ways in which those qualities can, yes, sometimes detract from and sometimes be irrelevant to but also sometimes actually augment the “sexiness”/hotness of the action for the characters involved in the scene.
TL;DR: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Amis. Jeez.
(via havingbeenbreathedout)
Lawrence has written some terrific sex. It’s just that since its between two men he calls it naked “wrestling.”
(via cymbalism)
kototyph 