Sex in the Novel

My MySpace friend, Beth, asked my opinion about sex in the novel, prompted by something I’d said in an earlier blog. This caused me to think about the whole problem (as it sometimes is) of writing about sexual matters. My novella, A Bottle of Plonk came out about three years ago; my novel, Tainted Tree, this year. Neither was very sexually explicit - that’s not my way - but would I have wanted my mother to read it? Probably, even though you could say that I’m a mature person (in terms of years), I could well have been embarrassed, even despite my restrained descriptions.

My mother died in 1997, my father many years before that, so it was never an issue. But what about my children? Surprisingly, I am not embarrassed at the prospect of them reading my work; my daughter read some of my stuff when she was in her late teens/early twenties, though she’s never read the polished up versions. (At the time, she told me she stayed up half the night finishing them - but now she runs a book business, she is a bit sniffy about would-be writers and in fact authors at all levels.) My son has not really read my work at all, apart from the occasional short story. It would be all too easy to say that he wants to retain his vision of me as ‘just a mum’, though this may be the case, I’m not too sure about it. If anything, I suspect my writing is too tame for him - simply too feminine - and he wants something a little more masculine and muscular in a writer. However, Beth’s question centred more or less on whether I felt inhibited with the prospect of the offspring looking over my shoulder, as my hero and heroine found themselves in flagrante delecto. Did I moderate what I wrote as a result of that, or because of any other person who I respected potentially being shocked at my writing.

This reminded me that when I sold books at the local Flower Show, I spotted a neighbour in her 80s, who regularly goes round the village collecting for church funds. She had many years ago, bought my autobiography, The Fruit of the Tree. I shrank into my chair. Unusually for me, I did a little prayer that she would not buy Tainted Tree. There were scenes in it and words (I did use the F-word, once, though only once) that I would not have wished her to see. Fortunately, she smiled and walked on. I breathed a sigh of relief.

So why do we feel embarrassment. Our parents - and our children - pick for yourself which ones you would be most embarrassed by - know we have had children; they know we know how these things happen. They know we hear swear words, all too often, on the TVand in the supermarket, these days; they know we see nudity and have knowledge of pornographic magazines and of all sorts of appalling behaviour, even on the news. So why do we think they will expect us to remain innocent and on a pedestal?

That isn’t to say that you might not feel embarrassment once the book is written. My immediate neighbour and her husband (both of whom enjoyed the book) said they had to put out of their minds the fact that I was the writer. And I suppose by the same token, when you’re writing, you have to put out of your mind the fact that your book will be read by friends, family, the children, the elderly neighbour.

I do not put into my books explicit sex, but that is not because I’m inhibited by my potential readership; it’s because I don’t like reading stuff that’s very explicit any more than I like writing it. Subtlety, is, in my book, more erotic than a description of every bit of the anatomy; less is more, as they say. Explicit sex is for teenagers who are still trying to work out what happens. The rest of us know. As for me, I try to view the event from the point of view of the emotional impact on my character, and in the main, leave the other bits out.

So what happens when I get to a scene in which my hero and heroine are going to make love? At that point, I could not write if there was anyone else sharing the scene with me. When I write descriptive narrative, I may be me, reporting on something I have seen, or researched. But when I play out a scene in my head or on paper, I must be one of the protagonists - an actor who has forgotten that the stage hands are all watching her love scene - she has become the principal person in that scene; and that must apply to me too. So, Beth, and any others who may be reading, forget the observers, clucking their tongues in horror, or, in the case of the children, astonishment, that their parent has learned so much more than they expected. Throw yourself into it; be there - and forget the audience.