The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: sex scenes

  • Write Like Your Mom’s Not Watching

    John Stewart can’t believe you just wrote that.

    Let’s be clear from the outset. My mom is the last person I fear judgment from in my work.

    But I think every writer second guesses their decisions about how far to go in sex scenes. In Monster in My Closet, I wrestled a great deal with writing the incubus plotline. Not because it was filled with sex, but because it was, essentially, rape—even if, in some cases, all he did was brush his hand against his victim’s arm.

    I expected some backlash over it. I worried I’d chosen a sensitive subject. And I did choose something difficult. But in my head, I had imagined the ickiest, scariest scenario I could, and that’s what came out. It felt right. I wrote it. And I waited for people to yell at me.

    It hasn’t come. A few reviews have said they didn’t feel the nastiness of the incubus fit with the quirky, lighter feel of the rest of the book. But many more said they liked the mix of light and dark.

    (more…)

  • Write for Yourself; Edit for Others

    I never worried about judgment of my writing before I started to submit my work. As I continue to put myself out there, and now that I have my first short story published, I find myself suddenly paranoid about what people are going to think when they read my stuff.

    I don’t think it ever really crossed my mind before, though, to worry what the people I know would think of the subject matter of my stories. Well, in the sense that they’d be offended, anyway. My main concerns about judgment were more about whether they’d think my writing was horrible.

    I don’t fear the horrible writing criticism much anymore, mostly because I know that I’ve grown a great deal as a writer over the years and most of what I write isn’t horrible. Also because I know I write better than a lot of bestsellers these days, so obviously there is no accounting for good writing anymore.

    Alas, I digress. (more…)