He put his what where? Or: how to teach creative writing students to write plausible sex scenes, and at least prevent them from winning the “bad sex award” - Writing creative writing pedagogy

Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

He put his what where? Or: how to teach creative writing students to write plausible sex scenes, and at least prevent them from winning the “bad sex award”
Writing creative writing pedagogy

NICOLE MARKOTIĆ AND SUZETTE MAYR

Introduction

Bad sex scenes have entered the literary consciousness not only as trite passages that readers must endure (or quickly pass over), but as an ongoing joke, usually (but not always) at the expense of inexperienced writers. In the United Kingdom, the Guardian posts shortlisted samples of its annual Bad Sex Award, given out to any bad sex scene in a published novel. The 2010 award went to novelist Rowan Somerville who, says the Guardian, with “one killer sentence … demolished all comers” (his sentence: “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her”). Musing about why so many sex scenes slip into accidental comedy, author Ian Coutts says, “I think it’s because sex is one of the very few human activities that can’t be seen as standing in for something else.… A carrot can be a phallic symbol; a phallus is never a carrot symbol. We often use metaphor and euphemism to hint at sex, but once you’re actually describing it, further metaphor only looks ­ridiculous … Trying to get those subjective experiences down on paper in a way that resonates with others is tricky.”

Given that a “good” sex scene in life has a good probability of being a “bad” sex scene on the page no matter how experienced the writer, our aim is not to analyze or critique sexual dynamics so much as to help creative writing students figure out how to further their narrative without simply dropping in extraneous sexual content. We are not comfortable with a format that would present examples of “good” sex scenes versus “bad” sex scenes, as “good” depends so much on context, and can be ambiguous. We are far more interested in encouraging students to think away from the obvious and expected than we are in presenting a prescriptive formula with ironclad, specific examples. And our idea of “good” and “bad” sex scenes would of course be informed by our own tastes (no matter how hard we might try to keep our tastes out of the discussion). To that end, we emphasize that this essay critiques the clichés of male-dominated, one-sided sex scenes; ours is a pedagogy paper in which we set out to explore these writing issues in the classroom.

As our title demonstrates, we aim specifically to take on the proliferation of masculinist sex scenes that dominate twentieth- and early twenty-first-century sex scenes in English-language novels. Such scenes — where the focus is entirely on a male character who “puts” his penis somewhere — tend to restrict the representation of female pleasure as strictly passive and heteronormative. This is a problem for feminists who wish to write feminine sexuality as empowering and female-driven, rather than present female characters as simply pliant receptacles. But it is especially troubling for those writers who have no interest in the clichéd sexuality of male-defined characters. So how might creative writing teachers go about teaching sex scenes that are purposefully inclusive of sexual and gender minorities in undergraduate creative writing classes? Perhaps one of the most tedious experiences in a creative writing workshop is when a student submits fiction that contains a poorly written and/or gratuitously pornographic and/or gratuitously violent sex scene. We both have spent many years teaching creative writing and somehow sidestepping or evading, or outright attempting to avoid, student sex writing. Suzette remembers being horrified at how many times students’ stories opened with or included a graphic rape and murder, clearly in imitation of the many police procedural and forensic detective shows on television. And Nicole finds that students still hand in material — whether in imitation of TV or because they believe such topics to be “gritty” — that spirals around graphic and sexual violence. A similarly discouraging situation for a creative writing instructor might be when students deliberately choose not to include sex scenes in their work because of anxiety about how certain sexualities might be received, even when a particular text would be enhanced by the inclusion of more explicit sexuality. Suzette recalls asking a student why she skipped over the sex scene between two key characters in her short story — a sex scene that was essential to understanding the characters — and the student’s response was that writing any sex scene made her “uncomfortable.”

Russell Smith advises in a Globe and Mail article that lists his “top ten rules for fiction” as his rule number nine: “Don’t be afraid of sex scenes. There is no reason to avoid them other than prudery. Sex is just as important to people’s relationships as dinners are. You wouldn’t skip the dinner scenes out of decorum, would you?” (R1). Interestingly, Smith is not the only writer to liken eating to sex. Foodie Jeremy Iggers has a similar, yet opposite, position on the subject: “In a culture in which consuming rather than connecting is the central motivating force, it is only natural that eating has more erotic potential than sex” (109). For many writers and readers, sex and food are fitting companions: both suggest corporeal pleasure, excessive devouring, and sensual “treats.” Yet sex is also — at least in literature — aligned with death. Starting with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), analysts have often cited “Sex and Death” as the two driving forces of literature. As one example of a writer who further aligns the two, Georges Bataille observes in Death and Sensuality, “The orgasm is popularly termed ’the little death’ — la petite mort” (239).

Many a creative writing teacher has lamented that the majority of students in a creative writing class will choose to write about death (of which, presumably, they have no first-hand experience), yet will shy away from writing about sex (of which, usually, they have some first-hand experience). Such reluctance to explore the more carnal nature of love may come from student cynicism with the notion of love itself. As Catherine Belsey muses, “The postmodern condition brings with it an incredulity toward love. Where, we might ask, in the light of our experience, the statistics, our philosophy, or any documentary evidence outside popular romance, are its guarantees, its continuities, proof of its ability to fulfill its undertakings?” (683). It could be, too, that students are merely channelling North American culture’s contradictory and ambivalent attitudes toward the portrayal and purpose of sex. Sex is regularly used to sell consumer goods, but the sex advertised to consumers is incomplete and partisan, often relying on misogynist or homophobic versions of sexuality. To be a responsible writerly citizen, some students might feel it’s best not to write about sex at all. Or perhaps students don’t appreciate that sex scenes need not rely on shame, violence, or exploitation. But as director John Cameron Mitchell so pithily laments, “Some people ask me, ’Couldn’t you have told the same story without the explicitness?’ They don’t ask whether I could’ve done Hedwig without the songs. Why not be allowed to use every paint in the paintbox?” (qtd. in Schimpf).

Pedagogy

When Nicole taught from the anthology Sexing the Maple for a survey CanLit course, her students came to the (not far-off-the-mark) conclusion that all Canadian literary sex scenes are dysfunctional at best and rotten at worst. In a good way. In Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers not only does the narrator spend the entire novel in bed with his best (male) friend, F, screwing their asses off all while proclaiming their heterosexuality, but F and Edith (the narrator’s wife) also have brutal sex with an insatiable Danish vibrator. Canada is well known for producing writers who embrace cutting-edge sexual explorations (for example, Barbara Gowdy’s title story in We So Seldom Look On Love), disturbing sex (the Impregnation Ceremony scene in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale), and sexual descriptions excessive to the point of parody (not only does Robert Kroetsch’s protagonist “stud” himself and his horse out in The Studhorse Man, but Hazard must also work at one point butchering pigs, slicing from their “dainty male nipples,” past their anus, and through the penis shaft). Equally prominent are sex scenes that perpetuate heterosexual stereotypes (for example, in Morley Callaghan’s They Shall Inherit the Earth, Bishop Foley imagines the scandal that would harm his charity campaign, should it get out that a priest has been meeting with two [female] prostitutes [198]).

We recently arrived at the conclusion that the best possible strategy for dealing with bad writing about sex is to opt for the preventive route — that is, build into our classes a structured unit and/or an exercise on writing about sex. To that end, Nicole created a “sexercise” and Suzette designed a lecture on the differences between writing a standard sex scene versus writing erotica versus writing pornography.

Here is the “sexercise” assignment:

Write a sex scene. A good sex scene! Many, many, MANY writers have relied on sex scenes to offer readers a more fully rounded, or contrasting, or surprising experience of characters or language. Many writers believe (usually erroneously) that simply describing characters having sex is titillating. Only a few manage to make their sex scenes sexy. Most writers, however, do very consciously write a sex scene to somehow provoke a response in their reader. Not necessarily to scandalize, but to show an aspect in the writing that would come out in no other scene. Consider how (and why) your characters might explore the sexual act on the page. This assignment is not restricted to fiction writers. What happens to sex and sensuality in a poem? Who has written intriguing poetic language about sex? Read the following creative writing CanLit examples (Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, Phyllis Webb), though you may bring in other literary examples on your own.

Not only were the student hand-ins that week particularly revealing, but the class discussion also took an unexpected turn. To begin with (and we realize we are using examples of only one class each), out of eighteen students, not a single one wrote a scene that didn’t involve a heterosexual couple. Nearly a third wrote sado-masochistic sex scenes, with all but one writing the female characters as submissive and the male characters as physically cruel. In the one scene where the female character was dominant and the male character submissive, the student ended the scene with a jokey corrective that allowed the dominated male to stand up for himself and end the “imbalance” in their relationship. Another third of the class wrote stories and poems in which the female character was sexually unfulfilled, either because her male lover was inept, or because the couple had been married for over ten years. Sadly, the class discussion about these pieces turned on the weariness of why “we” have to read about frustrated, cold women. Only two students wrote sex scenes where the female characters experienced sensual pleasure. One was so metaphoric that Nicole first read it as a sci-fi scene, as there was a great deal about planets and beaches and animal avatars. The other, about a female character who attends sex-addiction meetings in order to hook up with men, was written by a male student. Ironically, the one student whose hand-ins until that assignment centred on teenage boys in love, wrote a sex scene in which his female protagonist beats up another girl, and then gets very turned on by how much her boyfriend delights in the Carrie-like gore.

During the workshop, Nicole turned continually to the literary examples she had given her students, asking pointed questions about the minimalist language of Webb’s poetry, the overt sensuality of the Ondaatje, the raucous humour of the Kroetsch, the unacknowledged homoeroticism pervading the Cohen. The students were surprised that Nicole read the Cohen ­characters (who declared themselves heterosexual) and the Webb lines (which, being poetry, they read as entirely metaphorical) as queer. As our discussion ­widened to include the question “Why write a sex scene in the first place?” students came to the conclusion that in fiction, showing a character vulnerable (or at least partially stripped of their character coverings) allows writers to reveal character inconsistencies without merely throwing gratuitous contradictions onto the page. And in poetry, a sexual or fleshly reference may disturb the lyric line, or normative image, in ways that allow various modes of difference to emerge. As an interesting footnote, Nicole’s students were so enamoured of the exercise (not always their response to these weekly assignments) that they titled the class chapbook accordingly: UNcensored.

Suzette found herself in an unusual but serendipitous situation: she was approached by a female student (whom we’ll call Tammy) enrolled in an otherwise sex-scene-less, mid-level fiction writing class, who wanted to write erotica and had already distributed her erotic story to the class for the following week’s workshop. Tammy was worried because her last creative writing instructor had said that any pornographic submissions would be given an automatic F. Suzette commented that there was a difference between erotica and pornography. Suzette had to be strategic in figuring out how to help this student write the best possible scenes for her fiction. She also knew to prepare the rest of the class to respond to Tammy’s work in a constructive way that would generate fruitful discussion and provide a useful lesson to everyone in the class.

Suzette consulted and reproduced for the students in the class two texts: Ian Coutts’s short article “Good Sex, Bad Writing” and an excerpt from the preface to Anaïs Nin’s book of erotic short stories, Delta of Venus. Coutts’s article makes fun of bad writing about sex, but is explicit about what constitutes bad writing, and advocates that sex scenes should stay away from metaphor. Coutts praises a sex scene in David Lodge’s novel How Far Can You Go? because “the language is straightforward, neither crude nor euphemistic.” Coutts concludes that a writer should “keep the prose simple. Stay out of people’s heads.” Suzette worried that Coutts’s theory — that the simpler and more unadorned the language the better — would appeal too much to students who wanted to merely describe sexual actions, without considering resounding contexts. As an alternative point of view, Suzette looked at the preface to Nin’s Delta of Venus in which she describes what makes effective erotic writing. To give a bit of context: in the early 1940s, Nin and other impoverished, writerly friends such as Henry Miller, George Barker, and Robert Duncan made money by writing erotica for one dollar a page for a wealthy, anonymous patron, a collector. At first Nin wrote the erotica fairly easily, but she eventually became more and more discouraged as the repeated response from the mysterious patron was, “[Your writing] is fine. But leave out the … descriptions of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex” (ix). In spite of the excellent wages, in her diary Nin composes a rebuttal (which she never sends):

[Does] anyone ever experience pleasure from reading a clinical description? Didn’t the old man [the collector] know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh? … Dear Collector: we hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices.… No two hairs are alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry “Cut the poetry.” (xiv—ix)

Of course, what Nin touches on in this rebuttal most explicitly is the difference between erotica and pornography. For many writers, pornography is the “clinical description,” the “mechanistic obsession” — sex is the story. Whereas in erotica, sex is informed by context, conveyed with “poetry” — the story is in service of the sex (unlike the admittedly loose and contestable category of “literary” sex in which the aim of the sex scene is to be in service of the story). And because Nin’s sex scenes are meant to titillate the mysterious collector there is a “lot of” sex in Delta of Venus. But there is also a surprising amount of context and enticing story. Unlike what Coutts suggests, the narrator in Delta of Venus often goes “into people’s heads,” and in many of the sex scenes it is important that the narrator enter characters’ heads because so many of the stories describe female desire and lust rather than just “objective” sex. So much of the desire performed in these stories relies on context, character connection, and dynamic, and does not follow Coutts’s advice to leave out the “subjective component — how it felt, what it meant.” Frankly, it would be a shame if Nin’s stories did not have these moments of reflection — many vividly portray a side of mid-war Europe that contemporary readers would not otherwise have a chance to witness. Nin herself comments in her diary, “I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of women’s sensuality, so different from a man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented” (xv—xvi). We suggest that a creative writing student wanting to include a sex scene in her work might find a happy medium between what both Ian Coutts and Anaïs Nin propose, and that, yes, sex scenes should likely stay away from excessive metaphor (a “phallus is never a carrot symbol”). But without the context, without the “poetry” of knowing that — as Nin suggests — “no two hairs are alike,” the sex scene doesn’t really entice the reader with sensuality, or seduce a reader into inexplicable pleasure in literature that the same reader would most likely avoid in life (think, for example, of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, where the Anglo narrator has sex with a pro-separatist Quebec crowd). Sex scenes, we’re trying to teach our students, don’t just titillate, they enthrall.

Discussing Anaïs Nin’s reflections on what makes good writing about sex likely benefited the student, Tammy, and all the students in the class. It also allowed Suzette to establish some criteria for what could constitute a so-called “literary” sex scene versus erotica versus pornography. The Coutts and Nin texts together gave the class an opportunity to discuss sex scenes as another tool in the writer’s toolbox. As an aside, we have both taught students who wished to write scenes that challenge other students’ ideas about sexuality. For example, Suzette had one student (we’ll call her Judy), who wanted to write a lesbian sex scene but was nervous about presenting such a scene to the class — nervous, in particular, about how other students in the class would respond, and eager for recommendations of lesbian scenes she could read that convey characters’ sexuality without tipping over into a cliché of titillation. And Nicole had a student (we’ll call him Charles) who veered away from emotionally demonstrative queer scenes for similar reasons.

Neither Coutts nor Nin completely agrees about what makes a “good” or “bad” sex scene. Coutts’s and Nin’s lack of agreement presents an ambiguity that we aim for as a useful, general guide for creative writing students and teachers. We both took a more proactive approach with these students’ literary challenges, bringing in various fiction scenes, poetry, and articles about writing beyond readers’ comfort zones. Beginning writers may often think a text (especially in fiction) needs to resonate with a “universal” audience. We found that class discussions around audience, in particular, and place give a wider context for allowing students — to cite a long-standing creative instruction adage — to write what they know.

Conclusion

Given that students continue to write problematic sex scenes or avoid writing them altogether, and that the Bad Sex Award never fails to find many contenders and clear winners, it is obvious that writing sex scenes is fraught territory for both emerging and established writers. In the spirit of Russell Smith’s “Ten Rules of Fiction,” we would like to offer “Six Rules of How to Teach Sex Scenes.” To sum up:

1. As a creative writing instructor, don’t shy away from talking about effective sex scenes and how useful they can be for a writer, even though discussing sex scenes in class might inadvertently let your students know that you are a sexual being with a life outside the classroom. Be smart: stick to literary examples.

2. Definitely include literary examples that show a range of writing styles and content you want to bring up in class discussions, and make sure you discuss why these scenes are effective for the piece as a whole. You may even wish to hand out “bad sex” examples, as a way of showing students that many of their “original” and “scandalous” sex scenes have already been (ineffectually) written (and many times).

3. Time allowing, do give students a “sexercise” that will allow you to focus the writing and/or shape the class workshop within particular parameters.

4. Don’t be shocked or surprised when students write aggressively heterosexual sex scenes. And don’t be overly shaken, when a female character experiences unfulfilling sex, that both male and female students may comment on the female character’s lack of agency, or even “frigidity”!

5. For a junior writing class, set out instructions in your course outline that overly graphic or violent sex scenes are not welcome. We also suggest that you might invite students to show you their work ahead of time if they have any concerns about how their sex scenes might be received in class.

6. And finally: have fun, and always use protection!

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. Print.

Bataille, Georges. Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. Trans. Mary Dalwood. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1962. Print.

Belsey, Catherine. “Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of Desire.” New Literary History 25 (1994): 683—705. Print.

Callaghan, Morley. They Shall Inherit the Earth. New York: Random House, 1935. Print.

Cavell, Richard, and Peter Dickinson. Sexing the Maple: A Canadian Sourcebook. Calgary: Broadview Press, 2006. Print.

Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. Print.

Coutts, Ian. “Watch Your Language: Good Sex, Bad Writing.” Quill and Quire, Nov. 2008: 10. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Print.

Gowdy, Barbara. We So Seldom Look On Love. Scranton: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.

Iggers, Jeremy. The Garden of Eating. New York: BasicBooks, 1996. Print.

Kennedy, Maev. “Bad Sex Award Goes to Rowan Somervillle.” Guardian, 30 Nov. 2010. Web. 29 Jul. 2012.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Studhorse Man. Toronto: Macdonald, 1969. Print.

Nin, Anais. Delta of Venus. 1969. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Print.

Schimpf, Rich. “This Week’s Movies: Review of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus.” Scriptwrangler. Web. 3 May 2008.

Smith, Russell. “Want to Write That Book? Read On.” Globe and Mail, 29 Dec. 2001. Print.