Sex Scenes and Immersion

I did NOT believe I would be back so soon with another write-in, yet here we are! Thanks so much for your questions.

Today’s question comes from Mr. Cheese Deluxe Extravaganza (lmao I’m not lying) and they ask:

Hello Robyn! Hope you're warm and snuggly with a nice cup of hot cocoa and cuddles from your pet! I have 2 questions for ya! :

1. How do you write smut scenes? (Plus highlight stuff you love writing about! ) Any inspo you look at that inspire your work? (Manga,anime,movies etc)

2.How do you get your audience to be immersed in your stories? I love that about your work cuz I get really sucked into your characters and their world.

Thank you!

I AM warm and snuggly, but with coffee. Close enough to hot cocoa! My pet is also nearby, nosing around for snacks.

I think it might surprise you to know that with sex scenes in general, I’m more inspired by music than anything visual. (Although, yes, I’m a big fan of anime and manga.) Since writing these scenes, for me at least, relies on simplicity of emotions, I find that best replicated in music. There’s always a certain tempo for sex and it varies based on the couple and where they’re at in the relationship and how they feel about each other. So a hate sex scene is going to have a different sound to it than, say, a ~*romantic*~ sex scene.

The key to this is that I always have a relative idea of what music/genre/band relates to the story. I use music a lot not just in the sex scenes but it impacts the world of the story itself. My characters usually do have a genre of music they’re into or there is a theme of some music throughout. You can find this to be true in all recent examples: Come, Thou Almighty! had hymns; Little Animals had Riots in Africa; Prothalamion had R&B and rap influences. So these carry over into sex scenes.

Personally, I enjoy the differences in all the sex scenes because their characters and their situations are varied. They don’t always like each other and they don’t always get along. They don’t come from the same places or have the same friends. That’s why all the sex chapters come out so wildly different. If it was just the same two identical people going at it in the same way again and again and again… well, not only does that become predictable, but it’s not impressive.

THIS BRINGS ME TO YOUR SECOND QUESTION.

Immersion happens when the world of the story is a complete bubble — I touched on this briefly yesterday when I talked about time period, setting, but this also includes what I just mentioned about music. Your world has to exist on its own, have its own rules. This has nothing to do with realism — same thing could easily be accomplished in a wild and wacky fantasy, of course, but the key is to make even that world adhere to its own rules.

A lot of readers can get pulled out of the zone with something like wonky dialogue or repetitive and boring prose. Editing is its own savior here because no one is immune from the odd bad line — just edit it out before people see it.

Another thing I would say here is that it’s about command of the language. Readers respond to a storyteller with a firm grasp on what they’re saying, what they know to be true about the story in motion. If you have iffy/waffling language or use only a light touch when handling a bigger story, that’s an innate turn off and the reader may not even know THAT’S why but it is. Confidence is something that comes from doing this a lot and often. My confidence has been built up over years! It certainly wasn’t always this way.

Thanks again so much for writing in and if you would like to ask a question, hit that Contact button.

Hintlord Series #4: Character building 101

Your Hintlord returns! I’ve had a request from a reader who asked about characters and how to build original ones! Here’s her note:

I'd love to hear if and how you manage to create characters who not merely represent a part of who you are or would like to be. I really struggle with creating someone new who is independent from who I am.

This is a great question and I am AWARE there are many schools of thought on this. Even some from my own alma mater that may differ from what you read here. But what you have to understand is: I̶'̶m̶ ̶s̶m̶a̶r̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ I do things differently and they’ve worked out for me so far. :)

For example, some may say that good characters inform the plot; their choices direct the plot and therefore the character’s personalities come first. That’s all well and good in theory but sometimes it doesn’t work out. What if you’ve started your story with a couch potato character who sees something going on out of the corner of his eye but Maury’s on and he doesn’t wanna go check it out? That’s the end of your story unless your “something” comes barreling into Couch Potato’s living room. But that is a conscious choice of the author, so don’t give me that spiel about characters being voodooish and moving around on their own. That comes later.

So, instead, try out this lesson from the School of Robyn: try thinking about your story first. What does the story require?

I’ll be the first one to call myself out on this — my stories often require a blushing, rather submissive twink to be anxiously receptive to another guy’s advances. So I build one. Now, for the reader’s question. How to do this without your character being you/someone you want to be? Well, first of all, don’t make them look like you and there’s a world of separation there to begin with. Second, there’s a difference between who you ARE and what you KNOW. Just because something is in your wheelhouse — for example, characters I have that are into poetry/drawing/yoga — doesn’t mean the character is exactly like you. You use this to add spice, not meat.

In terms of “who you want to be”, hopefully you don’t want to be a shitty person, so you can make the character a shitty person! Trust me, this is always fun. And shitty people are good for a story because they inherently bring conflict with them. They pump in new blood.

(There’s seemingly this stigma against “negative character development” in this new day and age, which is just stupid. There’s nothing wrong with a character deteriorating over the course of the story, becoming less and less someone you’d feel comfortable meeting at night in a parking lot. But that’s a rant for another day.)

So let’s do it how I do it: first, we start with the story. The story always comes first. What do I need to make this idea in my head pop off? Well, let’s use my last published story Impossibly Tender as fodder. The story idea was: man kidnaps kid. That’s pretty basic, huh? To embellish it, I needed a flourishing, multi-layered character to pull that kind of thing off. He would need to be well-liked at least locally (so: teacher), deemed non-threatening to law enforcement (read: white), and he’d also need to be the kind of person who’d do something like that (unhinged) and also have an internal reasoning so that it seems reasonable in both his head and the reader’s, for a time (his own moral compass). And, why would he do this? (Past transgressions.)

When we use the story to build the characters, you’ll be hard-pressed to build one that’s like you.

Now: for all you voodoo purists out there, that’s not to say that building characters this way ensures they never do their own fantastical things and make choices on their own that informs the story in turn. Of COURSE they do. But they can only stand on their own feet if you give them bones and tendons and muscles. It’s not magic, it’s storytelling.

[Would you like a writing hint from the Hintlord? Just send in a request here!]

Cover Letter Tips and Tricks!

Look. I’m gonna make this short and sweet. I’m currently on each side of the submission game: writer and editor, so I get that every time you send something out there’s this ITCH to tell the faceless noodnik on the other side of the screen that yes, this is the piece you’ve been waiting for, and no, you’ve never seen fiction/poetry/nonfiction like THIS before. Like, I get it. But submitting is like dating. Don’t put your heart in the game and fuck everyone you can, raw.

Here’s some rules of thumb from your friendly neighborhood pervert:

Don’ts:

• Don’t tell me your life story. Cute facts in your bio is one thing but I don’t need to know your 3rd grade teacher thought you were a Stephen King in the making.

• Unless the mag specifies to give a summary of the story, don’t give one. You’re gonna make the story sound boring.

• DON’T TELL ME YOUR AGE. Seriously, this will never go well for you! If you’re 15, I’m gonna be like, “Welp, this is gonna go great.” And if you say you’re 95, I’ll probably be looking out for slurs.

• Don’t brag about how you’ve edited your piece to perfection because WHEN I find a typo, hoo boy.

• Don’t say anything controversial in your cover letter. Come on, man, you have no idea who’s reading this, and if you paid money to submit, you’re wasting it by pissing people off. If you didn’t pay, I guess, then whatever.

• Don’t try and shame editors into publishing you because you’ve had a rough life. Seriously, what the fuck.

Dos:

• Open your cover letter with the editor’s name! It makes us pay attention at least a little more!

• Tell us your story’s word count, name, and if it’s out on submission with other places. This is standard but sometimes people just leave that out in lieu of telling us their cat’s name.

• KEEP IT BRIEF. I’m not gonna read a two page cover letter anyway so you’re wasting your air.

• ACTUALLY WRITE A COVER LETTER. Don’t just send shit with no preface, that’s rude!

• Include your website, previous publications, etc. Hell, couldn’t hurt, right? Unless you’ve linked to questionable porn. Plus, if you don’t plug yourself, no one else will.

• Include contact info!

For your pleasure, I’ve included a template that I’ve made and always use! I get rejections just like everyone else, but I also get acceptances, so it can’t be too awful, right?

Dear [editor],

My short story, [TITLE], is complete at [X] words for your consideration. I have most recently appeared in [PUBLICATIONS]. This is a simultaneous submission.

Thank you for your consideration.

Robyn Ritchie

robynritchie.com

[CONTACT INFO]

Nice and painless. Try out these tips!

Also, a short story of mine is forthcoming in Crack the Spine so be on the look out!

The Hole in Your Sex Scene

What the fuck’s wrong with you people?

… Okay, that’s not very nice. But it’s how I feel — and I have a lot of feelings about this hole business. I’m honestly flabbergasted whenever I see it, or maybe that isn’t even a strong enough word. Bamboozled? Is that stronger than flabbergasted? Will the world ever know?

Let’s take a step back. Let’s set the mood.

You’re feeling a little introverted tonight. Your roommates or family or dogs are either away or in another room. You’ve got a hot beverage beside you which works only as a temporary balm for the post-Christmas doldrums that have descended over your hemisphere. It’s cold outside, and dark. You’ve recently dived headfirst into a new fandom and have heard the fanfiction scene is lit, or so your white friend on Instagram says. You head over to AO3 and settle in for a night of steamy sex scenes with little to no plot because who gives a good goddamn, you just wanna imagine two hot guys going at each other like the world’s gonna end. You find a story, scan the first paragraph to make sure they can put a sentence together, and say to yourself: Good enough!

Everything’s coming up roses. The main characters find each other in the woods and are inexplicably horny. They give little consideration before tossing away their heterosexuality like ill-fitting uniforms and start rimming each other on the ground. Then—

It happens.

You see it.

And your once flooded basement shrivels painfully with the sudden lack of moisture.

Jojo slipped his fingers into Dio’s used hole…

Agh, God, why!? Why, Lord? Why would the writer do that? And you know, it’s not a sometimes thing, for people who don’t regularly debauch themselves. I’ve seen it in published novels too. I’ve honestly got no idea about why this is such a phenomena, because it’s universally awful.

And don’t @ me, okay, I’ve never done that shit. Even when I was FOURTEEN, I knew better. Holes are holes are holes, and we’ve all got them on our bodies, but first of all they do have NAMES. You don’t call what you breathe through your nose hole, do you, you degenerate? What about your food hole? Hear holes?! How ridiculous does that sound in normal tone? Now you wanna throw it into something sexy? The hell’s wrong with you?

Sexy is subjective, I get it. I’m the first one to say it. But who honestly thinks of a hole and thinks, Ooh la la?

Big holes.

Gaping holes.

Sinkholes.

It’s all either ridiculous or disgusting. Where did young girls learn this kind of language? Is there no such thing as finishing school anymore? Where are the goddamn debutantes?

It’s an easy enough fix. You literally do not have to say hole. The human imagination and context of a reader is what helps your writing along. We know what you mean when you say:

Jojo slipped his fingers into Dio.

That’s literally all you have to do. Take words out and it instantly becomes better. Readers around the world will be thankful. I’ve had tons of girls compliment my sex scenes because, as filthy as they can be, they don’t require the flicker of an image of a character fucking SPELUNKING.

Motivation, or: What I Talk About When I Talk About 2005

Picture it: Nashville, TN, 2005. A young black girl has recently discovered soft-core porn and her parents don’t know she has access to Skinemax on her bedroom TV. She's new to the area. Her love of Yugioh is in full swing. She has a chalkboard on her wall full of fanfiction titles, plots unknown. She’s often naked and wears plaits. She writes and she loves to write, with no real expectation of the activity besides happiness and fun. She will not live forever.

Lasses and lads, that young black girl was me.

And that unmolested love of writing is… gone.

That’s not to say it’s always gone. It does come back every once in a while. A glimmer of it, or a ghost only hinted at on the edge of a photograph. It’s hard to touch, anyway, and it doesn’t like to be touched. I haven’t been that girl in so long.

The hardest part of writing, we think, is motivation. Which isn’t wrong, it is hard to find time enough and inspiration enough but I think the crux of it is finding love enough.

Back in those days, I had enough love for 1,000 yaoi girls. I just enjoyed it so damn much and lately I’ve been trying to examine why. Why don’t I feel that way anymore? It’s hard to put your finger on if you don’t admit to yourself why you write or have ever written in the first place. Why did you ever start?

For me, it’s easy.

I do it to harass people.

That’s as straightforward as I can be. And there’s no open forum I can really voice all my opinions in, so it’s a good thing I paid for my own domain, eh? Yeah, I like harassing people with my writing, always have. That’s what got me started, what kept me going, and posting, and amassing readers. I’ve had legit thousands of people subbed to me and I was delighted to be able to write just outrageous, disgusting, ridiculous things and have people show up week after week to read and respond to it.

Let’s take it past fanfiction — when I started writing original, I was in undergrad, attending my first fiction writing class with the great Dr. Mini. I was scared shitless but there was this fire in me: look, new people to harass! I glanced around the room shiny-eyed, salivating. What a great opportunity.

I remember, specifically, my second fiction writing class at MTSU where one of the other students was a total prude. He, for some reason, despised anything with sex in it. He simply was not having it, dahling. So I latched onto that and wrote about sex the entire semester, going so far as to start off a story with it and I drank in his discomfort like an aged Italian wine.

Fast-forward to now.

What am I now?

• an adult

• usually alone at home

• writing original

• barred from sharing original work outside of sending it to editors because putting it online suddenly makes it unpublishable

• ergo no one but editors reads my stuff

So what does that mean?

I HAVE NO REAL REASON TO WRITE.

It’s cause and effect. I know you’re supposed to want to write for yourself, for your -gag- ART, oh Jesus save me from ART, but fuck man, do you know what this does to me? I have no one to harass, It’s like a predator alone on a desert island with no sheep to eat. I’m dying, oh, I’m dying.

And my agent wonders why my next book is taking so long, but that’s another post.

…

No, fuck it, it’s THIS post! I’m lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself and I don’t want to. At this point, the only way I motivate myself into writing and finishing this goddamn book is by sheer force and threatening but there is no JOY in it. Writing is joyless for me now and so when I think back to 2005, what was arguably the height of my fervor for writing, I don’t just think of the scene and emo kids, the Death Note AMVs, the long nights spent on MSN while rewatching the L death scene, the Hot Topic trips, discovering masturbation, the hot Tennessee summers, the ice cream sandwiches, the giant house shoes I wore, my hair in long braids, the sound of a locker door slamming, ringing down an empty hallway, a Snickers bar melting in my hand.

I think, I wish I could love it again.

The Irrelevance of Irredeemability, or: No One Cares About Your Feelings, Becky

Here’s a secret about yours truly: I’m kind of a shy writer. Not like the “No, I can’t bear for anyone to look at my work!” way but more the “Maybe other writers won’t like me so I’ll just kinda sit over here,” way. I’m a lurker. I’m a creepy perverted lurker and I’m in your forums, judging you and keeping myself out of it. So I’ve been creeping and lurking, as I do, and the thing that really has come to my attention is this new obsession with redeemable characters.

More secrets about me.

Ugh. And who knows if it really is a new obsession; it could be I’m just behind the times which happens more often that I’d care to admit. But I’m seeing this from people who don’t write a lot, like maybe they only do it at Nano or they’re working on their first stab at a book or something like that. They seem to get caught up in asking people, “Is this character still redeemable?”

And people (of the same type) have the nerve to tell them, “No!”

No?!

Okay, first of all, I’ve seen this asked about the villain, which, if you want your villain to pal up with the hero at the end after many a hardship and battle (channeling Pokemon, I suppose) then… okay, that can be hot too, I guess, but then these aren’t typically the villains/rivals who are mass murdering people or setting off on raping sprees or hurting animals. Typically they steal something or like, I dunno, call the hero a naughty name.

Villains, real villains, don’t need to be redeemed. The best book villains I can think of off the top of my head: King Haggard, Humbert Humbert, Patrick Bateman, Leland Gaunt, Annie Wilkes, none of them needed redeeming to be satisfying, and two of those are also protagonists and this brings me to my next point!

If you’re asking if your protagonist is redeemable, this tells me two things:

1. Your protagonist has done maybe some bad things while also trying to make his way in the world and get what he wants in the novel, which makes him cool and hopefully well-rounded and go you, babe, go you.

2. But you’re trying to nuke him by possibly watering him down the first time some person who may not even be your prospective audience tosses a bitch fit.

(Sidenote: Yes, your prospective audience matters. Your stories are not for everyone. Mine certainly are not. Nor should they be. When you pick people to look at your story for mishaps and pink gaping holes, you have to pick someone who’s aesthetic lines up at least a bit with your own or else they might tell you to lose necessary parts for the story you want to tell. At the end of the day, who are you telling this story for? Who are you telling it to?)

So, your protagonist has done some nasty shit, but haven’t we all? Haven’t the people who’re looking down their noses at your protag in the forums? But, okay, for the sake of exploration, let’s give this some leeway.

Your character is irredeemable.

To who?

There’s only two answers; he could either be deemed irredeemable by the characters in his story or by the reader. If it’s the characters, that sounds like it has branches. His best friend can’t forgive him for fucking his grandmother? For quitting his job, ditching responsibilities just as the economy collapses, and joining a tribe in Papua New Guinea? For stealing his winning lottery ticket? Sounds good to me. Then if you want them to fix their friendship by the end, how does he make up for being a colossal douche? Or if you want them to go separate ways and live to be terrorized by the memory of what happened, that’s great too. You could do almost anything with characters who can’t or won’t forgive or want to forgive but don’t really know how.

If he can’t be redeemed by the reader… uh. SO?!

I mean really, who gives a fuck? As long as the reader is entertained and moved in some way, who cares if it doesn’t fall into this hippy-dippy we-are-the-world redeemable and everyone lives happily ever after schlock? I’ve had it! Officially!

…

Zen.

Okay, okay, okay. Look, here’s the thing. I just get so worried. In a forum the other day, I saw a girl describe her main character, and he was a total dick. He was a blond twink dick who thought the world owed him everything and was a bit ditsy to boot. And that sounded magnificent. I was literally salivating. But then you have these people popping up who are literally just random assholes telling her, “I dunno, he may be too unlikable.” Or, “Well, okay, but how’s he going to be redeemed at the end?” Filling this young girl’s head with NONSENSE.

And I wished I could take her aside and tell her her story is good and her character is boss and as long as she writes well, as long as each sentence makes me want to read the next, and as long as her blond dick of a protagonist fights like hell to get whatever his spoiled little heart desires, then those people in the forums can redeem this dick.