In this week’s book club episode, we talk about “I Give You My Body…”: How I Write Sex Scenes by Diana Gabaldon. We discuss how to use her methods to write realistic sex scenes, and how these tips translate to other types of writing as well.
Show Notes
“I Give You My Body…”: How I Write Sex Scenes by Diana Gabaldon
You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story by Houston Howard
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. And welcome to our February 2021 book club. This month we are reading, “I Give You My Body…”: How I Write Sex Scenes by Diana Gabaldon. With me, I have Janet Kitto, JP Rindfleisch, and Marriane Hansen.
So this book is a very, very short book, and I’d say a good portion of it is just a dump of, what is the word… slang for parts. A good part of it is examples from Gabaldon’s books, mostly from her Outlander series, and the rest is her explanation around those examples. So… hot take, folks?
What did you think of the book?
JP: Can I just say that some of this terminology should never be used, ever.
Crys: Do you to say your favorite terrible one?
JP: Give me one second. Yogurt gun. What is that? Who would use that? Never use that!
Crys: I definitely think that part of the purpose of the list was just to be ridiculous and like, hey, here’s a word you could use, not necessarily that you should use.
JP: Correct. I did find it quite enjoyable to read through them all. The little teenager inside me definitely found it hilarious.
Crys: Janet, I think you said at one point that that was where you fell asleep.
Janet: I did. There was quite a long list of male genitalia.
Marianne: I read it out loud while I was getting my nails done and it made the salon a much more interesting place.
Crys: How did you explain that?
Marianne: Well they just said, “What are you up to?”
And I said, “Well, I’m reading this book for a book club by Diana Gabaldon.” And I’m like, “Have you ever seen the Outlander series?” And it just kind of went from there. It’s amazing how you can bring up some of these subjects in just a conversation while getting your cuticles removed.
Crys: I think it’s less just you, in the general you, and more Marianne. Marianne can bring these conversations up.
Marianne: The part that I loved is that one of them is a fire truck. And here in Helena, sometimes the counties will sell their fire trucks. And so you’ll just see a fire truck on the side of the freeway, and it will say for sale. So part of me will never look at fire trucks the same ever again.
Well, the irony of it is that like three years ago, one was for sale a week before my anniversary. And I had posted, “Hey, somebody tell my husband that I want a fire truck for our anniversary.” And then I read this and I just wish I could pull that that post back up.
Crys: So other than the copious amounts of slang, what was the most useful thing you found in this book?
JP: I really liked the focal length conversation. I think that that’s super applicable to not just sex scenes, but action scenes. Where you start broad in the room and you describe, or just interact with things, in the broader sense. And then as it becomes more intimate, the descriptions and the focal point of the story zooms in, and that’s very accurate to not just sex scenes, but to high anxiety scenes or action scenes. I mean, when you talk about crime, for example, a lot of people don’t remember the perpetrator’s face because they’re focused on the weapon. It’s the same concept. So it was nice reading that for sex scenes, because I can definitely apply that to almost any writing.
Janet: That’s very true. She makes a point of how those scenes can feel very claustrophobic if you keep them that close. So that was a point I liked too. I like what she says about not being too literal about what the character sees, that we can just let the reader fill in the experience. It’s about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids.
Crys: Yeah. I would say that that is probably the element that I took away most, especially the first time I read it. As someone who does write explicit scenes, that really helped me understand the purpose of these scenes in the book rather than just pure titillation. And later on, she does also mention that the level of explicitness depends on your genre, which I was very happy with because most people don’t recognize that unless they are actually writing romance.
Early on, she made a blanket statement about it not all needing to be explicit, but some genres do need to be explicit because that’s what the readers are expecting. But for me, writing just slots and parts fitting together is rather boring, and I could be writing about a Nintendo game as much as two humans if I don’t lean on the emotions.
Janet: Yeah, and I don’t write sex scenes in my books. I haven’t written them. There’s the talk that goes on, that’s another thing that she talked about. Good characters talk in bed, and I feel like I’m writing about that moment just before, and then the reader can go wherever they want to go with it. So this was a really interesting read, because I don’t write sex scenes, to go through the long list of all of the terminology that I can use. I loved her examples. It was a lot to get through to read all of the examples, but well worth it.
Crys: Marianne.
Marianne: Yeah. I thought it was interesting how she talked about how you need to have the five senses going. Her number one thing was you only write to what you feel comfortable in. And I think sometimes if you’re looking at the market and what sells, I could see that line kind of being blurred.
I don’t see myself writing explicit sex scenes because I write mysteries, and the murders aren’t explicit. And I feel like in a way I would need to balance those out. And I could be very, very wrong with that, but if I’m slapstick about the murder, I don’t see myself going too explicit with the sex.
So I just liked how it talked about how the characters work and just how it fits for your book, and you need to think about it before you take that first step.
Crys: Absolutely. Honestly, one of the things that frustrates me the most about the genre I’m in is the expectation that there will be explicit sex scenes.
It’s very difficult for closed door books to succeed. And it’s not that they can’t, but it’s very difficult. And it is very important if you want to write some kind of romance or intimacy, regardless of whether you are straight-on romance, or fantasy, science fiction, mystery, figuring out the genre that fits with your comfort level.
Was there anything that you guys disagreed with in the book?
JP: So they have a lot of examples. They do have some non-straight examples. I felt like it was written from a straight perspective trying to apply what homosexual relationships look like. I don’t know. It didn’t seem accurate. But I did like that at the end she did talk about how you can apply this to not just heterosexual relationships. And to Janet’s point, like sex scenes aren’t about the physical attributes of sex, but about the emotion, and so I think that’s highly applicable. So even though I didn’t necessarily agree with the example, I think that the quote unquote teaching throughout the rest of the book was well over that example.
Crys: Yeah, one of the constant conversations — going a little sidetrack here — but again, talking about genre, one of the constant conversations in gay romance, LGBT romance, particularly in a male-male romance, it is mostly written by AFAB, assigned female at birth people. I think that’s mostly because it is mostly assigned female at birth people who write romance period, no matter who the characters are.
But one of the conversations that is constantly going on is that gay romance is often written from a straight perspective. Either because the person writing it is straight, or even if they are assigned female at birth, writing gay romance, but maybe nonbinary, they have grown up in a heteronormative world where heteronormative stories are the norm. And either they haven’t experienced non-heteronormative relationships themselves or they’re just inundated with the other stories. And so they’re kind of re regurgitating what they’ve read, and that’s something think that will change in time as there are more non heteronormative stories out there, so that people who are reading and writing have more experiences to draw from than just their own, or the constant male-female toxic structures that have been so common.
JP: So I’ve been contemplating whether or not to have a sex scene in the fantasy that I’m writing. And this book actually made me lean more towards doing it because of the fact that it’s more focused on the emotion side of it. And I think that doing that and at least providing hopefully representation that I would like to see on the page, I’m just hoping that I can provide that as an output.
Janet: I liked that because she says, “good characters talk,” I like that she covers the purposes of dialogue. Like she talks about the dialogue, revealing the character, revealing the relationships. Just so that focus is not just about how the pieces go together.
Crys: And that’s one of the reasons that I did put this book on our list is. Yes, it’s labeled explicitly, how I write sex scenes, but there’s so many other little pieces of just how I write that Gabaldon shares in this tiny little book.
Marianne: Well, and also how it reveals character because I love Janet Evanovich, and I don’t remember what book it was in or anything, but in her Stephanie Plum books, she kind of has a love triangle with Stephanie Plum, but in one of them, she doesn’t go into graphic detail, but she says that they have sex in the front driver’s seat of a Maserati or some car that is just really small. And the guy, Ranger, says, “I’d love to accommodate, but I don’t think it’s possible.”
And Stephanie Plum just looks at him and says, “Oh, I think I can get this done.” And it kind of shows how whatever situation she’s in, whether it be in the front seat of a car, she’s like, no, I can figure this out. I can figure this out, it may not be pretty. Because during the whole scene, her butt is like honking the horn.
But using that as a conjugation now, the scene just says so much about Stephanie Plum as a character. And so as I was reading this book, I just thought about that one scene because it’s always stuck out to me how much it said about Stephanie rather than even their relationship. It was just more the fact that she’d been challenged, she’d accepted the challenge, and she was going to meet the task at hand. That sounds like a good way of phrasing it.
Crys: Marianne’s like, “How do I not turn this into a double, triple, and quadruple entendre?
Marianne: Well, I was just going to go back to my background. Reading this book in some ways though, it just kind of cracked me up because I read all the Sweet Valley High books, and I was just this like cute little innocent 12-year-old who went into a Walden Books and decided that I was going to read a real and true live romance. And I found Anne’s House of Dreams about when Anne of Green Gables gets married. And I thought, well, this will be a true romance with all the scenes because it’s married people.
And it was far from that. And then from there I went onto Jane Austin. And so it was just kind of funny to me reading this now, looking at how I was trying so hard to find quote unquote romance novels, and read Anne of Green Gables instead.
JP: And I almost think that the book, even though it just says, how I write sex scenes, I almost want to argue it’s like, how do I write sex scenes and sexually charged scenes. I think that there are definitely examples in there where there is no sex that’s happening in it. It’s more about the dialogue that’s happening. And I feel like we would be able to use that to get our characters into these intimate settings.
And it almost peels back a ton of layers to make it more accessible to what that core character is to lay out on the page. And that’s why I want to explore these scenes, but I feel like it can be applicable to almost any genre, especially the portions where she doesn’t have explicit sex, we could use that in almost any writing.
Marianne: There could be a very flippant comment with the train whistle. Part of me wishes that I could get a version of this book, or she had a version of this book, at the end where it was just without any of the examples. That it was just what she says about writing because sometimes the examples, because I didn’t know the plot, confused me.
I mean, maybe I knew what was going on, but it would have been more helpful had I read all of her books. So part of me wishes that they could have been just at the end, because even now flipping through to try and find the parts that I really enjoyed, there’s so much of the snippets that it takes a while to find her teaching writing rather than the snippets of her book.
Crys: I agree, and if you are someone who is currently reading Outlander, there will be massive spoilers. Just as a warning for anyone who did decide to pick this book up.
Marianne: Does she say that at the beginning or just that she uses a lot of her own quotes?
Crys: I don’t know if she said anything about spoilers. She does say she uses a lot of her own quotes.
Janet: Yeah. I’m not sure where she tells you which books these are coming out of. But I don’t think she tells you until at the end of the scene.
Marianne: Well, and they’re not in order either, I think.
Crys: Is there anything else that stood out that anyone wants to bring up before we close out?
Marianne: I thought that this also applies to friendships in your books, to think about how they communicate with each other and how they express their emotions. I think it works with any relationships, not just sexual ones, by showing through conversation the kind of relationship that your characters have with each other. I thought this was a really good book to point that out.
Crys: Yeah, I would say that between this book and parts of Techniques of the Selling Writer, those two have helped me write emotion more than any other. And I’ve read a lot of craft books.
Janet: This is a good book to discuss with other people. It’s not necessarily a book that we all want to talk about on a podcast and have our opinions out there for forever, but I think it is a book that you want to pick up and you want to discuss with someone else who’s read it.
Marianne: Yeah. Well I’m okay with everyone knowing that I’m a huge Anne of Green Gables fan. I’ll put that out there. Sweet Valley High books.
Crys: All right, friends. We will be back next month with, You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story, and it is a big book. And that episode will go live on the tenth unless you are one of our paid Substack subscribers. In which case, you will get access to it and every other episode two days early, along with our weekly email that goes to everyone with our extra thoughts on the previous week’s episode, updates on our plans and what we’re doing, and our special tarot episodes.
Thanks everybody for joining me, and I will see you next month.
JP: Bye.
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