WIP check in - Tuesday 24th January

[lullabymoon]

How are things going today? 

Poll #9223 Tuesday check in

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12

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Today I

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wrote
6 (50.0%)

edited
2 (16.7%)

posted
1 (8.3%)

researched
0 (0.0%)

did something else
6 (50.0%)

Today's discussion topic comes from fanfic flamingo:

[Now I have to write a sex scene? (Fanfic Flamingo) Fade to black is your friend]

Is fade to black your friend? Or does it depend on the fic itself?

Comments

[annotated_em]

It definitely depends on the fic and what you wanna do with it. If I'm starting out to write smut (and the plot doesn't go screwy on me) then it's smut all the way down. If it's more plot-driven, smut may or may not be necessary. Totally depends.

I do remember the days when I couldn't/didn't know how to write smut! And fade to black was definitely my best friend in those days. *rubs chin* Got over that, though.

[dhae_knight_1]

Depends. If it's PWP there's really no way around the sex, but for most of what I write, fade to black is my friend. Not least because I rarely feel explicit sex adds anything to the story. I write for the angst, the emotions and how they deal with it, and in that context sex can be present, but it doesn't have to be explicit. In fact, I often find explicit sex in the stories I read boring and something I can easily skim over in favor of seeing where it stops and the story picks up again.

[insignia]

I agree so much with this. When a good plot is interrupted by porn, my first reaction tends to be "oh, just get on with it already -_-" :D

[dhae_knight_1]

Exactly! *skim-naughty!word-skim-kissed!deeply-skim-two!fingers-skim* pretty much sums up what I get out of 99% of all sex scenes.

I read fanfic for the emotions. If I want sex there are other options. :-)

[0jack]

Another "it depends". For me, it's about the particular subgenre I'm in (for work) and the fandom I'm writing in (for fannishness)—I can't explain the logic but some fandoms seem to call for more blatant sex than others, oh brain. (Pretend I typed "in which I'm writing" back there, I'm so tired.)

What I do is put [SEX GOES HERE] where the sex should be, and maybe (if I am super alert that day) I put in a comment about what kind of sex. I have also been known to put in [SOMETHING HORRIBLE HERE] and [CHARACTERS ARE WITTY FOR ~100 WORDS]. I'm not the only one because some of my friends are editors and not all of us remember to go back and put in the blocked scenes. That's my nightmare, submitting a piece with [SEX GOES HERE] still sitting there.

So far, I have not done that, though. I go back and put it in. I find that a lot of character development can happen in sex scenes, especially in erotic fiction of any kind, and sometimes writing it later is your friend. You know what the character needs to be thinking and feeling to accomplish what comes up later and can write the scene to show it.

[dhae_knight_1]

I would *love* to read a fic that just randomly had a [sex goes here] comment in the middle of it! XD

[insignia]

Me too! :D

[proseac]

In some cases, it might actually be better that way...O_o

[insignia]

I can't imagine myself ever including explicit sex scenes in a story. Non-explicit ones I might do, but only if they add something important to the plot or relationship development--and they rarely do, because that's not the kind of stories I tend to come up with. My imagination doesn't go there, except with extreme caution. I have one fanfic idea where the sex scenes would actually be necessary, because the characters multitask by having long-winded conversations in bed :D But that still won't require much biological detail, luckily. (It's also a low-priority fic that I may never get around to.)

So yeah, fade to black is my bestest friend in most cases.

[crowdog66]

I edited some stuff I crafted yesterday, wrote another 1000 words on Chapter 41 of "When the Farsei Blooms", and posted it. In doing so I met the goals I set when starting this month's challenge, but of course I'll still continue writing for the rest of the month and perhaps even get another chapter of "WtFB" done by the end.

As for fading to black... let's just say that I never met a sex scene I didn't like to write (with the conspicuous exception of "How Do You Say 'Seduction' in Kardasi?", but even that came out as an R). Some stories naturally stay in PG-13 territory, and in some cases the dramatic tension of the story is generated by the emotions leading up to the first touch or kiss, in which case it's natural to wrap things up once that touch/kiss has occurred or is just about to occur; however, when sex rears its not-so-ugly head I don't hesitate to get right down to brass tacks. Sometimes it turns out poetic, sometimes it turns out filthy, but when a fic calls for a sex scene I feel perfectly comfortable writing it.

[vae]

It depends a LOT on the fic. Given that the last thing I finished apart from Yuletide was a kink fic on orgasm denial, that was pretty much as explicit a no-sex as I've ever written. Before that was 11k words of breathplay, before that was 11k of size queen... erm, I'm not really a fade to black writer in most of my writing. There needs to be a reason for the sex to be there, though, and a reason for it to be on the page (even if it's as simple as "this is hot") - and it has to be something that isn't interchangeable. It has to be something that's specific to those characters and how they interact, and it has to stay in character.

[jagnikjen]

Some writing since yesterday, a tiny bit of revisions, and some brainstorming. Most likely there will no writing today until I am home from work.

Discussion topic...it depends on the fic, the plot and the characters.

I'm not afraid to write sex, though I generally do get a bit of performance anxiety. In fact, I'm writing something new, and it's targeted for an erotic publisher so there has to be fairly explicit sex in it.

[dagas_isa]

I've been reading prompt lists, and copy-pasta inspiration lyrics. But I need to focus on an exchange story.

Discussion topics:

It really depends for me. I write a lot of sex in fics that are PWP or PAP (porn as plot), and I don't really believe that sex scenes are inherently without value when it comes to portraying things like characterization and relationships. But I also write a lot of fics that are intentionally fade to black because I think the sexiest part of the concept is the build-up, and anything after that would just...ruin the mood.

I'm also really leery of mixing porn and plot in stories in the sense of having a regular non-sex plot interspersed with sex scenes. I think it can work, but I'd rather concentrate on doing one or the other really well, and not have to worry about pacing or having extra filler messing things up.

[rhi]

That depends on the fic and how the scene's going. If the fic doesn't need it, I don't write it. And if I can't make it interesting and/or hot? I go with the fade to black.

[lacygrey]

I uploaded (reposted) a lot of fic to my AO3 today. I hadn't realized how behind I'd got and Hikago fandom are having an AO3 posting drive at the moment. It kinda of makes me feel efficient, even though it does nothing for the word count.

I've written an awlful lot (or a lot of awlful) smut and haven't posted any yet.

[taelle]

Today I planned a story. Well, half a story - I got stuck at "and then the canon events go there, only, taking the AUness into account, how much of canon do I need to include?"

As for sex scenes - mostly fade to black. I think I only maybe wrote two or three stories which needed to have the sex scenes included, and at least one was of the "does it really happen or is it a dream" variety.

[proseac]

No writing yet today, but the day's not over. :) I downloaded Scrivener last night, so I'll probably be playing with the tutorial most of the evening.

I've written one chapter of mostly smut, with two separate sex scenes in it, and that's the extent of it. It was essentially an experiment to see if I could actually do it and make it believable rather than comical. Judging from the comments I got, I think i succeeded, but as for whether I'll do it again? Probably not. I'm not inclined to write strictly PWP or even erotica, so there wouldn't be much occasion for it to be absolutely necessary to advancing the story.

I think Hitchcock had it about right - show just enough to stir the imagination, and then let the reader fill in the blanks. Chances are, they'll come up with something WAY more sexy than anything I might dream up!

[insignia]

Scrivener is awesome. Just so you know.

[bay_alexison]

Later tonight I'm going to try to polish up the scene from my Big Bang I had rewritten yesterday. That part is harder to pull off than I thought.

Like everyone else, it depends on the story. For my Big Bang, I do have a couple sex scenes in which I show a little bit what's going on. Most of the time those sex scenes are for character/relationship development. There had been a couple other stories in which I did the fade to black as there's really no need to show the characters in bed.

[krait]

I think there are three main factors which go into the "will this fic have explicit sex?" decision, for me.

First: What is the point of the story? Relationship stories are 90% more likely to have sex (yes, I am making up percentages) than, say, a character study or a caper/solve-a-task fic. Sex is an interpersonal tool, so fics which are all about how different people relate to each other is much more likely to bring in, at least once, all the different ways that people interact. If the main plot isn't interpersonal, those tools are less useful to writing about it.

Second: Who am I writing for? Most of the time I am writing for me (because I never finish anything and so all my WIPs remain on my hard drive, unshared), and that means the other factors, combined with my mood, will be the determinants. However, on the occasions when I am writing for someone else -- Yuletide, a Bingo challenge, kinkmeme responses, etc. -- then "is there sex?" will be influenced by what (I understand) the audience is expecting or requesting. Both my Loveless kinkmeme fics are explicit, because that was what the prompt requested; my Yuletide fic was not, because the recipient's letter didn't say outright but did seem to emphasise the buildup rather than the details of the relationship desired.

Third: What's the tone of the canon? This one feeds into the "what do I want" aspect of writing for myself, because I generally prefer fics that match the tone of the original canon. (This is why I find it very hard to write Sherlock Holmes fic -- I am the wrong age/sex/period/mindset to mimic Sir Conan Doyle's style and setting! It would take me a LOT of rereading and research and Brit- and history-picking to produce a fic that I liked.) If the original canon is open in its acknowledgement of sex (even if it's not explicit), I'm more likely to include sex in the fic; for canons which prefer a fade-to-black or nonacknowledgement approach, I'm more likely to skip over it or just skip it.

Obviously there are exceptions to all of these. If a canon is TOO avoidant, for example, I might find myself tempted to write a rebuttal-fic (it's ridiculous to pretend that there is no sex! Why is the author acting like I'm five years old?), or attempt to answer the questions created (why does no one in this universe acknowledge that sex happens? Is the viewpoint character terribly repressed? Is the entire society strictly regulated?). Sometimes a giftee/commenter will request something that intrigues me, but the plot takes a left turn in the writing and goes somewhere smutless regardless of what was requested. Same with plot types -- unexpected relationships might crop up in a fic that I planned to be task-focused, or a relationship might derail in the writing before I get a sex scene in.