Vulnerability and Strength – stripping my characters bare.
by Dianna Hardy
This article was first published on Bookaholics Book Club, on 1st August, 2012
This blog post was brought on by someone asking me why I put [explicit] sex scenes in my books. After my initial internal answer of ‘why not?’, I thought about this in more detail, and the answer revolved around vulnerability and strength.
There are very few things in life that really strip you bare. One is pain, one is death and the other is sex. (Can you tell I’m a Scorpio? Lol.)
All of these things make you vulnerable, but it’s only by learning how to be vulnerable that you can be strong – something that all my characters go through.
Out of all those three things (pain, death and sex), sex is probably the one that everyone relates to the most. Most adults have had sex by the time they’re adults, or at least, by the time they’re twenty-five. Not everyone has experienced a death by that age. Not everyone will have experienced excruciating pain (not just physical), but everyone will have been stripped bare through sex.
I make my scenes explicit because, in my mind, this is the only way you really get to know a character. Sex is such a personal thing. Knowing what someone likes and how someone responds gives you a humongous insight into who that person truly is.
Examples (may contain SPOILERS):
Elena is very open and “giving” of herself in a physical and sexual sense. There’s the energy transference with Gwain, and the blood-letting with Katarra, and it’s all wrapped up in a perfect innocence that has never left her, after all, she would “heal the whole world if she could”, says her mother of her. It’s a wonderful contrast to how she couldn’t give of herself at first, and to the “taking” energy of the succubus and what happened when she lost her virginity.
Amy is fiercely independent… well, not in the bedroom she’s not! She likes to submit. She may not like that she likes to submit, but she does. And there’s this bittersweet dichotomy she has between her past and her present as well. The 1950’s was a much more “submissive” time for women to be living in, and yet, even as her present personality rebels against it, the other side of her is quite at peace with that era and cherishes her time there.
Mary (oh, I love Mary!) – she’s a woman who knows what she wants and will damn well tell you so. She approaches sex the way she approaches life: head on, with zest and curiosity – and, of course, as a way to [try to] heal her pain, emotional as well as physical.
And I don’t have enough room to talk about the men – I’d be here all day, lol!
In short, what my characters get up to in the bedroom – how they respond to sex – simply makes them more three dimensional for me; it makes the story rounder, too. One explicit sex scene in which you can hear the characters’ thoughts / see their reactions, and you suddenly know them a hell of a lot better than you did just a few minutes ago. It’s a great way of connecting the reader to them, particularly in a novella length book, where you may not have a lot of time to pad out all their surface traits.
Why do we connect so strongly to characters in this way? Because sex makes us all vulnerable. It makes us all feel something on a very deep level that is only ours; that no one else (maybe with the exception of your partner) gets to see. And reading a book is a private thing – you can indulge in what makes you feel vulnerable without anyone needing to know about it. You learn about yourself this way, and you learn about what your strengths are too, because vulnerability can only lead to a stronger you. If you’re reading a scene where you like the writing style and the people in the story, you become attached in that short, shared moment of vulnerability. You relate.
I also mentioned pain and death (death, in my world, really only being a metaphor for transformation). I write about those too. Pain (whether emotional, mental or physical) is often also “explicit” in my stories. The result is the same: an attachment is formed through that shared moment of vulnerability.
I think we all become attached to characters in this way, but obviously different writing styles and different scenarios will appeal to each of us.
For myself, I get to know my characters better through writing them into sexual / painful / transformative situations. They’ll often do something in those raw moments that I totally will not expect, and I’ll be all, “Whoa! I did not know that about you – cool!” You get to the naked truth of who they are.
Finally … well … I’m a Scorpio. Life itself is explicit to me, and everything, at its crux, is about sex, pain or death.
I’m leaving you with a Buffy The Vampire Slayer quote (love Joss Whedon), from Becoming, Part 2. I think it sums up the above perfectly. Angelus is fighting with Buffy – it’s their final showdown, and he’s metaphorically stripped her bare…
This blog post was brought on by someone asking me why I put [explicit] sex scenes in my books. After my initial internal answer of ‘why not?’, I thought about this in more detail, and the answer revolved around vulnerability and strength.
There are very few things in life that really strip you bare. One is pain, one is death and the other is sex. (Can you tell I’m a Scorpio? Lol.)
All of these things make you vulnerable, but it’s only by learning how to be vulnerable that you can be strong – something that all my characters go through.
Out of all those three things (pain, death and sex), sex is probably the one that everyone relates to the most. Most adults have had sex by the time they’re adults, or at least, by the time they’re twenty-five. Not everyone has experienced a death by that age. Not everyone will have experienced excruciating pain (not just physical), but everyone will have been stripped bare through sex.
I make my scenes explicit because, in my mind, this is the only way you really get to know a character. Sex is such a personal thing. Knowing what someone likes and how someone responds gives you a humongous insight into who that person truly is.
Examples (may contain SPOILERS):
Elena is very open and “giving” of herself in a physical and sexual sense. There’s the energy transference with Gwain, and the blood-letting with Katarra, and it’s all wrapped up in a perfect innocence that has never left her, after all, she would “heal the whole world if she could”, says her mother of her. It’s a wonderful contrast to how she couldn’t give of herself at first, and to the “taking” energy of the succubus and what happened when she lost her virginity.
Amy is fiercely independent… well, not in the bedroom she’s not! She likes to submit. She may not like that she likes to submit, but she does. And there’s this bittersweet dichotomy she has between her past and her present as well. The 1950’s was a much more “submissive” time for women to be living in, and yet, even as her present personality rebels against it, the other side of her is quite at peace with that era and cherishes her time there.
Mary (oh, I love Mary!) – she’s a woman who knows what she wants and will damn well tell you so. She approaches sex the way she approaches life: head on, with zest and curiosity – and, of course, as a way to [try to] heal her pain, emotional as well as physical.
And I don’t have enough room to talk about the men – I’d be here all day, lol!
In short, what my characters get up to in the bedroom – how they respond to sex – simply makes them more three dimensional for me; it makes the story rounder, too. One explicit sex scene in which you can hear the characters’ thoughts / see their reactions, and you suddenly know them a hell of a lot better than you did just a few minutes ago. It’s a great way of connecting the reader to them, particularly in a novella length book, where you may not have a lot of time to pad out all their surface traits.
Why do we connect so strongly to characters in this way? Because sex makes us all vulnerable. It makes us all feel something on a very deep level that is only ours; that no one else (maybe with the exception of your partner) gets to see. And reading a book is a private thing – you can indulge in what makes you feel vulnerable without anyone needing to know about it. You learn about yourself this way, and you learn about what your strengths are too, because vulnerability can only lead to a stronger you. If you’re reading a scene where you like the writing style and the people in the story, you become attached in that short, shared moment of vulnerability. You relate.
I also mentioned pain and death (death, in my world, really only being a metaphor for transformation). I write about those too. Pain (whether emotional, mental or physical) is often also “explicit” in my stories. The result is the same: an attachment is formed through that shared moment of vulnerability.
I think we all become attached to characters in this way, but obviously different writing styles and different scenarios will appeal to each of us.
For myself, I get to know my characters better through writing them into sexual / painful / transformative situations. They’ll often do something in those raw moments that I totally will not expect, and I’ll be all, “Whoa! I did not know that about you – cool!” You get to the naked truth of who they are.
Finally … well … I’m a Scorpio. Life itself is explicit to me, and everything, at its crux, is about sex, pain or death.
I’m leaving you with a Buffy The Vampire Slayer quote (love Joss Whedon), from Becoming, Part 2. I think it sums up the above perfectly. Angelus is fighting with Buffy – it’s their final showdown, and he’s metaphorically stripped her bare…
Angelus: Now that's everything, huh? No weapons... No friends... No hope. Take all that away... and what's left?
Buffy: Me.