SETH W. JAMES

Sex and Violence

February 6, 2024

By Seth W. James

Anyone who has read my novels will have found plenty of sex and violence, from protagonists dodging CIA assassins on the streets of Cairo, to love requited for a married woman and the man she couldn’t have, to battling orcs or exploring undercover kink or walking balls-out into a room full of fascists to save a lover or die trying, I have written a hell of a lot of sex and violence.  A fundamental question to writing such scenes, however, is: what makes an action or love scene good?  Or, conversely, what takes a violent set piece or sexual episode and drags it into tedium?  Surprisingly, the exact same things.

Despite sex and violence largely representing two opposites—that is, creation and destruction (with exceptions, of course; martial arts, for instance, are violent yet creative)—effectively writing either requires the same approach, challenging writers to avoid the same pitfalls.  It is all too easy, when launching into an action sequence or walking a pair (or more) of protagonists back to the bedroom, to focus on the mechanics of the situation, to become lost or bogged down in depicting rather than storytelling.  The solution, fortunately, is the same for these sorts of scenes as it is for all others: focus on the reader.  When I approach such scenes, I ask myself, how will it move the plot forward and what knowledge—about the characters, their arcs, their capabilities, vulnerabilities, etc.—will the reader gain from the telling?  If the scene I envision doesn’t move the plot or tell us something new about the characters, deepening the readers’ insights, then I either change it or cut it.

So, what does that look like on the page?  Let’s start with sex.  Imagine a hardboiled detective from the 1940s and his acid-blonde torcher client returning to his office after a night of trying to get the skinny on a movie producer who stole her inheritance.  Classic.  They hadn’t found much at the clubs they had visited, except for one clue.  They talk it over, decide what to do, and then the dick makes a pass at the blonde and, for once, she doesn’t slap his face.  The clothes come off, a long scene depicting genitals in action commences, and, when it ends, the blonde lights up a coffin nail, throws on her clothes, says, “thanks for the drink, mac; I’m going for a massage; pick me up at eight,” and the dick wonders where he’s going to find a clean shirt.

Does this sex scene succeed?  No, it doesn’t; no matter how erotic or inventive the genitals-in-action catalogue, we, as readers, know nothing more about the characters than we did beforehand and the plot hasn’t moved: the detective and client still only have the one clue, their feelings for one another haven’t changed, and we haven’t learned anything about their personalities, where they’re going or why.  So, what would make the scene effective?  Change it so that the detective wants to drop the case, that he doesn’t think the clue is worth it and that he’s worried about the three other cases he supposed to solve; then, have the blonde seduce the detective, to keep him interested and working the case.  Why does this scene work where the sex-for-fun scene largely does not?  It works because now we know more about the characters and the plot: we lose confidence in the clue and, as readers, start looking at other investigative avenues; we also know more about the detective, that he’s worried about his other cases, that he’s willing to drop a client if the case has little potential, and that he’s a bit of a sucker; we also learn that the blonde is willing to do anything, isn’t too romantic in her opinions about sex, and that maybe she’s hiding something, if she still thinks there’s a case when the facts don’t support it.  In short, the second version works because it is a part of the story and the first one doesn’t work because it is extraneous.  Now, could the second version be written with a catalogue of genitals-in-action?  Sure.  Would it hurt it?  Well, that’s largely a matter of taste, both the writer’s and readers’.  If the blow-by-blow account (pun intended) doesn’t illustrate the character’s state of mind or intentions, etc., then the readers may wonder why it is there.  Pandering rarely succeeds.

Action scenes also need the same focus on characters and plot and can fail when they focus too much on mechanical sequences and gore.  Consider: our detective has uncovered the blonde’s true motive behind the investigation, to locate her polygamist husband and rub him out; unfortunately for the detective, the husband, and his second wife, the blonde has tailed him to the husband’s new home and is armed with tommy gun.  The blonde opens up on the house, blowing out the front windows; the husband and wife drop to the floor and are showered with glass; the dick barely gets off a couple rounds from his revolver, hitting nothing.  The blonde kicks in the front door and lets off a long burst to her left, nearly decapitating the dick, who dives behind a steamer trunk that he hopes has something more solid in it than linens.  The blonde then swings back to the other direction, roars in fury, and shoots the husband, catching him in the shoulder; he stumbles back, crashing into the China cabinet, and then the blonde opens up full-auto, riddling his torso with fifty rounds of hot lead, punching through his lungs, exploding blood out of his mouth in his last desperate breath.  As the husband’s bloody corpse slips to the floor with a sound like a butcher slapping hamburger into wax paper, with his new wife screaming until her throat bleeds, the blonde turns her fury and her sub-machinegun on the other woman.  The dick sees that it’s now or never, pops up over the steamer trunk, and puts a round from his revolver straight through the back of the blonde’s head, shattering her skull and spewing grey matter over the remains of the China.

Does this scene work, even as a finale?  It does not.  Clichés to one side, it fails because of its focus on blood and guts and the mechanics of the scene, rather than on the people enacting it.  With the exception of the word “fury,” we have no real insight into the blonde’s motivations, what she feels—if anything—in that long-awaited moment of revenge.  All we get, instead, is the sequence of her assault on the house, which might be okay if there were obstacles to overcome rather than elongating “she entered the house,” followed by a description of the husband’s death that receives as many words as the rest of the scene.  Could it be salvaged?  Sure.  If the focus of the scene is instead changed to the people enacting it, rather than just the events, it could work, particularly if it is the finale.  If the blonde has to employ tactics and patience, pinning down the detective until he runs out of ammunition, it would show that her fury runs cold, is calculated, and may satisfy the readers’ predictions about the blonde, developed from earlier scenes.  If the husband tries to shield his new wife or push her out of the room, it deepens his character beyond being a cad who couldn’t be bothered to divorce one (admittedly intense) wife before marrying another; we’d care just a little bit more about him.  If, after fighting her way into the house, the cold and calculated blonde begins to shed tears as she kills the husband, it would reveal something other than the baser instincts of ownership or propriety, signaling that even the femme fatale has a beating heart somewhere inside.  Again, what makes a sex or violence scene work is its contribution to the plot or to our understanding of the characters.

Are there exceptions?  You bet.  Sometimes a sex scene or a scene of violence is a species of celebration.  If the plot of the book (or show or movie or whatever) is or involves a “will they or won’t they” arc, where we, the readers, wonder if those two crazy kids will ever get it together, then the sex scene where they finally do get together celebrates, in a way, their plot’s success.  It can be taken too far, of course, but a little salaciousness in that moment constitutes the payoff for the readers’ emotional investment in the characters.  Again, focusing on the character’s joy in such a scene, their experience, will save it from seeming awkward.  If the reader comes away feeling as though they just witnessed the writer masturbating in public, yeah, you’ve failed.  Keep it in your pants, fella.  And, of course, the same can be true for action scenes: the final defeat of the BBEG calls for a little explicit description, a payoff for the readers who, hopefully, have come to dislike Mr. Big Bad.  And, of course, like the celebratory sex scene, it can be taken too far: if the specificity of the kill or the duration of its description gets out of hand, the reader may feel that they are reading the writer’s confession about a hated, personal opponent, rather than the protagonist’s.  As T.S. Eliot wrote in Tradition and the Individual Talent, “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,” by which Eliot meant that we, as writers, should keep our prejudices out of our works and, instead, focus on giving the work what it needs to succeed.  You, as a human being, may have really hated your kindergarten teacher, but the detective isn’t shooting her for you: he’s shooting the blonde to protect wife number two—and the scene will be better if it stays that way.

To sum up: scenes of both sex and violence succeed when they move the plot forward and show us something about the characters.  That is, after all, why we write them in the first place.