Post by MMADfan on Oct 25, 2008 13:17:58 GMT -5
I wasn't sure where to post this, but I thought here might be okay. It's not precisely a rant, though I do vent occasionally!
Something struck me and set my brain off on one of its tangents. The inspiration for this tangent: Stef recently posted an announcement that she had written (and posted) a lemon in response to a (non-CR) challenge that I think has to be one of the strangest challenges I’ve heard of. (No offense to you, Stef!
The challenge asked for “smut with no bad words,” or something like that. Smut by its very nature has “bad words” in it, from my understanding of “smut,” and that’s why it’s called “smut.” (I personally don’t read anything labeled “smut” because, given the meaning of the word “smut,” I assume that it’s devoid of anything that I personally consider erotic and will just be filthy and coarse without giving me any sense of eroticism.) I also thought the challenge was interesting, though, and perhaps impossible, because different people have different ideas of what “bad words” are.
My immediate thought on reading the description of the challenge was that the person issuing it wanted something that managed to be dirty sex but without using any words other than sterile, neutral terms such as “penis” or “vagina.” *shrug* Now, that would be a challenge! I haven’t read Stef’s story in response to the challenge yet, but from the description of it as kind of a lime, I’m figuring that my interpretation of the challenge was off! LOL!
Anyway, whatever the intent of the challenge, it got me thinking about lemons, eroticism, sex scenes, and the recent rash of people trying to tell other fanfic writers (and readers) what makes an acceptable lemon, right up to declaring what words are acceptable and not acceptable. The result can be people trying to think so much about following these “rules” that they forget about everything else they should be thinking about when writing the scene (characters, anyone?). It can also lead to readers either thinking there’s something wrong with their taste if they like a different sort of lemon or, worse, becoming distracted by the presence of certain words or descriptions in a scene – ones that they wouldn’t have noticed before having read these “rules” – and being taken out of the scene and losing what enjoyment they may have had if they hadn’t been told that certain things are required to make a lemon good, including what vocabulary is “good.”
For me to find something lemony, I like to have a sense of the feelings of the people involved and to have a sense of the characters and what they’re experiencing as erotic. That’s why I feel that my most “questionable” lemons are those in my lemon drabbles. There’s no/little opportunity for character development or exploring the experiences of the characters. I think they are the most “smutty” and least erotic things I’ve written, but it was an interesting exercise to try doing it.
On the other hand, I think that for most readers, it’s not the vocabulary that makes something an erotic, tasteful lemon, it’s the way the vocabulary is used, the context for it, and the ability of the writer to put the scene together for the reader. I’ve read some really bad, fairly disgusting “lemons” that used a relatively innocuous vocabulary but that were completely unerotic to me, and some were actually a turn off, though not because they were squicky, but because they were coarse. (There’s a lot of that on adultfanfiction. Some of it seems to be written by teenage boys with little or no sexual experience beyond looking at porn. But obviously, a lot of people do find it erotic even though I don’t!) I also find sex scenes unerotic when I have no sense of the characters and their experiences; they’re just people going through these physical activities, and it could be describing how to assemble a bicycle or play badminton for all I care. LOL!
If someone has an issue with certain terms and doesn’t find them erotic, that’s a matter of taste – and I’m not going to tell someone that they should find a particular word erotic that I might commonly use – but trying to tell others (as I’ve seen in various places on the net) that there is a only a certain acceptable vocabulary for writing lemons is just hubris. Just because I don’t find a particular word erotic (particularly out-of-context) doesn’t mean that a writer shouldn’t use it, nor does it mean that the word can’t contribute to the eroticism of a lemon. A word that I might find disgusting, offensive, or objectionable in certain contexts I might not even notice when I’m caught up in reading a well-written lemon, or I might notice it and think, “huh, that word works there in this context; who knew?”
Writing an effective lemon, that is, one that many people will find erotic, is a function of far more than choice of vocabulary or even how the vocabulary is used. It also depends on the audience. I might be able to write an excellent, lemony piece of slash that a lot of people who read slash will find erotic, but someone who doesn’t find slash erotic, regardless of how well it’s done, won’t find it lemony. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it (or the reader), just that it’s not to the taste of the person reading it. (Personally, I’ve never read a piece of femmeslash that I experienced as erotic, though I might be able to appreciate it on another aesthetic level as being well-written, etc. It just doesn’t do anything for me, regardless of how well-written it is. Just because I don’t find femmeslash lemony doesn’t mean that I think there’s anything wrong with reading it, writing it, or finding it erotic, regardless of one’s sexual orientation.)
Likewise, there are people – quite a few of them – who dislike ADMM, who dislike what they call “wrinkly sex,” even when there are no “wrinkles” described, who don’t like scenes with older adults having sex, and who find it “yucky” regardless of how well it’s written or what vocabulary is used. In fact, I know of one of those who literally say “yuck” about ADMM who also is vocal about what vocabulary is acceptable in lemons. It’s a matter of taste, either way, IMO.
I’m getting really tired of certain people in the fanfic community who think that they can prescribe what constitutes a good lemon, not merely saying that when they read lemons, this is what they like and dislike. Unfortunately, people who think that they know the “right way” and only way to write lemons (or anything else) tend to have such confidence that their taste should be the final arbiter that they are able to convince some people that what they’re saying isn’t simply a description of one kind of good lemon (the kind that they like), but that it is the way to write and judge lemons.
This brings me to a second, related issue: sex scenes that aren’t meant to be lemons by the author (or not primarily so), although they may have some erotic content. For example, in An Act of Love, although the scenes between Minerva and Severus may have some erotic/lemony effects, they were not intended as lemons, but as very simple descriptions of the activities, demonstrating the thrall in which the spell held Severus and the friendship and generosity exhibited by Minerva. Even the culminating chapter between Severus and Minerva was not intended to be lemony; it was presented from Minerva’s point-of-view and was deliberately written to present the sex as a relatively mechanical act for her. Anyone who criticized it (mildly) for the fact that it seemed clinical was half-right: it was intended to be clinical. But as that was the intent, although the scene may have disappointed anyone who had hoped for a really hot lemon, the criticism was off-the mark, since the scene achieved what I intended if the reader found it “clinical” or “mechanical.” This was contrasted with the various scenes between Albus and Minerva in AAoL, which were intended to be lemony. I am quite aware that some of those lemons were fairly extreme (for me, anyway), particularly the role-playing one, and that they wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, but they were qualitatively different from the scenes with Severus and intended to be so.
This isn’t to say that there is no erotic component to the sex scenes that are there for another purpose, and people also have differing threshholds of what turns them on, and the mere description of sexual activity between two people can be erotic for them, regardless of whether that’s the primary purpose of the scene. So anyone who found the scenes with Severus titillating to some degree, there’s nothing wrong with that!
Even Minerva, sometimes to her own discomfort, found them occasionally mildly arousing, after all!
That now brings me to another point: many authors, me included, write a variety of lemons. The circumstances, situations, characters, events leading up to the lemon, and other factors can all help shape the lemon. Depending on the feel and tone that I want to establish for the lemon – and the characters involved – I use different vocabulary, different sentence structures, and other techniques that I hope will convey that feeling and tone. This is apart from the actual content of the lemon – what the characters are physically doing with each other – and although not all of the lemons I’ve written are going to be to everyone’s taste, I still believe they are lemons, regardless of whether I’ve used any of the words that some people would like to forbid, and I know that a lot of people have found them “hot.”
Just as there are certain sexual activities that I might describe one particular pairing participating in but would never have a different couple engage in, there are words that I might use in some lemons involving one specific pair of characters, but I wouldn’t use those words with a different pair – particularly when it comes to character speech. Usually, most of my characters talk during sex scenes; the characters have different vocabularies and different ways of speaking in non-sex scenes, and it makes sense that different characters will have different ways of talking during sex scenes.
Anyway, I have given advice to some writers about particular lemons – after they wrote the draft and after they asked for my opinion – giving suggestions about how to make a particular scene more effective, but I don’t think there are any cut-and-dried rules about what vocabulary should and should not be used in lemons. There may be certain words that don’t fit with a particular scene or with certain characters given the way they behave in the rest of the fic – and it might be a more innocuous word that doesn’t fit, rather than a more “dirty” word, depending on the characters and context – but that’s a different issue. Also, since JKR never writes the HP characters in sex scenes, trying to judge whether the sex is “in character” or not requires us to remember that you can’t determine precisely how a character will enjoy sex based on the view we get from canon. I think that certain kinds of behavior are less likely (or more likely) for certain characters than for others, but presuming, for example, that because Minerva is strict and “buttoned up” in public means that she must be sexually repressed or asexual, is just silly, IMO. I don’t think that we can point to people we work with or who live in our neighborhoods and be able to say what kind of sex lives they have or how they enjoy their sex (unless you live in a swingers’ community! LOL). I could see some people thinking that I might be a sexual prude in the bedroom, if it crossed their minds. And I’ve known men who seemed sexy and energetic but who were actually utter bores, if you know what I mean without my going to far into the area of TMI! So if the characters behave in-character with the rest of the way you portray them in the fic and in keeping with the relationship you put them in, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether they are OOC; and if they do have some extreme of sexual behavior (being completely repressed or into heavy BDSM, for example), make it a credible, integrated part of their character if you’re concerned about having people criticize it as OOC. Unless you’re doing a PWP, in which case, it could be beside the point!
I think the one bit of advice I would give people who are thinking about writing lemons or limes is really advice I would give about writing many kinds of scenes: don’t forget your characters. Obviously, there are times when description of setting is more important to what you want to do with a scene than what a character is thinking, feeling, etc., but in general, I think that when writing something that you want to have a citrusy effect, remembering the characters and having them maintain primacy in your mind as you write is more important than trying to get down the physical activities. You can always go back and add in more physical detail – which can also be used to help flesh out the character’s experience. For example, describing the way a character physically reacts to something done by another character (in a sex scene or otherwise) can tell the reader a lot about what the character is experiencing. Do they do something with their hands, for instance? Unless you’re describing a solitary activity, two people involved in something together (sexual or not) will both be acting and reacting. When I read something that’s competently written but flat, I often find it’s because the scene is supposed to be about the characters but we don’t really have any sense of them. On the other hand, some readers might think the scene was just fine as it was. But if you write something and aren’t pleased with it, you might consider whether that might be why. (Pacing is another thing I work at – if someone is being introspective and broody, I might have longer, more complex sentences, but if I’m trying to convey action or excitement, I might either use short, choppier sentences, indicating, for example, a rapid sequence of events, or I might use sentences that are strings of short, choppy thoughts to give a sense of speed, the inability to slow down, and events just barreling forward.)
Anyway, this is a very long, and quite possibly uninteresting (and definitely unsolicited!), post, but I wanted to get it out there! If you read the entire thing, I hope I haven’t offended you in any way! Or even if you haven’t read the entire thing, I hope I haven’t offended you!
Something struck me and set my brain off on one of its tangents. The inspiration for this tangent: Stef recently posted an announcement that she had written (and posted) a lemon in response to a (non-CR) challenge that I think has to be one of the strangest challenges I’ve heard of. (No offense to you, Stef!
The challenge asked for “smut with no bad words,” or something like that. Smut by its very nature has “bad words” in it, from my understanding of “smut,” and that’s why it’s called “smut.” (I personally don’t read anything labeled “smut” because, given the meaning of the word “smut,” I assume that it’s devoid of anything that I personally consider erotic and will just be filthy and coarse without giving me any sense of eroticism.) I also thought the challenge was interesting, though, and perhaps impossible, because different people have different ideas of what “bad words” are. My immediate thought on reading the description of the challenge was that the person issuing it wanted something that managed to be dirty sex but without using any words other than sterile, neutral terms such as “penis” or “vagina.” *shrug* Now, that would be a challenge! I haven’t read Stef’s story in response to the challenge yet, but from the description of it as kind of a lime, I’m figuring that my interpretation of the challenge was off! LOL!
Anyway, whatever the intent of the challenge, it got me thinking about lemons, eroticism, sex scenes, and the recent rash of people trying to tell other fanfic writers (and readers) what makes an acceptable lemon, right up to declaring what words are acceptable and not acceptable. The result can be people trying to think so much about following these “rules” that they forget about everything else they should be thinking about when writing the scene (characters, anyone?). It can also lead to readers either thinking there’s something wrong with their taste if they like a different sort of lemon or, worse, becoming distracted by the presence of certain words or descriptions in a scene – ones that they wouldn’t have noticed before having read these “rules” – and being taken out of the scene and losing what enjoyment they may have had if they hadn’t been told that certain things are required to make a lemon good, including what vocabulary is “good.”
For me to find something lemony, I like to have a sense of the feelings of the people involved and to have a sense of the characters and what they’re experiencing as erotic. That’s why I feel that my most “questionable” lemons are those in my lemon drabbles. There’s no/little opportunity for character development or exploring the experiences of the characters. I think they are the most “smutty” and least erotic things I’ve written, but it was an interesting exercise to try doing it.
On the other hand, I think that for most readers, it’s not the vocabulary that makes something an erotic, tasteful lemon, it’s the way the vocabulary is used, the context for it, and the ability of the writer to put the scene together for the reader. I’ve read some really bad, fairly disgusting “lemons” that used a relatively innocuous vocabulary but that were completely unerotic to me, and some were actually a turn off, though not because they were squicky, but because they were coarse. (There’s a lot of that on adultfanfiction. Some of it seems to be written by teenage boys with little or no sexual experience beyond looking at porn. But obviously, a lot of people do find it erotic even though I don’t!) I also find sex scenes unerotic when I have no sense of the characters and their experiences; they’re just people going through these physical activities, and it could be describing how to assemble a bicycle or play badminton for all I care. LOL!
If someone has an issue with certain terms and doesn’t find them erotic, that’s a matter of taste – and I’m not going to tell someone that they should find a particular word erotic that I might commonly use – but trying to tell others (as I’ve seen in various places on the net) that there is a only a certain acceptable vocabulary for writing lemons is just hubris. Just because I don’t find a particular word erotic (particularly out-of-context) doesn’t mean that a writer shouldn’t use it, nor does it mean that the word can’t contribute to the eroticism of a lemon. A word that I might find disgusting, offensive, or objectionable in certain contexts I might not even notice when I’m caught up in reading a well-written lemon, or I might notice it and think, “huh, that word works there in this context; who knew?”
Writing an effective lemon, that is, one that many people will find erotic, is a function of far more than choice of vocabulary or even how the vocabulary is used. It also depends on the audience. I might be able to write an excellent, lemony piece of slash that a lot of people who read slash will find erotic, but someone who doesn’t find slash erotic, regardless of how well it’s done, won’t find it lemony. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it (or the reader), just that it’s not to the taste of the person reading it. (Personally, I’ve never read a piece of femmeslash that I experienced as erotic, though I might be able to appreciate it on another aesthetic level as being well-written, etc. It just doesn’t do anything for me, regardless of how well-written it is. Just because I don’t find femmeslash lemony doesn’t mean that I think there’s anything wrong with reading it, writing it, or finding it erotic, regardless of one’s sexual orientation.)
Likewise, there are people – quite a few of them – who dislike ADMM, who dislike what they call “wrinkly sex,” even when there are no “wrinkles” described, who don’t like scenes with older adults having sex, and who find it “yucky” regardless of how well it’s written or what vocabulary is used. In fact, I know of one of those who literally say “yuck” about ADMM who also is vocal about what vocabulary is acceptable in lemons. It’s a matter of taste, either way, IMO.
I’m getting really tired of certain people in the fanfic community who think that they can prescribe what constitutes a good lemon, not merely saying that when they read lemons, this is what they like and dislike. Unfortunately, people who think that they know the “right way” and only way to write lemons (or anything else) tend to have such confidence that their taste should be the final arbiter that they are able to convince some people that what they’re saying isn’t simply a description of one kind of good lemon (the kind that they like), but that it is the way to write and judge lemons.
This brings me to a second, related issue: sex scenes that aren’t meant to be lemons by the author (or not primarily so), although they may have some erotic content. For example, in An Act of Love, although the scenes between Minerva and Severus may have some erotic/lemony effects, they were not intended as lemons, but as very simple descriptions of the activities, demonstrating the thrall in which the spell held Severus and the friendship and generosity exhibited by Minerva. Even the culminating chapter between Severus and Minerva was not intended to be lemony; it was presented from Minerva’s point-of-view and was deliberately written to present the sex as a relatively mechanical act for her. Anyone who criticized it (mildly) for the fact that it seemed clinical was half-right: it was intended to be clinical. But as that was the intent, although the scene may have disappointed anyone who had hoped for a really hot lemon, the criticism was off-the mark, since the scene achieved what I intended if the reader found it “clinical” or “mechanical.” This was contrasted with the various scenes between Albus and Minerva in AAoL, which were intended to be lemony. I am quite aware that some of those lemons were fairly extreme (for me, anyway), particularly the role-playing one, and that they wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, but they were qualitatively different from the scenes with Severus and intended to be so.
This isn’t to say that there is no erotic component to the sex scenes that are there for another purpose, and people also have differing threshholds of what turns them on, and the mere description of sexual activity between two people can be erotic for them, regardless of whether that’s the primary purpose of the scene. So anyone who found the scenes with Severus titillating to some degree, there’s nothing wrong with that!
Even Minerva, sometimes to her own discomfort, found them occasionally mildly arousing, after all!That now brings me to another point: many authors, me included, write a variety of lemons. The circumstances, situations, characters, events leading up to the lemon, and other factors can all help shape the lemon. Depending on the feel and tone that I want to establish for the lemon – and the characters involved – I use different vocabulary, different sentence structures, and other techniques that I hope will convey that feeling and tone. This is apart from the actual content of the lemon – what the characters are physically doing with each other – and although not all of the lemons I’ve written are going to be to everyone’s taste, I still believe they are lemons, regardless of whether I’ve used any of the words that some people would like to forbid, and I know that a lot of people have found them “hot.”
Just as there are certain sexual activities that I might describe one particular pairing participating in but would never have a different couple engage in, there are words that I might use in some lemons involving one specific pair of characters, but I wouldn’t use those words with a different pair – particularly when it comes to character speech. Usually, most of my characters talk during sex scenes; the characters have different vocabularies and different ways of speaking in non-sex scenes, and it makes sense that different characters will have different ways of talking during sex scenes.
Anyway, I have given advice to some writers about particular lemons – after they wrote the draft and after they asked for my opinion – giving suggestions about how to make a particular scene more effective, but I don’t think there are any cut-and-dried rules about what vocabulary should and should not be used in lemons. There may be certain words that don’t fit with a particular scene or with certain characters given the way they behave in the rest of the fic – and it might be a more innocuous word that doesn’t fit, rather than a more “dirty” word, depending on the characters and context – but that’s a different issue. Also, since JKR never writes the HP characters in sex scenes, trying to judge whether the sex is “in character” or not requires us to remember that you can’t determine precisely how a character will enjoy sex based on the view we get from canon. I think that certain kinds of behavior are less likely (or more likely) for certain characters than for others, but presuming, for example, that because Minerva is strict and “buttoned up” in public means that she must be sexually repressed or asexual, is just silly, IMO. I don’t think that we can point to people we work with or who live in our neighborhoods and be able to say what kind of sex lives they have or how they enjoy their sex (unless you live in a swingers’ community! LOL). I could see some people thinking that I might be a sexual prude in the bedroom, if it crossed their minds. And I’ve known men who seemed sexy and energetic but who were actually utter bores, if you know what I mean without my going to far into the area of TMI! So if the characters behave in-character with the rest of the way you portray them in the fic and in keeping with the relationship you put them in, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether they are OOC; and if they do have some extreme of sexual behavior (being completely repressed or into heavy BDSM, for example), make it a credible, integrated part of their character if you’re concerned about having people criticize it as OOC. Unless you’re doing a PWP, in which case, it could be beside the point!
I think the one bit of advice I would give people who are thinking about writing lemons or limes is really advice I would give about writing many kinds of scenes: don’t forget your characters. Obviously, there are times when description of setting is more important to what you want to do with a scene than what a character is thinking, feeling, etc., but in general, I think that when writing something that you want to have a citrusy effect, remembering the characters and having them maintain primacy in your mind as you write is more important than trying to get down the physical activities. You can always go back and add in more physical detail – which can also be used to help flesh out the character’s experience. For example, describing the way a character physically reacts to something done by another character (in a sex scene or otherwise) can tell the reader a lot about what the character is experiencing. Do they do something with their hands, for instance? Unless you’re describing a solitary activity, two people involved in something together (sexual or not) will both be acting and reacting. When I read something that’s competently written but flat, I often find it’s because the scene is supposed to be about the characters but we don’t really have any sense of them. On the other hand, some readers might think the scene was just fine as it was. But if you write something and aren’t pleased with it, you might consider whether that might be why. (Pacing is another thing I work at – if someone is being introspective and broody, I might have longer, more complex sentences, but if I’m trying to convey action or excitement, I might either use short, choppier sentences, indicating, for example, a rapid sequence of events, or I might use sentences that are strings of short, choppy thoughts to give a sense of speed, the inability to slow down, and events just barreling forward.)
Anyway, this is a very long, and quite possibly uninteresting (and definitely unsolicited!), post, but I wanted to get it out there! If you read the entire thing, I hope I haven’t offended you in any way! Or even if you haven’t read the entire thing, I hope I haven’t offended you!
