The Problems of Sex and Death

A while back, at the end of a Scatters meeting, someone's chance comment made me realize for the first time that there is a remarkable similarity between fight scenes and sex scenes. In both cases, you're writing something that focuses mostly on physical movement; dialogue is secondary, and if there's too much of it, it starts to undermine the effect (and believability) of the scene.

Which leads, of course, to similar problems in both types of scene. Modern fiction, in general, is much better at handling dialogue than movement. We have endless reserves of words to describe the way someone is speaking -- their tone of voice, etc. When it comes to the body, though, our options are much more limited. You can leave out dialogue tags periodically, to avoid repeating yourself too often; there's no equivalent for movement. And since you're generally referring to the same body parts/objects/actions over and over again, repetition becomes a problem very quickly. The sixth time you find yourself mentioning someone's knife or breast, you really wish there were another word for it, so you could get some variety in there. And sometimes there are other words -- but then you get a new problem, which is that most of the words (especially in sex scenes) are ludicrous euphemisms that are likely to cause the reader to burst out laughing. You end up caught between a rock and a hard place, between repetition and purple prose.

The more I thought about this, though, the more I realized the problems don't end at mechanics. With both fight scenes and sex scenes, I am of the opinion that they had better be something more than just gratuitous spectacle. I don't object on principle to writers describing in great detail what's going on, but there better be a reason for it. Those scenes, like any others, should be a part of the story.

And advancing the plot isn't enough, either. If the only reason for a fight is to get the hero wounded so that he ends up under the tender care of the love interest, then just tell me there's a fight and he gets wounded. Don't spend three pages on it. My favorite scenes (of any type) tend to be those where something happens on the characterization level; those can be long, and I won't care, because there's something more than just movement going on. Both sex and fighting have the potential to be a moment where the character undergoes some kind of transformation, or perhaps where nothing actually changes, but you the reader learn something about the character that wasn't clear before. After all, sex and death are two of the most basic things there are, and it's very revealing, how someone behaves in those situations.

So really, fight scenes and sex scenes should, ideally, serve all the functions of any other scene in the story; they should contribute to the plot, flesh out and/or transform the characters, and be entertaining on top of that. And they have to do all this while still avoiding the mechanical pitfalls of using the same words over and over again, or describing something in such detail that the reader loses track of the overall action, or describing something in insufficient detail such that the reader isn't clear on what just happened.

Put that way, it's damn hard to write those scenes well. And I take my hat off to any writer who can manage it. As far as my own writing goes, I've put a fair bit of work into how I write fight scenes (four years of combat choreography did a lot to shape my opinions on this matter), and I think I manage them reasonably well; sex scenes not so much, because by and large they haven't figured into my stories -- my characters are too busy trying not to die ;-) -- and when they do they don't meet my own standards for meriting a lot of description. The one time I might have felt justified in going into detail (Dantano and the reyas), I was afraid the detail would "normalize" what was going on, and rob the scene of its creepiness. So I left it up to the reader's imagination.

I'll have to keep all of this in mind as The Waking of Angantyr goes on. There are some fights coming up that are very important, on every count mentioned above. Writing them is going to be a bitch -- akin, I think, to writing that bloody group fight in Doppelganger, but for different reasons -- but they're critical enough that I have to make sure they come off well. However hard that may be.