Sex? I'll pass. by Eric Beetner

 Love is in the air. How do you feel about writing sex scenes in crime fiction?

My books have quite a lot of action, violence, suspense. What they don’t have a lot of is sex or even romance, really. 

Not that I intentionally write chaste books, but it just sort of happened that way. Perhaps it stems from the one time I did try it and how I feel about it now. In an early novel I included a sex scene. I still stand by that it was true to the characters, advanced the plot and wasn’t extraneous or merely there for titillation. That said, when I look back on it now, it feels icky to me. I recently got rights back to that book and if I were to bring it out again, I would revisit that scene and maybe not cut it entirely, but rewrite it for sure. 

There is a very good chance that I simply wrote it poorly. As I’ve admitted, I don’t have much expertise in this area of writing. That includes reading. I don’t read a whole lot of stuff that has extended sex or deep romances. And I don’t mean smut or porn, but I’m not among the millions of reader who love so many of the epic fantasies that are huge right now. I’m not a Romance reader. I’m not the kind of reader who stops their scrolling when they see a book cover with a half naked model on the cover, male or female, and think “Oooh, tell me more”. But those readers exist in huge numbers. They want the steamy, the sexy, the bawdy. But they want it well written. (there’s a reason they give an award for worst sex scene in a book. It’s a minefield)  And there are hundreds of authors willing and eager to give it to them. Just not me.

I don’t consider myself prude. I’ve got no religious hangups about sex. I’m equally as uninterested in a same-sex scene and a straight scene. And yet, I don’t think it’s realistic to ignore sex entirely in books. It’s a part of life, therefore it should be a part of our characters. 

So maybe when I wrote my scene, and the later regretted it, I was just admitting this is not what I do well.

I avoid many things I know I don’t do well. I don’t write traditional Agatha Christie-type murder mysteries because I’m just not smart enough to reverse engineer a case and to use the sleight of hand on readers to make the solution anything less than obvious.

I don’t write about dragons and knights because I find it silly. I prefer the real world, but I’m glad those that want to delve into the fantastical have those options.

I don’t write about serial killers because they bore me and if an author is bored by their subject, then the reader will be as well.

So, I gave up writing about sex.

In my latest novel I do have a bit of an unrequited love. Or at least a what-could-have-been for two characters that stops short of actual romance because of the circumstances they’re both in. That ends up more Remains Of The Day than a hot, steamy romance. 

I mention it just so you know that I don’t ignore character’s feelings of love, or even lust. I wrote a whole book, The Year I Died Seven Times, about a man’s quest to get his girlfriend back and in my world, if knocking on death’s door seven times for a woman isn’t romance, then I don’t know what is. (that’s not the one with the sex scene if you’re wondering) 

So I’ve taken myself out of the game for writing about sex. Not that I won’t ever again. It if fits the story and it advances the plot, sex can tell us a lot about characters. Maybe I’ll practice a little first. Write some stuff and only show it to my wife. She’s already excellent at telling me if my attempts at sex are lousy.