Welcome back. So what have we learned? What I hope we've learned is that novelists need to treat sex with respect and care. It is, after all, a matter of great importance, something that goes to the very heart of our lives. We talk easily enough about life and death. When we want to say that something is really important we say it's a matter of life and death.

But novelists, I hope, treat words with greater care than other people do. And we know that those two things life is more important than death. Why? that's simple enough. If we never had life, we couldn't have death. And sex creates life.

Not every time I give you that, but there's no human life without sex. But sex is not only the initiator of life, it's also a great distraction to your readers. In the course of writing your novel, your story will have peaks and troughs. The peak So the times when you want total attention from your readers, you don't want anything to distract them. And you know that a great many of them will be distracted by any mention or description of sex. And yet your characters are human beings.

Some of them are having sex, and your readers know it. What I want you to practice is presenting the scene without describing it exactly as I did when I put into Billy's mouth the words just before she gave herself to me to provide the whole of the description of Betty and puppies lovemaking. So here's an exercise for you. A file is provided with this case for you to download. It comprises a number of short passages in which the sex act is described in greater or less detail. What I'd like you to do please is rewrite those passages in such a way that the reader will understand what has happened without reading a description of it.

I provided As an example, you do the rest. And let me say that none of those passages can be described as pornographic because I don't know who's going to download this, what age they're going to be what preferences they will have. So I've taken care to make sure that nothing is explicit. That fire also gives you my email address. If you email your effort to me after you complete the assignment, I'll let you have my comments. This has been the first class in a number of short classes designed to help you write your novel.

I'll be rolling them out at intervals of 10 days or so. The next class will deal with the vexing question of show don't tell, which seems to trouble a lot of new novelists and quite a few who aren't new. The class after that we'll deal with timelines and the software I use first to outline my plan novel and then to avoid silly mistakes while I'm writing it. If you want to know when those classes and the ones that follow them are available, follow me here. You could also Email me at the address I've given on the assignment file, asking to be kept in touch. I look forward to hearing from you.

Bye for now.