Welcome back. By now you should be thinking Why? Why does this matter? If the reader is going to know anyway, what my characters are up to? Why not just describe it? The answer has to do with the way your story unfolds, the steady flow of the story.
And please excuse my use of this word here. The climax is you can't tell the whole of your story on one level. If you write a novel in which every action and every conversation on every page is conducted at a peak level of excitement, no one will read past the first five pages. And that also goes for if there's no excitement at all, you need fluctuations in excitement. And what I'm asking you to accept is that it's okay to describe sexual activity, at least to some extent, in most parts of your novel, but not in those that are most important to the story. Here's another extract from Zappos mountains of slapper This one comes from earlier in the book than the one you've already heard.
Billy has just arrived in Norwich, where he's attending art school in pursuit of his photography. My first girlfriend in Norwich was Amanda. I saw her looking at me almost from the moment we both arrived. The old bill he would have done nothing about it, and probably been surprised if she'd made an advance. as surprised as I had been when Wendy wanted to go to the board with me, the new buddy or at any rate, the emerging bill, he did things differently. She was in the Union bar and I don't know whether I'd have approached her in the way I did.
If two pints of beer on an empty stomach had not given me courage. I said, my place or yours and she said, my flatmates are out and took my hand. I never did a poll, and I can't be sure what percentage of first year students had sex, but my guess would be not as many as said they did. What I couldn't be more certain of is that most of the sex wasn't very good, not enough for play all over too soon to both parties. These were young people, many of them doing it with a real person for the first time, and each as much in the dark as the other. I'd been taught by Melanie, the older woman of legend.
That first afternoon, when I raised my face from the junction of Amanda's thighs after bringing her to orgasm with my toe, my face was spatter than fragrant with her juices. And hers was a picture of ecstasy, where she asked Where did you learn to do that? Of course, I didn't tell her the truth. I was rolling a condom into place and she said, You don't need that. I'm on the pill. I'll use it anyway.
I said. Belton braces. Okay. We've now read two extracts from the same book. In each extract. A young man and a young woman are doing the same thing.
They're in bed together. And then making love. In the first extract that we read. There's no description of the activity at all, all you get is just before she gave herself to me, the whole business of making love was contained in those words. The second extract isn't exactly something you might write in a sex manual either, because that's just not my style. But in that reference to Amanda's ties and juices, you do get more than a hint about the foreplay that's gone on.
Why this difference? It's simple. When you write about sex, if you provide detail, a lot of readers will be distracted. They'll be thinking about the sex more than they're thinking about the story. The business between Amanda and Billy is simply an episode and Billy's development part of the character arc, which is going to be the subject of a class all to itself in this set of classes. And so it's all right to include some detail a little reader distraction isn't going to hurt.
But that first extract I read, when billion poppy are reunited after all the troubles they've been through. That is in many ways the key scene in the book when I wrote that, I wanted readers to understand the central importance of what they were seeing on the page. And so I didn't want any distraction. And that's why the only description of the lovemaking between puppy and belly is contained in the words just before she gave herself to me. And that is also why you need to learn how to write sex without writing about sex. Because you will need to identify in your novel The scenes that are so key to the story, that the reader must not be distracted.
In a nutshell, sex distracts and there are times when we don't want to distract our readers. In the next video, I'm going to be wrapping up this course go For the things that we've learned, or I hope we've learned, and talking about what's going to be in the next courses to come. I'll see you there.