Posts by Barbara O'Neal

A week or two ago, I was watching a movie On Demand and switched back to network television. It was a crime show, and I happened to come into a scene that featured a man discovering the dead body of a woman who had been murdered.  She had clearly died violently. The depiction was violent and deeply offensive to me.

What immediately came to me was, if that that same woman had been alive and naked, it would have been censored. Because, you know, the living flesh of a naked woman (or even worse, full frontal nudity of a man!) is far more likely to undermine the fabric of our society than gallons of blood leaked by a corpse staring at the heavens.

Here is my rant: violence is twisted humanity. Sex is normal. Why have we reversed these two ideals in our popular culture, and in literature?   How could sex possibly be more dangerous than gruesome violence?

When I wrote my first mainstream novel, No Place Like Home, I confessed to my editor that I had been worried about the love scenes in the book. She laughed and said, “Everybody likes sex.”

But it seems quite difficult for writers to tackle love scenes.  On Facebook, I saw a writer bemoaning her editor’s request to add a love scene, and it made me start thinking this even more.

Why is sex such a challenge for writers? Many reasons. Self-consciousness, a lack of confidence, a lack of study and discussion of good sex scenes, a fear of being judged.

Certainly not every book requires sex. Probably most do not, though I have not yet written that book myself.  Many writers are not writing about people kissing, much less getting down to the serious business of sex.  All that is fine.

But if a book turns in some way on the relationship between lovers, especially lovers who have only begun to know each other, or lovers who are falling away from each other, sex is an important part of the way they relate to each other.  I have often felt that a writer closed the bedroom door because he didn’t know how to get a sex scene on the page without it sounding like grade c porn (which it often does, unfortunately).  While it is legitimate to be flummoxed about it, fear is not a good reason to avoid writing sex. A fear that all sex is porn, and it is not.  The discussion would take too long and isn’t the point of this blog, but there is a difference between sex scenes in novels and porn, which is titillation for the sake of titillation.  (And I have nothing against that, at all.  It’s just not the same.)

Sex, like every other action in a novel, can be a very powerful addition to the writer’s toolbox (no pun intended). It can reveal character, underline themes. One of the best sex scenes I can remember reading was by Jennifer Crusie in Faking It. It’s bad sex, because it takes forever and the protaganist is working very hard, but it’s very good writing because it underlines the theme of the book, and character and the real work of relationships.

So, how can you write better sex scenes? Here are some […]

I don’t know about your world, but in mine, the only thing anyone is talking about is the paradigm shift happening with the explosion of ebooks.  I’ve been caught in the worry and discussions as much as anyone.  It’s hard to hear anything over the din, but yesterday I remembered one very important thing: what matters, over and over, is story.

Story. Story. Story.

Yesterday, I ran away to the movies with my sister. We saw Water For Elephants, made from the wildly popular book of the same name.  It was a modest little book when it first arrived on the shelves in hardcover, then was published in trade paperback and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon.

Here is my relationship with the book: the cover did not appeal to me. I didn’t really get what it was supposed to be about.  It sounded super-depressing.  So I passed, over and over.

Except, it kept selling and kept selling, and so I kept seeing it.  Finally, one afternoon I was talking my agent about good books we’d recently read, and she found I’d not read it, and she said, “Oh, Barbara,” in that tone of voice.  So I dutifully picked it up.

And that’s where duty stopped.  Water For Elephants might be dark and it might be historical and there might be animal cruelty (which is the point), but it is also a rip roaring good read.  (Note: there are no spoilers in the following discussion). There is no posturing or stylistic little pretties or any of that.  It sets up the devastating tale of a young veterinary student of some grace and intelligence who loses absolutely everything and sets off to walk to the big city.  Instead, he ends up on a circus train.  The circus is in trouble. They buy an elephant from another circus.  There is a terrible adversary.  The stakes are extreme. The risks enormous.  You care, very very very deeply, about what will happen to the three main characters.

Kit Dunsmore asked: How much do you let the idea of audience shape your work? I lost my way on my book trying to get the first chapter written to kick off my story and hook an audience. I wound up writing stuff I’m not sure I’d want to read. So I’d love to hear different viewpoints on how to stay true to your story, your voice, your vision while also trying to produce something someone will want to publish.

The audience is important, of course, but more important is the story itself.  A great story will hook an audience and hold its attention without any trouble, so the trick is to use the time honored tools of a storyteller to get your tale on the page.  If you have studied pacing and turning points and good plotting tools, it’s easy to stay true to your work.  If you get lost, go back to the simplest tools you have: what is my story about? What is the main problem? What is the most important thing that my reader needs to know to begin? And what is the next thing? And the next?

It’s really easy to get lost in details and backstory and advice from well-meaning critique partners and friends and our own desire to Write! The! Best! Book! Of! All! Time!  A story begins on the day things are different. It follows a character or a group of characters through a problem, a crisis, a solution, and ending.

If you get lost, go back to basics.  Listen to your story, not external advice, and be true to your own idea of what a good story looks like.  Believe it or not, there is no one right answer. Your answer might be just as good or better than mine.

Katharine Owens asked: If you could go back, and deliver a message to yourself when you were writing your first book, what would it be?

Keep writing. Whole books, essays, poems, short stories.  Keep writing. Fill the well and keep it full by reading, watching movies, devoting yourself to the hobbies you love. Keep writing. Observe everything and everyone, everywhere.  Keep writing. Believe in yourself, even when no one else does.  Keep writing.

The next book might be The One.

Readers, do you have anything you’d like to add for Kit and Katharine?

photo by Vincent Lock