f/f writing gripe of the night
Dec. 23rd, 2017 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sciatrixf/f writing gripe of the night:
the problem with having been wistfully deterred every time I tried aggressively to dive into femslash writing the first time is that I just have way less to draw on for scene structure than I apparently can pull from for m/m. Which is ridiculous: I’m not even limiting myself to standard human vulva-inclusive genitals, so why the hell is this hitting me so much harder than sex from a male PoV?
like, why is shit like “I would like clothes off, please remove” and “excuse me, please put your hand on my fucking clit now now now” and “I am nervy but I want to make my body feel good please and thank you” suddenly so much trickier from a female PoV than a male one? It’s not like I don’t have a ton of experience with the latter to draw on here. but okay, it’s intimidating, fine; I’m a baby writer, I am still learning this shit, practicing is okay. gotta think on it and chew a bit.
so I go looking for resources and advice. and…. there are none. fuck.
well, okay. that’s not entirely true. but what there is seems to be very focused on either anatomy, mechanics and safe sex (”how do lesbians do it, anyway?”) or on coming up with good words to use for genitalia in your porn writing. and. neither of those are my bloody problem here.
first, I am pretty well acquainted with the theoretical ways that you can get up close and personal with a cunt. tribadism and cunnilingus and fingering and fisting are not foreign concepts to me. I am aware of the difficulties with actually pulling off scissoring and frankly tits present all manner of possibilities, and all that assumes your characters have never heard of toys. I don’t need another list of dry descriptions of Possible Activities to do if you have two editions of Slot B.
hisses Scarleteen is a lovely resource but it is not particularly helpful as a guide to writing porn, thank you.
second, the wording thing people complain about is not usually what I’m bothered with. which: c’mon, folds? lips are right there, or rely on texture and sensation to describe things. obviously euphemisms like ‘love tunnel’ are Right Out, but I wouldn’t have been using those anyway. (also I’m gonna be honest: vulva is an appealing, velvety word. fight me. and cunt: also lovely. I can take or leave pussy, but cunt and vulva are buddies to me.)
besides, word choice normally wouldn’t bug me much–after all, I tend to not be someone who writes heavily on the anatomy references anyway, so
that’s stalling me just a bit, but it’s not actually the thing that keeps smacking me in the head as I try to write this scene and derail.
no, what I’m scrambling for is descriptions of sensation, of experience, of feeling… from the perspectives of actual people. And scenes with women fucking each other described in an interesting way that illustrates the vulnerability of the characters
and it’s not just me: cursory searches from my trawling through DW comms yields an anon femslash thread wherein the first comment when asked what people would not want to confess to off anon was people complaining about the paucity of anything but fade-to-black.
so is it something about the headspace? my internalized weirdness? what is going on with my head?
and gah, is there like a treasure trove of How To Write Good F/F Explicit Sex I’m missing somewhere? I’ll work up a bunch of links to all the best stuff I find in the morning as I trawl Dreamwidth and LJ comms, but I’m regretfully afraid of the possibility that there’s just nothing for it but to go hunting for the best f/f in my favorites lists, reread them, and brood.
oh, oh, the horror.
F'in the Inf'able
Date: 2018-12-10 09:07 am (UTC)I have a theory about this! I actually think that most porn has a problem with this, and that the larger problem is that we only have words and useful idiom for describing the experiences of active partners with penises. Most of those words are verbs and most of that description is actions. That is much more useful for describing the perspective of a fucker than a fuckee.
And I think this is a specific instance of the greater class of problem that we don't have a great language for discussing or describing internal bodily sensations, a problem that comes up when I try to explain things I am experiencing to medical professionals. It doesn't make it easy to convincingly communicate the experience of being penetrated (by anything, in any part of the body), or really even being touched. Nor any of the experiences of being a recipient of BDSM.
More thoughts, having to do with the repetitive nature of sexual behaviors making them hard to describe, and how this is like trying to describe evocatively the experience of listening to music. But later; it's my bed time.
Re: F'in the Inf'able
Date: 2018-12-10 06:01 pm (UTC)18 years of reading fanfic and romance novels, 10 years of writing fanfic myself, and I still struggle to make that part interesting. I don't want to gloss it over completely, since from the POV of the participants the repetitive stroking is in fact the main event -- but at the same time, I'm running out of synonyms and creative phrasings for "bit rubs over other bit for the 50th time" here.
[And I think this is a specific instance of the greater class of problem that we don't have a great language for discussing or describing internal bodily sensations]
OH MY GOD THIS. Porn that relies too much on straightforward description of actions leaves me cold because I want to know how those actions are making the characters feel. But at the same time, one can read about "heat coiling low in the gut" only so many times before one starts to wonder if we might not need to start looking for new metaphors and similes for those internal bodily sensations.
Especially orgasm. It throws me off when a smut scene devotes thousands of words to the actions and emotions of a sexual encounter, expertly crafted, really getting into the characters' sensations and feelings, building the tension up to a fever pitch...and then the literal climax gets relegated to "she came with a cry" or "he came all over himself" with pretty much no exploration of how the actual orgasm feels to the character(s) experiencing it. Even though orgasms are a fairly large part of why people have sex in the first place.
I realize this phenomenon might be a backlash to bad sex scenes with awful purple prose and faulty metaphors. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.
Re: F'in the Inf'able
Date: 2018-12-18 03:55 am (UTC)One thing that sticks out for me as I go "but I don't want!" for purely idiosyncratic reasons is that... well...
I have exclusively really shitty experiences with penetration, is the thing. (You'd think that it would take less than seven years of dutifully going in for pelvic exams and reliably recoiling in pain to identify an imperforate hymen as a problem, but apparently not.) So I actually hadn't even conceptualized that lack of verbiage and description as a problem right up until last week, when I sat down and worked out all the scenes I've written... and there's exactly one with PIV in it (and none at all with anal), the point of view is from the gentleman doing the penetrating, and he's also pretty uncomfortable most of the time.
I had not actually noticed that before this discussion, so that was a new and exciting food for thought. But yeah--that is one reason that the ability to have nonpenetrative sex in my f/f is apparently rather important to me, at least defining "nonpenetrative" as "no one is inserting anything dicklike into anyone else"--hands are fine, fisting is fine, tongues are fine, but PIV and things resembling it aren't the end all be all, and I think that's weirdly important to my hindbrain to emphasize given how often "sex with vulva" winds up going to "stick a dick in it" in broader sexual culture.
But that isn't to say that your theory is remotely wrong! It reminds me of the discussion we were having over at