Alkani asks, “How much sex should I put in my stories?”
They go on to say that they know that the answer is as straightforward as it is unhelpful: “Enough.” And that’s true, but there’s more to say about it, so let me share some of my experiences and thoughts, because as a writer of fiction that includes sex scenes, I have thought about this question a lot.
My first forays into sex were short stories, and the answer to this question there is pretty easy. Short stories are composed usually of a number of scenes you can count on one paw, and so if the story’s going to have sex in it, sex is one of those scenes. Sometimes you can get away with two, but if the story only has three scenes, there better be a good reason for the second sex scene (idea: sex is bad, therapy scene, sex is good).
When I set out to write Volle, spurred to disprove the community’s insistence at the time that you could have Good Stories or Sexy Stories but not both, I had no idea how much sex to put in. I started with a sex scene, sort of (Volle’s boss comes looking for him in a tavern and finds him under a table servicing another patron), to signal to the reader what they were getting into. Then Volle turned out to be something of a horndog, so he sought out sexual situations and they turned into more explicit sex scenes in the book.
How much sex is too much? I asked myself, and look, there are people to this day who enjoy Volle and do not complain that he goes to the brothel an awful lot, but there were also people who said that in the second half of the book they found the sex scenes to be interruptions and they wanted to get back to the plot. Honestly, I felt at the time that I was maybe wedging more sex scenes into that book than the story warranted, but I thought it was necessary to keep people interested. Not so, as it turns out.
So what I want to talk about with sex scenes is how you decide to put anything in your story. There are three big reasons, as I see it: For the story, for yourself, and for your readers. Sometimes, often, there’s overlap in the last two, and that’s fine. In general, most of what you put into your story should be for the story, which means it should either: establish setting, advance plot, reveal character, or build theme (or some combination of those). It’s your choice as to how you do any of those things, and all of them can happen in the context of a sex scene.
Clearly, though, in general you would not want every scene to be sex, nor—assuming you’re interested in sexy stories enough to have asked this question in the first place—would you want no scenes to be sex. So the key is, as with so many other writing problems…balance.
There’s no hard and fast (ha ha) rule for sex scenes, but if you’re looking for a guideline to start with, the rule of threes is a good one. I settled on two or three explicit scenes per book for the later Out of Position ones1: one at the beginning to show the state of the relationship before the story, one at the end to show the progress the relationship had made, and maybe another one in the middle if it felt right. There would be other times in the book where I’d fade to black instead of showing a sex scene because the sex wasn’t going to reveal anything new about the characters or the plot.
In Dude, Where’s My Fox?, the plot kicks off right after a sex scene, and Lonnie (the hero) wants to find the guy he’s just been with, but the only clue he has is the smell of sex. So he has to have sex with a bunch of guys to figure out which is which. In a 50K-ish word book, I think there are actually three full sex scenes—four if you count him having sex twice in the same place—plus you can probably count “waking up naked and sticky and remembering sex,” so five total. But that plot is based around sex, and a lot of the story has to do with the importance of sex and relationships, so the scenes feel like they fit, and what’s more, they advance the plot. Lonnie learns something new from each scene.
Finally, look, if you want to write another sex scene and put it in, go for it. Your writing is always going to be finding the balance between what you want to write and what people want to read, and the truer you are to writing the things you want to write, the more your fans will appreciate your sensibilities2. So if you want to be the “one sex scene per book” author, you’ll attract one-sex-scene-per-book fans. If you want to be the “ten sex scenes per book” author, you’ll find fans who want that. A couple things that don’t serve the story but do make you happy as a writer are for sure permissible and even encouraged (and that doesn’t apply to just the sex scenes).
If you consistently hear from your fans that they want more or fewer sex scenes per book than you would ideally want to write, then you have to ask yourself how much that matters to you. If it’s not a big deal—you don’t mind writing an extra scene or two, or maybe taking a scene or two out to post as bonus content—then go ahead and accommodate your readers. If it is a big deal for you, then stick to what works for you.
At the end of the day, here’s the thing: your story is yours. It goes out into the world with your name on it, and it will be out there for years, decades even. So make sure that you are happy with the story, first and foremost. How much sex should be in your story? As much as you want.
The first book, Out of Position itself, started out as a collection of short stories, so in the first sixty pages there’s like four or five sex scenes. Maybe more, I’m not going back to check, feel free to correct me in the comments. Anyway, this felt to me like a lot.
The balance comes when you get feedback on your writing and have to decide what changes to make to maybe reach a wider fanbase, but that’s a big topic and not exactly relevant here.