‘Fatal Reckoning’ has been out a few weeks now and I’m beginning to get feedback from readers about it. Overall views are very positive, but there are always some who wanted something from the plot which I didn’t choose to provide. In particular, two male readers have regretted there wasn’t more explicit sex, or a more romantic view of the two protagonists.
They’re right. I could have added a plot development that involves a wedding, and there was opportunity for some more explicit sexual content. So why did I reject both? The wedding thing is easy: I’ve never been a fan of weddings, and both my female lead characters have similar ambivalence. I’m particularly unwilling to represent a wedding as part of the end of a story. ‘Lived happily ever after’ seems to be then required and in my experience that’s not often the case. Does that make me a cynical old feminist? Probably.
My response to the request for more sex is another matter, less personal, more ‘writerly’. There was one explicit sex scene in my very first book, ‘A Good Liar’ but it wasn’t actually about sex at all: it was about power, and the casual use of physical force that proved to be a turning point in the main character’s view of her lover. The details were necessary to provide the reader with the facts of her humiliation, and to heighten her dilemma about how to react.
As a writer I’ve decided, for the time being at least, that unless details of sexual behaviour add to either the plot or the readers’ understanding of a character, they should left to the imagination. The writer can feed that imagination with a fragment of detail, – the line of a shoulder, the play of light on skin – but hesitate to do more than that. Verbal descriptions of good sex fall hopelessly short of the real thing, in my view. The act itself is pretty basic and widely understood. Trying to describe in words the complex intertwining of senses and emotions, beyond the physiology of the act itself, is a pretty hopeless task and the result could fall far short of what the engaged reader can supply for him/herself. So why spoil it by explicitness, especially if the outcome detracts from the readers’ potential enjoyment?
Having said all this, I may change my mind by the time the next story gets ‘fleshed out’.
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