Are you Ready for This...?

by Clara Nipper

Good morning, children, today we are going to talk about the birds and the bees. When two adults are in love, they hug in a special way and that is sex.

So now it’s the writer’s job to capture that mind-blowing, earth-shattering hug of love somehow and communicate all the tension, passion, lust, urgency, juice, satisfaction, release and repeat on paper.

Usually, I’m not a “method” writer. I don’t believe I have to be miserable to write of misery. Same goes for joy or fear or any other human experience. I think, as writers, this is where we draw on our skills and imaginations, so we can be free of the limitations of our own possibly small, sheltered lives. We can sit in safety and comfort while we put our characters through the rigors of hell without having to go through all that too, thank goodness.

The exception is sex. In my experience, sex and creativity are profoundly and inextricably linked. I know, this is not a fresh insight. Probably when the earth was cooling, one amoeba complained to another of feeling stale and stuck while writing her memoir and that when she was having great binary fission, the writing just flowed. So we’ve all heard it before, but there’s a difference between knowing and knowing. When I’m not feeling that erotic, the sex scenes are dull and I know readers are checking their watches and hoping for that root canal. Or even worse, laughing hysterically. Unfortunately, I have had some of my most belly aching, rib-cracking, pee in my pants, snorting, gasping for air, begging for mercy laugh sessions while reading samples of erotic fiction that was clearly written by a Republican or by someone else who never had an orgasm. Just the phrase ‘throbbing member’ will set me off.

But when my wet-ware is engaged, I can tell the difference and the writing is more likely to seduce. The words will sizzle. That is not to mean that I have done everything I’ve erotically written about literally as I’ve written it; or that if you want to write about hot pony play, before you write it, you must get a bridle, a butt plug tail and pony shoes (thought it surely couldn’t hurt, ha, ha), it just means that when your sex is fed, you’re nourished and inspired and the erotic scenes will ‘come’ as naturally as all those delicious orgasms.

Therefore, let me just urge you, as one who knows: got block? Have sex, even if it’s by yourself. You’ll hug me later.