On smut (writing of) and shame (lack of)

cedar85 writes:

I wonder what separates those that can write smut from those who have to bite their lip to keep from giggling while writing. Does it have to do with being comfortable with oneself? Is it all about reckless abandonment of modesty? Or maybe it's my whole idea that fics are closer to my heart than I'd like to admit? Is it even something that should bother me in the first place, since they aren't even real people anyway?

We've got a lot of cultural taboos about talking about sex. And to write good smut, you basically have to learn to ignore them.

Essentially most modern people view "talking about sex" as being in itself a sexual act. And I don't know about men, but as a woman, I've spent a lifetime being encouraged only to perform sexual acts with people I'm in love with, or at the very least with people I like, trust, and feel intimate with.

So setting out to write an explicit sex scene can, to the inhibited among us, feel like setting out to have sex with a bunch of strangers.

When I first started reading slash, I was so bashful about smut that I even had a hard time writing feedback. I mean, typing, "This was really sexy" felt scary and wrong to me.

I got over that sufficiently to send a few shy little LoCs to Cesca for her Sentinel stories, and she kept saying, "I take requests." So one day I wanted to write her and say, essentially, "You do a really good version of Blair talking dirty. I'd like to see more of that." Only I couldn't bring myself to write "talking dirty" to a comparative stranger, so I spent four sentences beating around the bush trying to say it without saying it.

My first story, Anoint, was NC-17, because I forced myself -- I knew it was what I wanted to write, and I knew that if I allowed myself to get into the habit of fading to black, I'd never get out of it. But I kind of cheated because the story is tagless -- i.e. I only had to write what they said, not what they did. (Link provided for historical purposes only, not because I'm suggesting it's a good story.) So then, even after having posted one story with explicit sex in it, I still had inhibitions I had to get over.

I got over them, over time, not by writing smut, but by betaing smut, my own and other people's. Because when you actually have to go and get people's help to make a sex scene sexier, you have to talk about it. In detail. And then you get used to it.

Exhibit A is this bit from the chat log when Cesca andjulad were doing beta on Alive In Here:

Julad: I'm inclined to suggest that he doesn't even say "live"
Cesca: it's not really elegant, that
Julad: could he say "come"?
Cesca: he could, but only if
Cesca: the supporting narration connections orgasm to life
resonant8: Draco's not coming again, anyway.
resonant8: He's spent.
Julad: ah, damn
Cesca: hmmm
Julad: can't he have another orgasm?
resonant8: He really doesn't get very much time for it.
Cesca: Do it in reverse, then
Cesca: "Come on," Draco whispered, all flushed and--and never looking so alive.
resonant8: OK, my viscera suggest that that's a good solution.

I don't know if this is any help to beginning smut-writers like Cedar, but basically for me, learning to write smut was a process of desensitizing myself to that set of cultural taboos. If you think of it like that, maybe it will feel all liberating and all. Or not.