Sex and Violence: How to Write Either (or Both) Well

Sex and violence are parts of many good stories. This is true whether the sex is a sweet kiss between teen crushes, or graphic vampire-on-werewolf shagging in supernatural erotica. It’s true whether the violence is the incipient threat of world war, or a guts-spilling sword battle on the fields of Hyperborea. Conflict is core to story, and many of the best conflicts involve sex, violence, or both. 

Although in our daily experience, sex and violence are about as far apart as can possibly be, handling either in writing turns out to be very similar. For example:

• Both sex and violence exist inside an emotional framework that extends well beyond the act of sex or violence itself
• Both involve physical exertion (hopefully) near the upper limits of ability
• Both require two or more human beings to connect at a level that’s unusual in day-to-day life
• Most people tend to fib while storytelling about the extent to which they’ve been involved with either
• Both play deeply and complexly with the the morals and taboos of the society they happen in

Below are ten keys to writing these surprisingly similar aspects of story well. Be warned: I will use examples. It won’t be X-rated, but we’ll touch on some topics that are a little more risque than most of our other content. 

10 Keys to Writing Sex and Violence Well

Begin With the Goal In Mind

With the exceptions of pornography and a certain genres of horror and action films, gratuitous sex and violence always detracts from whatever you hope to do with your story. Even the corner cases I just mentioned prove this point. The goal of pornography is to erotically excite the reader/viewer by showing them graphic scenes of sex. The goal of slasher and torture-porn horror is to show the viewer as much violence as possible. The goal of kung-fu cinema is to give the watcher a beautiful show of martial arts prowess.

In our own books, every scene of sex or violence should begin with considering the goal. How does this scene move forward your overall storyline? How does it relate to character expression and/or growth? Why can these goals only be solved with sex or violence? How graphic does the depiction need to be for you to fulfill these goals?

With those goals forming the boundaries of your literary canvass, you can then color inside those lines to craft a scene that fits and complements your story overall. 

Know Your Market and Genre

I don’t think I’m surprising anybody when I say that scenes of graphic sex are unexpected in high fantasy, while scenes of great violence would be conspicuous in their absence. Similarly, readers of erotica will eagerly devour very explicit scenes of lovemaking, but would be put off by a sudden bar fight. 

It’s your job to know your market and genre no matter what you write; if you have scenes of sex or violence, that responsibility carries extra weight. Because both topics are more taboo, more likely to trigger a reader, the risks that come with delivering them by surprise are greater than with other sorts of on-page action. 

Read in your genre and spend time in genre-related communities. It’s the only way to get a solid sense of the norms for what you write. 

If you want to write “against genre” – for example, delivering cozy mysteries that have scenes of explicit sex or space opera science fiction with violence normally associated with horror – you still need to know your market. In that case, your job is to find the other authors who are doing similar things in your genre so you can associate your work with theirs. That way readers who like them will gravitate toward your books, and those who don’t will know to approach your work with caution. 

Know Your Subject

Mojo storytelling master Joe Lansdale is infamous for having once quipped, “you can always tell when a virgin writes a sex scene.” Interestingly (considering the theme of this article), he was saying that as a critique for how many authors write violence. They say to write what you know, but in this case any author of character and morality will need to handle some topics from a more theoretical point of view. 

That said, if you just make stuff up, your readers can tell. I’m not suggesting that you must become a serial killer, or spend time apprenticing as a coroner, to write violence well. Nor do you have to spend a year as a submissive to write a BDSM scene. 

But you should take the time to learn what you can. If you want to write a military novel, talk to some veterans. If you want to write a book about doll fetishists, hang out in their Facebook groups. Direct experience with many of the things you write is at best ill-advised, but you must know enough to have an intuitive feel for how to accurately depict it. 

Foreshadow the Stakes

Think about the times you’ve had sex or been in a fight (or a sports competition, which is the closest many adults come to fighting). The actual physical acts involved were interesting, but what really mattered were the stakes. 

Would your team make the playoffs? Would you be able to razz your buddy on the other team? Would this schoolyard tussle impress your crush? Would you successfully drive off that mugger, or go to the hospital? Would this one-night stand turn into happily ever after? Those stakes are what matter most in scenes of sex and violence, in real life and in literature. 

To make those stakes plainer and more powerful, set them up well before the scene. Introduce the players, and the risks, what might happen with success and victory, and with defeat and failure. 

Build Anticipation

If you want to really show off, combine this foreshadowing with setting up a narrative arc where the fight or the sex are inevitable — the only people who might not see it coming are the individuals actively involved. This starts with foreshadowing the event and its stakes like I just talked about, but goes deeper than that. 

Some strategies for building anticipation include:

• Flirting, threatening, and other verbal interactions that indicate an interest
• Exposition or dialogue that presents one or all participants as particularly skilled in their area
• Near misses, such as aborted kisses or face-offs in a bar
• Support characters having “what if” conversations about what might happen
• A participant fantasizing about, fretting over, planning for, or worrying about getting in a fight or having sex with their opposite number
• Training and/or training montages in preparation
• Showing how the impending encounter might impact important support characters

By sprinkling these into the action before your encounter, you build reader anticipation. It’s like foreplay…the more and better you do it, the bigger the payoff when you get to the main event. 

Focus on Emotion

The Horatio Hornblower series is an old set of nautical adventure books featuring a sea captain. One reason they’re so compelling is how the author treats these great naval battles. Cannons roar, ships maneuver, boarding parties clash…but that’s not the focus of the scenes.

The focus is Captain Hornblower perseverating over what it might mean if he loses. In the middle of the chaos of battle, he’s worried about his wife ending up in the poorhouse should he lose the battle and then lose his officer’s commission. His emotions are palpable, and put the violence in a perspective that makes it much more powerful. 

If you’re old enough to be reading about writing sex and violence, I’m going to assume you know enough about the emotional context of lovemaking to not need a graphic example. 

My point is, during the scenes of action: don’t focus on who did what, to whom, where, and how well. Include the details your audience demands (more on that in a minute), but focus instead on what the encounter means to your protagonist and to your story. That’s where the real action is. 

Choose Your Details

Details are important in every aspect of fiction, but may be more important with these two topics. How much detail is too much? How much is so little it leaves the readers disappointed? Which details should you choose to depict? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this, not even within a specific genre. However, I can recommend a process that works pretty well:

• Step One: Review the entries above on this list: goal, genre, stakes, subject, anticipation, and emotion. Consider in turn how each impacts the level of detail your scene of sex or violence should contain
• Step Two: Choose one to three types of detail that you want to highlight in the scene. For example, do you want your duel to focus on skill with a sword, the anatomy of a stabbing wound, or the unique terrain? Do you want your sex scene to focus on the foreplay, the participants’ physiques, or a new experience for your protagonist?
• Step Three: If necessary, do a little more research on the subjects your details will involve. 
• Step Four: Write the scene

I wish I could give you more powerful advice on this, but being able to do these better or worse is the skill of writing these kinds of stories well. Don’t worry: as with all skills, it gets easier with experience. 

Make the Followup Meaningful

We’ve spent a lot of time here talking about how sex and violence don’t exist in a vacuum. There’s lots of action, anticipation, worry, and detail that comes before the encounter. There’s also lots to happen afterward. 

Those emotional stakes, whether from sex or from violence, carry forward into your story and through your characters’ arcs of growth. That’s what makes the scenes compelling. If they don’t, you probably didn’t need the scene in the first place. 

Make this consideration part of your outlining (or if you’re a pantser, consider it while you write the rest of your manuscript). What threads related to the encounter did you set up prior to the action, and how does the action resolve those threads? What questions did the encounter answer? What new questions did it create? What consequences arise from this point on?

The degree to which the fight or night impacts the rest of the story is the degree to which it justifies your effort and the reader’s time. 

Avoid Exploitation

It’s important to make certain your depictions of sex and violence never exploit or sensationalize the darker sides of either. Trauma, vulnerability, sexuality, and pain are all important themes in literature, but as a general rule should not be on your page for prurient or gratuitous reasons. 

As with so many other items in this article, it’s good to consider how anything questionable plays out before and after the main scene. If it’s a detail that only exists in the description, it can probably be done away with. If it’s a theme, but doesn’t fulfill a compelling reason that invites serious consideration, it can also probably go. 

Another good test is to consider the creepiest person you know. If they’re likely to enjoy an aspect of your book “for the wrong reasons”…seriously consider not including that material. 

Embrace the Test

Sex and violence carry disproportionate weight in the human psyche. So do sports, for much the same reason. There’s a theory about why this is that speaks directly to writing all three well. 

Most aspects of modern human life are not meaningful physical tests, but we evolved and survived by taking and passing meaningful physical tests. Our spirits crave them, but even challenging careers and hobbies rarely provide them. 

By “meaningful physical tests”, I mean experiences where you do your physical utmost and either fail or succeed. Your team wins or loses the game. You’re standing or on the ground – or ran away – at the end of the fight. You connected emotionally and your partner…um…finished…or you didn’t. There’s no negotiation or hedging. Your best was good enough in the moment, or it wasn’t. 

That’s the core of one reason sex and violence fascinate our readers so much. If you can make that test a core of each and every scene of sex and violence you write, your books will be that much better. 

Trigger Warnings

Although some people might disagree with me, I am of the firm conviction that there is nothing morally wrong with any depiction of violence or sex, or of any real-life act of consensual sex. Where things get gray and sticky is when it bumps up against consent. 

In the case of reading what you write, it’s fair for a reader to get what they’ve been led to expect. If you sit down expecting a cozy mystery, and you get a graphic and gory serial killer tale, you’d be justified in being upset. A reader with PTSD from sexual abuse should have some advance notice they’re about to read a book where rape is part of the story.

If you want to put in a formal, explicit trigger warning, that’s becoming more common and popular. Absolutely go for it. If you don’t, and I respect people who feel that way even though I don’t agree, consider strong foreshadowing, or notes in your book description and back cover copy, to let people know what to expect. 

The way I see it, that’s only polite.