Copyright © 2012 by Diana Gabaldon. All rights reserved/ I wrote the short piece below on request for a Canadian magazine called Chatelaine, in 2012. I have the reprint rights back, though, and since a Twitter acquaintance recently expressed a desire to “write smut”—I thought I’d at least provide him with the basics. This short piece has also been expanded into an ebook titled I GIVE YOU MY BODY (HOW I WRITE SEX SCENES), which was released in 2016. Click on the cover image at right for more information. Where most beginning writers screw up (you should pardon the expression) is in thinking that sex scenes are about sex. A good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids. That being so, it can encompass any emotion whatever, from rage or desolation to exultation, tenderness, or surprise. Lust is not an emotion; it’s a one-dimensional hormonal response. Ergo, while you can mention lust in a sex-scene, describing it at any great length is like going on about […]
Tag Archive for ‘sex-scenes’ 
Language, Language….(Part I)
It doesn’t happen often, but I do occasionally get email from people asking—always very politely (well, almost always very politely)—whether I have ever considered producing a bowdlerized edition of my books. Mind, none of them uses the word “bowdlerized”; I doubt most people under the age of forty have ever heard it. It comes from: Thomas Bowdler (pronounced /ˈbaʊdlər/) (11 July 1754 – 24 February 1825), who was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare’s work, edited by his sister Harriet, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original. He similarly published an edited version of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His edition was the subject of some criticism and ridicule and, through the eponym bowdlerise (or bowdlerize),[1] his name is now associated with censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programmes. [Source: Wikipedia] Now, what these readers would like me to expurgate from my own work, in order to accommodate their desires and sensibilities, ranges […]