Describing the Indescribable

If you write explicit erotica or erotic romance, as I do, you’re constantly facing the problem of describing the indescribable. How can you convey the essence of a sexual encounter? You can’t show your readers a picture. You can’t literally evoke the sensations of skin on skin, the sound of a moan that is halfway between agony and delight, the scents of sweat or semen. Words are your only tools. Somehow you must employ these tools to communicate both the sensual and emotional experience of your lovers.

Describing actions is relatively straightforward — who touches whom, how and where. Actions, however, are not enough to create a moving and arousing sex scene. Somehow you have to put your readers inside the heads of your characters. Sex scenes just don’t work unless your readers share your characters’ experience.

What does it feel like, to be aroused? Warm,wet, full, throbbing, aching — we’ve all used these words a thousand times. Yet they’re only the roughest approximation to the way it really feels. Concrete terms only get you part of the way to the goal. Even if you succeed in precisely describing sensations (a difficult task), that’s not sufficient. In fact, the purely physical parts of sex can seem ludicrous, even gross, if that’s your sole focus.

To effectively describe sexual encounters, I find that I need to emphasize emotion, while suggesting sensation. To do this, I tend to use a lot of metaphor, that is, implicit comparisons, often to phenomena in nature. Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Fire. Clouds. Rivers and oceans. These familiar phenomena evoke emotional responses. By using them to describe sex, those emotions get transferred to the characters and the scene. At the same time, because they do relate to physical experience, metaphors can also convey ideas about how things feel, from a physical perspective.

Romance has gotten a bad rap for “purple prose”, overblown, exaggerated language that sounds ridiculous. An orgasm like a hurricane? Come on now! I read a blog post not too long ago where the author ridiculed the many outrageous descriptions of orgasms that she had encountered in her reading. I cringed at some of her extreme examples.

There are dangers here, I admit, not only overwriting, but also falling into clichés. Nevertheless, I don’t think I could write sex scenes without using metaphor. The human mind operates by recognizing familiar patterns and then filling in the blanks. That’s how metaphors work. They’re a kind of emotional shorthand. When I write that a climax is a hurricane (if I do it skillfully), my readers think: ferocious wind, drenching rain, overwhelming power, uncontrolled fury, terror, excitement, helplessness. All these connotations overlay the literal meaning of the text, giving it depth and intensity.

At least, that’s my objective! Here’s a brief excerpt from my paranormal romance Serpent’s Kiss. It demonstrates my point, I think. I use lots of metaphors, but I never actually come out and say, her climax was like a volcano. I hope that it works, that it conveys the intense pleasure my character is experiencing.

“You don’t understand what you ask. If we couple, you and I, we will open the gates of chaos.” He hovered close, leaning over her, gazing into her eyes. His scent made her dizzy.

“I don’t care. So be it.”

His strong arms snaked around her body and pulled her to his chest. “So be it,” he whispered. “As the gods will.”

His mouth captured hers. He sucked away her breath, drained her of her strength. Then he swept his tongue across hers and everything flowed back: strength, breath, awareness, pleasure. She felt his tongue everywhere, on her aching nipples and in the liquid gap between her thighs, tickling the tender lobe of her ear, dancing in the hollow at the base of her throat. Yet she knew, with the tiny kernel of rationality that remained, that his lips had not left hers. This exquisite ballet of sensation was nothing more than an illusion.

Real or imagined, the fluttering tongues quickly carried her to the edge of release. “Please,” she begged, sliding her mouth away from his. “I can’t wait. Make love to me.” He clutched her to him. His erection pressed into her belly like a lump of stone. “You want me, Jorge. Take me.”

“Your clothes…” he murmured. In ten seconds she had them off, her jeans still hanging off one ankle, her blouse a torn heap on the ground. He pulled his shirt over his head and folded it into a pillow for her comfort. Then he bore down on her, taking them both the floor of the porch.

She untied his drawstring pants and pushed them down around his lean hips. His swollen cock sprang out, an invincible spear of flesh aimed at the sky. She stroked her hand down his length, marvelling at the satiny texture of the skin, the way it sheathed a core of granite. She was suddenly reminded of the feather, simultaneously stiff and soft.

Jorge swept his fingers once through her cleft, as if to assure himself that she was ready. She jumped at his shocking touch, teetering on the precipice. A river of sweet moisture flowed from her, coating his hand. He did not make her wait any longer.

With one jerk of his hips, he sank his rod into her juicy depths. Elena felt the silk-encased stone of his cock, sliding over her slick flesh, filling her, claiming her. The delicious invasion finally pushed her over the edge. Her climax erupted, starting at her molten core and overflowing, sweeping away everything in its path. She wailed, her voice shocking the birds and other night creatures into silence.

Engaging the Senses

How do you make your stories come alive for readers? One important factor is your ability to engage their senses. When you give readers some idea of how your fictional world smells, sounds, tastes, and feels, their vicarious experience becomes more vivid and compelling. (I left the sense of vision off the list above because most authors already describe how things look.) In erotica and erotic romance, of course, sensory details become even more critical, because sex is such an intensely physical activity and because arousal depends so much on non-visual stimuli such as touch and smell.

Personally, I find it quite difficult to come up with effective sensory descriptions. All too often, I sit there at my computer, a scene playing out in my mind, knowing how it would feel, smell and taste, but finding myself at a loss as to how to convey those impressions in language.

The fact is, words can never adequately capture the nuances of sensory perception. Actually, all you can hope to do is trigger the recollection of sensation on the part of your reader. Your words must act as cues that evoke a kind of recognition. Ah, yes, you want your reader to think, I know how my nipples feel when I'm turned on - like I'll die if someone doesn't touch me. I remember how my husband smells when we've been working out in the yard all day and he hasn't showered. I can call up the slightly bitter taste of semen, the salt-and-iron flavor of blood. I know the crinkly sound a condom packaging opening and the gasp of lube spurting into a palm. Actually, of course, conscious thought isn't what's going on. Descriptions evoke emotion via memory or imagination.

Starting this post (without really knowing where I was going) led me to consider what strategies we have at our disposal to work this little trick. It seems to me that there are three basic methods for engaging the senses: adjectives, metaphors, and mirroring.

Adjectives, of course, exist to describe. The trouble is, the most obvious adjectives are frequently overused. Again and again, I find myself describing skin as "smooth", voices as "low","rich" and "melodious", the scent of arousal as "musky", the taste of muscular flesh as "salty". Bring out the thesaurus, I can hear you say, and I do. However, it's not necessarily a better solution to use some other term that is less frequent in the language (and thus more difficult to understand) or perhaps not exactly right for the sensation I'm trying to convey.

Let's try "smooth", as an example. When I dig out my trusty Roget, I find three inches of entries in the index under "smooth". I guess "smooth-textured" is the closest to my meaning when I'm writing (for example) about the feel of a man's erect organ in one's hand or mouth. I flip to entry 287.9 (287 as a whole is "smoothness") and find the following:

sleek, slick, glossy, shiny, gleaming; silky, silken, satiny, velvety; polished, burnished, furbished; buffed, rubbed, finished; varnished, lacquered, shellacked, glazed; glassy.

Aside from silky, silken, satiny, and velvety, which are metaphoric, which of the above adjectives would be a better description for my hero's penis than "smooth"? It might be "slick", but only if I've already dispensed the lube (or I have a ménage going on). "Sleek" seems to me to have a different meaning, and also to be a strange description for part of a man (though you might talk about sleek hair). "Gleaming", "shiny" and so on refer to the sense of sight, not touch. I would imagine that my hypothetical penis would be "rubbed", but not in the sense mean here! I rather like the notion of a "laquered" penis, but that would have to be a sex toy, not the real thing!

So in fact, my hackneyed adjective "smooth" may be the best choice, at least among the options here. Sigh. (I'd be interested in hearing other suggestions.)

Metaphors work by explicitly stating or implying a comparison between the sensation being described and some other well-known or prototypical sensory experience. (Actually, an explicit comparison is called a simile, but the effect is the same.) "Silky", "satiny" and "velvety" are all metaphorical when used to describe skin. They refer to three different textures, associated with different types of fabric. I've used all three of them - a lot. In general, I rely on metaphor for the bulk of my sensory descriptions. Excitement is likened to electricity or fire. Pleasure is described as melting or boiling, compared to slow-pouring honey or breath-stealing race cars.

Metaphors offer a far wider variety of options for sensory description. First, one can draw on the full range of natural and artificial phenomena as potential sources of metaphor. Second, we already understand and describe our experiences in metaphorical terms. We talk about "burning" pain, a "heavy" heart, "biting" sarcasm or a "bitter" argument. Strictly speaking, these are all metaphors.

But metaphor can be overdone, too. I know, because this is one of my weaknesses. Over-reliance on metaphor to describe physical sensations can end up distancing the reader from your character, rather than bringing her closer. This is particularly true if the metaphor is "strained" (a metaphor in itself) - if basis of the implied comparison is not immediately obvious or possibly inappropriate. Overuse of metaphor can also make writing sound overly precious and "literary".

Mirroring is the third alternative for engaging the senses. Don't go looking up this strategy in your writing text books; I just came up with this name, though I'm sure many of you use this technique, consciously or unconsciously. What do I mean by mirroring? Instead of describing the sensations themselves, you describe the character's thoughts and/or reactions to those sensations.

Here's a short excerpt from my BDSM story "The Understudy". It uses all three techniques, but relies quite heavily on mirroring. I've highlighted in red the sentences where I'm using the character's reactions or thoughts to imply sensation.

Geoffrey positioned himself between my splayed thighs. “Remember, Sarah,” he said. “Be still.” Then he rammed his cock all the way into my cunt in one fierce stroke.

The force drove the breath from my lungs. The fullness made me suck the air back in. If I hadn’t been so wet, he would have torn me apart, but as it was my flesh parted for him as though sliced open.

My pussy clenched reflexively around his invading bulk, but otherwise I managed to avoid moving. His eyes, locked with mine, told me he approved. His hardness pressed against my engorged clit. A climax loomed, then faded away as he kept me there, motionless, pinned to the bed.

He pulled mostly out. My hungry cunt fluttered, empty for an instant. He drove back into me, harder than before. I strained against the bars, struggling not to jerk and writhe as his cock plunged in and out of my cunt like a pile-driver.

God, it felt good! His roughness somehow heightened the pleasure. I was his, to use and abuse. His fuck toy, as he had said. At that moment, that was all I wanted to be.

I am not holding my own writing up as a model here. I'm merely trying to illustrate what I mean my mirroring. There's very little direct description of sensation in this passage but I hope that it evokes the intensity of this experience for my heroine.

I don't know if this analysis is any help. It's still agony to come up with vivid, original sensory descriptions. I remember recently, for instance, I was trying to describe the smell of freshly brewed coffee. How would you convey that unique sensation? You recognize it in an instant, but what are the characteristics of the smell?

Warm. Rich. Dark. Earthy. Sweet? Stimulating. Mouth-watering (that's mirroring, really). Complex. Chocolatey (a metaphor). Roasted (but can you really smell that)?

I'm getting nowhere here. Maybe you'd like to give it a try. Maybe you'll be more successful that I am. And I'd love to know what techniques you use to engage your readers' senses!

Metaphor, Reality and Fantasy

By Cecilia Tan (Guest Blogger)

When I first read The Lord of the Rings, in grade school, one of the things that stuck with me was the bit about Frodo's wound. One of the Ringwraiths stabs Frodo in the shoulder early in the story, and because of the cursed nature of the wound, it is said to never truly heal. At the time I only thought of it in literal terms, and was struck by Tolkien's confident use of magic and curses as something his characters had to deal with permanently.

It wasn't until later, after re-reading the series as an adult, as well as some books about Tolkien's life, that I began to see the metaphors in it. Tolkien wrote without a particular political agenda, but the themes of the horrors of war, the loss of farmland to industry, and other issues that parallel his life's experiences are clear enough. And so it struck me that Frodo's wound is something of a unique literary prestidigitation only possible in fantasy. Normally one takes something from real life and makes a metaphor in a story for it. In this case, Tolkien took a metaphorical concept, that of the "wound that could not be healed"--spoken of as the way soldiers who came back from World War I were "scarred for life" psychologically and never able to be happy again--and made it a literal thing in his fantasy book. Frodo bears an actual wound in silence for the rest of his life, and to this day that is still the powerful image that stays with me from the book(s).

So of course I want to emulate the techniques of the masters in my own books. I'm currently in the middle of writing a paranormal fantasy romance series called Magic University. The concept is a bit like Harry Potter for grown-ups. Our main character follows the same literary tradition as Harry, Cinderella, and many others, who discover their magical heritage after being oppressed. This time, it's a college freshman who stumbles on the magical university hidden inside Harvard known as Veritas.

I've got a rather ripe metaphor for the plucking right there. After all, here I have a young person embarking on a grand journey of learning, and also entering adult life for the first time, and so about to learn life's lessons about love, friendship, women, dating, et cetera. But I've made some of it quite literal as the new world that opens up before Kyle's eyes is an actual magical world he hadn't known about before.

And it goes further. As he learns about the various fields of magical study (alchemy, soothsaying, conjuration, and so on) he finds himself drawn to the Esoteric Arts, which is the polite term for erotic magic. So I don't just have him figuring out how sex, love, and attraction works. I have him learning what erotic power really means in his world, and where sex and love intersect.

Ultimately, being a fantasy series, Magic University tells the tale of a quest. But although the series has its share of magic rings and swords, here we move back from the land of the literal to the land of the metaphor. Because Kyle is not on a literal quest--at least not as far as he knows. Here is where we shift from fantasy to the world of romance. Kyle isn't trying to reach a distant mountain or capture a magic flag. But he definitely is on a search for something that is often described in the real world as "magical," namely, true love.

BIO: Cecilia Tan has been writing professionally since she was a teenager, which she definitely isn't, anymore. She is the author of several romances for Ravenous Romance, including her "Harry Potter for adults" the Magic University series and Mind Games, as well as the BDSM sci-fi adventure Royal Treatment just released from Torquere Press. Her literary erotica has been published nearly everywhere. She loves tea, baseball, cats, and books, and more of her thoughts on these and other subjects can be found at her blog: http://blog.ceciliatan.com/.

Buy link: http://www.ravenousromance.com/fantastica/magic-university-the-tower-and-the-tears.php?flypage=0