My graduate adviser told me I was better at writing sex scenes than any writer he had ever met. Considering the quantity and quality of the writers this award-winner knows, I took that straight to my head. The irony is that I have had comparatively little sex in my life. There was only one two month period, my brief engagement, when it was readily available. That relationship ended with her abusing me. Then I got the clap after my first and only one-night stand, which gave me a distaste for those. So I am wary of relationships and hook-ups both, which I use an excuse the fact that I have been single for seven years. This is likely something I tell myself so that I don’t feel entirely impotent, in a metaphorical sense only, but in a sense nonetheless. So my ability to illustrate passion and even incite it in the reader seems counter-intuitive. I grasp but fail reach satisfactory answers to this apparent paradox. Could it be an issue of my being objective about such acts with them buried so far in retrospection? It is easier to see the truth as it falls further into the past. Perhaps it is easier too to represent events or draw from them the further they are in the past. My detachment might let me depict without the myopia of closeness, and thus intimacy. This does not quite hold up under scrutiny, however, because I am mostly a fiction writer, and the work I do on sex is necessarily more interesting than anything I have lived through. If I am not drawing from what really happened, what difference is there when creating rather than recreating it? Also, the fact remains that the best sex scene I ever wrote was done about a year after that diseased that one stand. Now that that is years and years back, I find myself no better or worse at making such pictures in the mind. I also wonder if it has something to do with how little I have had it, leaving me in an observer’s position much, much more often than not. Which is to say I am a voyeur, if only one who watches relationships and never sex. This does not hold up as an explanation either. Why would seeing lovers interact from a across the room have anything to do with me showing rather than telling when it comes to what happens in bedrooms? I have never spied on a single instance of coitus. Many other thoughts come to mind, too many to mention. In truth I feel that I was given this gift because God wants me to embrace my destiny and write trashy romance novels. Whenever I doubt the power of my imagination, I remember that I can write good sex, and so must be a singularly convincing liar, because I have never had it. Research, anyone?
