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Old 12-01-2010, 05:41 PM   #3
Worldwalker
Curmudgeon
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What Hal said.

It's like movies: for some reason, they always seem to find an excuse to jam a sex scene into a movie. They don't feel compelled to put in a car chase, or a spooky deserted building, or a spaceship, but the sex scene has to be in there no matter how bad the fit is.

Most of the time, sex scenes stuffed into books that don't need them require someone else who doesn't need to be there, and a justification to put that person in the story, and then something visibly pointless for them to do, to justify them being there, so the protagonist can have sex with them for no reason. That's a waste of my time. I have plenty of books with well-written sex scenes that are an important part of the book that I can read; I don't like seeing them stuffed in somewhere just because "it has to be there" when, in fact, it doesn't.

As Hal said, all characters and activities must be justified and intrinsic to the plot. It irks people when they aren't. If you're reading a cozy mystery where the protagonist wanders off and picks her niece up from school, there had better be a reason for it; if there isn't, you're irked. I go off all the time about the cement mixer subplot in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders -- it goes nowhere, does nothing. I think it's just a bit more obvious with sex scenes. You might forget about the school pickup a couple of chapters later, since it never turned into anything, but you keep remembering the sex scene and waiting for something to come of it, but it never does.

If there's a shotgun on the wall in the first act, it had better go off by the third (Anton Chekhov). That goes for books, too. Anything that is not important to the plot must go, and you can tell an professional writer from an amateur (or a self-important pro with bad editing, which is perhaps even worse) by whether or not they abide by this rule.
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