Learning From Garth Greenwell: Writing About Sex in Fiction
Few things are approached with hesitation, read with reluctance, or rejected more than writing about sex, regardless whether its fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. It’s often a subject reserved only for those who’ve proven to do it well enough, leaving even the most curious skeptical of whether they’ll be met with praise or be met with failure in the form of the coveted Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Sure there might be some sex scenes that are deserving of such an award. But what the award represents is the fear of even attempting. If a writer doesn’t try, they will never know and never improve. And the reward for writing about sex and what can do in ficiton is far greater than the repercussions of receiving a Bad Sex Award.
While writing about sex might not seem at times important to the narrative, there is a vast array of emotions and deeper psychology that can be evoked by sex. Sex, afterall, is intrinsic to the human experience. A well-written sex scene, regardless of how perverse it can be, has the ability to tell far more than the narrative plot might be able to. It allows the reader a deeper view into the psyche of the characters, to experience their past while in the present, and even open up the characters to new possibilities.
This is exactly what occurs when reading fiction by Garth Greenwell, who has been hailed of one of the greatest living writers of sex.
Regarding his latest novel, Cleanness, he said, “I wanted to write something 100% pornographic and 100% high art.” It’s a pursuit he succeeded in doing so and then some. The idea of pornography and high art coexisting might seem a stretch, but Cleanness holds no punches and proves that it can be done.
“Desire is completely unchosen. Nobody chooses what they desire,” Greenwell said during his online seminar about writing sex. It’s a fact that I don’t think most writers consider when it comes to writing about sex and desire. Most of the time, we write the obvious course of action and follow the narrative we’ve been most exposed to, which is the sex we most often see in teledramas and movies.
“When sex is interesting,” Greenwell continued on. “Most isn’t interesting … it’s the accumulation of all that we are in the metaphysical manifesting itself into the physical.” In a sense of speaking, we become that which we feel. Sex becomes a gateway for the subsconcious to enact itself on reality, on another body. “No where are we more acutely aware of who we are than during sex … selfish, cruel, generious, kind.”
What Greenwell aims to do in Cleanness by blending pornography with high art is to show the interchangability that occurs within people; to show how we want, all at once, to be both punisher and the punished, damned and forgiven, dominator and dominated, clean and filth. Sex allows access to a higher transcendence or consciousness that allow characters to achieve new insights or to fall victim to old habits long thought buried, which is a concept in Giovanni’s Room.
By trying to write about sex, writers are challenging themselves, testing their ability to move in and out of the past, even for the briefest moment. We are opening ourselves up to vulnerability while practicing refinement. The human body in all its physicality and the connection, or lack thereof, with others is nothing to shy away from.
As Greenwell writes in what seems to be a manifesto to writing sex, “Sex is a uniquely useful tool for a writer, a powerful means not just of revealing character or exploring relationships, but of asking the largest questions about human beings.” To be a great writer, we must use and sharpen all our tools at our disposal and open ourselves up to the vulnerability that sex innates holds.
Art is a derivative of the humanities; humanities is the state of being human. If sex is intrinsic to the human experience then why shouldn’t it be explored through art? If we’re to make sense of the experience and the conduit it often acts as, whether its queer, straight, or otherwise, then we must explore the possibilities through the act of artistic creation.
