Sex Sells

   Today I’m going to talk about something book related, but it’s not promotional. It’s just more of something I’ve noticed with other people’s writing. Most people feel that they need to have at least one smut scene in their books, and many people make books that revolve completely around one thing – sex. Now, I’m not here to bash anyone or to tell you what you should and shouldn’t read based on right and wrong. I just think that this trend is interesting. Most writers truly feel like they have to include a graphic sex scene to make the book complete and “adult."

   I differ on this opinion. I want my characters to be perceived a certain way, and while I can’t control how people picture them, I don’t want that image to be of the standard muscle man or pinup girl that you see on most covers. I want it to be of someone relatable, and I don’t want the love between my character to resemble the lust that we see in raunchier movies and books. That’s not love. It’s infatuation. I want my characters to be sexual beings, but I want my readers to focus on what’s really important about them, and honestly, the bedroom isn’t my highest priority. Take Trent and Ally from the Strange Visions series for example. Even if I had never implied that they slept together, you would still know that they love each other in a very deep way. I think that people miss this step. They go straight for how attractive parts of characters’ bodies are to another character while never establishing the lasting connection that we all crave in our real life relationships. Unfortunately, I don’t think this trend is going to change anytime soon, though. There’s a large audience for erotic and risqué writing. I’m a normal human being, and let’s be honest. I’m a man, so I understand lust and things like that, but I guess I just don’t understand why so many people put such an emphasis on making their characters such sexual beings or to read smut.

   I’m still young, so maybe I’m missing something here, but here’s what I’ve gathered about love and sexual relationships. If you’re looking for love, you’re not going to find it in a book. Men and women don’t react the way they do in love stories and erotic novels. You should try to find someone in the real world who might not take your breath away from the first time you see them, but instead, that will grow on you a little more every day. That’s the dream, isn’t it? Don’t you want to wake up and love the person lying next to you a little more every day? So why read or write about things that aren’t what you need? Any lasting relationship starts with a connection that goes past sex, and any great sexual relationship takes time to perfect, and expecting what you read in books or even reading to try to fill a void that can still be found in the real world is simply strange to me. You should write and read about what you want to see in your own life, and if that revolves around one thing, then you might have a problem whether you’re a man or a woman.

   Well, that’s my two cents on things. I’m not trying to criticize what anyone writes. I just think there are a lot of good writers out there who waste their incredible talent on something that could be so much more. Do yourself a favor today. If you write, reexamine why you started writing to begin with, and if you’re a reader who gets something out of your books that you can’t get in real life, put the book down, and go find exactly what you’re looking for. It’s probably not a good idea for an author to tell readers to put their books down, but I think we all get lost sometimes. We should write what we love and not what sells, and we should read what we love and not what we long for.