My wife is in Auckland overnight for a meeting of her glamorous
media coven. For the children’s dinner I made the quinoa-crusted salmon dish
from the first Ripe
Recipes book. (I didn’t use quinoa – I am not that much of a wanker – but
substituted panko. No complaints from the diners.) Now that they are in bed
reading about ponies I am going back to work to edit a sex scene. I have edited
many novels but have never had to work on an explicit sex scene before, apart from the one in Danyl McLauchlan’s Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley,
but that was comedy sex. This is… well, it’s a slightly odd way to spend a
Saturday night.
So here is Tom Waits in 1975:
Curious - what do you edit a sex scene for? Language? Grammar? Logic/sense? Spelling?
ReplyDeleteYes, all of that, plus tone, dialogue and whether the action is consistent with the characters, so it's business as usual, with extra watching for the "ick" or "eww, too much information" factor. You really don't want the reader to get the impression that the scene was - to use an ancient term of literary criticism - "typed with one hand".
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