Gratuitous Sex and Violence

I’m in the midst of slogging my way through the latest thriller by a NYT bestselling author. I’m putting myself through this torture because I like to keep current with the publishing industry, and because the subject of this particular book touches close to something I’ve written myself. Since I’m not enjoying the process, I’m reading fast. And I’ve found I can skip the action sequences without missing anything. I’ll come to one and think, Oh, good; the bad guys are going to try to kill the heroes again; I can skip ahead at least ten pages!

If that isn’t the definition of gratuitous violence, I don’t know what is. I’m reminded of the gratuitous sex scenes that populate so many of today’s romance novels. When I was judging RITA entries, I frequently found myself skipping sex scenes, too. Now, since authors put in sex and violence in order to make their books more entertaining, yet some of their readers are actually skipping those scenes, something is obviously wrong.

So how does a writer keep an action sequence—or a sex scene—from being boring?

In the best action sequences or a sex scenes, something happens that actually moves the plot forward. We learn something new about the characters. The characters learn something new about themselves or each other. The action ups the stakes. Or it changes the characters’ motivation. Or it changes the characters’ goal. Or the characters acquire new information that causes them to alter their course of action. But something has to happen besides just violence or sex. When nothing changes—if the characters and the conflict are all the same at the end of the scene as they were at the beginning—then the scene is gratuitous. The writer could yank the car chase/shootout/sex scene from the plot (or the reader could skip it) and no one would notice. The plot line would flow on without interruption or confusion.

Unfortunately, today’s audiences are so addicted to sex and violence that writers frequently feel the need to insert sex/violence every so many pages/minutes. Now, it’s pretty hard to make each and every one of those scenes pivotal. Yet I do think it is possible to have gratuitous sex and violence without boring the more discriminating members of your audience. How? By creating sympathetic characters.

If your readers care about your characters, they will be carried along by the action, both because they care what happens to the characters and because they like spending time with them. If I’m watching a movie and I don’t like the characters, I have nothing at stake; I couldn’t care less if they killed or caught. Oh, our heroes are being shot at again? Yawn. Let me go make another cup of tea…

Even if I don’t care about the characters, an action sequence can still hold my attention if it’s well done, if the sequence is original, or funny, or cleverly orchestrated. Ironically, the NYT bestselling author of the thriller I’m reading at the moment writes really, really bad action sequences. They’re unoriginal, unbelievable, and badly executed. There is absolutely nothing to entice me to read them. So, I skip. A lot.

Of course, a lot of people really don’t care if the sex and violence in a book or movie is gratuitous or unoriginal--they're actually reading/watching for the sex and violence. Sigh.