From Taboo to Tool Kit: How to Embrace Your Characters’ Sexual History

#7 FWSG Blog Post

Sexual History is one tool that is a frame of reference for writing about sex in scene. It was a true favorite in my therapy practice and in educating students about relationships. It is rich with PEMS components, the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. In fact, it could be called your character’s missing chapter, an unexplored territory of sexual history. From now on, I hope that you will create a dedicated chapter in your Character Bible for sex history. Your full character profile will be complete when you’ve done this.

Why Sexual History?

Sexual history is our experience of the world through sexuality. It occurs from the moment we are born until we die. Through sex, you have an intimate way of understanding your characters. This is the place where people grow up in front of one another. This is the place where people either share or withhold real vulnerability. It is where you can learn to ask for what you want and learn to receive. It is an element that creates fantastic tension.

It’s Not Just Action

How do characters think and feel about what has occurred in their sexual history? It’s about a frame of reference: sex-negative or sex-positive. Over a lifetime, authors and their characters have myriad experiences that shape who they are as sexual individuals.

We bring that forward in movement, conversations, attitudes, etc.

Consider how you could create internal and external tension between your characters. How might you tie this to the goals and desires your characters have in your story?

The Importance of a Sexual History Timeline

A sexual history timeline moves us through a character’s life. We can see sexuality through the life stages and goals that affected them in their sexuality world. I use the broad umbrella of sexuality here because you may explore the family background and relationships for treatment of sexuality or explore the messages they received about where sexuality should stand in their life. Then, add the experience they had, from masturbation or sexual interactions with others to exploring their sexual orientation and identity, plus any sexual medical history. How might having no nipple on their breast or no uterus affect a character? To have premature ejaculation with a meaningful partner? To have had someone walk in on them while self-pleasuring. Every experience of this could be different, and when you know the differences and what caused them, you have more information with which to work.

Charting Your Character

When you put sex history together, you will see your character in a new light. This is because you change the vantage point for seeing the character. Your new understanding can give characters’ interactions a nuanced and new flavor.

Looking at sex over a lifetime gives you so much material and adds realism to your story. I’ve included worksheets in The Fiction Writer’s Sexuality Guide to help you assemble everything. Have you been following along with the FWSG Blog Series from the start?