lobelia321 | 1001 ways to write an orgasm

It occurred to me that the act of sex is the perfect mini-narrative, a kind of ur-narrative. Aristotle said that every good plot needs to have a beginning, middle and an end. The ur-end is the orgasm. The sex narrative is incredibly predictable: it always ends in an orgasm. (When it doesn't end in an orgasm, it becomes a different kind of story. But I'm not talking about that different kind right now.)

So how to write the orgasm? I trawled some of my favourite (and some not-so-favourite) lotrps, HP and assorted other fics to find out how writers do it and how writers vary it, how we play variations on that most standardised trope of all: the orgasm-ending.

(I mean after all: coming is coming, right? Or is it?)

One of the first questions I asked myself is: to embellish or to state baldly? There's something to be said for a terse He came, and that kind of laconic baldness has been used to great effect in many a fic.

Here's the understated he came used by

resonant8 in Transfigurations:

After that everything seemed to happen in flashes, like buildings seen from a runaway train. The cold of the cubicle wall against his forehead, Malfoy murmuring, "All right, let me, hang on," Hermione's voice in the corridor calling, "Harry? Draco?" -- and Harry, in a perfectly excruciating rush of heat and humiliation, coming in his pants.
There's a bit of the run-on sentence (on which more below), a bit of metaphor (the runaway train -- although technically, this is a simile, of course), a bit of dialogue-in-snatches, a bit of description of setting (cold of the cubicle wall), and then that wonderful crescendo, ending in the boom of the final phrase: coming in his pants. A superbly-constructed sentence, and a classic orgasm-finish.

Here are some more examples of simple he cames:

From

azewewish's 'Fun & Games' (Dom/Karl):
Faster, faster, endless pleasure like waves washed over him, through him. "Only yours." And then he was coming and Karl was coming with him, in him... and it felt so good, so right.

From

3jane's Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be (Crabbe/Goyle):
He came, growling, and pushed Vince off. [...] Jerked him, finally, and kissed Vince’s hip, open-mouthed, until Vince came too.

And here an example of the popular coming all over something, a diction which I actually quite like. It's the all that gets to me. This one's from

natasha1805's A Lonely Impulse of Delight WIP, part 12 (Memphis Belle fandom, Rascal/Danny):
Rascal amost bounced off the bed, nearly sitting up as he came all over Danny's hand.

As an exercise in restraint (because I am prone to the rambling sentence), I produced a few terse orgasms of my own (all of the following from Different Tastes, Dom/Karl):
Dom came with a moan. [...]
He came in his hand. His mouth came in Dom's mouth. [...]
They had sex, kneeling on the bed and facing the television. [...] It was a war film so they ended up coming to the sound of gunfire. [...]
Dom watched as the cum plopped out of Karl's cock onto Karl's stomach. Some of it collected in Karl's navel, some spread in a small puddle and got caught in Karl's pubic hair.[...]
Karl came and couldn't reply.[...]
"Oh, fuck," sighed Karl and came.

And one three-word-orgasm from my The Orc's Tongue:
Unbelievably, Pippin came.

And here's a lovely matter-of-fact description from

helenish's A Soft Spot for Lost Causes:
[...] this was short, and neat, and almost easy, Draco’s forehead tipped against his shoulder. He sighed a little when he came. Ron fetched a flannel from the bathroom.
What I love about this is the way the passage describes an orgasm without need to resort to a run-on sentence (more on which below). I find that quite hard to do and have been known to write fics in which I trained myself to use a sparse style, bereft of secondary clauses. So I admire it when others can pull it off so beautifully. Somehow the orgasm often tends to resist the short sentence.

When I wrote my very first slash fic, I was dissatisfied with He came. It seemed too matter-of-fact. So I embellished it through repetition; I wrote: He came and came. My beta immediately cracked down on that and deleted the second he came. I'm not sure why she did that; I didn't dare ask and she didn't explain. Later I experimented with more baroque ways of embellishing the orgasm, and two of my favourites are these visual analogies, taken from my very own Up Shit Creek:

Alpine meadow:
For several seconds, the boat vanished, the sky vanished, Karl vanished, and Billy was in an Alpine meadow full of little white daisies. The grass was green, there was a brown cow in the distance, it was like a fucking ad for Swiss chocolate. Except it wasn't an ad, it was an orgasm.

Red-hot place:
Because Billy was transported. Not to an Alpine meadow this time. No, the Alpine meadow was left so fucking far behind it wasn't funny, and its pathetic moo cow now seemed piteously inapt. Billy was somewhere else entirely, somewhere hot and red, could have been Mars, could have been Hell, it was a red-hot place, a heedless place, a place full of subterranean rumbling. It was a vast space, red and hot, with a horizon rimmed in tongues of flame. Something was approaching from that horizon. Billy rode up and down on Karl, he rode up and down on Karl who was a bison again, galloping across that vast red place, and as they were galloping, they were drawing nearer and nearer to the horizon and to that something approaching. Billy didn't know what that something was, some huge beast, or a wall of fire, or a rumbling roaring earthquake, or a swirling whirling dust storm. He didn't care, he just galloped on, faster and faster, and slicker and slicker, until Karl the bison bucked underneath him, reared up and bellowed, and then the something was upon them both.

It crashed about their ears, it blew right through them, hot and dry. It picked them up and flung them about until the breath was knocked out of their lungs, and the moisture squeezed from their eyeballs, and the strength sucked out of their muscles, and the semen shot out of their cocks, out of their hot, hard cocks, hot wet semen, semen everywhere.

The Alpine Meadow is pure orgasm-as-metaphor while the Red-Hot Place is a mix of metaphor and baroque description of anatomical event. I'm not usually fond of semen shooting but it is, I believe, a way that men may experience what is actual a sluggish motion of viscosity -- so I'll let it pass in this fic as Billy's pov. *g*

Here's another beautiful example of orgasm-as-metaphor, although technically speaking the wonderful image of the spinning clay does not, in this passage, refer to the actual orgasm, but to the build-up. It's from

eyebrowofdoom's Mill in the Mirror (Frodo/Aragorn):
Then I wasn't me any more at all -- I had become slick, spinning clay, and he was a potter with his fingers in the centre of me, smoothly pushing my insides out, and the potter's wheel was spinning faster and faster.
This is an evocative and innovative image of what the build-up to an orgasm might feel like.

Of course, slash deals primarily with male orgasm. So what we are always and for ever dealing with is ejaculation. There are words for ejaculation, and then there are words for the ejaculate.

Let's take the ejaculate first. Fluid bubbling is, to my ears, a very bad choice of words for the ejaculate. Better words include the ever-popular come or cum (to me, these are different, though identical in pronunciation). There is also the somewhat more clinical semen and sperm, words I particularly like writing myself. Some writers prefer to avoid mention of the actual substance and refer to post-orgasmic cleaning-up operations instead. Frequently, there is talk of bodies being sticky or even sticking together. This always puzzles me as it correlates to nothing in my own experience. I have never found myself 'stuck' to any semen though I have had my fingers stuck together by commercial glue or grapefruit juice. Who knows, I may be missing out on something very special there...

Here's some nice fluid shooting (from

eyebrowofdoom's Something to Pass the Time:
Karl was yelping, "Shit!" His legs seized Harry like a clam snapping shut. Harry rose again, and Karl bucked in counterpoint, and then again. Fluid shot past Harry's fingers.

Ejaculation itself can be described along a gamut of registers, ranging from the delightfully coarse and manly (He shot his wad) to the discreet and elegant (He was spent). I'm quite partial to the old release myself but realise that it has to be placed in the right fic at the right time.

One odd trope that seems to recur, along with the supposed stickiness of sperm, is pressure. Again, this does not correspond to anything in my own experience but then again, I am not a man and who am I to say that a man may not experience orgasm as mounting pressure? The poor dears tend to feel pressured by all sorts of things in life so why not by orgasm?

Here's a classic use of pressure, taken from

cupiscent's 'Plumbing':
And this was what it was like for women. All inside, all internal, the reverse feeling to that he knew well, but still familiar, this tingling
under his skin and the tightening coil inside, all inside. Like sweet, blessed pressure building, with Viggo moving above him, inside him, with him and his mouth at Dom's throat, his breasts, and Dom's fingernails digging
into Viggo's back, and he shuddered, splintered apart and imploded, inside
his own skin, with Viggo's name on his lips.

Although the anatomical premise of this orgasm is highly unusual, the vocab is not: orgasms are often described as pressure or tingling or even tightening coil. Myself, I quite like the tight coil.

Personally, I do not like coyness. A spade is a spade and an orgasm is an orgasm, and (to me) fade-to-black is part of Hollywood but not part of my slash enjoyment. I want the ending, not just beginning and middle and then an ellipsis and a Then I woke up. The fic is the build-up; the orgasm is the pay-off.

However, I have encountered some lovely lyrical evocations. The most gorgeous writer of gorgeous orgasms is

thejennabides, and this one is taken from her 'Wrong To Love You' series, Part 3 of No Vows that Can't Come True:
Sean lets go of Orli's hips, slides his arm around Orli and pulls Orli up, flush against him, Sean still hard inside him; wraps his hand around Orli's cock and starts stroking Orli off, smooth, rapid, firm. His other hand is flat against Orli's belly, sliding up to his torso; Orli's leaning back into him, head turned towards him and they're not kissing, Orli's just rubbing his cheek against Sean wherever he can, appreciative, contented hum vibrating from his throat, his body; hums and vibrations intensify until Orli's body is singing and he comes, shuddering all over and crying out; and Sean slows but doesn't stop, carefully massages Orli's cum into his head, all along his shaft. Sean hasn't come yet, he's hard inside Orli and Orli's trying to wriggle, push back more, clenching around Sean, rolling his hips for Sean; but Sean holds him still, tells him to be still and just keeps stroking him until Orli's hard again; until he comes again... and Orli melts and Sean starts again, until Orli's melted, glazed... and then again... and...
On one level, this paragraph is one long embellishment of the barebones and he comes. But on another level, this is sex transported onto an almost surreal, delirious plane of sensation, where an orgasm is not an ending at all but something that triggers new narratives in a dizzy-making spiral. I love the words melted and glazed as metaphors for having come.

I think subliminally I was influenced by that passage when I wrote my own version of melting for the never-posted Dom/Karl epic:
[...] They're not kissing anymore, their eyes are glassy, their mouths too, everything is glassy. Everything is hard and brittle, everything reflects patterns and foliage.

Then the glass melts.

"Karl," gasps Dominic. Karl whines like a mosquito. Everything's a mess, their jeans, their underwear, the car seat.

And nobody is as lyrical, baroque and matter-of-fact all at once as

thamiris. This is from her Lies in the Rookery (Remus/Snape):
[...] Remus stops holding back, gives himself up to the pleasure that isn't really pleasure anymore. One more hard stroke, and Remus cries, "Now," then the goblet's there, cool against his skin. He fills it, fingers hooked into the tapestry, his eyes half-closed so he can pretend through the blur that this is something else.
There is no mention of ejaculate nor ejaculation but this is fic for adults, and we know what's going on.

A less hallucinatory approach is found in

shaenie's Catalyst (Dom/Billy):
And that was it, that was all he could take, he was shuddering and whimpering (release, God, yes so good, so fuckinggoodsogood), spilling into Billy's heat, mindless and breathless, hips jerkingstrainingpushing, god, insideinsideinsideBilly, yes, nothing but white-hot, molten need driving him, relief, yes, bliss, yes, fuck yesyesyes.
This one's quite a classic of its type. There is whimpering (close to pain); there is very subjective, very free indirect discourse: God, yes so good ... yes, bliss, yes, fuck as an evocation of a mind orgasmically unhinged; there is the running together of words, a device popular in lotrps and here used to indicate the force of sensation over grammar (fuckinggoodsogood). The word spilling is quite nice as a descriptor of ejaculation.

There is also the loss of syntactical control which mirrors the loss of physical and mental control during orgasm. I have myself succumbed frequently to the long sentence when describing orgasm, the breathless rhythm of verbs and nouns and exclamations and shreds of phrases, separated only by commas and sometimes not even by those. It can be an easy way out, a kind of cheat shortcut but it can also be done incredibly well. Here's an example I consider to be very good, taken from

julad's Night-blooming Heartsease:

He could feel Snape, there, and it made Neville a bit nervous. He hadn't really done this before, or, well, anything like this, and it wasn't like he could go bake a cake if he messed it up. But Snape didn't seem to mind, just rolled them over so Neville was on top, and kept kissing him. Soon Neville forgot about being worried, and concentrated on kissing, and remembering what made Snape groan and doing it again. Then he noticed that his hips were moving in a way that felt amazingly good, and Snape was doing it too, so he concentrated on that as well. Snape grabbed his hair with both hands and rolled them back over, kissing him even deeper, moving harder and faster, and Neville did the same, until he was gasping for breath and pulling Snape's hair and they'd forgotten to kiss and his heart was beating like crazy and they were just -- there, and it was, oh, wow.
That last superbly-placed wow made me shiver. Note also in this paragraph the free indirect discourse (it was, oh, wow) and the faux-naive use of quite simple vocab which reinforces the first-time'ish, rather sweetly innocent tone of the whole scene: his hips were moving in a way that felt amazingly good.

Speaking of sweetly innocent, nobody did that better than

badgermonkey, and this is also an example of a lovely run-on sentence (taken from her 'A Rush of Blood to the Head', Orli/Viggo):

The weird little moans started again. Not from me, this time, though; we were working out fairly even on the weird little moan front. And you know, it was kind of horny. Yup. And, so, really, it was all Viggo's fault that I started making somewhat louder noises against the side of his neck where my mouth had ended up somehow, possibly because I'd discovered that flickering my tongue just under his ear made him make more of those nice little noises and wank me that bit faster and that bit harder, and that made me do it back to him more too, and then we were sort of staring at each other in disbelief because we were naked in an armchair on a Sunday afternoon and we were coming all over each other's hands and thighs and it was all so strange but nice that we couldn't really do anything but grin at one another in an almost soppy fashion. But not, of course.
And yes, there's the all over something phrase again... :-)

Here's another straightforwardly doggone hot orgasm, taken from

azewewish's 'Playground' series (part 6: 'Tempted'):
Volcanic heat surrounding Marton--heat in his mouth, heat on his cock...too many sensations, a sumptuous overload of the most provocative kind. He tried to last as long as he possibly could, but the heat of Sean's mouth was too much and he came in thick spurts down Sean's throat. His own orgasm seemed to trigger Viggo's...moments later, hot liquid seared past his open lips and he drank in the salty taste.

For me, the equivalent of

azewewish's hot, no-nonsense, manly orgasms in HP-fandom are

fabularasa's hot, manly climaxes. Here's a hot, hot, hot one from her Repechage (Sirius/Snape):
"Yes," he groaned. "Show me what you like, Severus, show me what you do to make yourself feel good, I want to see how you touch yourself. . . oh God oh God oh God," he panted, and the first wave of his orgasm tore through him, come spilling out his pulsing cock and over his hand. He heard a cry from Snape, and managed to focus his eyes long enough to see Snape biting his lip, his eyes wild and lost, shuddering hunched over his hand as his come spattered his trousers. The sight wrenched another wave of orgasm from Sirius, and he gave in to the delicious throb and pulse, watching the pleasure rip through Snape, watching the way he chewed his lip and gasped and bent almost double as it seized him.
It's quite classic in its way: there are bits of run-on sentence; there are erotically-charged words piled on (wild, lost, delicious, throb, pulse, pleasure, rip); there's explicit ejaculation as well as subjective sensation. There's also gabbling dialogue, reinforcing the effect of loss of control.

But now for some examples of how not to do it. I mentioned above that pov (and I should add, humour) may excuse shooting semen but pov does not, however, excuse a bit of pre-coital fluid bubbling from the tip, a howler taken straight from bad!fic-land. Okay, technically the pre-cum does not refer to an orgasm but you see what I am getting at.

It is also true that people do moan and groan during orgasm, and personally, I can never resist a fic-mention of a moan, but I am not fond of onomatopoeic direct-speech moanings, as in this un-sexy example:

Before long, he [Craig] was urging, "Come for me, darling... let's go..." Orlando obeyed, but didn't scream, instead uttering something along the lines of, "Mmmmmnnnnnnyyyyyyoooooooohhhh that's soooooo goooooddddduh...uhh... uhh... uhhhhh... "

There is the wave cliché which doesn't do very much for me, especially if it's not made strange by any unusual detail:
Billy lets the wave wash over him and sighs.

And here's one last example of what is (to me) a boring specimen of climax:
He keeps his pace steady as I come, bucking under him, screaming so loud I fear the neighbours might call up to investigate what the hell's happening. The high is unbelievable, and it feels so good to release the amazing load of tension he's made me accumulate.
I'm not generally overly taken by screaming orgasms (although I have to admit to having written one myself but that, of course, was different... *g*). This paragraph also conveys nothing of breathlessness, and it breaks tone to boot: what the hell's happening is too jaunty for a mid-spurt thought and the amazing load of tension reminds me of a suspension bridge more than of sex.

Finally, there's that little bit of realism or quirk that twists a detailed description into someting else, as happens in

ukcalico's Accessory (Dom/Orlando):
And then he was coming, a sharp rush of wet heat against his cock, and he'd always thought the only good thing about condoms was the way that gush was startlingly intense against sensitive skin, and then a dark thought struck him even as he waited for the comedown to reach his heart.
*Perfect*.
Note also the use of the past continuous (he was coming), not the somewhat more terse simple past (he came). There's something nice about the continuous tense; it evokes the duration of orgasm which, admittedly, is short but which, also admittedly, can feel much longer on a subjective level and certainly on a fic level. Here, the 'ending' is placed at the beginning of the paragraph, and that also is a nice chiasmus (or inversion).

Orgasms are satisfying on two counts. They satisfy me on a physical level (although there are also squibs and half-assed orgasms but they get written very, very rarely -- I don't think I've ever read one) and part of the enjoyment of reading a good orgasm is the way it evokes the sensations and memories of a real one. But then they also satisfy me on an aesthetic level because they are that originary ending, the primal porn conclusion and so satisfyingly dramatic into the bargain.

They're the staple diet of my pron reading. They're the bread and butter of NC-17. So it's good to remember the fictive variety that is out there. :-) And it's been so much fun to assemble these, you have no idea!

...

Orgasms courtesy of

thejennabides,

eyebrowofdoom,

ukcalico,

azewewish,

badgermonkey,

helenish,

resonant8,

fabularasa,

cupiscent,

julad,

thamiris,

3jane,