Writing Sex and Intimacy in Fiction | Sanmingzhi Workshop

Sanmingzhi is pleased to invite Melissa Wan, a published writer and a practice research PhD from University of Leeds who looks at the writing of sex and its intersection with disability to carry out a workshop with us: Writing Sex and Intimacy in Fiction.

Melissa develops her interest in researching writing sex in fiction since her study in UEA, where she held a symposium named “I’ll Show You Mine” to explore this difficult but important subject. She explained Why Sex Writing?

Sex is not something easily written about in fiction. Very often the act is reduced to a paragraph break or so dressed up in elaborate metaphor that you can barely find it. And in our internet age, sex has become permeated by the language of pornography or drenched in cliché which does little to get us any closer to what it's all about.

We believe the task of literature is to break down clichés and reveal something new about the world in which we live. So how can we, as writers, write sex in a way that reveals something true? How do ideas of shame, normalcy and representation affect our reading of sex-writing? What can we, as readers, writers and thinkers do to create a more sex-positive environment in literature? How does one technically approach the writing of sex, particularly outside of mainstream representations and traditional publishing?

In these three writing workshops we will unpick the writing of sex and intimacy in fiction, thinking not only about language and form but also about the politics of bringing sex to the page. Some of the themes we will cover include desire and domesticity, fantasy and pornography, writing sex from lived experience and linear narratives of orgasm. Workshops will be split into two; the first half will involve close reading and discussion of novel extracts or short stories which write sex, including work by the workshop tutor, and in the second half we will focus on writing exercises, generating writing and thinking about the techniques of craft. 

Workshop 1: the language of writing sex in English-language fiction: use of dialogue, interior monologue, implicit and explicit language, the use of metaphor or abstraction

Time: Apr 5th (Saturday) 1:00 -3:00 pm (GMT)

Workshop 2: playing with perspective: what difference does it make when writing sex in first, third – close third v omniscient – or second person?

Time: Apr 12th (Saturday) 1:00-3:00 pm (GMT)

Workshop 3: writing from life – how to mine personal experience when writing sex, how to protect oneself and others, the politics of writing sex

Time: Apr 19th (Saturday) 1:00-3:00 pm (GMT)

Breakdown of each workshop

1:00 – 1:40pm – Introduction and Close reading 

1:40 – 1:50pm – BREAK  

1:50 – 2:30pm – Writing Exercises  

2:30 – 2:40pm – BREAK  

2:40 – 3:00pm – Editing and Close 

This is an online course conducted with Zoom. 

Every workshop will assign creative writing homework, which in the end of the workshop will come into a full essay of 1,000 to 1,500 words. Reading materials provided.

Fees:  £170 for three workshops

No refund available after the first class begins.

Melissa Wan

The author of This Must Be Earth, published by Nightjar Press. Her short fiction has been published by independent presses, including Bluemoose Books, Dead Ink Books, Salt and Cōnfingō Publishing. She was awarded the Crowdfunded Writers’ Scholarship to study Creative Writing at UEA, and her practice research PhD at the University of Leeds looks at the writing of sex and its intersection with disability.

- MA Creative Writing: Prose Fiction, University of East Anglia (2018 – 19), Distinction

- MA Paris Studies, University of London Institute in Paris (2012 – 13), Distinction

- BA (Hons) Social Sciences, University of Manchester (2009 – 12), First Class