During the writing of certain stories, there inevitably come occasions when your characters want to take their clothes off—and suddenly, you, the unsuspecting writer, are obligated to write a nude scene.
This can come as quite a shock to the uninitiated. One minute your characters are talking politely over dinner, then suddenly they’re testing mattress springs at the nearest hotel, or steaming up the windows of a ‘97 Buick Skylark.
Nudity can worm its way into the narrative in other ways as well. A character might suddenly decide she wants to take a shower in the middle of the day, so she can sit under a hissing stream of water and cry. Or, it might turn out that mild-mannered real-estate broker Jerry Parker likes to exercise in the nude in front of a mirror. Or, it might turn out that the lithe young heroine you’ve dreamed up has a mental condition that makes fabric feel like sandpaper on her alabaster skin, so she can’t stand to wear clothes.
Whatever the motivation, when the garments come off, it is the writer’s responsibility to continue telling the character’s story sans a protective buffer of cotton and polyester. When this happens, the writer must weigh the character’s dignity against the reader’s desire for her to have no dignity whatsoever. Or, if the character is male, the writer must decide which body parts should bulge the most—belly, biceps, or . . . ?
The characters themselves do not always make these choices easy. You might have a character who wants to take their clothes off in early January, right after the holidays, so they’ve packed on an extra ten or fifteen pounds without even realizing it. Or, you might have a character who looks fine with a shirt on, but when he takes it off there turns out to be a nasty rash on his back. It could be impetigo, shingles, hives, rubella, allergies—you don’t know. All you know is that it’s gross to look at, and now you have to describe it, because the idiot in your story decided to take his shirt off.
But even if their skin is smooth and young and clean, writing an effective nude scene can still be problematic. The reason every New Yorker story starts with a detailed description of the subject’s clothes—“he wore a houndstooth vest over a sky-blue Canali dress shirt and a gold Ferragamo tie, with Melton Oxford shoes so shiny he could see himself . . .”—is that the clothes themselves say something about the person who is wearing them. But if the person you are writing about isn’t wearing any clothes, you have to say something else about them—or worse, you have to start describing their thoughts.
Now, inner dialogue is part of the stock in trade of fiction writers. Many writers can go on for pages about a character’s thoughts and feelings while the character herself is doing nothing more than sipping a cup of tea. But take that same character’s clothes off and put her in a room with an attractive man, and there is a very real danger that her thoughts will wander into the uncomfortable territory of her deepest, darkest desires. Readers are always keen to know this stuff, but it’s the writer who must shine a light into the forbidden recesses of a character’s mind, and it’s the writer who has to deal with the consequences of what he or she finds there.
It’s not always pretty. There could be child abuse in the character’s past, or the unwanted attentions of a creepy uncle. Maybe they are shy about their own body. Maybe they have reason to be shy about it. Maybe they’ve had a double mastectomy. Maybe they have a war wound that blew their pecker off. You just don’t know until you get down there what you’re going to find, and by then it’s often too late. You may have thought your female chanteuse with the lovely singing voice was seducing her high-school sweetheart—but no, it turns out she’s from another planet altogether, one where they eat high-school sweethearts for lunch. Then you’re stuck with an alien teen-muncher in what was supposed to be a romantic coming-of-age story. And it all happened because they couldn’t keep their clothes on!
Describing the human body itself isn’t much fun, either. When you think about it—and, unfortunately, that’s what writers with naked characters must do—the human body is rather disgusting. On the outside, it’s just a bunch of folds and flaps of skin that secrete all sorts of liquids and ooze. And on the inside, it’s a lot of tubes and pumps and filters that don’t always work right, sometimes forcing things that should stay inside the body to shoot suddenly and violently out of it. Trying to make this repugnant contraption sound appealing in print can test the most eloquent of writers, and the English language is not always up to the challenge. Even the most compelling human body parts have ugly names (too ugly to mention here), and the euphemisms for these body parts aren’t much better.
Then there’s the fact that characters who are not wearing clothes inevitably want to engage in sexual intercourse—which, believe me, is precisely as distasteful as it sounds. Again, when this happens, it is the writer who must face the horror head on and render the scene however he or she sees it. Writers cannot flinch from this responsibility, because readers expect courage and honesty from the teller of the story, even if the teller is himself dismayed by what his characters are doing. Though many writers have tried to make it so, there is nothing poetic about the heaving biology of human lust, and there is nothing more regrettable than two or more characters who insist on disrobing and fornicating just because they can, not because they should.
There are always exceptions, of course. It’s rare, but sometimes it’s the writer who wants a character’s clothes to come off, and it’s the character in the story who is reluctant. Not all characters want to do nude scenes. Some will only bare their skin on the condition that doing so is integral to the story and shows their character in a positive light—usually candles, torches, or under the glow of a full moon. In those cases, it is the writer’s duty to convince the character that all of these conditions have been met, and that appearing nude in the story will not tarnish their reputation or cause their parents to think ill of them. Describing the scene as “tasteful” or “artistic” usually helps, and it never hurts to reassure them that no one will be peeking over your shoulder while the scene is being drafted.
My personal advice when it comes to nude scenes is to avoid them if at all possible. And on those occasions when such a scene can’t be dodged, my advice is to get it over and done with as quickly and efficiently as you can. The sooner your characters have their clothes back on, the sooner you can get on with the story. And that’s what people want—a story—not a bunch of pointless digressions into the bedroom or florid descriptions of thrashing human flesh, slapping and writhing like a freshly caught fish on a boat made of jello.
Nobody wants to wallow in that kind of depravity. But as writers, we must sometimes take our readers to places we would rather not go ourselves, and allow them to experience things that we ourselves find distasteful. Sometimes, a writer’s sensibilities must be shelved for the sake of the story—and, like it or not, this is the case with characters who cannot—or will not—keep their clothes on.