Yes it is a tricky subject, the most rewritten parts of Scholarship were the parts where 'things happen'.
The question is what to include and what to omit? Am I trying for the bad sex award or something more subtle? There was also another overriding motive that led me to spend so much time on these parts was the desire not to produce an erotic novel but one that went deeper into what was going on in a relationship between two boys, part of which concerned their physical relationship.
It took numerous drafts before I felt I had the balance right between what was happening and what I wanted to say. That meant editing out a lot of other encounters as I felt things were getting repetitive. Whilst the other encounters were based on real life events, they did not take the story forward, in fact they waylaid the story and I felt gave the wrong impression about what the book was about.
I was reminded of this when re-watching one of my favourite films, Thomas Paul Anderson's 'Boogie Nights', which presumably had the same problem, how to make a mainstream film about the adult porn scene in California. Director Anderson used dialogue taken from real porn movies to make it real and on screen it sounds so stilted it is very funny as Amber says to our hero Dirk:
"Let me check on something"
She pulls down Dirk's pants,
"This is a giant cock."
That dialogue took some writing, totally banal yet it tells you what is happening so for most of the film, you know you are in the world of the adult entertainment industry without having to digest endless sex scenes.
