Ooh, Your Grace

The missus and I have slightly random TV habits and don’t generally just sit down to watch whatever the show-of-the-moment is. But I will say that I often go to bed earlier than Her Mightiness and she occasionally watches a bit of extra TV in that time. And during that first year of the pandemic, there was a week or two when I seemed to be going to bed early every night, the TV was always running late, and Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton seemed to colonise the ‘Continue Watching’ spot on our TV dashboard.

There was, of course, quite a lot of critical conversation about the series, reinvigorated by the release of Season 2. I was interested enough in all this that my wife and I ended up watching, or rewatching, the whole of Season 1.

I think the series did well in part because it involved a (gently managed) collision of two genres. Yes, the series looked roughly like your standard issue Jane Austen drama. Same dresses, same carriages, same houses, same reliable mixture of unmarried women and dashing dukes.

But where a BBC Jane Austen drama will aim for precision on language, clothes, settings, and the rest, Bridgerton simply didn’t care. Its string quartets played themes by Nirvana. The Regency landscape was suddenly full of people of every race and colour. The wisteria which was in full flower at the start of the season bloomed and bloomed and went on blooming week after week after month. The cinematography was often given a hyper-real tint, a child’s Cinderella remade for adults.

All this was done with the lightest of touches. The multicultural invasion of the Regency period was barely alluded to. It just was. The ever-blooming wisteria was never mentioned. An improbable monarch reigned happily over a world that never was.

This broad strategy works like a dream for any kind of storytelling. If a reader or viewer loves a genre, they’ll read plenty of it and it won’t be long before they find themselves wanting the same thing (because they love it) but done differently (because they’re human and humans, bless them, get bored more easily than any creature except the show-poodle and the Barbary macaque.) Mixing up your genre conventions is a delicious, subversive-feeling way of delivering that same-but-different sensation.

I’ve done it myself in my crime writing. The Deepest Grave took a standard-issue police procedural (the genre beloved of my core readers) and rammed it with a storyline revolving around King Arthur. The whole thing was just about a plausible procedural – I adhered to the basics, just as Bridgerton did – but the whole thing was plausible only if you closed your eyes to the shimmer of absurdity that flitted across every page.

However, it’s actually illegal to talk about Bridgerton without touching upon the sex scenes and making specific reference to (a) Regé-Jean Page’s torso and (b) the way those scenes were shot for the ‘female gaze’, not the male one.

Now, I’ll admit I don’t quite understand the fuss made about RJP’s torso – it looks much the same as my own. But the female gaze idea is really quite interesting, especially for the writer.

Through the whole series, which contained plenty of bedroom scenes, one almost never saw a naked breast. Not one of the main female characters were ever shown bare-breasted. During the sex scenes, they were either clothed or covered by sheets. The same was absolutely not true for RJP’s character, the Duke of Hastings. It’s not just that he was asked to reveal his pecs during bedroom scenes. The Duke had a merrily improbable friendship with a boxer that called for a whole lot of gratuitously bare-chested scenes as the two of them sparred.

So in part the female gaze idea is just a boring one. Men like boobs. Women like hunky torsos. So if you’re doing a show aimed mostly at women, offer fewer breasts and more torsos. Obvious, right?

But one of the things that struck me was that the radical female gaze of these sex scenes seemed mostly to feature … Daphne Bridgerton’s face. The single sexiest thing in the whole series wasn’t RJP’s pecs, it was the face of the central female character.

Where a series directed by a man might have concentrated on the act of sex, the physical activity, the female-led Bridgerton concentrated relentlessly on relationship. So when Daphne Bridgerton has sex for the first time, we see her shocked delight dawning in her face. That’s what’s sexy. That’s what’s emotionally charged. The act of sex was (nearly) always subservient to its emotional context, because the emotions were what mattered most. Again and again, the camera returned to Daphne Bridgerton, so we could read her emotional transitions.

That’s a good lesson for writers. We don’t have RJP’s torso to conjure with. Yes, we can describe such things, but in the end our written descriptions will fall short of what a TV-screen can show.

But emotions? Yep, we can do those, and we can do those better than Bridgerton, or anything else, because can climb inside the human brain and tell readers what we find. Sex, for the novelist, is a continuation of relationship, by other means. That’s it. Don’t think of sex as sex. For novelists, it’s a relationship that unfolds in the bedroom. Any physical activity is really just a way of nudging that relationship forward into new places. It’s a different type of exploration. That’s all.

Same with fights. I saw the lovely phrase recently that a fight scene should be thought of as a ‘conversation with fists’. Exactly so.

Fight scenes can become incredibly convoluted very fast. ‘He placed his right hand on my left shoulder and, as he did so, the blade in his free hand flashed up towards my thigh. I saw the move and countered by twisting my leg round to the tree behind me. At the same time, I …’ You can sort of imagine what’s going on there, but only by working hard at it. In a way, you decipher that kind of writing the way you decipher IKEA instructions – bit by bit, frowning, manipulating shapes inside your head.

As soon as you consider the fight as a conversation, everything becomes easier. You can drop the judo-manual type language, and simply focus on what’s happening in the relationship. There’ll be more room for dialogue. Less need of complicated explanation. The scene will breathe more. It’ll read with greater clarity. Your story won’t be interrupted by the fight; it’ll be moved nicely forwards.

A conversation with fists. A conversation with bedsheets. That’s how to write your sex and violence – and keep your reader glued to every word.