Author James McCreet looks at the sticky topic of writing sex scenes, with advice for writers who don’t want passion to end up being conveyed in purple prose
CONTENT WARNING Includes explicit material
Martin Amis has said that sex is hard to write because it tends to the particular rather than the universal. Everybody’s experience is different. ‘It may be,’ he wrote, ‘that good sex is something fiction just can’t do – like dreams . . . Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.’ Indeed, The Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award has been won by many notable writers otherwise known for their fine prose. It’s a minefield. But why?
One of the problems is exactly what Amis identified: it’s very difficult to describe sensations that are highly personal and subjective using mere words. Writing sex puts into words the things we usually don’t say. There are no words in sex – only deeply felt physical and mental experiences. As soon as we seek words to label them, we’re turning the sex into a fixed and universal thing and separating an organic, holistic act into ordered sentences.
There’s also the ever-present risk of inadvertent parody or comedy. If the tone is not exactly right and completely consistent, the reader will guffaw. If the choice of language is not precise and judicious, the sex may seem vulgar or dirty when it’s supposed to be titillating. Worse still, it may seem numbly mechanical. There are so many ways to get it wrong. Let’s look at a few in detail (and how to address them).
Choosing nomenclature
Dick. Cock. Johnson. Schlong. Manhood. Rod. Member. Almost all of them look silly on the page – either uneasy euphemisms or vulgar slang. If you try to be more poetic (stalk, wand, sceptre), you risk being ridiculous. If you opt for the biological (vagina, penis and scrotum), the sex might look like a school textbook. Many writers avoid naming the parts, going for phrases like ‘He slipped inside her’ or ‘She grasped him firmly’, which minimise the naming threat and allow the reader some interpretative leeway.
Another problem is word association. ‘Moist’ could describe a nice lemon drizzle cake. ‘Stiff ’ could describe a swollen window frame. ‘Swollen’ could describe a twisted ankle. There’s very little vocabulary that’s sex-specific. We have to choose it from the rest of the lexicon. Some writers try to get around the naming problem by recreating physical sensation through simile or metaphor. This is from Nobel prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez: ‘. . . her entire body resonated inside with an arpeggio, an
