A friend had one suggestion after my first book was published.
“More sex.”
“They're folkloric short stories,” I protested.
He shrugged, saying there were a few instances at which he thought there could have been greater erotic elaboration. And, thinking about it now, perhaps he was right. Except I remember how long I wrestled with setting down the phrase “made love” in one of the stories. I tried out many variations – “slept together”, “had sex” – and while what I chose has an old-fashioned, almost Victorian ring to it, it was one by which I felt least embarrassed. After all, this would be read by parents. Older uncles and aunts.
More pertinently, I felt entirely incompetent to handle the intricacies of writing a sex scene.
How do you start? Where do you end? How much must be described? Also, if my character was male, how could I possibly know what it felt like for him?
Yet if you Google “How to Write a Sex Scene”, you’re offered about 2,18,00,000 results, so clearly I’m not alone in this amorous literary quandary. Our discomfort springs, I think, from the fact that sex, in real life, is when we are at our most vulnerable. Perhaps it’s only natural then for that fragility to spill over into one’s writing. No matter how wild, rumbustious, and raunchy the act you set out to describe, it’s a delicate, difficult task. One that writers, even good writers, sometimes fail at spectacularly.
There are few (if any) literary shortlists authors wouldn't wish to find themselves on, but I can’t imagine anyone bringing out the bubbly for the annual Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. As the title makes amply clear, it seeks to “honour” a writer who has “produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel” (some consolation there?).
This year's winner, reports The Guardian, "is Singer Morrissey’s reference to a 'bulbous salutation' in his debut novel has helped him win the bad sex award."
Established by Rhoda Koenig, a literary critic, and Auberon Waugh, then the editor of Literary Review, the awards have been going at it (terrible pun intended, of course) since 1993, honouring the likes of Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolf, the late Norman Mailer, Manil Suri, and most recently Ben Okri.
To Okri we may attribute this luminous opening sentence: “When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch and she came alight.” Wilbur Smith offered him stiff competition. His contribution read thus: “Her body was hairless. Her pudenda were also entirely devoid of hair. The tips of her inner lips protruded shyly from the vertical cleft. The sweet dew of feminine arousal glistened upon them.”
There are many reasons why sex scenes fail.
Using the word “pudenda”, for example. Or penis, balls, vagina, clit. As a rule, there is no need to name the genitals. One isn’t writing a biology textbook. Or discussing venereal disease with a doctor.
Consider the following sentence:
“He wet his fingers with his tongue and reached for my vagina.”
And this alternative:
“He wet his fingers with his tongue and reached for me.”
There is, as possibly all 2,18,00,000 results will tell you, great power in suggestion. In building it up slowly. In subtle hint and allusion. Like Paul Cezanne, master Modernist painter who accommodated vast white spaces on his canvas, allowing the colours to breathe. Allowing viewers to fill in using their own imagination. Likewise with readers.
Sex scenes fail also when descriptions read like a “How To” list.
George Pelecanos, for example, one of this year’s (strong) Bad Sex Award contenders, is immaculately clear about how his characters proceed: “She stroked my pole and took off my briefs, and I got between her and spread her muscular thighs with my knees and rubbed myself against her until she was wet as a waterslide, and then I split her.” (Also, please never call a penis a pole. Or say “and then I split her”.)
Sex is visceral. It engages all of our senses. It’s meant to be evocative. Don’t we remember the smell of our lovers? Sweet sweat, wild grass, apricots, salt. And how they sound. Guttural. Low. Gaspy. Even wide-mouthed and silent. Touch is distinct. It’s sandy, feathery, rough. Sight can be caught in mirrors, in shadows cast on walls. It’s not always about seeing each other directly.
In an effort to be descriptive, steer clear of euphemisms (unless you’re writing a parody and deliberately trying to be funny). No one mentioned this to Morrissey, a first-timer on this year’s shortlist with “his bulbous salutation”. Also none of the following: sausage pocket, lady passage, oyster pie, fish mitten, wet lettuce. No disco stick, pork sword, lollipop, Bilbo Baggins, cream bandit. Definitely not altar of love, bearded clam, hot rod.
It’s equally important not to resort to (inadvertently) hilarious comparisons. Nipples, for example, as Steve Almond writes in “How to Write a Sex Scene” for Utne Reader, are tricky. “They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and shades. They do not, as a rule, look like much of anything, aside from nipples.” No cherries. Cherry pits. Fried eggs. Dark berries. Ripe pomegranate. If you must compare, keep it fresh. Surprising. A back like a curved seashell. A chest like a young leaf. Do not, like Joshua Cohen, also a 2015 contender, say, for obvious reasons, “her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop”.
It’s terribly easy, as you’ve probably noticed, for sex scenes to trip into the comic.
For them to seem stilted and somehow unnatural. Perhaps because, as a writer, you are left, quite literally, with your characters in the flesh. And the emotions that sex, or the build up to sex, evokes are complicated – often what we grapple with ourselves.
As Jennie Nash says in “The Making of a Novel” for The Huffington Post, “everything else is stripped away… There's nowhere to hide.” You are in that room with your characters. Like us, they laugh, and think about groceries. There are odd noises. Sticky fluids. No porn cliché talk. And, if they happen at all, perennial orgasms. In a sex scene between two fictional people, it’s always a threesome. If you’re awkward, they’ll be awkward too.
Janice Pariat is the author of the novel Seahorse and the short story collection Boats on Land.
“More sex.”
“They're folkloric short stories,” I protested.
He shrugged, saying there were a few instances at which he thought there could have been greater erotic elaboration. And, thinking about it now, perhaps he was right. Except I remember how long I wrestled with setting down the phrase “made love” in one of the stories. I tried out many variations – “slept together”, “had sex” – and while what I chose has an old-fashioned, almost Victorian ring to it, it was one by which I felt least embarrassed. After all, this would be read by parents. Older uncles and aunts.
More pertinently, I felt entirely incompetent to handle the intricacies of writing a sex scene.
How do you start? Where do you end? How much must be described? Also, if my character was male, how could I possibly know what it felt like for him?
Yet if you Google “How to Write a Sex Scene”, you’re offered about 2,18,00,000 results, so clearly I’m not alone in this amorous literary quandary. Our discomfort springs, I think, from the fact that sex, in real life, is when we are at our most vulnerable. Perhaps it’s only natural then for that fragility to spill over into one’s writing. No matter how wild, rumbustious, and raunchy the act you set out to describe, it’s a delicate, difficult task. One that writers, even good writers, sometimes fail at spectacularly.
There are few (if any) literary shortlists authors wouldn't wish to find themselves on, but I can’t imagine anyone bringing out the bubbly for the annual Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. As the title makes amply clear, it seeks to “honour” a writer who has “produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel” (some consolation there?).
This year's winner, reports The Guardian, "is Singer Morrissey’s reference to a 'bulbous salutation' in his debut novel has helped him win the bad sex award."
Established by Rhoda Koenig, a literary critic, and Auberon Waugh, then the editor of Literary Review, the awards have been going at it (terrible pun intended, of course) since 1993, honouring the likes of Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolf, the late Norman Mailer, Manil Suri, and most recently Ben Okri.
To Okri we may attribute this luminous opening sentence: “When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch and she came alight.” Wilbur Smith offered him stiff competition. His contribution read thus: “Her body was hairless. Her pudenda were also entirely devoid of hair. The tips of her inner lips protruded shyly from the vertical cleft. The sweet dew of feminine arousal glistened upon them.”
There are many reasons why sex scenes fail.
Using the word “pudenda”, for example. Or penis, balls, vagina, clit. As a rule, there is no need to name the genitals. One isn’t writing a biology textbook. Or discussing venereal disease with a doctor.
Consider the following sentence:
“He wet his fingers with his tongue and reached for my vagina.”
And this alternative:
“He wet his fingers with his tongue and reached for me.”
There is, as possibly all 2,18,00,000 results will tell you, great power in suggestion. In building it up slowly. In subtle hint and allusion. Like Paul Cezanne, master Modernist painter who accommodated vast white spaces on his canvas, allowing the colours to breathe. Allowing viewers to fill in using their own imagination. Likewise with readers.
Sex scenes fail also when descriptions read like a “How To” list.
George Pelecanos, for example, one of this year’s (strong) Bad Sex Award contenders, is immaculately clear about how his characters proceed: “She stroked my pole and took off my briefs, and I got between her and spread her muscular thighs with my knees and rubbed myself against her until she was wet as a waterslide, and then I split her.” (Also, please never call a penis a pole. Or say “and then I split her”.)
Sex is visceral. It engages all of our senses. It’s meant to be evocative. Don’t we remember the smell of our lovers? Sweet sweat, wild grass, apricots, salt. And how they sound. Guttural. Low. Gaspy. Even wide-mouthed and silent. Touch is distinct. It’s sandy, feathery, rough. Sight can be caught in mirrors, in shadows cast on walls. It’s not always about seeing each other directly.
In an effort to be descriptive, steer clear of euphemisms (unless you’re writing a parody and deliberately trying to be funny). No one mentioned this to Morrissey, a first-timer on this year’s shortlist with “his bulbous salutation”. Also none of the following: sausage pocket, lady passage, oyster pie, fish mitten, wet lettuce. No disco stick, pork sword, lollipop, Bilbo Baggins, cream bandit. Definitely not altar of love, bearded clam, hot rod.
It’s equally important not to resort to (inadvertently) hilarious comparisons. Nipples, for example, as Steve Almond writes in “How to Write a Sex Scene” for Utne Reader, are tricky. “They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and shades. They do not, as a rule, look like much of anything, aside from nipples.” No cherries. Cherry pits. Fried eggs. Dark berries. Ripe pomegranate. If you must compare, keep it fresh. Surprising. A back like a curved seashell. A chest like a young leaf. Do not, like Joshua Cohen, also a 2015 contender, say, for obvious reasons, “her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop”.
It’s terribly easy, as you’ve probably noticed, for sex scenes to trip into the comic.
For them to seem stilted and somehow unnatural. Perhaps because, as a writer, you are left, quite literally, with your characters in the flesh. And the emotions that sex, or the build up to sex, evokes are complicated – often what we grapple with ourselves.
As Jennie Nash says in “The Making of a Novel” for The Huffington Post, “everything else is stripped away… There's nowhere to hide.” You are in that room with your characters. Like us, they laugh, and think about groceries. There are odd noises. Sticky fluids. No porn cliché talk. And, if they happen at all, perennial orgasms. In a sex scene between two fictional people, it’s always a threesome. If you’re awkward, they’ll be awkward too.
Janice Pariat is the author of the novel Seahorse and the short story collection Boats on Land.
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