The best rule for how to write sex scenes is this one. Don’t.
This is good advice and I sincerely believe writers should take it. Not because sex is a bad or sex scenes are inherently bad. But because the written word is singularly well adapted to making the act of love sound ridiculous.
This advice applies to descriptions of sex acts only. The thoughts and emotional states of characters during sex scenes – arousal or attraction or doubt or embarrassment or worry or gratitude or relief or vanity or self-satisfaction, what have you – all these are fine, in fact they can be pretty darn interesting if they illuminate character or situation. It’s the who did what to who stuff that gets you in trouble.
Still think sex scenes can be sexy? I would at least encourage writers you know to follow these 7 rules for how to write sex scenes in novels.
1. Don’t include costumes, props, toys, food used for non-nutritive purposes, interior decoration, or multiple participants
If you can’t make the basics – two people, naked, bed, a little Barry White – compelling, then all this other stuff isn’t going to save you and just highlights your desperation.
2. Don’t include dialogue or phonetic transcriptions of love noises in sex scenes
This one is obvious and is an absolute prohibition, unless you’re playing the scene for comedy, in which case, pile on. Authors should avoid “Oh. Oh! Oooohh!”s for the same reason they avoid “Ha, ha, ha!”s. The effect of these words on the reader is the exact opposite of their meaning.
3. Don’t create orgies in mansions where everyone is wearing masks
What the heck is up with this? Maybe it is Arthur Schnitzler’s fault, or Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s, or Anne Declos’, but whoever is responsible, it is far past time for the whole business to STOP.
4. Don’t drag the sex scene out
Quickies are definitely best. A few well chosen words beat long paragraphs every time. If you write too much, you’ll fall into cliché or you’ll start using complicated metaphors that will earn you a nomination for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
5. Don’t give cute names to body parts
In the French lesbian erotic classic, Therese and Isabelle, the two young girls call each other’s clitorises “pearls”. This is pretty good once, but they keep doing it, and soon the repetition is so cloying it makes you want to shoot yourself (if the overly earnest tone of the novel doesn’t push you over the edge first).
6. Don’t write sex scenes if you’re an old man
This rule is important. Older male writers seem to write horny books, and the older they get, the hornier the books get. You suspect old men write these books to compensate for impotence. A little restraint will make readers believe the writer is still in his vigorous prime. I’m not going to name a lot of names here, but Philip Roth should think about it.
7. Don’t make it the greatest sex ever
Why is it that everyone in books always has mind-blowing sex? People do have transcendental sex on occasion, sure, but in between they have lots of okay sex. Or sex that isn’t working too well because they’re distracted by the strange noise the dishwasher is making. Or sex that plain just doesn’t work at all. (I understand this happens based on television commercials.) Want to make a real impression on your readers? Write about mediocre sex.
I recently read and reviewed a book by someone I know and was really put off by the sex scenes (and I am no prude). I realized that they were cliche and boring – the book would have been much better off without them.
Your post puts in a concise form everything I was thnking about from reading her book. Very useful… thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Bill. Words can handle almost any subject well … except sex and (the other one that comes to mind) religious ecstasy.
Peter,
Great post. I’ve never written a sex scene – I just make them up in my mind 😉
By the way, my apologies for not replying to your comment on my blog. I can’t believe didn’t do that – I had started to write a response but must never have actually hit ‘reply’! Mea culpa.
Hi Samir. No need to apologize about the reply. I’m glad you liked the post, and hope you like future ones.
I once attended a writers’ critiquing session, during which this man read out a sex scene from his novel as if reading an extract from a car maintenance manual. It dawned on me why his wife always looked so miserable.
Hilarious. That sounds like a scene I would like to read (as long as we had access to the wife’s internal commentary, too).
Hi, Peter. This is a great blog (and thanks for following mine).
I am not a BIG writer as you guys are; I write from time to time for, don’t look now, release. Ha! ^_^
Cheers!
I thought your post on “Oranges” was very good, but only had time to read it quickly, and wanted to make sure I found it again. I also thought it likely I would want to read your other posts. So, you’re welcome for the follow, but … you earned it.
Thank you for writing this post! I agree entirely, particularly with Guideline #5. I see this happen in novels and I end up rolling my eyes and “fast forwarding” to the end of the sex scene just to continue the story because the repetition is indeed cloying!
You’re welcome, and thanks for the good feedback. When someone says, “Words can’t express…” I always find myself replying (mentally), “Oh yes they can express…!” But when it comes to sex, I think, that isn’t true.
Great post! I particularly like #7 – sometimes, it almost feels like romance/erotica writers are trying to make me feel inadequate. I love that scene in “Hot Tub Time Machine” where the young girlfriend says something along the lines of: “Last night was awesome. You lasted almost five minutes!” Funny & so much more realistic than ten orgasms while making love on the beach.
That scene is funny, but a little less so for men.
Well, you probably know I’ve written a fair amount of steamy stuff – used to write erotica for Random House, back before they were making silly money out of very bad Twilight fanfiction.
This is a great list. Definitely a million times no transcribed sex noises, weird names for body parts and I have no idea who is doing masked mansion sex parties but I agree with you – they should stop it at once.
The mansion was “Eyes Wide Shut” based on the Arthur Schnitzler. Getting paid for steamy stuff sounds good. Where do I sign up? Do you get paid extra if it is lightly ironic?
You don’t. Random House closed down the label I used to write for back in 2009. And it wasn’t great money to tell the truth – most of us did it because we wanted to write fun dirty stories for other women to read.
I’m told the money these days is in ‘Kindleporn’ – grab yourself a pseudonyn, bang out some dirty stories, put them up for sale in the Kindle store and collect your cheques. E-reader porn is hugely popular (It’s a big reason why e-readers took off, let’s face it.) and when you’re selling 6000 word stories as ‘books’ then it takes no time at all to build up a catalogue. I know several people who are keeping up with their rent payments and better, just from online smut.
Kindleporn would make an interesting ePublishing post, if one could get some statistics on which to hang an opinion. I’m not sure I’d be a good “dirt” writer. I have turned over in my mind writing a porn parody and then seeing if anyone noticed it WAS a parody. But so far, in that field, inspiration has not struck.
I can dig out some more resources if you want to write about Kindleporn, but this podcast is a good start.
http://thefpl.us/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=128%3Airregular-1-kindleporn-authors
I realize this is quite an old post–hoping you’ll see this comment nonetheless.
It occurred to me recently that I don’t believe I’ve ever read a truly great sex scene, largely following the rationale detailed in your excellent post. But I wonder. . .can it be done? Do you have any examples of books/passages/authors that DO get it right?
Hi Hannah: WordPress is good at notifying me about new comments, and yours showed right up. Keeping in mind that the definition of what’s “sexy” is about as subjective and personal as an idea can get, nothing comes to mind for me. Intensity of feeling can be sexy in literature, I think. So Molly Bloom thinking about Bloom at the end of Ulysses works pretty well. Maybe the tiniest snippet of a description, some detail that stands in for the whole experience, can also work. I’m thinking of Madame Bovary shedding her dress during one of her assignations with Leon. But once you get to the who did what to who stuff, the play by play god forbid, and it just doesn’t work. For me. I’m glad you found this post. It’s always been one of my favorites, although I worry I went a little too far, and hit the topic a little too hard.
The subjective nature of literary evaluation acknowledged (I’m still glad I asked, as you’re certainly better read than I), I think I’m forced to agree with you, though I’d like a writer to come along and prove us both wrong. Even sex scenes that are neither overbearingly vulgar nor off-puttingly clinical always seem disjointed from the rest of their novels, as though written in a vacuum and spliced in. Given the complexity and infinitude of sexual experience, it seems there ought to be some perfect balance of implicit and explicit that captures at least one moment of it without succumbing to the weaknesses you name (and/or others).
Also, perhaps it’s worth noting that I’ve spent hours today reading your entire blog (yes, every last post), and I consider my time supremely well spent. Yours is the type of blog I’d aspire to write, if to blog I aspired. Matters as they are, it’s one hell of a great read.
Thank you for the many good compliments! For a fella like me, they are always most welcome, and mostly of the time … a little thin on the ground. At the risk of being blatantly self-promotional, you’ve probably noticed that I have an eBook (“Queen of the Nude”) which is my answer of how to write a sex book, which is basically to not write one. The first full chapter is here: https://petergalenmassey.com/category/queen-of-the-nude-excerpts/ If you like that, the full Kindle or Nook version is $0.99, priced to not put a barrier between me and a reader. If I’ve been to blatantly self-promotional, I apologize. P.
Not at all. If I’d written a novel, especially a very good one (judging by the excerpts I read and very much enjoyed–a critic who’s also a novelist is among the most admirable personages), I’d probably promote it much more assiduously than you have! While the price is a steal and one I’d gladly pay, I don’t own an e-reader of any kind. 😦 I just turned 25, but you’d never know it based on my luddite reading preferences. I wonder if a family member would let me borrow her iPad for a few days…
Despite the fact my day job is marketing, I don’t much enjoy doing it for myself. It’s also the fact that I enjoy writing much more than the kind of networking I really need to do.