Welcome, sexy sequelites, to this week’s Sequel Country. In this week’s proudly upstanding column I will, if you consent, talk about sex and its place in the modern novel. As G.B. Shaw said,
It is the sexless novel that should be distinguished; the sex novel is now normal.
This is of course true, especially in the last 60 years, since the end of censorship in the UK. Sex scenes and realistic discussion of sexuality are considered normal, at least if they are justified by deepening the characters and their stories to include this important part of adult life. Gratuitous sex still tends to be ridiculed, and the Bad Sex Awards attempt to curb the worst excesses of novelists inflicting bad writing on innocent readers. Actually, I find them very helpful; examples, good and bad, are useful, and Bad Sex provides some enlightening examples of what constitutes bad sex writing in the opinion of its judges, plus a little extra motivation to do better. In this column I’ll provide some good examples and suggest half a dozen pitfalls to avoid.
One option is always just not to mention the sex; and yet, since coyness and prudishness abruptly went out of fashion in 1960, when writing stories that include sexual relationships a writer needs to find a way of writing about sex in a way that works for their particular novel and its style. (Pitfall 1: the sex scenes stand out because they’re written in a way that jars against the style of the rest of the book.)
The Bad Sex Awards quite often feature famous writers, and I suspect this is because they’re less carefully edited – publishers will trust the successful writer’s instincts more, but this can go badly wrong. It can be a temptation to just write down one’s own fantasies, since that’s both satisfying and easy, but it’s also easy to go wrong with this approach, writing something that is way too long or detailed, or doesn’t ring true with other things the characters say or do in the novel (pitfall 2: just write down your personal fantasies). I’ve done this myself, but luckily had the wisdom to cut the whole scene in editing. A related trap is that readers will tend to assume that if you write about something specific, that it’s something you, the author, approve of. And indeed some authors clearly do reveal a lot more about their own tastes, in sex scenes, than they probably intended (pitfall 3: unintentionally revealing more of yourself than you meant to). In writing sex, you need to be very aware of what the reader will see as normal, because if you include any kinks or fetishes and readers don’t happen to share them, they will associate them with you (pitfall 4: not making it clear enough that the characters are doing something that they, not you, like). This is an area where the modern role of a “sensitivity reader” can help, objectively letting an author know how their words are likely to be received.
How, then, to write sex well? Here are a few examples from novels I happened to have within arm’s reach of my desk.
Firstly, in The Best Thing That Can Happen To A Croissant, a few chapters in, the protagonist (who is a hard-boiled private investigator sort of type) visits a prostitute. The encounter is described in immense detail – this is about a thousand words into the scene, including two paragraphs of watching the sex worker wash herself:
‘Are you comfortable?’ I asked. She nodded yes, as serious and focussed as before, observing my journey across her breasts with a kind of relaxed curiosity. I slid my right hand down toward the centre of her sex. She separated her right leg, which was resting on my foot, allowing me to extend the full length of my finger across her mound, cold and damp from the prophylactic rinse she had just given herself. Little by little, my mouth still playing games with her spiky nipples, I tilted my index finger to the side and pressed deeper, hoping to shift open her lips. That was when I began to feel a much warmer mound, a delicious swelling down below. I selected one of the condoms on the night table at random, put it on (not without a certain predictable difficulty, which is overcome by ignoring the enclosed instructions) and began to mount her, rocking back and forth as she adjusted her position to accommodate me. I could feel my heart beating at the base of my prick and I tried to keep it from plunging directly into the crevice between her legs by raising up a bit and situating my balls in her little nest, simply enjoying the moment, the feeling of just being there, between her open legs. At moments like these I often feel an overwhelming urge to declare unconditional love, but I contained myself […]
You can see why this sex scene runs to many pages: it’s full of unnecessary detail about whose leg was resting on which foot and so on. The author (just) gets away with it by reminding us occasionally that he’s playing it for laughs, with the self-deprecating jibes about the “predictable difficulty” of putting on a condom and the urge to declare his love. Even so, an inch by inch description of a sex act is trying the patience of the reader and I think it’s a common problem (pitfall 5: going on a bit). Still, going for lots of realistic detail, showing that the character is paying close attention, is a valid choice. Another good example of super-detailed realism would be the blow-job in New Street Station early in Rainbow Milk, the novel which I mentioned briefly in part 7 on dialect; it’s the most amazingly visceral description of cock sucking that I’ve ever read.
You can describe sex in a lot fewer words. In Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl, we are less than 20 pages in when he has sex for the second time, and this is almost the whole encounter:
Maisie stood in the dark bathroom doorway and pulled on Paul’s corduroy arm. Better to be in snug places. He closed the door behind him and Maisie pushed him back up against it, mouth on mouth. Paul handled her tits through her shirt, then underneath. He had his hand down her pants without thinking, fingers up inside her, and out, and up, until she came all over his fingers. He covered her yelps with his mouth and wet kissing.
He has sex again, another couple of pages on - with so much of it, you can see why each encounter needs to be described so sparingly. It’s the opposite of the approach above in terms of brevity, and yet they’re both extremely explicit. What matters is that they suit the tone of their respective novels and the characters and the way they think about sex.
Of course, going for the unflinchingly explicit is only one possible approach to writing sex. Tales of the City, which I’ll be writing more about next week, goes the opposite way: at first, sex always happens off-stage. A lonely DeDe persuades the hot Chinese delivery man not to rush off, and in the next scene she’s having her second bath of the afternoon. Michael meets Jon at a skating rink, and in his next scene he’s waking with “cottonmouth” and brushing his teeth with the bathroom door closed so he won’t be heard. Little by little, in later books, we start to get a sentence or so describing the actual sex act, but only for the heterosexual characters. I’m sure that’s a deliberate choice, perhaps to keep the books’ appeal broad, but maybe also to promote the idea that gay men could be romantic which at the time was still widely disputed (including by some gay men). It’s not until the fifth book in the series that we see actual body parts, and when we do, it’s rather poetic, but still also down-to-earth like the characters:
Thack stretched out, arching his ivory neck. ‘Look at that fucking moon. Is that beautiful or what?’
It was full and fluorescent, a real troublemaker. Michael stretched out next to Thack, leaned back on his elbows. There was something supremely sexy about a man who planned ahead like this, who wore his options like a tool belt, ready for any emergency.
Thack took another toke, then stubbed out the joint. He rolled his head over lazily and gazed at Michael. ‘I thought this would never happen.’
Michael smiled at him.
‘You’re a great guy’, said Thack.
‘You too.’ Michael turned on his side and flicked open the pearly snaps on Thack’s denim shirt.
His mouth went straight for the left nipple, pink and proud as a tiny cock.
Afterwards, they lay there motionless, listening to the music. A snail’s trail of semen still glimmered on Thack’s stomach. He kept his hand cupped gently around Michael’s cock, as if it were a wounded bird trying to escape.
Poetic language can help a sex scene a lot, so long as it’s done with a light touch (it could quickly get absurd). Probably the first explicit gay sex I read in a novel was in The Swimming Pool Library, which I mentioned in part 30 on class, which has this flashback half-way through explaining that at the protagonist’s posh school, prefects were called librarians, and going on to describe what the prefects got up to:
On high summer nights when it was light enough at midnight to read outside, three or four of us would slip away from the dorms and go with an exaggerated refinement of stealth to the pool. In the changing-room serious, hot No. 6 were smoked, and soap, lathered in the cold, starlit water, eased the violence of cocks up young bums. Fox-eyed, silent but for our breathing and the thrilling, gross little rhythms of sex - which made us gulp and grope for more - we learnt our stuff. Then, noisier, enjoining each other to silence, we slid into the pool and swam through the underwater blackness where the cleaning device, humming faintly, swung round the sucking tentacle of its hose.
I think that’s beautiful writing. The water is “starlit”, the young men are “fox-eyed” and to round the scene off we have the “tentacle” which is so obviously there as a metaphor for them swinging their hoses around that it adds a touch of humour, or you could read it as a light touch of postmodern irony showing that the author knows what he’s doing. I aspire to write this well.
As a final example, How Far Can You Go charts the love lives of a group of Catholics in the 1950s who start out as students (so it’s a clear forerunner of what is now called the “new adult” genre). It has a whole chapter of sex when they all lose their virginities (except for the one gay character, who apparently never gets a sex life). It’s described in a straightforward, open, unashamed, matter-of-fact tone that matches the rest of the narrative.
They undressed very decorously with the light off, but then they collided with each other in the dark and one thing led to another and before long they were in, or on, the same bed, and Tessa’s nightdress was up round her armpits and she was moaning and writhing with pleasure in his arms. […] Edward himself was quite out of his depth. Feeling the pressure of an imminent and unstoppable orgasm, he was filled with shame and panic at the thought of spilling his seed all over Tessa and the bedclothes. In his perturbation it seemed to him that their sin would be less, certainly his own humiliation would be less, if they performed the act properly. Desperately he rolled on top of Tessa and, with a fluke thrust at the right place and angle, entered her in a single movement. Tessa uttered a loud cry that, if it was heard in that house, was probably not recognized; and Edward, groaning into the pillow, pumped rivers of semen into her willing womb.
While not stylish or poetic, this is also not cringe-making; there are no genitals mentioned, and the encounter is described with pace. The psychology is also believable (though, typically of David Lodge, only really tells the male point of view.) What this has in common with the other examples I’ve given is that none of them go in for metaphors as a way of avoiding the explicit description of genitals and what they’re doing (pitfall 6: ridiculous metaphors). This is exactly what tends to get you in the Bad Sex Awards, as the writer Monica Ali noted in a Guardian interview in May 2022. She offered the best advice I know for writing sex scenes:
Stay away from the metaphors and from the mechanical descriptions.
I thought this was so good (and pithy) I wrote it on a post-it note so that I’d remember it, and maybe you’ll remember that you got it from me.
Like with condoms, there’s no “one size fits all” approach to sex scenes in novels. If you have them at all, they need to suit the style of the novel, as well as its aims – what I think of as its “manifesto”, as I explained in part 8 the synopsis, its storytelling goals. I’ll leave you with that thought as I set off on a different direction into Sequel Country, where I hope our paths will meet again next week.