So, You’re Ready to Write a Sex Scene

Whether you pen fiction or essays, eventually your human characters are going to want to have sex. While coupling is an instinct to ensure a species survives, for humans, it’s far more, mostly because our brains are the largest sex organ we possess. Sex can be existential if we procreate to leave something of ourselves behind when we die. It can feel sinful, nasty, embarrassing, terrifying, pleasant, loving, unifying, and downright like the best thing ever invented. So, why is it so difficult to put it down on paper?

It isn’t just emerging writers who grapple with this. Famous ones do, too. In 1993, the Literary Review began bestowing a Bad Sex in Fiction Award each year. Editors explained the award is meant to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."

I am pretty sure Norman Mailer wasn’t too happy to win in 2007 for this excerpt from The Castle in the Forest: “Klara turned head to foot and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement.”

Or Christopher Bollen in 2017, for The Destroyers: “The skin along her arms and shoulders are different shades of tan like water stains in a bathtub. Her face and vagina are competing for my attention, so I glance down at the billiard rack of my penis and testicles.”

Or Stephen King, nominated in 2011 for this interlude from 11.22.63: She opened her eyes and looked up at me with curiosity and hopefulness. “Is it over, or is there more?”

“A little more,” I said. “I don’t know how much. I haven’t been with a woman in a long time.”

It turned out there was quite a bit more … At the end she began to gasp. “Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear, dear God, oh sugar!”

Many times, we overthink sex scenes, believing our readers will assume we are writing from experience, causing clunky, mechanical scenes emanating from our shyness about the whole subject. Sometimes, we underthink it, because describing how Part A is inserted into Part B is nothing more than an operator’s manual or a blueprint if you are writing pornography instead of a complex story with flawed and loveable characters that your readers want to know better.

Sometimes we pick metaphors that may have some resemblance to a body part, making us more comfortable writing about an innocuous substitute for our sex organs. That doesn’t work either. For example, fruits and vegetables are not good metaphors for breasts and penises. Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel laureate in literature, was widely panned for comparing women’s breasts to ripe mangoes. John Updike was also criticized for a passage in his 1994 novel Brazil that likens a penis to a yam. These metaphors may, on a basic level, resemble a highly personal body part, but the core flaw is nothing else about the comparison is applicable. “Her breasts were like ripe cantaloupes” implies the character has large, firm breasts, but a woman’s skin, like the rind covering the pulp, is not corrugated and grey. You should never bite into the succulent pulp of a breast for fear of being accused of cannibalism or lycanthropy, making such comparisons awkward.

The trick to good sex scenes then is to delve into your characters’ brains. You must interpret how they would think about sex, how they are feeling as they engage in sex, and their fears and hopes in the aftermath. Communicate this to your readers with limited and appropriate metaphors. Close your eyes and imagine. An 18-year-old virgin on her wedding night in 1950s rural Alabama is going to view sex a lot differently than a 30-year-old gay man arriving in 1970s New York to experience everything available. The 50-year-old divorcee rejoining the dating scene reacts differently to a sexual encounter than a couple married 60 years who consider it a way to stay connected, knowing their deaths will separate them soon.

So, musings aside, here is my sex scene from my now finished book, French Kiss. The protagonist is a 40-something American falling in love with a French man she met online and is now visiting in Paris for the first time:

“It was late afternoon, and the sun was already slanting lower in the sky, lazy blue-grey shadows beginning to fill the bedroom’s corners. Frédéric sat on the edge of the king-sized bed, washed and wearing a burgundy, jacquard silk robe, his scarf rakish around his neck, leather slippers on his feet. I could hear Cheryl on my shoulder,” Oy vey, it’s Hugh Hefner!”

I also washed and changed into my silk kimono, wrapping and belting it now as I knelt in the center of the bed, trying to look a little bit like Rita Hayworth. Except, I was almost twice Rita’s age when she starred in “Strawberry Blonde”. I had lived in this skin for more than forty years, and it was not the unlined, vibrant skin it had been twenty years ago. We were all beautiful then. Now, I had a little mileage on me. Would I even remember how to do this? And with my limited French vocabulary, in what language was I supposed to make love? Why didn’t I listen in seventh grade French class when Miss Durkin admonished me that I needed to? Stop, I thought. Just stop overthinking this.

“It’s been a long time,” I managed to say.

“We have much time, Darling. If you wish, I will hold you close to me and you could nap in my arms,” Frédéric said. I nodded. He rose from the bed, kicked off his slippers, and lowered the window blinds, leaving pale, milky light to seep between the slats, striping the room. We lay in each other’s arms, with only the sound of the whooshing silk around our entwined legs, with only the feel of his fingers caressing my face and hair, his lips pressing softly, then hard against mine. We lay like that a long time.

I could feel my pulse quicken as his caresses moved slowly to my neck and shoulders, the kimono slipping from them under his insistent hands. Finally, he untied my belt and I untied his, our robes falling open, mine beneath us, his above, like a silk cocoon in which we were the butterflies. Not butterflies, though. They are too gentle and innocent for what I felt we were in that moment. Frédéric kneeled between my legs and dashed his robe and scarf to the floor. My kimono lay open under me, the little bit of milky light igniting the charmeuse into languid copper flames. The striped light fell over us, and we were striped too, like tigers. Tigers, he and I, soft animals, he with hard edges, me with none. Soft, soft animals, his lapping tongue lighting little fires as he moved up my thighs, little fires like sizzling embers shooting from the copper flames beneath me. I arched and pulled the kimono from under me, tossing it to the floor.

“I don’t want it to get wet.”

“Shhh,” Frédéric said. “Just lie still while I make love to you. I have dreamed of our moment.”

“I want to please you, too, Darling.”

“But you are. You will see.”

I did see. We were another gift to each other, wrapped in silk but opened now in the center of the bed. I did as he asked and he did as I asked and the pleasure washed over us, scenting the room like the sea, the taste of salt in our kisses, waves of pleasure crashing and receding and crashing again on the shore, receding one last time like a sigh. Finally, we napped in each other’s arms until the milky light turned dark and light again.