Writing a sex scene is an impossible task

It’s a strange career path that can have you debating the use of a throbbing member before your second cup of coffee. But such is the lot (and the minimum caffeine requirement) of a writer about to enter the perilous territory of the sex scene.

Lyrical and metaphorical, or brutally realistic? Queasy Rothian coupling or jolly Cooperesque romp? Either carries a risk your reader will clench their toes, drop your book in horror, or worse, fall about in appalled hysterics. For as novelist Martin Amis observed last weekend, translating the act into print is an impossible task. “It’s not that someone’s going to hit upon the right way [of describing it],” he said. “There is no right way.”

The lengthy sex scene in his book The Pregnant Widow was easy to write, he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival, “because it was… anachronistically pornographic for plot reasons”. It is where emotion meets sex on the page, he said, that it becomes “impossible” for the writer and “embarrassing” for the reader.

I have some sympathy for this view. In nine novels about the intricacies of human relationships I have struggled to find a balance between laying bare the erotic fulfilment of two lovers, and the squeamish urge to type: “and … then he closed the door behind her”.

The most pressing issue is, of course, language. Too gynaecological, and you sound like a biology textbook: the words “penis” and “vagina” still hold an uncanny power to disrupt narrative flow. But use euphemism and a world of potential pitfalls opens up like a vast, gaping… (you get the picture).

As the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards testify, the more “literary” the book, the more determinedly unlyrical the descriptions. Anyone for a vulva as a “gorgon’s head, a motionless Cyclops”? (Jonathan Littell)? Care to linger in Tom Wolfe's decidedly unerotic “otorhinolaryngological caverns”? Norman Mailer may well have been America’s Finest Novelist, but I am haunted by his description of a penis “as soft as a coil of excrement”, as I am by David Mitchell’s climaxing woman who “made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll”.

D.H Lawrence wrote explicitly, but kept a spiritual element. As he put it: “Life is sordid at times, art must be also.” Otherwise, I can only think of the library scene in Ian McEwan’s Atonement as managing to be both explicitly erotic while avoiding cliché or ugly metaphor. McEwan, of course, wrote the defining bad sex scene with On Chesil Beach, a novel about a failed wedding night coupling.

Novelist India Knight, who compiled the anthology The Dirty Bits for Girls, says that men find it much harder to get sex scenes right than women do. “I think men of a certain age ought to be banned from writing them. My love of Philip Roth has been severely tested on a number of occasions – once with a scene involving milking cows [The Human Stain] and also, even more problematically with a scene where two hot gay women are “turned” by the manly goodness of the protagonist’s octogenarian loins [The Humbling]. You just don’t know where to look.”

Rachel Johnson, novelist and editor of The Lady, agrees. She is still smarting after receiving the Bad Sex award for her book Shire Hell, and is considering making her next novel a sex-free zone. “Roth, Updike et al have been masturbating into their keyboards for decades…When men do it, it’s regarded as literary – but when women do it, it’s regarded as confessional or self-descriptive.”

And even comic novelists aren’t immune. “I have written one sex scene in my life,” says bestselling author Jenny Colgan. “It was a virgin deflowering, and I have no idea if it’s any good because I couldn’t bear ever to go back and even read over it again, I was so embarrassed by the process.”

What works in Atonement and elsewhere, says Knight, is “ yearning explosively rewarded. She cites Forever Amber, the bestselling Forties novel banned as pornographic in the US, as a brilliant example. “The heroine behaves appallingly but only ever loves one man, who for any number of reasons can’t be with her – but when they do get together, the sparks fly off the page.”

And writing really well about sex can be problematic in itself. If I write about war brides, Sixties society, or haute école dressage, everyone assumes I’ve read around my subject matter. Equally, on the few occasions I’ve written something even vaguely explicit I’ve had knowing looks – even the odd wink – at the school gates.

Perhaps it is wisest simply to emulate Barbara Kingsolver’s sex scene in Animal Dreams, which tells us everything we need to know in just four words. In it, the narrator decides that if her man friend has a condom in his pocket, it’s her lucky day.

“He did,” she writes. “It was.”