How to write about, and portray sex in fiction.

"Like many younger readers who had not yet experienced sex, except with myself, I was deeply misled by 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', which seemed to insist that running naked through damp undergrowth, with wild flowers entwined in your pubic hair, was just about the closest thing to heaven."

In his Radio 3 Essay, 'Explaining the Explicit', Man Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes posed the question, "Is writing about sex, the same as writing about any other human activity - say gardening or cricket?" His exploration of the subject (including an amusing analysis of an Evelyn Waugh sex scene) was compelling, and went on to talk about self-consciousness and exposure; the fear that readers will assume the sexual encounters you're writing about actually happened to you, and how this impacts on the tone of the way you write about sex. "The naming of parts:  which parts do you name and what names do you give them? At the basic level... He put his what into her, or indeed his, what?"  He talks of John Updike comparing the male member, in one novel, to a yam, which made visualising the sexual scene difficult, the reader being distracted by mental images of a vegetable stall.

"The proper, grown up novel is the most intimate of art forms," concludes Barnes, "the one that puts the reader's mind and heart most closely in touch with the minds and hearts of the characters.  It is the place where the most truth about the intimacies of life can, and should, still be told." 

The full recording can be found here:    Explaining the Explicit

Last year, while completing a novel about a fairly dysfunctional (middle-class) family I found myself in the slightly uncomfortable position of having to write a sex scene.

Well, I say a sex scene, but love scene would describe it more accurately, because it's really rather tender and in many ways quite innocent, and though I found it necessary to describe the sleepy, sensual foreplay leading up to the sex act, I stopped short of portraying the intercourse itself, I'm not sure what Julian Barnes would say about that.

I had deliberated long and hard about whether to include the scene at all, but it was ultimately necessary, because the reader needed an awareness that this sixty-year-old protagonist, who is a remarkably likable character, isn't some sort of saint; he is real, vulnerable, sexual, like any other man.  And I think understanding his internal battle adds to our appreciation of his anguish, for the woman he has formed a deep bond with is his own niece.

Now hopefully, I dealt with that sensitively, and while the developing obsessional relationship between these two consenting adults is not entirely healthy, their involvement seeks to harm no-one else, and it's our own narrow-mindedness as the reader, perhaps, which might object to the thought of these two having sex.

More recently, I've been adapting 'Attachment' to a radio play script, and this has given me the added difficulty of portraying sex, through dialogue and sound affects alone.  Given these would-be lovers are barely conscious there isn't a lot of dialogue in the novel, the scene is set through the prose, and so I fear I shall be left relying on sounds, as in, sex sound (or at least foreplay sounds) to convey this love scene in a radio drama version.  This indeed has presented me with a new challenge, how do I achieve this in a tasteful way?.

BBC Radio listeners do not always appreciate such subject matter.  Recently the corporation received several complaints about love scenes portrayed on The Archers, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, and a Woman's Hour drama, with one listener stating:  “Please can all the grunts and grinds of people humping each other stop.  We don’t need that – we’d rather hear the pigs doing it.”

The British public have always been famously prudish about sex and nudity in its serious form, with a preference to reduce the subject to the somewhat immature schoolboy humour of the Carry On tradition.

Back in April 1970 acting stars Susan Penhaligon and Michael Mackenzie set pulses racing and tongues wagging, when they dared to portray an authentic scene from Romeo and Juliet naked in bed, at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing. In total, there were ninety seconds of nudity within the two and a half hour performance, but local residents threatened to cause havoc with tomatoes and water pistols if the scene went ahead, such was the perception of an attack on Christian moral values.

In that same year The Sun newspaper introduced Page 3! The explicit objectification of bare breasts in their daily tabloid was popular enough to save it from declining sales. Clearly there has always been a strange, insidious double standard deep within the nation's collective unconscious, and one that's not at all healthy.  A mother breastfeeding a child on a train will still attract looks of disgust and condemnation!

It behoves all of us who work within the arts to try and educate society, and encourage exploration in a positive, healthy way.  For now, I shall return to agonising over the beautiful, yet problematic erotic scene in my script.

Please feel free to leave your comments, and any sensible tips or advice.

The 2013 Bad Sex in Fiction Award - It seems in some ways, our society has not moved on significantly from D H Lawrence's time.

It's that time of the year writers seem to dread.  Yes, it's the Bad Sex In Fiction awards, but this year it's got a few people challenging the validity of the somewhat unprestigious accolade.

Established in 1993, by the late Auberon Waugh, and organised by the Literary Review, in order to draw attention to the "crude, tasteless and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it", former nominees include such national treasures as, Newsnight's Paul Mason and Will Self (on three separate occasions); even J K Rowling was tipped for the award last year - not for a Harry Potter book, of course!! -but for her post-Potter novel "The Casual Vacancy".  As it happened, she didn't actually make the shortlist.


Previous winners of the Bad  Sex in Fiction award include:

1993: Melvyn Bragg, A Time to Dance

1994: Philip Hook, The Stonebreakers

1995: Philip Kerr, Gridiron

1996: David Huggins, The Big Kiss: An Arcade Mystery

1997: Nicholas Royle, The Matter of the Heart

1998: Sebastian Faulks, Charlotte Gray

1999: A. A. Gill, Starcrossed

2000: Sean Thomas, Kissing England[3]

2001: Christopher Hart, Rescue Me

2002: Wendy Perriam, Tread Softly[2]

2003: Aniruddha Bahal, Bunker 13

2004: Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons

2005: Giles Coren, Winkler[4]

2006: Iain Hollingshead, Twenty Something[5]

2007: Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest[6]

2008: Rachel Johnson, Shire Hell; John Updike, Lifetime Achievement Award

2009: Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones

2010: Rowan Somerville, The Shape of Her [7]

2011: David Guterson, Ed King[8]

2012: Nancy Huston, Infrared[9]

Alastair Campbell openly said he wanted to win it, in 2010.  His comment immediately disqualified him, the award is intended to shame and embarrass writers, and presumably their readers too. Campbell had made it to the shortlist, though, beating his former boss, Tony Blair, who had surprised many with his autobiographical account of his own sexual appetite.

Laurie Penny writes a compelling article in the New Statesman, this week, "In Defence of Bad Sex", suggesting the award is dated and priggish.  While we, as a nation, remain so inhibited about sex generally, and specifically, uncomfortable about portraying normal experiences of sex, she argues, young people will continue to develop their understanding about sex, from the increasingly hardcore sea of pornography, available so freely now on computers, tablets and phones.  You can read her full article here .

Neurological evidence reveals that women who are inhibited about sex, will tend to feel less confident in other areas of life, such as standing up for themselves, against oppressive men.  It is as if sexual confidence affects the actual architecture of the brain.  If a society effectively stops women talking about sex, and exploring normal, healthy consensual sex, those women seem to become easier to manipulate and exploit, and that certainly seems to have been the case for generations gone by.  If you make sex sinful, or even just mucky, women of all ages will be dissuaded from engaging in it, or even thinking about it, through shame.

Many would argue that the seemingly harmless, Bad Sex in Fiction award, plays into that agenda, to some degree.

D H Lawrence's 1928 novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" is undoubtedly, the most famous book to have received an actual ban, in Britain, for its explicit sexual content.  It wasn't until 1960, thirty years after the author's death, that the public could buy a significantly censored edition of, what many consider to be a literary masterpiece, such was the determination of successive governments to control what art and literature ordinary people had access to.  There can be no doubt that those of less modest means had long been acquiring the book from Florence, and later France.


Back in 1929, a review by Edmund Wilson, praised "Lady Chatterley's Lover", for its attempt to explore sexuality with some degree of sensitivity and intelligence, recognising and admiring the challenge Lawrence had taken on:

"....The truth is simply, of course, that in English we have had, since the eighteenth century, no technique—no vocabulary even—for dealing with such subjects. The French have been writing directly about sex, in works of the highest literary dignity, ever since they discarded the proprieties of Louis XIV. They have developed a classical vocabulary for the purpose. And they have even been printing for a long time, in their novels, the coarse colloquial language of the smoking-room and the streets. James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence are the first English-writing writers of our own time to print this language in English; and the effect, in the case of Ulysses at least, has been shocking to English readers to an extent which must seem very strange to a French literary generation who read Zola, Octave Mirbeau and Huysmans in their youth. But, beyond the question of this coarseness in dialogue, we have, as I have intimated, a special problem in dealing with sexual matters in English. For we have not the literary vocabulary of the French. We have only the coarse colloquial words, on the one hand, and, on the other, the kind of scientific words appropriate to biological and medical books and neither kind goes particularly well in a love scene which is to maintain any illusion of glamor or romance.

Lawrence has here tried to solve this problem, and he has really been extraordinarily successful. He has, in general, handled his vocabulary well. And his courageous experiment, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, should make it easier for the English writers of the future to deal more searchingly and plainly, as they are certainly destined to do, with the phenomena of sexual experience...."

As a writer myself, who largely navigates plot lines away from sexual encounters, I would say writing really well, about a sexual encounter, is as difficult as doing it well, in real life.  Sex is, by its very nature, often unchoreographed and a bit clunky, is the word I think Laurie Penny used. Few of us have a back catalogue of BAFTA worthy performances, but awkwardness doesn't stop lovers doing it, or enjoying it, and perhaps our slight discomfort in reading about sex, is partly to do with our own personal insecurities and hang ups.

Certainly, when I read through this year's nomination passages, I didn't think they were particularly badly written, it seems to be the actual content that offends judges at the Literary Review.  In some ways our society has not moved on significantly from Lawrence's time, it would seem.