Columns: Tag – Sex Scenes
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Writing Quips and Tips
So much is revealed by a sex scene
I recently heard of a writer who, daunted at the thought of writing a sex scene for the first time, said: “I don’t know what troubles me most, the thought that people might think this is my sex life, or that I’d like it to be my sex life.”
Writing Quips and Tips
Plunging and grinding doesn’t make a story
A judge for this year’s Booker prize, commenting on the state of the British and Commonwealth novel, said no one was writing much about sex anymore.
“It’s as if they were paranoid about being nominated for the Bad Sex Award,” he said. He was referring to the now famous, and little wanted award by the Literary Review. He added that “a lot of people” were writing about “taking drugs, as if that was a substitute for sex”.
The Bad Sex Awards were inaugurated in 1993 in order to draw attention to, “and hopefully discourage”, poorly written, redundant or crude sex in fiction. The intention, they say is “not to humiliate”.
That might not be their intention, but it must be absolutely mortifying even to be nominated. Yet I wonder if it is the Bad Sex Award that’s discouraging sex scenes.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing about it is a lot like having it
If you’re self-conscious about sex in real life, you’ll be so on the page. You’ll hide coyly behind the frills of metaphor.
And if you’re over-confident, you’re likely to charge at the task and batter it with clinical description. Either way you’ll be cringy.
Since we were on the subject of sex in literature, (Last week’s blog on why no one writes about sex anymore), it occurred to me that sex in life is a lot like sex on the page. And learning to write about it can show us quite a lot about having it.
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