How to write sex scenes — without making people cringe

Monica Heisey and I are in a wine bar discussing whether novelists can really make up sex they’ve never had. Specifically, threesomes. It’s the kind of east London bar where such things should be discussed. Hip organic wines (orange wine, they lie, gives you less of a hangover), stripped wooden tables with high chairs and an achingly cool waitress who doesn’t bat an eyelid as we kick around the problem of what to name body parts when writing sex scenes — “Never ‘member’,” says Heisey, opening her eyes wide. “God forbid ‘member’. Member’s the worst.”
Heisey’s debut novel, Really Good, Actually, was a huge hit last year, in no small part down to the sexual misadventures of its frank, funny heroine Maggie, a “surprisingly young” divorcee. Which included a grimly awkward but deliciously funny threesome in the Portaloos at a wedding reception. I’ve come with a few questions about writing sex scenes, and a burning one: when it came to that threesome, did readers think she was writing from experience?
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“People assume that really happened,” nods Heisey. “But I just put it in there because I thought it was absolutely hilarious. A threesome is held up as the ultimate kind of sexy fantasy action. And in reality it is often awkward and there’s one too many people… or a non-equal share of what’s fun… or people didn’t go into it for the right reasons. I sort of felt, well, obviously no one will think that this is real because it’s ridiculous. And then you make the mistake of listening to a podcast and some girl says, I can’t believe that this author would do this thing. And I’m like, well, me neither, babe.”
I nod vigorously. These days, I have two notches to my literary bedpost. Both my novels feature sex scenes. One, if I say so myself, has a terrific orgasm in it. The other, you might say, comes too soon: it climaxes joyfully in chapter two. I wouldn’t count myself a professional eroticist, but I have discovered that when it comes to writing about sex, I am enthusiastic and better than I feared, like Ed Balls on Strictly.
But I’ve been struck, in both cases, how readers have assumed the sex scenes are me. My new novel is about a woman with a mystery illness who can’t choose between a hot doctor, the sexy washed-up neighbour upstairs and a love-struck Renaissance ghost. One early reader got back to me: “Loved it. Skipped through the bit when the doctor was going down on you.”
Which, Heisey and I both agree, is rather odd. Readers know that novelists make up stuff. A murder is fiction; a historical novel a feat of meticulously researched imagination. So why is it that a threesome must surely be autobiography? Forget “death of the author”; it’s as if we’ve written a feature for Readers’ Wives.
“I struggle with ‘her most intimate part’,” Heisey says. “I think if you wouldn’t use it in a sext, why would you use it in a sex scene? You would never be like, ‘Get over here and touch my most intimate part.’ ”
The only hitch is that, as we speak, I find half of my brain misbehaving. Because from the moment I sat down with Heisey, part of me wanted to know how much of her novel, particularly those vivid sex scenes, had actually happened. “It’s a strange thing to read something like that and just look at it as some kind of diary entry,” Heisey is saying. Strange, I echo, shaking my head. Very strange.
But on the other hand — I’m tiptoeing carefully now — like me, Heisey does share certain characteristics with her main character. Is it so surprising that people make the leap? “We used to call that ‘being inspired by something’,” she says dryly. Her mother, she sighs, thought “the whole book was a documentary”. As did many others. “We live in a time where people are hysterically obsessed by what is ‘true’ and what is ‘untrue’,” explains Heisey. “There is a frenzy for authenticity, even as it becomes less possible… And people want access. Not just to your work. They want access to your insides.”
By the time I leave the wine bar in Dalston, I’m a little over a bottle of orange wine down and worried about how much I am thinking about Heisey’s insides. I’m also in a muddle. I started out wanting to understand why it is that readers don’t believe authors can make up sex. Now I’m beginning to think more like the reader who suspects all writers, including myself, are not being entirely honest.
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I seek out Sara Collins, the prizewinning author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, a gothic lesbian love story about a female slave and her mistress. Surely Collins, who wrote a historical novel about a murder and opium addiction, can reassure me that she makes up stuff.
“I’ve written a couple of screenplays recently and I’ve realised looking back that every one of my female protagonists has a scene when she gets spanked by someone. Every single one. And I didn’t realise I was doing this. And I won’t say whether this is or isn’t happening to me,” she says, laughing, “but if it isn’t happening people will think, well, this is clearly what she wants… The more you get close to the stuff that people want but haven’t given themselves permission for, the more they start thinking, is this the author? Like, is this what she’s up to in her spare time?”
By now, I’m in a bit of a panic. I started these conversations feeling outraged. How small-minded of readers, I tutted, how patronising, to assume that fiction writers couldn’t invent sex they haven’t had. But now I’m the one jumping to conclusions about the sex lives of the writers I am interviewing. In my head, Collins is in some Portaloos getting spanked by Heisey.
Perhaps I’ve said some of this out loud, because Collins gives me a sympathetic look. “We authors are quite defensive. We like to say, ‘Oh, it’s all the character. Nothing to do with me.’ Of course, a lot of it is. But I think we also have to be honest and say, some of the good stuff… it might not be something you’re doing or fantasising about doing, but you are telling on yourself in some way.”
And perhaps, she continues, when it comes to sex scenes people are more likely to project onto a female writer than a male because “women are generally seen as titillating and men are culturally not”.
This is a good point. I need to raid the brain of a male writer. And who better to speak to than David Nicholls, one of the great romantic authors of our times. The sexy screen adaptation of his novel One Day was at one point the most watched show on Netflix on both sides of the Atlantic. So I’m stunned to discover there’s next to no sex in One Day the novel. Or almost any of his novels. There are a few comic sexual moments, but for the most part as soon as things start to get jiggy Nicholls slams the bedroom door. Less coitus interruptus than coitus non-startus.
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So what’s going on there?
On a sunny day, I find him in the garden of his house in Highbury. He’s warm, charming and a touch shy. I realise, as we sit firmly at the far ends of the bench from each other, that this could be quite embarrassing. But actually, he’s open and generous, interested in analysing why — given that he writes predominantly about love — when it comes to sex scenes he consistently “fades to black”. Is he drawing the veil because he worries whether people will think it’s autobiographical?
Nicholls shakes his head. He’s just come back from a book tour of his latest bestseller, You Are Here, a funny, tender love story between a copywriter, Marnie, and a diffident rambler, Michael.
“I’ve had a lot of, ‘Are you Michael?’ ” says Nicholls. “Just straight up.”
Much the same has happened with all his male characters, except, as it happens, Dexter, the protagonist in One Day.
“I don’t think anyone ever thought that I’m like Dexter. And Dexter is, you know, very sexual, very promiscuous… Certainly in his twenties, a kind of slightly unpleasant, cokey womaniser.” Readers drew more comparisons between him and Emma, the bookish, witty heroine.
But in every other one of his novels he was aware “of the assumption that I must be like the male character”. “So I would imagine the same would apply if I were to write explicit sex scenes,” says Nicholls. “And that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.” That’s not what’s stopping him, he says. “It’s not embarrassment or the fear that Mum would read it.”
He draws a distinction between the kind of fumbled, inept sex scenes that he’s happy writing, because they fit with the tone of his books, and that erotic writing that is “designed to arouse”, which he doesn’t think he’d be much good at. Plus, there’s always the problem of vocabulary.
“You’re either chilly, like a surgeon. Or slangy,” he says. “And aside from that… I can’t quite overcome that problem of how you do it in a way that isn’t obnoxious.”
It’s pretty hard to imagine Nicholls being obnoxious. What does he mean?
“Straight male desire has a terrible history on the page,” he says. “It’s either predatory or feels male gaze-y. So how do you redress that while being authentic to what men think and say?”
Huh. So he thinks as a heterosexual male author there are more pitfalls to writing about sex than as a female author?
“I think women at the moment can get away with some really straight objectification. Male authors, at least straight ones, risk sounding crudely lusty or just ‘off’, somehow… How do you find a middle way that isn’t horribly macho and neither is it kind of apologetic?”
So then he is worried about self-representation? He supposes he is, in that way, and suspects other straight male writers are too. There’s some very good, frank writing about sex by young gay men, he says, but it’s hard to find straight men writing well about sex in the way that some women are, whatever their sexuality. (He lists Monica Heisey, Dolly Alderton, Marian Keyes. I add Miranda July, whose darkly erotic novel All Fours needs to be read next to a fire extinguisher.) Which, Nicholls says, is a shame, “because it’s probably something young men need quite badly at the moment. Which is not to be the laughing stock. Because now the mockery is the other way round, right?”
I leave Nicholls’s garden with a slightly better grip on my own assumptions. When it comes to this debate, whether writers can truly make up sex, I’ve swung both ways. Both as a writer (of course I can!) and as a reader (if you say so).
Perhaps the truth lies, as it so often does, somewhere in between. Fiction writers may not be writing from direct experience, but over time they are, in some way, revealing themselves. And so too are readers. What they project onto the author is also a measure of what they desire, long for or repress. They’re also, as Monica Heisey puts it, “showing their ass”.
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Perhaps the more intimate the writing is, the more revealing our thinking is on both sides, author and reader. Like it or not, we are all telling on ourselves.
Which still leaves me worrying about chapter two and my mother-in-law. Perhaps, before she reads it, I need to bring round a bottle of orange wine.There’s Nothing Wrong With Her by Kate Weinberg (£16.99) is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Would the Times literary team do a deep dive into their favourite sex scenes? Yes! Yes! Yes! By Robbie Millen, Susie Goldsbrough and Laura Hackett
The 18th century had some great erotica — no wonder the novel had a reputation for leading young ladies down unrighteous paths. Fanny Hill is the most famous erotic novel of its era, and it’s all about a young lady being led down an unrighteous path. When Fanny’s parents die of smallpox, she travels to London looking for work as a maid. Of course, the innocent girl mistakes a brothel for a domestic agency, and is introduced to the truth about the birds and the bees in extravagant fashion. Mostly she watches her fellow prostitutes consort with men while hidden in wardrobes or cupboards and is overcome by new, unsettling feelings: “I was transported, confused, and out of myself; feelings so new were too much for me. My heated and alarmed senses were in a tumult that robbed me of all liberty of thought.” In a way, it’s an astonishing early example of sex viewed through the female gaze, albeit written by a man who describes breasts as “hillocks” and the penis as a “wonderful machine”.
Foxy Flaubert found himself in the dock when Madame Bovary first appeared, accused of flouting public morality and religion, so scandalous was this tale of a bored bourgeois housewife’s dalliance with a younger man. Imagine the unbroken sequence of swoons across Europe, the shattered sherry glasses and distressed housemaids, as impressionable females found their heroine “tearing at the delicate laces on her corset, which rustled down over her hips like a slithering snake”. Ooh là là. Other passages leave a little more to the imagination: “Where to, monsieur? asked the coachman. Wherever you like! said Léon, pushing Emma into the carriage… Just once, around midday… an unclad hand was pushed out from behind the little yellow linen curtains and threw away some scraps of paper, which scattered in the wind …” Oh, that unclad hand. Pure filth.
It was, of course, Lolita that was banned for being obscene, but the censors forgot about Ada or Ardor, which is far more filthy. Set in an alternative 19th century, the novel follows the lifelong love affair between Van and Ada Veen, cousins (and perhaps even more than cousins) who fall violently in love when aged 14 and 12. So, incest? Check. Under-age sex? Check. But this is Nabokov, the most exquisite stylist of the 20th century, and he manages to transform a sordid plot into meltingly beautiful prose. Here he is on the aftermath of their first sexual encounter: “After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established — high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping — nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette.”
Read it and feel simultaneously dirty and intellectually elevated.
Alan Hollinghurst’s debut novel thrums with the possibility of sex — rough, urgent, gentle, sybaritic, mindless, lazy, hectic — on every page. The book is positively tumescent, bulging with appreciation of the male form. William Beckwith, the twentysomething protagonist, young, posh and educated, is always on the prowl. Some writers describe sunsets; Hollinghurst prefers to conjure up penises (“long, listless”, “curt, athletic”). The novel is a brilliant portrait of the gay scene in the Eighties, albeit painted without the dismal colours of Aids, which goes unmentioned; it’s a portrait, too, of the ungovernable male libido in heat. The sex is wittily described: “In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the [showers] to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.” But there’s a sexy romance too. Beckwith describes a lover: “the pumping heart I laid my ear to, the neck I kissed and bit, the glossy speckled darkness of his pupils in which I looked and looked and saw myself, miniature, as if engraved on a gemstone, looking”. Woof!
Sex, as everyone knows, is really just a synonym for power. So this scene in Graham Swift’s sexily tragic novella set in the shadow of the First World War, in which languid young country gent Paul undresses a maid, Jane — a kind of kinky cosplay of the duties she performs for her own “madam” every evening — is undeniably hot. “It seemed that he wanted her not to move, just to stand, while his fingers gradually undid and released everything and let it fall about her. So it was not at all unlike how she might sometimes, if Mrs Niven should wearily request it, be required to ‘undo’ Mrs Niven. Except, she couldn’t deny it, there was a reverence with which he went about the task that she could never have applied to Mrs Niven. It was like an unveiling. She would never forget it.”
There’s a Mandela effect about sex in Sally Rooney novels — everyone thinks there’s lots but until the most recent books (fans might be pleased/mildly concerned to hear that her latest, Intermezzo, out in September, has loads), there was very little. That’s because Rooney is a good writer and she knows that most of the time, big, overwrought sex scenes are cringey, not hot. Instead, she flecked her first two novels with sudden little flashes of erotica. Take the beer bottle moment in her debut, Conversations with Friends, where at an overheated birthday party, student Frances finds herself alone with quiet, married actor Nick. “I rested my back against the fridge and fanned my face a little with my hand. He held up his beer bottle and touched it to my cheek. The glass felt fantastically cold and wet, so much that I exhaled quickly without meaning to. Is that good, he said.”
Between the ominously clinking carrier bags and pulverising poverty, Douglas Stuart smuggles sultry little pockets of tenderness into his vision of Eighties Glasgow. The reception for his second novel was a little muted compared with Shuggie Bain, but Young Mungo does something more ambitious — adding a glitter of gay teenage romance to the dour backdrop of industrial decline and family tragedy. Mungo and James, secretive and still discovering things, not sure if they are boys or men, wrestle and kiss, “greedy little kisses … full of bumping teeth and shy apologies … It was like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.”
Duncan, we learn, is “good with women the way other people are good with cars or numbers”. He’s not a sleazebag; he’s just an affable charmer who likes sleeping with women. And he’s good at it too. He’ll also dispense footrubs along the way.
When Jane, a teacher, rocks up in his small town in Michigan and falls for him, she has to deal with the fact that she’ll forever be bumping into his exes (“Candy, Mandy, Mindy, Lindy…”). But what a guy. “Jane thought that nobody had ever loved her body the way Duncan loved her body. He loved it deeply and simply and entirely, the same way he loved a winter sunset or fresh banana bread. That night he lay for hours — what seemed like hours — between her legs, licking, caressing, murmuring, ‘I love this so much, this makes me happy.’ (Which was exactly what he said about banana bread, come to think of it.)”
Forget sturm und drang, sex is sometimes as straightforward and pleasing as baked comestibles.
Most literary fiction deals with the problem of sex by retreating into either humour or disgust, leaving the more titillating descriptions to genre fiction.
But not so in Yael van der Wouden’s remarkable debut novel, The Safekeep. Set in Sixties Holland, it centres on a lonely young woman named Isabel whose quiet life is disrupted when her brother’s girlfriend, Eva, comes to stay.
Eva is loud, brash, peroxide blonde and keeps interfering in the running of the home — but Isabel’s frustration, it turns out, is a cover for desire.
That desire spills over in a long series of sex scenes between the pair which are lyrical, even rhythmic, without any coy glancing away: “The world had gone a high-pitched silent; only Eva’s shuddering, choked-off moans.” Take this simile for instance: “The sound of her fingers inside Eva — the wet ticking of it, like the rolling of a hard candy in a mouth.” Evocative, unblushing, real but not gross. It’s a masterclass in sex writing.