Where, Oh Where, is the Good Sex in Fiction?

This is the question The Guardian asked recently.

From the piece...

As the bad sex in fiction award shortlist lined up yesterday, the authors and their publishers scrambled to declare they'd have been offended not to have made the cut. Perhaps they were forgetting: it's the quality of the writing, not the sex, that's being assessed – and writing about sex well is one of the hardest things to do.

There's an assumption that it will involve writing the nuts and bolts, what goes where. Wrong. Try it. "His right hand slipped down her left thigh, as his left hand deftly undid the catch of her bra, and then he whispered in her ear … " – which one? Where's this guy standing? Or is he sitting? Perhaps lying? And what's she doing with her hands, right and left?

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture. Maybe there are some people who are turned on by DIY manuals, but for most of us they have the opposite effect. There are better ways for the writer to seduce the reader.

And talking about sex, AL Kennedy, also for The Guardian, has a new piece on writing, entitled, "Just because a story's about sex doesn't mean it's about sex."

From her piece...

It's sometimes difficult to explain this to people – and journalists – who seem to expect all kinds of strenuous research for which I personally would lack, in every way, the flexibility. Fiction about sex is still fiction – standard operating procedures apply. Equally, it is occasionally disconcerting to deal with emerging writers' work when half the notes you have to give read roughly along the lines of "As far as I'm aware, the average penis doesn't extend to three feet and is unable to go around corners." Or "Is this scene followed by reconstructive surgery?" And a percentage of the remaining comments may mention errors caused by embarrassment or a desire to shock. But we, as writers, are already sitting in the nice privacy of the reader's head, enjoying the usual range of necessary intimacies, which we earn by being beautiful, interesting, hypnotic, poetic and all the rest – jumping out from behind a damp bush and ejaculating wildly would almost always be inappropriate and shoddy. And there is, naturally, nothing to be embarrassed about – the reader thinks of sex a ridiculous number of times per hour without our assistance already. We are simply dreaming together – anything goes.

Painting by Frances Lynn.