With Fifty Shades of Grey still hogging the Amazon Best Sellers list and Mummy Porn the must have for every publisher as a result, my Alphabet of Better Writing would be incomplete if I didn't mention sex in it at some point.
A recent bio of Louise Mensch, who writes under her maiden name Louise Bagshaw, mentioned that her novels generally contain thirty sex scenes. Thirty? Now that's what I call stamina. Me, I'm more of a quality-rather-than-quantity girl. I can't write sex scenes just for the sake of having sex scenes in my book. I can't be that gratuitous.
One of the tenets of good writing is that there should always be more than one thing going on in any scene-- you don't cover plot in one and character in the next, it has to be more of a mash up than that. I think the same is true of sex: there needs to be more going on than just the act of copulation. There are so many interesting emotions and motivations which can come into play - do the participants love each other? Like each other? Is one more interested and committed than the other? Is it an honest and open encounter, or is there a hidden agenda at work? Do they enjoy it? Do they feel guilty after? Is it manipulative, celebratory, perfunctory or joyous? Is it some of these things for one of the people? As with the act itself, what is going on inside the heads of the participants is at least as important as what is happening physically, so if you want to write about it well, you need to cover all these bases.
Weirdly, the two sex scenes that I remember most are both comical - perhaps that's why they stand out in my memory. Read Michael Dibdin's Dirty Tricks, or What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe for a masterclass in erotic writing with a twist. As in the real world, sex that makes you laugh out loud is often the best kind.
With that in mind, here's my very own X-rated picture, snapped in a lock keeper's garden in France...
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