How great sex scenes are written

TARA Moss loves writing a good sex scene, and says it helps to be in the mood. But it’s not always easy to make things hot and heavy.

Writing a good sex scene is less to do with mechanics and more to do with the honest thoughts and desires of the characters.

“SHE wiggled her breasts beneath my hands and intensified the pushing. I went in up to my groin and came out almost entirely. My body was her gearstick,” wrote Erri De Luca in his novel The Day Before Happiness.

Yes. There’s a reason he won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award for 2016.

If you feel like laughing until your sides hurt, here’s an X-rated list of things romance readers HATE reading in sex scenes. Think sex on horseback and “womb clenching.”

But enough about the bad ones. Let’s talk about good ones.

Canadian-Australian author and television presenter Tara Moss confesses that she loves writing sex scenes and finds then “pretty easy to write.”

“They’re kind of fun to research too,” she quips, “if you’re into that.”

I ask Tara if she, as an author has to feel sexy and aroused while writing a sex scene and she bursts out laughing: “If I don’t at the start I certainly do by the end.”

Tara Moss is an author, television presenter, journalist and former model. She also writes great sex scenes. Picture: Mark Calleja

No matter what human experience Tara is setting down on the page, she has “to feel a bit impacted by what I’m writing.”

“That’s true with sex as well but because I don’t really feel ashamed of that, I don’t think that’s a huge deal,” she continues.

The favourite raunchy scenes Tara has written come from her crime series staring the character ‘Mak Vanderwall.’ In particular, she notes the “sex scenes that involved handcuffs were really fun.”

Tara views sex as “quite core to our experiences of the world” and believes “it reveals a lot about human nature.”

“Is your character quite impersonal in a sexual way? Are they quite frustrated sexually? Are they very liberated? Are they comfortable with themselves and with the level of intimacy and vulnerability that you’re going to experience when you’re having sexual contact with someone?”

Reflecting on the craft of writing the perfect sex scene, Tara says: “The people I know who write a lot of sex scenes, they’re pretty interested in sex and sexuality in all its glory and messiness and … that’s probably part of what makes them so good at what they do.”

In some books the tease is the best part.

Contemporary romance writer Justine Lewis agrees that sex scenes are a way for the reader to find out more about the key characters and propel the plot forward.

However, she stresses that the writer’s skill must come into play well before the sex scene arrives.

“If the readers don’t care about the characters and you don’t care about the characters being together, then it doesn’t matter how good the writing is. It’s still not going to be an emotional and satisfying scene,” she says.

As a writer, Justine is less interested in “what goes where” and more concerned with the inner lives of her characters.

“You want to know what the characters are thinking before, during and after. You want to know how the sex has moved the relationship forward [and] … how it’s changed the way the characters think about each other,” she says.

Justine believes bad sex scenes arise when the writing is repetitive or the sex is simply “incongruous with the characters themselves.”

“If the language is not appropriate for the story and the heat level or the sensuality level, that doesn’t work either.

“I think it just makes the reader skip [pages],” Justine says.

Perhaps surprisingly Justine — along with many other romance writers — sees romance as a feminist genre.

“The heroine is usually having fulfilling sex and that’s one of the hallmarks of the genre. It’s about women’s fulfilment and women getting what they want,” she says.

This doesn’t mean the sex is always perfect. The word “honesty” repeatedly comes up. Both Tara and Justine confess to throwing in the occasional awkward or messy moment. (And who among us hasn’t had a few of those?)

As my research continues, one thing becomes clear. If it were easy to write a great sex scene, they would certainly be easier for the humble reader to come by.

Raphaelle Race, deputy editor of the online journal Writers Bloc, recently found herself a little stuck while trying to write a sex scene for a short story.

“I can’t even talk about sex so easily,” she says to me.

Writing about it would prove even harder.

“You’re opening yourself up and you’re putting your [sexual] thoughts out there on a plate for people to consume,” Raphaelle says.

“You get to that point and you start second-guessing everything,” she continues, and then the problem becomes “this big tangled mess of neuroses and inferiority complexes.”

“You have to decide what’s sexy and what’s creepy,” she adds a few minutes later.

To solve this problem both for herself and other writers, Raphaelle set out to interview a pile of published authors.

One of the main things Raphaelle learned is actually pretty straightforward — to get good, you need to keep at it.

“Practice is such an important thing, and writing things and using writing examples that take you out of your comfort zone, she says, “and not just going for the cliche or the stereotype.”

In short, she’s a big believer in honesty (there’s that word again!) and authenticity.

“People can pick it when it’s not your voice [or] it’s obviously not something this character would do,” Raphaelle says.

If you are brave enough to give writing a sex scene a crack, find Raphaelle’s great guide here.

Or if you want to laugh like a fool in public, you can’t go past the British podcast “My Dad Wrote a Porno.”

Ginger Gorman is an award winning print and radio journalist, and a 2016 TEDx Canberra speaker. Follow her on Twitter @GingerGorman

Originally published as How great sex scenes are written