This year’s nominations for the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards have been announced, and they include a pretty esteemed group of authors.
Philip Roth, Paul Theroux, and Booker Prize winner John Banville have all made it onto the list of authors adjudged to have written sex scenes that are clumsier than the pass you’re going to make at your boss during the Christmas party.
It’s fair to say it’s not a list that anybody would wish to be on, a bit like being told you’ve made the shortlist to be the next Scotland manager. (Incidentally, I have.)
So could I, a comedian with no background as a novelist, manage to write sex scenes any more convincingly or entertainingly than these published authors?
Well, it would be a stiff task (there you go, I’ve started). The problem with writing about sex is that it’s a topic that really only fails to be embarrassing and cringe-worthy to the two people involved. (Or the three, four, or entire football team involved)
The difficulty authors face is that they want to give an artistic flourish to proceedings, but in reality your thoughts can veer towards the more base instead.
A novelist would like to suggest that: “Her womanly curves gave cause to ponder whether the soft, gentle beauty of femininity indicates the wonders of attractiveness as being developed via the evolutionary cycle or whether such perfection points to the existence of intelligent design…”. In a moment of passion, I’d suggest a more realistic passage may be: “It wasn’t a wonderbra. Result!”
The moments leading up to the moment of intimacy rarely ring true to me either. I read things along the lines of, “When he looked at her he could think of nothing more than the union of body and soul that was about to take place. He wanted to be close to her, to be within her, to be part of her. He wanted to form a single-souled being, created by, and existing for nothing other than love and passion.”
What I need to be reading are thoughts that go… “Now, condoms – are they in my jacket pocket or my jeans pocket? They’d better be in my jeans pocket because my jeans are just on the floor by the bed. If they’re in my jacket pocket I’m going to have to go back to the living room…but her flatmate’s in the living room! I’ll have to get dressed again.
"Even if I do get dressed, I don’t want to be walking about in this state though. I’ll have to wait till it subsides. Aw no! It’s not going to go away if she’s going to be naked and kissing me like she is now. I’ll have to tell her to get dressed too so that I can calm down enough to go back through to the living room. Right, so I’ll just have to tell her that we can’t have sex unless she stops kissing me and puts her clothes back on. She’ll understand, surely?”
The real killer for writers though, must be the sounds. They want to utilise their vocabulary to have us drool, “It’s never been this way before…you complete me.” In actual fact they’d be better served swallowing their pride, and just bashing the keys to type out dialogue like “Unnnnhhh aahhh” and “ooohhh nnnnnggg”, and of course “Ow! Teeth!”
All in all, maybe it’s for the best that authors keep churning out bad sex in fiction. It’s still less cringeworthy than bad sex in reality.
Teddy Craig is a finalist in stv.tv's The Write Factor competition. The views expressed are not necessarily those of STV plc. If you would like to read more from this writer, use our comment system below.
Last updated: 30 November 2009, 19:31
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