How to Write Sex Scenes Without Looking Like an Idiot: A Brutally Honest Guide

Every year, the Literary Review hands out the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, and every year, established authors line up to collect their trophy of shame. Norman Mailer won it. John Updike got nominated. Even Sebastian Faulks took home the dubious honor. These aren't amateurs—they're literary giants who somehow forgot how to write the moment clothes started coming off.

So what's the secret? How do you write about the most universal human experience without sounding like a Victorian medical textbook crossed with a teenager's diary? I've read enough terrible sex scenes to fill a very uncomfortable library, and I've distilled it down to advice you can actually use.

**Rule One: Stop Calling Body Parts by Weird Names**

Let's address the elephant in the bedroom. The moment you write "his throbbing member" or "her heaving bosom," you've lost the reader. They're not turned on—they're laughing. Or cringing. Probably both. The 2008 Bad Sex Award went to a passage describing genitalia as a "shuddering, ejaculating column." Read that aloud. Now imagine your grandmother reading it. See the problem?

Here's the thing: you don't need elaborate euphemisms. You don't need clinical terminology either. D.H. Lawrence understood this in 1928 with "Lady Chatterley's Lover"—he used direct, honest language and got banned for it. The book became a bestseller precisely because it treated sex like a natural part of human existence, not a linguistic obstacle course.

**Rule Two: Character First, Gymnastics Second**

The best sex scenes aren't really about sex. They're about what happens between people emotionally. Take Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach"—the wedding night scene is devastating not because of what happens physically, but because of what doesn't happen between two people who can't communicate.

Before you write a single sensual sentence, ask yourself: What does this scene reveal about my characters? Are they vulnerable? Powerful? Desperate? Bored? If your answer is "nothing, they're just having sex," then congratulations—you've written pornography. Which is fine, but it's not literature, and it probably won't be very interesting either.

**Rule Three: Less Is Almost Always More**

Hemingway never wrote explicit sex scenes. Neither did most of the greats before 1960. Yet their books crackle with sexual tension. The ending of "A Farewell to Arms," the hotel scenes in "The Sun Also Rises"—you know exactly what's happening without anyone describing tab A entering slot B.

Consider this: in Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," there's a scene where Florentino finally consummates his decades-long love affair. Márquez gives us emotional devastation, not anatomical inventory. The reader fills in the physical details themselves, which makes it infinitely more powerful than any description could be.

**Rule Four: Avoid the Choreography Trap**

Nothing kills a sex scene faster than turning it into an IKEA instruction manual. "He moved his left hand to her right shoulder while simultaneously shifting his weight to his knees" reads like you're assembling furniture, not making love. Your reader doesn't need a blow-by-blow (pun intended) account of every movement.

John Updike, despite his nominations for Bad Sex, actually understood this in his best work. In "Rabbit, Run," the sex scenes work because they focus on sensation and emotion, not mechanics. It's when he got older and more experimental that things went sideways.

**Rule Five: Context Matters More Than Content**

A sex scene in a thriller serves a different purpose than one in a romance novel. In James Ellroy's noir fiction, sex is often violent, transactional, desperate—because that's the world his characters inhabit. In romance, it's meant to be the emotional climax (again, pun intended) of a relationship arc. Writing the wrong type of scene for your genre is like wearing a tuxedo to a beach party.

Anne Rice, writing erotica as A.N. Roquelaure, understood genre expectations perfectly. Her "Sleeping Beauty" trilogy is explicit because it's meant to be. When she wrote her vampire novels under her own name, the sensuality was present but more restrained. Different books, different rules.

**Rule Six: Humor Is Your Secret Weapon**

Here's something most writing guides won't tell you: sex is frequently awkward, funny, and ridiculous. Bodies make strange noises. People say stupid things. Someone's arm falls asleep at the worst possible moment. If your sex scenes are all perfectly choreographed encounters with no awkwardness, they'll feel fake.

Nicholson Baker's "Vox," an entire novel about phone sex, works because it acknowledges the absurdity of the situation. The characters laugh, they get embarrassed, they make jokes. That's realistic. That's human. That's what separates genuine intimacy from fantasy.

**Rule Seven: Read It Out Loud**

This is the simplest and most effective test. Read your sex scene aloud. If you can't get through it without laughing, blushing, or wanting to set your manuscript on fire, revise it. If it sounds like something you'd hear in a bad movie from 1985, revise it. If you wouldn't be comfortable reading it at a literary event with your mother in the audience... well, that one's actually okay. But you should at least be able to read it with a straight face.

**The Final Truth**

Here's what nobody tells you about writing sex scenes: they're hard because they require vulnerability from the writer. You're exposing not just your characters but yourself—your understanding of intimacy, your attitudes toward bodies, your ability to write about something deeply personal without hiding behind jokes or purple prose.

The writers who do it well—Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Jeanette Winterson—aren't thinking about shocking readers or titillating them. They're thinking about truth. About what happens when two people are physically close and emotionally exposed.

So here's my final advice: write the scene that your story needs, not the scene you think readers expect. Be honest. Be brave. And for the love of all that is literary, never, ever use the word "moist" unless you're describing cake.