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Every year, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award reminds us that even brilliant novelists can write bedroom scenes so cringe-worthy they'd make a teenager blush. The list of winners reads like a who's who of literary talent: Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Morrissey. If they can fail this spectacularly, what hope do the rest of us have? Quite a lot, actually — if you know the rules.

Let's get one thing straight. Writing sex is not about sex. It never was. When D.H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1928, the book was banned in Britain for over thirty years. Not because the scenes were graphic — by today's standards, they're practically quaint — but because Lawrence committed the real sin: he wrote sex that meant something. The intimacy between Connie and Mellors was about class, freedom, the revolt of the body against industrial England. The censors weren't scandalized by flesh. They were terrified of the ideas underneath it.

That's your first and most important lesson. A sex scene without subtext is just choreography. And nobody wants to read choreography. If your characters are in bed and the only thing happening is physical mechanics, you've written an instruction manual, not fiction. Every great sex scene in literature is actually about something else: power (Dangerous Liaisons), loneliness (Revolutionary Road), self-destruction (Crash by J.G. Ballard), or the desperate attempt to feel alive (anything by Henry Miller). Before you write a single heated breath, ask yourself: what is this scene really about?

Now, the mechanical stuff. Here's where most writers face-plant directly into the mattress. The Bad Sex Award exists because talented people suddenly forget how language works the moment clothes come off. They reach for metaphors like drowning poets. Exhibit A: the infamous passage from Morrissey's 2015 novel List of the Lost, where he described a sexual encounter with the phrase "the water arrived in wood." I'll let you sit with that one. The lesson? Your metaphors must earn their place. If you wouldn't use a comparison in any other scene, don't smuggle it into the bedroom just because you're nervous. "Her body was a landscape" — stop it. "He erupted like a volcano" — absolutely not. The moment your prose starts sounding like a nature documentary narrated by someone having a panic attack, you've lost the reader.

The best writers keep the language grounded. Look at Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. The entire novel builds toward a wedding night, and the sex scene — which is really about two people's catastrophic inability to communicate — uses precise, almost clinical language. It's devastating precisely because McEwan doesn't flinch, doesn't hide behind purple prose or poetic deflection. He writes what happens, and more importantly, what each character thinks and feels while it happens. The awkwardness is the point. The failure is the point. That's what makes it unforgettable.

Here's a practical rule that will save your manuscript: write the scene at the emotional level of your characters, not at the excitement level of a reader you're imagining. If your character is nervous, the prose should feel nervous — short sentences, clumsy observations, thoughts that interrupt the action. If your character is consumed by passion, the rhythm can lengthen, the syntax can loosen. But if your character is supposed to be a jaded thirty-something having a one-night stand and your prose reads like a breathless Victorian discovering an ankle for the first time, you've got a tonal problem that no amount of revision will fix.

Another concrete trick: use the senses, but not all of them at once. Amateurs try to paint the full sensory picture — the smell, the taste, the sound, the sight, the touch — and end up with something that reads like a sommelier reviewing a wine tasting. Pick one or two senses that your viewpoint character would actually notice. A hand on a hip. The sound of breathing. The taste of whiskey on someone's mouth. Specificity is intimacy. The more precisely you select details, the more the reader fills in the rest. And what the reader imagines will always be more powerful than what you describe.

Let's talk about what to leave out. Ernest Hemingway understood this better than anyone. In A Farewell to Arms, the love scenes between Frederic and Catherine are rendered with such restraint that you barely register them as sex scenes at all. But you feel everything. Hemingway's iceberg theory — show ten percent, hide ninety — works nowhere better than in intimate scenes. The reader doesn't need a play-by-play. They need the emotional before and after. They need the moment the character decides, and the moment they realize what it meant. Everything in between can be implied with a line break and a new paragraph that starts with morning light.

That said, don't be a coward about it either. There's a difference between tasteful restraint and squeamish avoidance. If your story demands an explicit scene — if the physical details carry emotional weight — then write it. Toni Morrison didn't shy away from the body in Beloved. Neither did James Baldwin in Giovanni's Room. Neither did Jeanette Winterson in Written on the Body, which is essentially a love letter to human anatomy that somehow manages to be both graphic and transcendent. The trick isn't avoiding explicitness. It's making sure every explicit detail serves the character and the story.

Here's one more piece of advice that nobody tells you: humor belongs in sex scenes. Real intimacy is often funny. Bodies make weird sounds. Someone's elbow ends up in the wrong place. A cat jumps on the bed. If your sex scenes are relentlessly serious, they'll feel fake. The best intimate writing acknowledges the absurdity of two human beings trying to merge into one. John Irving does this beautifully. So does Nick Hornby. A well-placed moment of humor doesn't deflate tension — it makes the tenderness that follows feel earned and real.

Finally, read your scene out loud. Yes, out loud. If you can't get through it without cringing, laughing at the wrong moments, or wanting to set the page on fire, it needs work. This is the most reliable test in existence. Your ear will catch what your eye forgives. If a sentence makes you wince when you hear it in your own voice, it will make your reader wince twice as hard.

So here's the summary, stripped bare. Know what the scene is about beneath the surface. Keep your metaphors honest and grounded. Match the prose to the character's emotional state. Choose specific sensory details rather than cataloguing everything. Be willing to leave things out — and be willing to put things in when the story demands it. Let it be funny when it wants to be funny. And for the love of all that is literary, read it out loud before anyone else sees it.

The Bad Sex Award isn't going anywhere. Every year, another celebrated novelist will reach for "pulsating orchid" or "molten core" and earn their place on the shortlist. But it doesn't have to be you. Write the scene the way you'd write any other — with honesty, precision, and respect for your characters. The bedroom is just another room in fiction. The only difference is that the stakes, when you get it wrong, are hilariously, permanently visible.

Here's a dirty secret the publishing industry doesn't advertise on its dust jackets: every masterpiece you've ever loved started as hot garbage. That pristine prose you underlined in Hemingway? He rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 47 times. Forty-seven. When asked what the problem was, he said, "Getting the words right." Not the plot. Not the theme. The words. If the man who defined 20th-century American literature couldn't nail it on the first try, what makes you think your NaNoWriMo draft should be any different?

Let's get uncomfortable for a moment. Your first draft is terrible. Mine is terrible. Donna Tartt's first draft of The Secret History was terrible — and she spent ten years turning it into something that wasn't. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you stop staring at a blinking cursor, paralyzed by the fantasy that real writers produce gold on the first pass. They don't. They produce mud. The gold comes later, from the refining.

Tolstoy rewrote War and Peace — all 1,225 pages of it — seven times. His wife, Sophia, copied the entire manuscript by hand each time because typewriters weren't exactly Amazon Prime deliveries in 1860s Russia. Seven drafts of the longest novel most people pretend to have read. Tolstoy's first version reportedly had a completely different opening, different character arcs, and at one point Pierre Bezukhov was barely in it. Imagine War and Peace without Pierre. That's what a first draft gets you: a book without its own protagonist.

Raymond Carver, the king of minimalism, the guy whose sentences feel like they were carved from stone with a scalpel — his editor, Gordon Lish, sometimes cut 70% of his stories. Seventy percent. Carver would submit a story, and Lish would return it looking like a crime scene, red ink everywhere. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" was originally twice as long and had a completely different title. The first draft wasn't just rough; it was practically a different piece of literature. The editing process didn't polish the story — it created it.

And that's the thing nobody tells you about the writing process: the first draft isn't writing. It's thinking out loud. It's you, fumbling in the dark, trying to figure out what you actually want to say. Anne Lamott called them "shitty first drafts" in her legendary craft book Bird by Bird, and she wasn't being cute. She meant it literally. The purpose of a first draft is not to be good. Its purpose is to exist. You can't edit a blank page. You can edit garbage.

Consider F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby — arguably the most perfectly constructed American novel — went through massive revisions. Fitzgerald's original title was "Trimalchio in West Egg," which sounds like an Italian restaurant on Long Island. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, essentially talked him out of a mediocre book and into a masterpiece. The first draft had Gatsby's backstory dumped into the opening chapters like a Wikipedia article. Perkins pushed Fitzgerald to scatter it, to create mystery, to let the reader discover Gatsby the way Nick does. That brilliant structural choice? It wasn't in the draft. It was in the editing.

Here's where it gets even more interesting. Research in cognitive psychology actually backs this up. A 2018 study published in Cognitive Science found that creative ideas improve significantly through iterative revision. The brain's initial output tends to rely on obvious associations — clichés, tropes, the first thing that comes to mind. It's only through repeated passes that writers access deeper, more original connections. Your first draft is your brain's lazy answer. The good stuff is buried underneath, and you have to dig for it.

So why do so many aspiring writers treat their first draft like it should be their final one? Because our culture worships the myth of effortless genius. Mozart composing symphonies in his head. Kerouac typing On the Road on a single scroll of paper in three weeks. Except Mozart's manuscripts are full of corrections and crossed-out passages. And Kerouac? He'd been writing and rewriting the material for years before that famous typing marathon. The scroll was a performance, not a process. The real work happened in notebooks, in letters, in drafts nobody talks about because they don't make good legends.

The cult of the first draft is killing more books than bad reviews ever could. I've seen talented writers abandon novels because their first chapter didn't sing. I've watched people rewrite the same opening paragraph forty times before moving to page two, trapped in an editing loop that prevents them from ever finishing anything. This is the perfectionism trap, and it's the deadliest enemy of any creative process. You cannot simultaneously create and critique. These are different brain functions, and trying to do both at once is like pressing the gas and brake pedals at the same time — you go nowhere and burn out your engine.

The professionals know this. Stephen King writes his first drafts with the door closed — no feedback, no second-guessing, no looking back. He gets the whole thing down, lets it sit for six weeks, then opens the door and starts cutting. He aims to trim 10% on every second draft. King has published over 60 novels this way. Whatever you think of his prose, the man finishes books. That's not talent. That's process.

Nabokov, on the other end of the literary spectrum, wrote every sentence of his novels on index cards, shuffling and rearranging them obsessively. Lolita went through years of drafting. He reportedly burned an early version entirely and started over. Even Nabokov — a man who wrote in three languages and could construct sentences that make English professors weep — couldn't get it right the first time. He just had a different system for getting it wrong and then fixing it.

So here's the actionable truth, the thing you can actually take away from this: give yourself permission to write badly. Not as a permanent state, but as a necessary stage. Your first draft is a conversation with yourself about what the story could be. Your second draft is where you start making it what it should be. Your third draft — if you're lucky — is where it becomes what it is. Editing is not a punishment for bad writing. Editing is writing. The draft is just the raw material.

The next time you sit down and produce three pages of what feels like utter nonsense, congratulations. You're doing exactly what Tolstoy did, what Fitzgerald did, what every writer who ever mattered did. The difference between a published author and an aspiring one isn't the quality of their first drafts. It's the willingness to write the second one. And the third. And the seventh. Your garbage draft isn't a failure. It's a foundation. Now stop reading articles about writing and go make some beautiful trash.