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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.