A year ago I was desperate to write some really good sex…
Writing good sex scenes seems impossible to me. It’s not because I don’t like them. I do. Really really. I love reading sex scenes and I love sex in real life.
The problem with writing sex scenes as an author is that my own experience in kinky stuff is pretty limited. I’ve been enjoying vanilla sex with my husband Nick for eight years, and it’s usually a missionary position in our bed.
As a mother of three children under the age of seven, my current problem in the bedroom is efficiency. I just want to enjoy it and do it. But vanilla missionary sex in a novel where everyone is pleasantly full in three minutes isn’t going to excite and disturb your readers or make TikTok book influencers swoon over you.
Even though a novelist’s job is literally to make things up, part of me feels like a fraud when I try to write wild sex scenes, like someone who’s never been on a safari trying to describe the mating rituals of the lions of the Serengeti. I have imposter syndrome from the hot sex.
I addressed this issue a few years ago when I wrote a quick and dirty novel called Marriage Vacation for the television show Younger. We didn’t have many guidelines for writing the book based on the series, except that a particular sex scene had to be one of the most salacious things ever written, so that hot people could trash the book by the window.
My editor Christine and I went back and forth as we got notes from the show’s producers to MAKE it HOTTER. I was texting him on my phone under the table on Christmas Eve at my very mother-in-law’s house.
I don’t remember what we landed on. But I know it was downright dirty.
Sex is huge deals right now for books. All kinds of sex. Perverted sex, violent sex, fairy sex. I wanted my new novel Sicilian heritage to be filled with all things delicious – delicious food, delicious wine, delicious men and women. I wanted my readers to yearn for garlic butter pasta and hot sex on the Sicilian beach. Food and wine were easy. But I was stuck on sex. It didn’t help that I was writing the book while pregnant and after giving birth.
When my sex scene writer’s block really set in, I started quizzing my girlfriends over coffee. Asking real women what turned them on on the page seemed like the best place to start.
I swear a guy next to us almost spit out his latte when my friend Erin said, “No more nipple action in foreplay and don’t use adjectives to describe a penis.”
Most women I spoke to wanted more women to control sex scenes in novels. Many women – ages 21 to 81 – have told me they’re tired of scenes in books and movies that are far-fetched or with characters that are too perfect.
“Talk about the way my butt shakes when you hit it,” a friend said. “And no one should do it against a wall.” Has anyone ever had successful sex while being lifted up against a wall? »
Friends also wanted efficiency (just like me). “Make it hot and fast,” said a friend.
Another told me, “I want it to be fun!” So many sex scenes take themselves too seriously. Make sure the characters feel like they’re having a good time. Sex in real life is all skin hitting skin and bodily fluids. These things are sexy and hilarious.
Another friend mentioned that this made it risky and dangerous, but without scary consequences. “Take me out of my comfort zone, but not too far from my comfort zone. Sex in a forbidden place is always hot for me.
Why hadn’t my friends and I had these conversations before? It was the first time we talked about what we liked and didn’t like in the bedroom, the first time we talked about it all out loud together. It was amazing and got me out of my doldrums (and even inspired me to be a little more adventurous in my own bed).
A friend told me she likes vanilla sex in real life too, but added, “When I read, I really want banana sex with a cherry on top.” It makes me look forward to resuming regular sex with my husband. The book is the fantasy. You enter a different world, then you can return to your own world.
That That was the thing. I didn’t need to tap into my reality, but rather into my fantasy. I could write about sex in beautiful, forbidden places, in a cave on a beach, in abandoned ruins in the middle of Palermo.
All these suggestions from all these brilliant women have been my path. I think I ended up writing some good sex on the page Sicilian heritage. Actually, I know this because an early reader told me that she went looking for her husband after reading one of the scenes (it actually involves sex in a cave on the beach).
“Good” sex is subjective. We all like what we like, and that’s really the beauty of it.
What would make a scene sexy for you?
Joe Piazza is a podcaster, editor and bestselling author of Sicilian heritage, We are not like them, and other books. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three children. Follow her on InstagramIf you want.
P.S. “I didn’t have sex for the first two years of my marriage,” And did you make love on your wedding night?
(Photo by Yurii Shevchenko/Stocksy.)