In a post on Lit Hub excerpted from her book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Melissa Febos offers advice for writing sex scenes. “When it comes to sex scenes, the rules say things like: Don’t write them at all, and if you do, don’t use these words. Don’t write them silly, porny, dramatic, tragic, pathological, grim, or ridiculous,” Febos says. “My whole practical thesis around the craft of writing a sex scene is this: it is exactly the same as any other scene.”
The experience of sex – or lack of it – is no different than any other experience that happens to a person. The real difference is how we relate to it. “It is our reluctance to name things, the shame we’ve been taught, our fraught compulsion to enact a theater of types,” Febos writes. But in the end, a sex scene needs what any other scene needs.
“To teach sex scenes is to talk about plot, dialogue, pacing, description, and characterization: all those elements that make a captivating scene,” Febos says.
“A sex scene should advance a story and occur in a chain of causality that springs from your characters’ choices. It should employ sensory detail that concretizes and also speaks symbolically to the deeper content of the story. Or if not, it should service your work of art in whatever ways you want from your scenes.”
According to Febos, the more difficult task is unlearning your preconceptions and the various “rules” about writing about sex. “Sometimes the best way to unlearn something is by simply cultivating defiance toward those unchosen rules,” Febos notes. “Willful, opposite action can counteract their habitual governance of your writing and thinking. I believe it’s possible to retrain the mind to write more creatively and truthfully and smartly about sex, just as it was possible for me to train my writing out of the bad habits of mixed metaphors, passive voice, superfluous modifiers, and a total lack of narrative tension.”
