Putting Penis to Paper: When Sex Writing Goes Terribly Wrong | Broadly

Putting Penis to Paper: When Sex Writing Goes Terribly Wrong | Broadly

The spokesperson for this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award explains why literary copulation is so often terrible.

vice.com

In many cases, Brinkley says, sex becomes a blind spot for novelists who can masterfully describe scenes of street fairs or sunsets or even shitting. "You end up with this really overblown imagery to try and make light of the act or find a new interesting way of describing it, when actually sticking to the mechanics of it can be much more successful," he explains. "One of the hallmarks of bad sex is that the passage really stands out in the texture of the book as a whole, and sometimes that's because the writer is approaching it with a slightly different attitude."