eros and psyche
why is it so hard to write good sex?
I’m in the middle of writing an erotic thriller. It’s meant to be a short, searing literary novel about a middle-aged mother, a writer in the middle of an agonising divorce, who becomes sexually obsessed with… herself basically. It’s story about loneliness, desire, celibacy, promiscuity, filial obligation, autoeroticism, obsession, madness, fear, mortality, love, abandon, pleasure, suffering and the erotic possibilities of the internet.
It’s fiction because a) it’s all made up (every single detail is pure invention, I assure you) and b) because I enjoy writing about stuff that no one talks about, and fictional worlds make that possible. Novels can advance arguments but they don’t need to be coherent, which is super relaxing, especially if (like me) you’re a bit lazy and allergic to conflict. All you do is make up a bunch of characters then let them do what they want and none of it has to ‘mean’ anything. The hard part is fusing the story to the language, or the subject to the form, mixing and matching, perfecting, til you stumble on the magic formula that keeps people turning the pages. Ask any writer, editor or reader for that matter. There’s really no better measure of a book than this: did you want want to keep turning the pages? I’m hoping sex might be a pretty good carrot and stick combined in service of arousing my readers’ desire to page flip.
I’m not just telling a slutty little story, I have something to say — high brow intellectual thoughts and ideas! Lots them conflicting, unspeakable, half-formed, frightening, confounding, etc. on how sex and our relationship to sex, as a species, both in terms of attitude, behaviours and corresponding social mores, is rapidly changing and in the process changing us. This strange new sexual revolution/evolution is rendering many people almost unrecognisable to themselves in ways that are joyful and terrifying but above all (as Clever Artists like to say) ‘interesting.’ Hence the recent resurgence of the erotic thriller on the big and small screen. It’s a genre I’ve always adored, but which is too often done badly or not at all.
Anyway, I want my erotic thriller to be something different and better. I don’t just want it to just be ‘interesting.’ I want it to be a work of bloody genius! Failing that, it has to be one thing and one thing only: sexy. Like properly sizzling. Legit hot. Not classy, high-minded erotic but straight up sexy— like Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface or Megan Fox on the cover of FHM circa 2005.
Hot like Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. (If you think there’s a sexier song please do tell me in the comments, in fact give me all your erotic thriller recommendations, sexy songs, erotic writing tips or whatever… hell, give me sex tips if you want, I won’t be offended, I don’t pretend to know what I’m doing in any arena of life).