You’ll Need More Than That Reverse Cowgirl: The Craft of Writing (Actually) Good Sex Scenes

For a few years now I’ve been teaching a class on erotic writing. Most of it follows the same structure of any creative-writing class—we discuss character and motivation—but the content, you can imagine, takes on a different slant.

It’s both a fun and hard class to teach; hard because the students are immediately thrown into vulnerability, immediately figuring out how much of themselves they’re willing lay bare before strangers, and fun in realizing that everyone else in the class is embarrassed in exactly the same way, and that everyone is always, always, a little bit of a freak.

A few interesting observations: good sex in the bedroom does not automatically make for good sex on paper; there’s no position that’s sexy enough to work without us knowing why the characters want to fuck; and even when you’ve figured out the why, having only an external motivation (“he’s HOT”) or only an external hurdle (“our PARENTS won’t LET US”) is not enough.

The text needs to work to get us to the same level as the characters themselves, to feel their desire as our own. A good sex scene has you teetering between experience and voyeurship: you’re seeing what’s happening, and you’re feeling it yourself.

This is why sex translated from real life tends to fall flat on the page: writers stick to the order of events, movements, and forget the reader isn’t entering the text with the lust they felt in the moment. It all comes down to creating tension through stakes. A reverse cowgirl, unfortunately, is not stakes enough.

Most literary text, whether erotic or not, will try to create some kind of tension with the reader. First of all through language, through small exercises in metaphors. The IKEA effect on the page: language as a puzzle for us to solve—wait, how may bolts are in the package? Where does the short rod go?—and in having the meet the text halfway we have come to feel invested in the result. Look, I put this one together! I figured it out!

Consider Raven Leilani’s sexy and confusing 2020 novel, Luster, where contrasting language pushes the narrator’s desires forward:

She is, I suppose, sexy in the way a triangle can be sexy, the clean pivot from point A to B to C, her body and face breaking no rules, following each other in a way that is logical and curt. Of course, in motion, when she turns and stoops to open the oven, the geometry is weirder.

The work we have to do to comprehend what Luster means with the sexiness of a triangle feels like flirting, like half game half tension; the inherent contrast between the word “sexy” and “triangle” creates that same tension within the text. We can apply the same logic on a broader level, to scenes and movement on the page. Take, for example, Elaine Castillo’s scorching hot America is Not the Heart:

Hero had been told before, not always in a complimentary way, that she was loud when she came—near-silent panting all the way through, and then deafening, devouring cries when it happened. Since arriving in California she’d toned it down, couldn’t let herself go, thought she’d changed….But when she finally came, slick-lipped, lifting her hips to grind her clit shamelessly against Rosalyn’s finger…she felt Rosalyn physically startle at the volume of her cry, fingerhold briefly slipping, before she rallied and rubbed Hero through it. When Hero’s cries petered out to a whine, Rosalyn slowed down to a bare flutter, just for a few seconds, only to gently wind Hero back up again, circling, no mercy, so it didn’t take long for Hero to give it up a second time, growling, annoyed—at how good it was, at how much she’d missed it, at how much more she wanted. Shit.

We have the tension in the language itself, negative contrast walking us through the first three sentences (“near-silent” vs “deafening, devouring cries” vs “couldn’t let herself go”) followed by an outpour once Hero comes; the text mimics the climax, goes into staccato rhythm, and we end on a single sentence with ten commas, followed by a single word: Shit.

The movements of the character are in tension: what she expects to happen once she comes (silence), and what does happen (a cry). We as readers are swung back and forth between witnessing the pleasure and wondering at its impact: words like “give up” and “annoyed” and “want,” the knife’s edge between desire and reluctance. How pleasure in our own bodies can sometimes feel invasive.

The game that is writing a good sex is one of knowing when to pull the tension tight and when to slacken it. In other words: don’t let the reader get too comfortable. It’s a play of balance between allowance (the narrator allowing our presence, the character allowing pleasure) and discomfort (our own discomfort at being voyeurs, but also the character’s potential discomfort in relation to their own desires).

I have this exercise that I do with my students, where I walk them through this one poem by Ellen Bass—Basket of Figs—and then ask them to keep track of which words feel soft and welcoming, which feel uneasy for platonic reasons, and which uncomfortable because of their sudden erotics.

It starts out easy: “Bring me your pain, love. Spread / it out like fine rugs, silk sashes, / warm eggs, cinnamon / and cloves in burlap sacks.” The soft words are obvious: fine rugs, silk sashes, cinnamon. No one likes the warm eggs. Everyone always makes a face at the warm eggs. And I ask why, and then the associations start rolling: why are they warm, what made them warm, the yolky slimy runny—you get the idea.

We continue: “Show me / the detail, the intricate embroidery / on the collar, tiny shell buttons, the hem stitched the way you were taught, / pricking just a thread, almost invisible.” Tiny shell buttons, intricate embroidery—lovely. And then the word “pricking,” a tiny jolt in an otherwise harmless stanza. “Unclasp it like jewels, the gold  / still hot from your body. Empty  / your basket of figs. Spill your wine.”

And we return to the heat, the warmth, and now we have a culprit: the body. No, your body. The demand: empty your basket of figs (!), spill your wine. The possessive is arresting, here—what are my figs? What is my wine? The literal fruit, the literal drink, or something that comes from within me, something more bodily?

Which brings us to the point where everyone starts shifting in their seats, where the discomfort sets in: “That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it, /  cradling it on my tongue like the slick / seed of pomegranate.” Nugget of pain! Suck it! Slick seed of a pomegranate! It’s the contrast that makes it land the way it does, how we start with sweet embroidery and shell buttons, to then enter the body fully: putting things in our mouths, sucking them, weaving it around the word, “pain.”

And for the final crescendo, we start out gently once more—”I would lift it, / tenderly, as a great animal might / carry a small one”—only to end with the danger of love baring its teeth, offering them as protection: “in the private / cave of the mouth.”

Once, after reading the poem out loud to the class, a student took a deep breath and said, Shit. Bass’s poem is the tamest and most PG-rated text we read in my class, and it always seem to have this effect—to leave everyone blushing and quiet for a second.

And that’s the magic of erotica. What makes it work isn’t the act of sex, but the tension the text manages to create, within itself and within you. It’s the stakes the text has created for the characters, for their desires; it’s the discomfort that it’s putting you through. The discomfort that you then choose to push through, or perhaps sit with. Or perhaps to simply enjoy. Take a breath, hold it. Exhale. Shit.

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The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden is available via Avid Reader Press.