LS Hilton on writing about sex: ‘An orgy is a technical challenge’

Some years ago, when I was just starting out as a writer, I was lucky enough to share a panel at a literary festival with the novelist Sally Beauman, who died this year. As an avid reader of bonkbusters in my teens, I was a huge fan of her book, Destiny, which was published in 1985, garnering a £1 million advance for its author – at the time the largest sum ever paid for a first novel. The book was a smash hit, but Beauman herself, who had started out as a journalist, was vilified.

“The inexcusable thing”, Beauman commented later, “was that I was paid a great deal of money and wrote a book that was sexually explicit. Both were unforgiveable.” I remember Beauman as great fun and full of kind advice for a nervous first-timer, particularly her belief that it was quite possible to write to a high standard whilst still appealing to a commercial audience. She had no patience for the idea that if a book contained sex scenes, it should be automatically dismissed as trash. “I’ve never understood (why) you should siphon off this one subject, and not write about it in the same way as you would anything else,” was the observation quoted in her obituary. Yet, 30 years later, it still seems that there is a certain literary snobbery surrounding sex, particularly when it is written about by women.

When my own novel, Maestra, was published this spring, I was genuinely surprised that many readers found the sex scenes unpalatable. The book is very much a thriller, rather than erotica, but the heroine does have a lot of sex, sometimes with people whose Christian names she doesn’t know. The sex scenes are integral to the plot, and to the reader’s understanding of the character, who is – I hoped – a very modern woman who is unapologetic about desire and feels no shame at its fulfillment. We live in a hyper-sexualised culture, and in the age of Tinder it didn’t seem all that shocking to me to try to write about the things that adults do in the vocabulary which contemporary adults use. I didn’t feel that writing about sex was in any way different from “proper” writing, yet many journalists asked me if I found the sex more difficult to write. Certainly, I was interested in the technical challenge of doing a good orgy scenario, but no more or less so than a good murder.

Admittedly, I hadn’t had much practice at writing about sex, but my background as an historian came in quite usefully. Firstly, because if you have spent as much time in Renaissance Europe as I have, very few sexual high jinks retain a power to shock, but also because writing battle scenes is not dissimilar to writing sex scenes. A battle requires a good overview of a physical situation – to put it bluntly, who is putting what where, it needs to be exciting and detailed whilst allowing the action to flow towards a – er – climax. When I was writing group sex scenes in a smart London townhouse or a Parisian partouze club, I had to spend a lot of time thinking about stray left arms, or whether it was possible for three bodies to achieve a certain position simultaneously. I confess I did draw the odd diagram to make sure everyone’s limbs were tidily in place.

The tone, or voice of the scenes was also important. Maestra is a first-person story, so when the heroine, Judith Rashleigh, is recounting her adventures, her voice had to be consistent with the rest of the book. Hence my choice not to be euphemistic (which can often lead to comedy), but to describe sex in the vocabulary that a 25- year-old woman would realistically use. Like it or not, that vocabulary is influenced by porn and sexting, so those were the words I felt it appropriate to choose. Judith speaks idiomatic modern English, but that’s what got me into trouble. I thought being a serial killer was bad enough, but apparently employing the c-word as a proper noun is a far worse offence.

Reading my bad reviews on Amazon (a nasty habit, but I enjoy a bit of self-harm at breakfast), it seemed that it was very much the language of the sex scenes in Maestra, rather than what was actually happening, that people disliked. For every reader who claimed to find the sex enjoyable, even empowering, there was another who found them disgusting.

I wonder whether this is because we still expect good behaviour from books in a way which we don’t from, say, Cosmo. When Emile Zola began releasing his Rougon Macquart series of socially realist novels in the nineteenth century, he launched a new literary movement, Naturalism, but many of his contemporaries were appalled that characters in novels like L’Assommoir not only spoke in the argot of the French working class, but swore – that is, they sounded like real people. When Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting, his orthographic rendering of Edinburgh speech felt daringly fresh and modern, but then he was mostly describing junkies shooting up heroin, which tends to diminish the libido. Writing about sex in non-“literary” language is still perceived as transgressive – Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint features a notorious scene in which the protagonist achieves satisfaction in the embrace of a rolled-up piece of liver, but any alarm the reader might feel at this ingenious expedient is diminished by the determinedly highbrow nature of the prose.

As someone whose early sex education was gleaned from furtive readings of Eighties bonkbusters, I also wonder whether writers don’t have a duty to describe the physical realities of sex as accurately as they can. “He played her like a Stradivarius” is a convention that made its way from Jackie Collins to Harlequin romances, yet I’m still not quite sure how it’s done. I don’t imagine it will be happening to Judith Rashleigh in the sequel to Maestra either – but for myself, I rather live in hope.

LS Hilton is the author of Maestra, now available in paperback, £7.99