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The trick isn’t trouble itself; the real lure is love, and what could be more troublesome for us humans than our romantic lives? When we fall in love, we dive headlong into the unknown, and the experience is a rush—exciting, surprising, frightening, and awe-inspiring all at once, sometimes buoyed by jolts of joy and other times shadowed by doubt, even disappointment. Love often arrives as unreciprocated, perilous, or off-limits, and even when it seems straightforward, there’s always a story brewing because we are mortal beings, marching toward an ending we cannot avoid. That is precisely why love’s trouble makes for such rich storytelling, and why there is a thriving market for romance narratives in publishing.
The challenge in writing about love—and its close cousin, sex—is that these forces remain slippery and veiled, resisting tidy definitions. We tend to pin them down with tired clichés or cloak the truth in euphemisms. This is how the shorthand comes to exist: Love is blind. Love at first sight. Love conquers all. Love makes the world go round. Yet these overused turns fail to capture the depth and mystery of this complicated, elusive emotion, which is why we must seek out new, odd, and more precise ways to speak about love and lust. We may never fully capture all of its intricacies, but the attempt is worth making.
Pep Talk: Getting Over the Hump of Writing Sex
When I was a child of around six or seven, I encountered the word fuck at school. I went home and asked my father what it meant. He replied, “It means making love.” Then he told me not to ask any more questions. Soon afterward, a picture book was left for me. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle depicts two plump characters having sex beneath a bright quilt. The man resembles a pink Pillsbury Dough Boy. I remember thinking the entire book was utterly strange, but the unspoken rule was that I should read it and not ask questions. I learned that sex should be kept secret, but the truth is that our very existence depends on people having sex. It is a natural function of our bodies, and desire is a normal feeling, even if we’re told that some expressions of desire are unacceptable or forbidden.
But isn’t desire the starting point for so many stories? Someone wants something, and then an obstacle arises, and suddenly we have conflict—and a narrative begins.
Tips for Writing Great Sex
Exploit the Messiness
Orgasms are wonderful, but they are rarely the sole motive behind sex, so reducing sex to that outcome is a misstep. Your narrator or character may crave affection, want to sway a lover, seek an adventure, rebel against parents, or ensure a breakup or a final separation. The essential approach is to maintain emotional honesty when you lay bare the tangled feelings that accompany desire—whether you’re depicting revenge sex, breakup sex, make-up sex, obligatory sex, trying-to-mmake-a-baby sex, taboo sex, or a thwarted sexual moment.
Talk the Right Kind of Dirty
How would the people in your piece—especially the narrator—have described what was happening as it unfolded? If the narrator thinks, “Fuck me harder,” but you render it as “Make sweet love to me,” you’ve missed the mark. Some claim there are no good ways to name sex and genitalia, but in truth there are many options—edgy slang, precise scientific terms, or vivid imagery and metaphor—but the language must reflect the tone. If you’re writing dull or clumsy sex, you might lean on clinical terms or even detach from speaking about bodies in first person, using “the” instead of “my,” as in the breasts, the thighs, the cunt. That last word might push you out of your comfort zone—does it make you wince? If so, you’re probably already closer to truth than you think.
If you’re going to write about sex, you must push past discomfort and use the full spectrum of sexual vocabulary. There aren’t true synonyms for every moment; each scene demands the right word, and that word could very well be “cunt.” As writers, we should own every word—or borrow it when necessary. Choose language that matches the piece’s mood, even if it silences your inner critic or your mother’s voice for a moment.
Sometimes “bad” words can yield good writing. Be brave and unapologetic.
Break Stereotypes
One reason stereotypes and clichés wreck our writing is that they’re mostly false. I’ve never witnessed rain falling in torrents, and I’ve never encountered a truly hot, throbbing member in real life. (And perhaps I’m missing something, but the word “member” evokes a club more than a body.) Even when you’re tackling stereotypically rough or exemplary sex, let your language remain fresh and surprising. Oscar Wilde is often cited: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” While there’s truth in this, avoid simply reinforcing traditional hierarchies. The media and popular culture—often even from my own childhood picture books—present limited visions of sex, which we should push beyond.
Our essays, poems, and stories about sex should reflect how rich and varied sex truly is, rather than conforming to stale molds.
Sometimes Less Is More
Draft the sex scene with all its sensory detail, but in revision ask whether it truly serves the piece. Do the sex moments move the plot forward in a meaningful way? Or is the sex itself the story? Sometimes what you leave out can be more charged than what you retain. The late Bette Davis is said to have observed that a single shoulder peeking from a satin nightgown can be more seductive than two naked bodies in bed. If your explicit moment must be trimmed to a reveal like that shoulder, the essence will still linger on the page. A digression can also hint at a sex moment—an internal monologue, a memory, a flashback or forward, or metaphor. Chekhov demonstrates this in his short tale “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” where what happens inside Gurov’s mind is made clear a moment later when Anna acts and speaks—she cries, tells him he won’t respect her, and he responds with a watermelon bite, a metaphor for what has transpired and his casual reaction to it.
Writing Prompt #21: The Language of Sex
Compile a list of every word you would normally associate with sex—the clinical terms, the crude slang, the romantic phrases. When your timer rings, reset it for fifteen more minutes and compose a sex scene (in poetry, memoir, or fiction—your choice) without using any word from that list. This exercise forces you to approach sex with fresh vocabulary and to discover new ways to describe the act. When you’re finished, assess what you’ve produced. Could it serve as the seed of a poem, a short story, an essay, or a chapter in a larger work? Might it function as a scene you could weave into something you’ve already written?
Bonus Prompt: Unsexy Words for Sex
Repeat the exercise, but this time write down words you would never associate with sex—the most unsexy terms you can think of—and then weave those words into a sex scene. You may end up crafting a few striking lines you wouldn’t have chosen otherwise, helping you push through the barrier to writing vivid sex scenes.
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Adapted from 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer by Suzanne Roberts by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2026 Suzanne Roberts Available wherever books are sold or from the Univ. of Nebraska Press 800.848.6224 and at nebraskapress.unl.edu.
