How to Write Killer Prose

Can we talk about sex?

Sex in fiction is like chili in food. Potent. You have to know why you're including it. Are you after the kind of fiery masala meal that you can only consume with a cold fan playing on the back of your neck, or something more nuanced. If the first, go for it. But remember that when sex is unhooked from character, a law of diminishing returns kicks in. The reader's taste buds quickly become numbed.

The highest selling fiction genre today is Romantasy (Romance meets Fantasy). Its success is no accident. It promises readers new worlds, and old values. The protagonists may have wings or magical powers, but its core stories are those in which deserving, quietly brave young women endure several hundred pages of misunderstanding (Romantasy sex is nothing if not earned) before melting the hearts of emotionally remote, titanically ripped men, and being rewarded with volcanic passion.

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The point about this genre is that everyone knows the deal. The process of world building is detailed and rigourous, but the characters are, au fond, always the same. So is the plot, whose long and calculated witholding is itself explicitly sexual in character.

The people who sneer at this kind of story miss the point. The mostly female readers of Romantasy are not retreating into a submissive, pre-feminist dream of male dominance, they're doing something much more fundamental. For while these heroes and heroines are of course characters in the literary sense, they're also archetypes, and vitally, conflicting aspects of the reader's interior self.

Viewed in this light the success of beauty-and-beast titles like Fifty Shades of Grey is easier to explain. The many readers of E.L. James's novel, I'd argue, aren't so much harbouring fantasies of being sadistically toyed with by investment bankers (although I'm sure that's a thing), as reconciling their own inner Christian Greys and Anastasia Steeles.

Once you start thinking about sex in fiction as the resolution (or not) of the reader's inner state, all sorts of possibilities present themselves. My own readers, I think, engage with my characters because both Eve and Villanelle co-exist in them, eternally moving, waveform-like, between peak and trough, estrangement and reconciliation.

I describe the loveless and predatory sex that Villanelle has before Eve, or apart from Eve, in more detail than the sex that she has with Eve, because it's an indicator of her affectless nature and a measure of her conflicted state. When the two of them are in harmony I back off, and leave the reader to fill in the details. Happiness is so much better imagined than described.

So where does this leave us? If you're going to write a sex scene, go all in. But have a reason for it. Know when not describing is better than describing. And think of your readers. It's about them, not you. Broadcast on their frequency. Harmonise with their music.