101 Reasons to Stop Writing

I’m about to tell you a secret so shocking, it might blow your mind. Yes, cranial fellation is a possibility. Are you ready?

All sex scenes are gratuitous.

There used to be something of a point to sex scenes in novels. Back in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The average semi-literate shopkeeper, who learned everything he knew about sexuality from bawdy limericks, and could count his sexual conquests by the number of different genital rashes that appeared in a calendar month, loved to read racy novels written in French and printed on parchment soaked in vinegar to rinse off the ink from Napoleon: I’ll Be Back. It was exciting, back then, to read about having sex on sheets, and to indulge the fantasy of raping the scullery maid without the “comeuppance” of being castrated by her scythe-wielding boyfriend.

By the 20th Century, most people had at least heard of sex, and fictional portrayals began to move on to exotic locales and positions, and introduced the revolutionary concept of having extramarital intercourse without a slow descent into Hell afterwards. In the last quarter-century, the average teenager’s sexual experiences were beginning to outstrip the inventive capacity of wallflower future authors who were in the library salivating over the one dog-eared copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn when their classmates were exploring the seductive powers of pre-mixed vodka and orange.

Now, of course, anyone with Internet access can have any sexual question answered, and any fetish satiated, in 0.13 seconds. So, the only sexual frontier left for fiction to explore is what it might be like if Galadriel, Lois Lane and Ally McBeal gang-banged Professor Snape and the fat guy from Lost.

Every sex scene is gratuitous.

For every sexual sequence in a novel that imparts some insight into the characters, let alone the human condition, there are thousands which exist solely because the author got to page 180 and realised the main characters hadn’t fscked yet. Almost all of them could be edited down to “And then they did it,” without losing anything original.

I’m all for sex in novels, and on novels. I’m being prudent here, not prudish. If I wanted to get an erection on the bus ride to work, I’d bring my PSP and a 1 gig memory card loaded with eroticism of a more visual nature.

Like every other page of your crappy book, the sex scenes should tell me something about the characters that I couldn’t figure out from “And then they did it.”

If not, stop writing. Or at least just admit that you’re writing porn.