Image of Dewey Decimal Daisy by the extremely talented Fantastic Media Labs; more FML hotness here.
Having been a professional erotica reader and erotic anthology editor (with awards and bestsellers) for going on a decade now, I can tell you I’ve read some *really* bad erotica in my time. Which is why every year when the awards for the world’s worst erotic writing are doled out by Literary Review (that’s last year’s award, appropriately presented by Courtney Love), I get just a bit tickled that I am not alone, not by a long shot. Here’s a snip from the Guardian UK’s article about this year’s lineup; it’s long but if you’re into this stuff the dog sex and onion soup at the end tops the cupcake, as it were:
Alastair Campbell’s depiction of a gauche sexual encounter in his debut novel All in the Mind has won him a place on the shortlist for the literary world’s most dreaded honour: the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.
Campbell would join luminaries including Tom Wolfe, AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Melvyn Bragg if he wins the award – a plaster foot – on November 25 at London’s aptly named In and Out club. Run by the Literary Review, the bad sex awards were set up by Auberon Waugh “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”.
The former spin doctor may take heart from the implication that his debut is an “otherwise sound literary novel”. Campbell of course has some earlier practice in depicting sex, having written pornography for Forum magazine under the pseudonym the Riviera Gigolo early in his career, but a passage set on a bench has catapulted Campbell onto the list: “He wasn’t sure where his penis was in relation to where he wanted it to be, but when her hand curled around it once more, and she pulled him towards her, it felt right,” Campbell writes. “Then as her hand joined the other on his neck and she started making more purring noises, now with little squeals punctuating them, he was pretty sure he was losing his virginity.”
But Campbell’s prose is considerably less purple than some of the other contenders for this year’s prize… (…read more, guardian.co.uk)
It is refreshing to see that even professionals are able to get it horribly wrong when it comes to bad sex scenes in literature. I think the lesson that needs to be learned here is that no, just because it is a novel, does not mean it has to have sex in it and also, in a novel where sex is not the focus: less is more when it comes to love scenes. Personally I feel that Gabriel Garcia Marquez does it perfectly, and when I feel that sex just must “happen” in my writing, I always follow his influence to simplify.