Bad Sex

Some of you following this blog will know that I have spoken in the past on the merits and issues associated with horror writer Stephen King. He has undoubtedly written some enjoyable and genre-defining novels and deserves his place as the ‘King’ of Horror. I am less appreciative of his writing-by-numbers approach to the creative process - which might be fine for King – but unhelpfully prescriptive for others. I am immediately distrustful of writers who dictate rules for other writers and artists. These rules seem totally ignorant of the literary and cultural developments of the past fifty years: poststructuralism; postmodernism; post-anything. What century did King think he was in when he postulated such unbreakable rules? This is discussed in greater depth here.


Personally, if you’re going to follow anybody’s advice, you might as well follow William Goldman’s famous declaration that ‘nobody knows anything!’ Something that Stephen King seems to know a little about is writing a bad sex scene, apparently. He has been nominated for this year’s ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’, awarded to one writer each year in order to (according to The Literary Review) "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it". King has been nominated for his time-travel romance, 11.22.63.