Sex is impossible to write about convincingly, John Banville says His comments echo those of Martin Amis, who told an audience at the Telegraph Hay Festival last month that it is not possible to write convincingly about sex. However Mr Amis said that women are better at writing about love-making than men because men tend to "forget the fiascos and the no-shows" while women are more honest. The authors" comments come as sales of erotic fiction soar due to the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey by E. L. James, which has sold one million print copies. Mr Banville said that no author sets out to write about sex in a book. Rather, a sex scene in a book "arises from the situation, from the characters, from the plot." It is not something you set out to do. It would go wrong. It wouldn't work if one set out to write about it," he said. He said that erotic novels tend not to be "true and honest" because there is no much more to relationships than just sex. However he described the 1954 erotic novel Story of O by Pauline Reage as a successful erotic book because its heroine, simply called O, "has power."