Let's Read About Sex - NYTimes.com Writing about sex can be uniquely powerful - and perilous. A group of novelists, memoirists and poets tell us about working blue: what novels first inspired them, what nouns they strive to avoid and who they think writes sex best. Why is writing about sex so difficult? GEOFF DYER: Sex scenes are difficult to write partly because the choice of verbs and nouns is so limited. You can mint new verbs - one of Martin Amis's characters speaks of having "Mailered" a woman - but this tends to take us into the realm of comedy, and sex, if it's going well, is not comic. Even when it's going badly, i.e., not going at all, it tends to be embarrassing rather than funny. Because having sex with someone for the first time is a leap into another reality - one moment you're having drinks, the next you're doing stuff you have dreamed of since you were 13. It seems to demand a shift into a new register. Except, it seems, if you're writing about gay male sex. In Alan Hollinghurst's novels you get these day-to-day scenes, described in meticulous, almost classical prose, and then, without any change of gear, we are in a demotic tangle of body parts. Writing my first novel in the 1980s, at the height of the feminist terror, when men were obliged to accept that dungarees were a form of lingerie, anything approaching a heterosexual equivalent was unthinkable. There's a kiss in that book of mine and then, in the style of old movies, we dissolve to black. This was handy but out of keeping with everything else in the book, which was quite explicit: if a character picked up a cup, you could see the coffee in it. So in subsequent novels I decided that if people went into the bedroom, I had to follow and dutifully record whatever went on there. The result? Well, the virtue of pornography is that it makes films like "The Double Life of Véronique" seem vulgarly dishonest by comparison. By these lights the best writing about sex often seems pornographic rather than artful. Dyer's most recent novel is "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi." RACHEL KUSHNER: I don't think of sex as any more difficult to write about than any other human behavior. Writers fail or soar at anything. Everyone thinks about sex, engages in it. It's the secret we all share. Just acknowledging its constant presence in people's thoughts is a good direction for a novelist. Of the books I like, it could be argued that sex is infused into every cadence, even if never explicitly. And "not explicit" doesn't mean that the prudish kiss leads to the prissy dissolve, but that characters are motored by desire. The authors I admire most seem to render an erotic force field on every page. DeLillo melds nuclear war and Texas college football in "End Zone," and it's hot. Rage, too, is about sex (consider Euripides" Medea). So is despair ("Miss Lonelyhearts"). Then there is plain old unvarnished lust, front and center in many of my favorite works: the poetry of the French troubadours and of Baudelaire, the novels of Genet, the weird louche America of William Gaddis's "Recognitions." It's a nice image that the patchwork quilt at the Spouter Inn matches Queequeg's patchwork-tattooed arms, but what distinguishes flesh from quilt is touch: a warm weight thrown over Ishmael. Some writer recently claimed somewhere that "Moby-Dick" has no sex in it. I find that idea strange. See what you want, Melville fan who is blind to buddy love. "Buddy" relates to "bunkie," which means "bedmate," and that is what Ishmael is to Queequeg, in their very first encounter. Kushner's is the author of the novels "The Flamethrowers" and "Telex From Cuba." TONI BENTLEY: It is not difficult to write about sex. It is impossible. Like its sister intimacies prayer and dance, sex is a live, three-dimensional (well, O.K., four- or five- if your cylinders are firing) happening, and black squiggles on a flat, dry page are, at best, a nostalgic distortion of a done deal - and usually skip the lube. Ouch! As I said, impossible. But being perverted, I mean perverse, I have always thought it would be a good idea to try. Besides, guaranteed failure has a thrilling upside: freedom. Sex is hard in words. Stories seduce a different part of the brain - the one that, er, thinks - while the erotic brain slithers insidiously toward vile visuals, debauched behaviors, absurd positions and stadium settings, while the merest mention of monogamy or fidelity will render Casanova's cane limp and Cleopatra's Nile dry. The real triggers of lust are rarely the food of great literature, an experience of word-to-mind: sex is body-to-mind. While the Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller, Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos), Pierre Louÿs, Jean de Berg (Catherine Robbe-Grillet), John Wilmot, Pietro Aretino, Erica Jong, Georges Bataille and ever reliable Anonymous remain the usual worthy salacious suspects, my gold star goes elsewhere, to those who really do it best: horny women. Think of those whose filthy, uncensored fantasies froth forth in Nancy Friday's collections, like Vesuvius upended, silencing the sentimental soft-core of Anaïs Nin and E. L. James in a single eruption. Here, unconsidered desire slices swiftly to the core of lust, and with their - our - trailer-trash orgies of incest, bestiality, rape, pedophilia, domination and submission, whoredom and heterosexual lesbianism we eat our cake before baking it. And leave men reeling in trailer blowback. Wrong is hot, and great writing, by definition, can just never be quite wrong enough. Bentley's erotic memoir, "The Surrender," has been adapted for the stage and will have its American premiere in New York in January. So, what makes a good sex scene?