Julian Barnes, one of my favourite contemporary authors, has complained that modern authors are under 'a commercial obligation' to include sex scenes in their work. This is an area notoriously difficult to get right as witnessed by the annual Literary Review Bad Sex Awards and perhaps explains why a lot of novelists choose to target a pre-pubescent audience which avoids the necessity for including anything beyond a chaste kiss.
Julian Barnes suggests that the new 'freedom' (ie post Lady Chatterly) which writers have can lead to the problem of striking the right balance between how much to describe explicitly and how much to omit in the interests of taste and decency.
As an admirer of Flaubert (his novel 'Flaubert's Parrot' was a masterly study of the French writer) Julian Barnes should simply follow Flaubert's advice. Flaubert was himself very keen on writing about sex (very French) but he made it a golden rule and the writer should never use a coarse word or be too explicit. His 'disciple' Guy de Maupassant always followed this strict instruction with the result that he is one of the very best writers about sex. My advice is follow Flaubert's advice and you can't go wrong.
Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending.
My book 'The Lady in Grey' is a fictional biography of Guy de Maupassant which includes most of Flaubert's advice and is available from www.amazon.com or www.amazon.co.uk in paperback or as a Kindle download.
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