How to write a sex scene like Tom Barry’s When the Siren Calls

“Restless and neglected, Isabel is suffocating in a stagnant marriage. An invitation to visit Jay’s resort in the hills of Tuscany sparks Isabel to imagine a life of freedom and excitement. She abandons herself in a passionate affair, with her controlling lover encouraging Isobel to push beyond her sexual boundaries.”

So begins the description of Tom Barry’s sexy book, When the Siren Calls. And the book itself features convincingly titillating sex scenes.

Barry is in town. My chance to find out: how do you write sex scenes?

Barry is the last person you would guess wrote When the Siren Calls, and its sequel When the Siren Cries. His innocent, gently ironic manner reflects a settled, middle class lifestyle.

We’re meeting in a coffee shop, late morning.

“The thing is,” he says, “you have to make yourself do it. It’s required in the genre. At first, I was very self-conscious about writing a sex scene. I knew everybody would read it. Including my wife and kids.”

But write it he did. “The first rule is to only write what titillates you personally. You’ve got to be honest with yourself. If you’re just trying to write what you think others want, it won’t work. People will see through you. And also envision your readers: everybody! From young to old, religious to radical, and your majority audience, which is women, especially younger women. They are your more avid readers. Which means you have to be more subtle, more suggestive, and more clever in structuring your scenes. Guys are so much easier to play. They like adventure. And with sex, they just want to get right at it. But you’ve got to work them harder than that. Lots of dangling teases, blind alleys, and setting the scenes in quality context.

If the plot is financial, crime, whatever, you need to work hard to make the story well-researched, and your protagonists rooted in the complexity of their world.”

When the Siren Cries, starts off at the San Diego-Tijuana border. “It’s the details,” he says. “The color of a Mexico City license plate, the customs officer’s cap and badge, the location of the secondary inspection area.”

But don’t overdo stage directions, Barry says. “When you do get to sex, it’s so much more meaningful if your reader is already drawn into a sort of trance. Suggestion is everything. Provoke the reader’s imagination. Use hard expletives sparingly. And in the field I write in, which you might call soft porn, sex should be, as far as possible, consensual, legal, no minors, and have a clear point of view.”

And with today’s women, he says, no more fainting, sighing, submissive broads. “Yes, there’s still ‘Will she, won’t she?’ but with strong female leads. She’s making active decisions. And keep a smattering of humor.”

Does he ever go too far? “It’s the opposite. I go for a meeting with my editor, and she is always pushing me to go further. She’s in the business of selling books. She knows her readers want to be titillated.”

Basically, though, he says it’s simple: “Give them a sex scene every 20-30 pages.”