I’ve been reading a lot about sex lately. Nearly every book and website on romance writing has something useful to say about sex scenes, and in researching this article I think I read all of it. I was reminded of the time I decided to write an essay on humour for psychology class. It sounded like a fun topic, but by the time I had read and analyzed everything Freud and others wrote on the subject, nothing seemed funny anymore...

One universal truth I found was that the romance market has heated up and what once seemed risqué to us has now become the norm. Readers expect a more sensual tone than just a few years ago, so it follows that authors who weave well-written sex scenes into their manuscripts are at an advantage. We don’t all have to start writing soft porn, but leaving sex out of a romance novel entirely now seems dishonest and artificial. Sex is a normal part of adult life, marriage and relationships and our characters should be driven to touch and explore one another just like real men and women.

Fortunately there is a lot more to sex in romance fiction than the act itself. A good romance contains plenty of chemistry, detail, emotional intimacy and sexual tension from the start. Sensual language is present long before any clothing hits the floor. A strong bond must develop early between the hero and heroine, and that can lead to erotic moments even without touching. In a romance novel the relationship is what is most important, not who does what to whom.

When sex does occur, though, it must seem an inevitable, integral part of the story and it must advance the plot. If you remove a sex scene and it does not leave a gaping hole in your story, then the scene was superfluous. Before writing, know what else will be happening in the scene besides intercourse – a sex scene is always about something else too. In a romance these moments are more sensual and erotic love scenes filled with emotion, commitment, and at least the possibility of a happily ever after ending.

Love scenes can be the most involved and engaging moments in your novel, an intimate place where inner conflicts and issues are explored, decisions and connections made, new understandings reached and misunderstandings occur. With all that going on and more, they can also be the most difficult scenes to write. When everything has already been said and done about sex so often, how do you make an original contribution? How do you write a sexy sex scene? What follows is my summary of what a few dozen authors have had to say about just that:

Find Your Level – Know how much detail and description is appropriate for your target line, your plot, your characters and your own comfort and ability. In many instances, less can be more: never underestimate the power of a smouldering look. Romance fiction is about teasing, not shocking, and a sex scene is a description, not a sex manual. 

Read the Greats – Bookmark your favourite love scenes and re-read them to see why they work for you. Authors whose work is widely acknowledged as particularly sensual include Virginia Henley, Beatrice Small, Susan Phillip Johnson and many of Harlequin and Silhouette’s Temptation, Desire and Blaze writers. Find your own favourites, especially within the market you are writing for. Further research can include books on women’s sexual fantasies, sex manuals and women’s erotica. A little reading can make up for a life of limited experience and is a good workout for the imagination.

Banish Your Critics – You are not writing for your parents, spouse or neighbours. Identify your inner censors then write for you and your characters, not them. Push your own comfort level a little and don’t hold back… you can always use a pen name!

In The Mood – Eliminate interruptions. Play some music. Dim the lights. Burn a scented candle. Pour a glass of wine. Nibble a dark chocolate. Wear something silky. Close your eyes and fantasize. Recall a favourite love scene from film, literature or even better, life. Don’t tense up; to write a good love scene you have to imagine yourself in the characters’ skin and let go of your own inhibitions. This takes work. In Paris I bought a photo of the author Collette and her quotation “On ecrit pas un roman d’amour pendant qu’on fait l’amour” (One does not write a love story while love is made.) Find your moment. Some authors write the scenes after the first full draft, when they know their characters best. Others feel this interrupts the flow of the narrative. See what works for you.

No, Don’t Stop – Try to write the scene all in one sitting. Let the words pour out. When in doubt, err on the side of the risqué.

Character Study - If your love scene comes to a dead halt or seems shallow, try working on the characters. You have to know why your hero and heroine are in bed together or they will refuse to cooperate. The needs, impulses and histories of your characters should drive the scene and what is specific and special about them is what brought them together in the first place so use it. The best part of a love scene is the emotional growth that the characters experience. Use that intimacy to reveal their hidden truths.

Timing Is Everything – Unless there is a good reason for them to have had sex early in the plot, consummation usually comes late in the story. A well written love scene can be jarring if it arrives without the proper build-up of attraction and frustration. The characters should be able to tell you when they’re ready, but you could have them fantasize a little before real opportunity arises. The number, timing and frequency of your love scenes is a personal choice, though editorial guidelines are worth noting.

Emotional Rescue – If the emotion is there you can be as explicit as you like, or as vague. What the characters feel is more important than what they do. Without emotion a sex scene is clinical or pornographic, but with it even a glance can be dynamite. Balance the physical and psychological content. As Mae West said, “Sex is emotion in motion.”

Theme Party – What is your story really about - redemption, a journey, recovery from trauma? Your love scenes should reflect this and the imagery and language you use can be inspired by that as well as your characters’ backgrounds and situation.

Pillow Talk – What is said during a love scene can be sexier than what is done. Dialogue also breaks up long descriptive passages, making the scene easier on the reader. Keep the exchanges short and meaningful, avoiding the obvious ‘I love you’ or anything that sounds like the soundtrack from a porno film. Carefully chosen, the right words at the right moment can be wonderful, sweet, funny and memorable. Also, use pronouns rather than character names; your reader is not going to forget who is in the bed.

Sense and Sensuality – Sex is sensual so leave nothing out. Use all five senses. If you were describing a meal, a room or a garden you would mention details, so why hold back at the very heart and essence of the story?  Show us what your hero and heroine are experiencing and what excites them. What someone notices and takes pleasure in noticing tells us a lot about them. Offer tiny details in extreme close-up throughout the story not just in love scenes, and find language which reflects the senses. Instead of ‘touch’, try ‘caress’, ‘stroke’ or ‘slides his palm over’.

Where Are We? – The sounds smells and textures of a high rise condo or luxury hotel room are very different from an old castle, sailing ship or log cabin in the woods. Use setting to help make your love scenes real and unique.

My Hero – You and your reader should love the hero as much as the heroine does, and since this is fiction he can be the perfect lover of all your dreams. Be careful not to use thinly disguised versions of the same man in every book, though. Offer variety!

Antici…pation – There should be plenty of sexual tension and a few ‘almost’ love scenes, building up from the first meeting. The increasing pressure is shown by the characters’ exaggerated sensual awareness of one another. Heroes often want sex with the heroine well before they’ve fallen in love with her, or at least before they have realized it, and a real romantic hero will struggle with his attraction and confusion for a good part of the book. When it happens, having sex should remove the tension only temporarily as new conflicts need to arise during and after love scenes in order to keep the plot going.

Less is More – You don’t have to describe every sexual encounter in painstaking detail. A few words or a short scene can sum up an erotic encounter just as well as a several pages of graphic detail. Never add sex scenes as ‘filler’ or in the hope of making your novel spicier. If the emotions aren’t there already, more sex won’t help.

Risque Business – Some readers enjoy a long, steamy love scene and look for them before they buy. Others skip over the ‘love stuff’ entirely. You can’t please everyone, so write what you like and find the best market for the finished product. Editors will tell you if your scenes are too strong or not strong enough for them.

Not You Again – Avoid stock situations like the virginal heroine who somehow turns into a sex siren, the heroine who runs off after a blissful encounter because of some silly misunderstanding, or the wounded hero who has hot, effortless sex despite a bullet wound or broken arm. There is more fun in twisting a tired cliché into something new.

A Public Service – Romance novels are read by young girls as well as mature women. In a world where sex has become an ever-present commodity, a romance is one of the few places where sex mixes with lessons about love, passion and commitment. Romances are their own kind of emotional sex education.

Safe Sex – How do we write love scenes in the age of AIDS? Use your own feelings and your characters’ situation as a guide. Do some asking around or reading to find out how people handle safe sex and dating. Remember that nice women carry condoms too. Don’t use lack of a condom as your only external conflict – that’s already overused. Don’t be politically correct yet artistically feeble. It’s not enough to just pull out a condom; use the moment to reveal something about the characters, their lives and attitudes. Playing it safe can be tender, funny, liberating or whatever else it needs to be for your story.

First Timers – Losing one’s virginity, even for a fictional character, is a big deal. Whether he, she or both of them are new to sex will add levels to your scene. First times are seldom physically ideal, but they give lots of scope for emotional growth. The setting is often unfamiliar to at least one of the characters. Second chances for first times also occur when someone becomes sexually active again after a long hiatus.

Fine Tuning – Get some perspective; put the scene away for a few days after writing it, then re-read it and smooth out the rough spots. Don’t worry about switching points of view; that can work if you find a way for a smooth transition in between, though you’re still better to choose one per scene. Never use an omniscient narrator in a love scene, don’t intrude with background details in the middle, and don’t worry about your vocabulary choices until the editing stage – your characters will tell you what to call things. Once your manuscript is finished, go back and rework the love scenes again. The better you know your characters, the stronger the love scenes will be. When editing, keep track of the choreography of the scene. Don’t leave anyone or anything hanging. Adapt your language to suit your story’s time and place. Make sure the emotion is there, too; without it, all you have is clinical description.

Cliché Alert – Find a comfortable middle ground between flowery and vulgar. Avoid negative or violent imagery. Euphemisms can work, but don’t be so vague that your reader can’t figure out what’s going on. Let movement, touch and sounds reflect your characters’ own personalities. Be comfortable with the language you choose, keep up with the ever changing trends by reading recent romances, and make each love scene unique to your story. Circumstances change and no two characters ever make love in exactly the same way.

On Purple Prose – Some clichés, words and florid phrases to avoid using or overusing: ‘every fibre of her being’, ‘her moist warmth’, ‘the heat of her femininity’, ‘silken warmth’, ‘slow burn of anger’, ‘nest of desire’, ‘nether lips’, ‘Mound of Venus’, ‘orbs’ when you mean eyes (and don’t keep telling us what colour they are), ‘mounds’ or ‘globes’ when you mean breasts, ‘arousal’ for erection (it’s okay to say ‘erection’). ‘his sex’, ‘manhood’ or worse, ‘manroot’ when you mean penis or simply ‘him’, and ‘his hardness’ (which always makes me think of royalty for some reason). Avoid any potentially humorous euphemisms like ‘tumescent tube of fire’, ‘hot, wet tumult of his love’, ‘bald avenger’, ‘throbbing member’, ‘turgid staff’, food images for the female anatomy, or weaponry for the male. Don’t overdo the ‘quivering’ and ‘throbbing’. As a general rule, when you read it over, if it makes you laugh or shudder, lose it!

So there you have it – plenty of advice for the budding sex scene writer. Not everyone is comfortable with or even capable of steamy writing, though. Some fear that readers will think they are writing risqué scenes from vast personal experience. Do those same people think you have to commit murder in order to write a mystery, do you suppose? Other romance writers are simply terminally shy. For them there is the growing Christian and Inspirational markets where bedroom scenes do not occur, as well as old-fashioned ‘sweet’ romances, Regencies and teen romances, and even some mainstream romances and ‘chick lit’ where degrees of sensuality vary widely. We can try to push past our inhibitions, grow as artists and teach old dogs new tricks but ultimately when it comes to sex, in fiction as in life, we should never feel forced to do anything we do not want to do.

References – Books

Writing a Romantic Novel and Getting it Published by Donna Baker

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Your Romance Published by Julie Beard

The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers by Elizabeth Bennet

How to Write a Romance for the New Markets by Kathryn Falk

Writing Romance by Vanessa Grant

Improve Your Romance Writing Skills by Genevieve and Michael Montcombroux

Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies by Leslie Wainger

References - Internet

‘Writing Sex’ by Steve Almond (www.bostonphoenix.com)

‘Writing the Love Scene, with Mary Gillgannon’ by R. Boettinger, (www.hodrw.com)

‘Writing Sex and Love Scenes’ by Lori L. Lake (www.justaboutwrite.com)

‘Ten Essentials for Writing Love Scenes’ by Anne M. Marble (www.writing-world.com)

 ‘On Writing Sex Scenes’ by Marge Piercy, (www.margepiercy.com)

’20 Steps to Writing Great Love Scenes’ by Karen Wiesner ( www.writing-world.com)