Writing Love Scenes
Some of the most challenging writing is creating compelling love scenes. Originality and emotion are the keys to selling a love scene. Readers will instantly be put off by predictability and cliches.
What position does the love story occupy in the overall story arc? In a romance, the love story is the big story. In other genres — women’s fiction, mystery, thriller — it may be a sub-plot. They’d be handled differently in those different genres. In a mystery, the love scene better be short. In a romance, it should be much more longer.
Cliches will distance the reader. Anatomical descriptions that lack feeling even more so. Author Denise Williams has an article I really like on how to write a good love scene. Her main point is to focus on the stakes between these two people. What do the two people have to lose or gain? “Romantic scenes feel romantic because readers know the weight of the moment—don’t let them forget.”
Writing Love Scenes That Fit Your Plot
Not all love scenes occur in romance novels. In my time travel story Undoing Time, the slow-burn romance is a sub-plot between contemporary people whose bigger story is about their travels into history. The love scenes have to be there, but they have to take a back seat to the bigger plot arc. We need to see Liv and Tom find a bridge across their social differences to act on their attraction, as contemporary young people. But we need for the romance not to get in the way of the larger story. That story is about Liv finding her purpose in life — to repair history.
But the romance I want to someday write will involve a love scene between a married couple who are still in love after 50 years! It would be told in the overlap between romance and women’s fiction. We’d want to see the spark of Eros still alive, but the complexity of a long, long friendship as the context. Perhaps the story is rekindling the spark — over and over throughout the years. Perhaps it’s a fantasy world, or a mystery with the couple an aged pair of married sleuths like Nora and Nick Charles (The Thin Man). Their love scene would be fascinating to write!
Writing Sex Scenes
Whether or not to put a sex scene or two in your love story is a complicated question. It has to do with your values, your audience, and your story. How to make a sex scene interesting is even more complicated. Many contemporary romance novels put sexual encounters at the forefront, if not completely eclipsing any other aspect of their love. I think this is because most of these romances focus on young people and Hollywood likes a good sex scene.
But contemporary romances aren’t like those in a Jane Austen novel — the novels which spawned the romance genre. Austen’s stories feature growing romance between longtime neighbors (Emma), or young people separated by social class finding a bridge across differences and prejudices (Pride and Prejudice). In those stories the physical attraction is a given. The story is centered in more complicated feelings, with no need for a sex scene.
Most contemporary romance novels are stories of chemistry, often beginning and ending with bedroom scenes (or kitchen table, or floor, or couch), with physical descriptions prevailing. That puts more emphasis on writing a good sex scene to hold the reader’s interest.
A good sex scene must be original. It has to portray character and emotion. The sex itself has to reflect the characters’ stakes. And it can’t just be choreography. Outlander author Diana Gabaldon offers advice on writing a good sex scene. I find it interesting that she characterizes a good sex scene this way: “In essence, a good sex scene is usually a dialogue scene with physical details.” Because dialogue brings emotion into the scene. And every good scene is about emotion.
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Are you writing across the boundaries of fiction categories — let’s say a fantasy romance or a time travel mystery — your marketing suffers from cross-genre syndrome? You’re not alone. Bestselling mainstream authors Neil Gaiman and Kashuo Iziguro had an interesting conversation about book categories and why publishers, agents, booksellers, and the public increasingly seek genres in fiction.
Check my post about the overlap between romance and women’s fiction.