(If you’re following me for freelance writing posts, you may not want to read this one. Just giving you a heads up…) What makes a romance novel so hard to write? Is it the work of bringing to people together, or trying to create two characters that have enough sizzle between them to keep readers wanting more? For me, the hardest part has always been writing about the more intimate moments between the characters. You know, the sex scenes.
At it’s core, having sex doesn’t change a lot from one encounter to the next. The techniques and emotions might change, but the basic act has pretty much stayed the same for the past several thousand years. Writing out a sex scene, and doing it well, presents an interesting challenge– How do you keep such a basic activity from sounding like a cheap porno or, to go the other way, like a technical report? You need to balance it, all without going too over the top with the purple prose. I’ll admit it; I really struggle with writing out these intimate moments, but I can’t imagine my stories without them. I’ve purchased books on how to write sex scenes, and I’ve studied successful sex scenes in other books, all in the hopes of improving my writing. And it’s helped, thankfully, but I still have a hard time getting it to sound just right. So, imagine my enthusiasm when I realized that Will and Suzy are only a chapter or two away from ‘getting it on’. It’s part of my half-written 7th chapter. I need to figure out where I’m going with it, and fast. Heh.
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