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Romance Author Roundtable
5.
AOTW: Level with us --- how easy or difficult is it to write a love scene?
Teresa Medeiros: It's excruciating, by far the most difficult writing I do! I'm so eager to get every word right that is has taken me up to two weeks to write a single love scene. You never want it to be just two bodies slapping. It's very important to choose the right words -- to bring emotion, passion, tenderness, and sometimes even humor and dialogue into the scene. From a literary standpoint, it's also important that the love scene heighten the dramatic tension instead of resolving it. It's a very delicate balance. Once after my husband read one of my books, I asked him how he liked the "love scene" I'd worked so hard to craft. He just shrugged and said, "Oh, I usually skip over Those Parts." I wanted to lunge across the table and throttle him [grin].
Rachel Gibson: For me, writing a love scene is extremely difficult. Each one takes me a week or two. There is a lot of choreography and emotion that has to go into those ten or twenty pages. Also, you have to describe sex without getting to graphic or sappy or just plain stupid. And how many ways are there to describe orgasm? Not many.
Shirlee Busbee: Hands down, love scenes are the hardest part of a book to write. Talk about trying to keep it fresh! It's a nightmare. Sometimes the scenes just unfold like magic, but most of the time it's just plain ole hard work.
Mary Lynn Baxter: At first, the love scenes were my favorite parts to write; they were unchartered territory --- new and exciting. Now, they are the most difficult to write because its' hard to keep them new and exciting.
Brenda Novak: Some writers talk about having real trouble with this. I typically don't mind writing love scenes. Maybe that's because I'm pretty open-minded and vocal as a person. Also, my love scenes are far from the most explicit out there. Maybe that plays a factor in my lack of embarrassment.
Kerrelyn Sparks: It's incredibly easy to write a BAD love scene. Insert tab A into slot B, emit a few groans, and you're done! Granted, it was a very big tab, but it just wasn't very satisfying, was it? Writing a great love scene is actually hard! It's difficult enough that it's tempting to shut the bedroom door. Unfortunately, my characters don't always make it to a bedroom, and I really think my readers deserve more. They've hung in there while the hero and heroine went through the process of falling in love, so they deserve to be there for the (ahem) climax. But whether the couple is in a bed or a hot air balloon, the basic action is much the same. The sad truth is there's only so much they can physically do. And a simple list of connecting body parts sounds more like a training manual than a love scene. It just isn't romantic, and the number one rule that romance writers must remember is: Romance readers want romance.
So, the question becomes how can I make this love scene romantic? The answer lies in emotion. Yes, the body parts connect, but how do the hero and heroine feel about it? The level of intimacy required in a love scene makes the characters extremely vulnerable. A certain amount of trust is required, maybe more than they had previously imagined. It's not the love act itself that becomes important, but how they react to it. Connecting with their emotions is done through the characters, so the key to a good love scene is good characterization. The love scene has to be true and consistent to the characters involved. By this point, the characters should seem so real to the reader that experiencing the love scene through them should also seem real. This gives the love scene the power to knock the reader's socks off.
Judith McNaught: I would rather give myself a root canal. The only thing that makes the process tolerable --- and the scene successful --- is that, by the time my characters are at that point, we (readers and I) are so emotionally connected with the couple that the scene feels especially intimate and even life-altering. I write love scenes about couples who are already so emotionally and intellectually joined, that their physical joining becomes far more stirring and provocative than the actual phrases I use to describe it. Under any other conditions but these, I don't think I could write a good love scene.
I realize there's a contingent of readers and writers who thoroughly enjoy sexy scenes about two adults who take one look at each other at a car wash and instantly begin a silent, but intensely lustful, relationship that starts during the pre-wash cycle, then promptly escalates to long sexual fantasies that continue through the "No-spot rinsing" phase, and reach a fever-pitch by the spray wax application. I even realize there are a few people in real life who do exactly that at the car wash and other places. But if I actually encountered them and knew what they were thinking, I wouldn't find their sudden erotic fantasies to be provocative, let alone romantic. Instead, I'd wonder about their general mental health, their sense of self esteem, and their sexual adjustment issues. If there was nothing to worry about from those aspects, then I'd find their instantaneous intense sexual attraction at the car wash as amusingly impossible as my 90 pound male Doberman's longing for my next door neighbor's 5 pound Yorkshire Terrier.
Having said that, I should also add that I've read some splendidly crafted scenes of instant sexual attraction that I admired as a writer.
Gaelen Foley: For me, love scenes are the easiest and probably the most fun parts of the book to write. Hey, "write what you know," right? .
Barbara Samuel: Depends on the love scene and what must be revealed about the characters in it. In my upcoming A Piece of Heaven, the first love scene has to break down the walls both characters have erected against love, so it had to flow in a tumbled, very emotional way. The trouble was, because of plot boundaries, they could not make love in any of the usual places --- their homes are filled with others, and the weather is too cold for outside--so they have to go to a motel in a tourist town. Awkward --- how to sustain the sexual tension through such a gritty reality? That was a challenging scene, and I rewrote it quite a few times before I found the details I needed to make it come alive and feel right. There are some moments of awkwardness between them, the simple, ordinary awkwardness of new lovers, but I discovered I liked the contrast between that moment, and some that come a little later, where the pair of them are bonding in deep, important ways.
Sex in a romance novel is not just about body parts and sexual feelings. Sex in romance novels is about union and mating, and how we connect mentally and emotionally through our bodies.
Leslie Carroll: When I'm in a happy and fulfilling relationship, I find that these scenes flow more easily from my imagination onto the page. I do admit that even when the emotions are right there for me, sometimes it's still difficult to write those scenes because you want to craft them with words that transport the reader and make her feel the characters' desires and passions without making her giggle or gag. I think we all know what we're talking about here. As a writer you have to sail between Scylla and Charybdis and avoid the too cutesy or the too graphic or, in my opinion, you take the reader right out of the scene, rather than immerse her in it.
Christina Skye: It's easy to write an unimaginative, rote love scene. Making it fresh and funny and poignant, with believable dialogue and real people is the hard part. But there's no better feeling than everything falling into place so that you really have captured the hearts of two people in love. After all, falling in love is the riskiest business around.
Carly Phillips: I wish I could say it gets easier ... but it doesn't! I hate when things seem trite, or worry I'm picking words I use too often. As a Blaze writer, I've done many love scenes and had to find ways to vary them. I'm still doing that in my single titles and hoping to continue! But it's a challenge. And often, writing the love scene takes longer than the other scenes in order to keep them fresh!
Candace Camp: I think that love scenes in general are more difficult to write, particularly as I've written more and more books, because they're basically the same sort of scene that I've written many times, and I have to think more carefully about exactly how to phrase things so that it fits the characters in this book and doesn't sound stale or trite or boring. They are scenes in which writing style is important. Also, there's not much dialogue, and dialogue is what is easiest for me. Of course, like everything I write, it differs from book to book --- some love scenes, like some books, just come more easily; they seem to flow. Other books, every sentence seems to be an effort.
Dorothy Garlock: I don't think it is at all hard to write a love scene between two people in love. I would hate writing the crude scenes that are the basis of some stories.
Jo Beverley: As easy as any other part of the book. If I found it difficult, I think I'd feel that I was forcing the characters. By the time the characters are ready to make love it will happen as readily as other scenes. It may not go smoothly, just as lovemaking in real life doesn't always go smoothly, but my part --- the writing --- isn't affected by that. In fact in many ways it's interesting to write the scenes that go amiss. One was afflicted by a breaking bed and a lactating mother spraying milk around. Another by dealing with a deep feather bed.
Julia Quinn: I personally find them more difficult than other scenes, but not because of the level of sensuality. Stylistically they're just not my forte. I'm great with dialogue and less so with description.
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