Sex Scenes
This topic recently came up as a prompt during the February Instagram challenge I participated in. The first place I went was to my blog archives to see what I’d said about this before. Turns out the last time I’d written about it was almost eight years ago. Not surprisingly, my thoughts have changed a little.
So, here we go!
Writing sex is an interesting subject to me since it’s one I’ve struggled with throughout the years. My first novel was a sweet contemporary romance, so I skipped the sex altogether. The pressure of writing sex intimidated me. Plus, the book’s content was pretty sweet, so sex didn’t feel necessary. I’d also written a novella with sex in it (Jungle Heat), so I was good with writing it. It had a mainstream heat, not too hot and not too sweet.
My first publisher specialized in erotic romance, so the heat level needed to be ramped up. Sex scenes needed to be plentiful. Needing to write so many caused me to majorly burn out on them. That’s why the Cry Wolf series and Beneath the Broken Moon doesn’t have as much sex as some of my books.
After the hiatus I took this past year, the charred bits have begun to flake off. Along with my passion to write, I’m beginning to enjoy writing sex again. Hooray for small victories!
One thing that hasn’t changed for me is needing to be in a certain mindset to write sex. I used to try to muscle through them because they were next, and I’m not crazy about writing scenes out of order. However, I’ve found that if I try to just write them regardless, they need a lot of editing. If the scene doesn’t excite you, chances are it won’t excite the reader either.
What I do with love scenes sometimes is type **insert sex scene here** and move on. The scene will be there when I’m ready, even if that happens to be during the editing process.
A funny story is one time I turned in a book to my editor with **insert sex scene here** still in. I was really tired, and my eyes must have glazed over it. My editor was confused, but I wrote the scene and turned it in for her to look it over. After that, I try to be more careful!
Until next week,
Sarah