Recently, I wrote a blog here at WITS about how to put sexual tension in your romance novel. But it felt like only half the story. Sexual tension often leads to…you guessed it…sex. Not all romances have sex in them, but many do. I’ve been teaching a class on writing romance and in talking to my students I found many were intimidated by writing sex scenes. The funny thing is, sex scenes don’t have to be scary at all. Here are nine simple tips for painless sex scenes.
Sex scenes are an extension of sexual tension. While erotic romance may have frequent sex scenes that start right away (more about that later), and sweet romances may put the sex scene off until after the book concludes, most romances fall somewhere in the middle. Funny, because that’s often around where most sex scenes actually occur. While there’s no rule about this (I’m not much for rules about anything) what I often see in books that I enjoy, is that you want to stretch out the question about whether or when the hero and heroine will have sex as long as possible. By the time you get to sex (except in erotic romance, where you can really get there FAST) you want the reader to know the characters, understand that they’re right for each other, and really be rooting for them to have wonderful, mind-blasting sex.
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