Question for Romance Fans

Cafe Society
1

I have a question for all two of you, I suspect.

I’m writing a romance novel (an action thriller) and I’m kind of stuck trying to figure out where to put the sex. I prefer slow burn stories where it takes some time to warm up and intimacy is a gradual process. But my sex scenes are explicit. I don’t want to put too many in the book because in my experience it drags down the story. So any sex I do include needs a story based reason.

Right now I’m at the midpoint of the book. There is a lull in the violence and the couple is in a safe place. The characters already had their first kiss a few scenes ago (they regret it, of course.) So this would generally be where sex happens.

But I’m not sure if it should happen yet. The characters are just starting to be vulnerable with one another. So I’ve toyed around with having them almost have sex and be interrupted by some exciting plot thing. I’ve considered just a heavy make out session where they reluctantly decide to put the brakes on moving further. They’re in a life or death situation where the outlook looks grim and there is very little hope of something long term.

Thus I ask the teeming several, what is your preference for the progression of sex in a romance novel? About where in the story do you start to feel like you’re being jerked around, if it hasn’t happened yet? What frequency do you prefer?

Do you have any thoughts about the different alternatives I’ve shared? Got any others?

Thank you!

2

A life and death situation can actually heighten the sex drive, so it shouldn’t be some kind of cognitive decision on their part. It should just happen, preferably after an intensely close call, and it should be explosive and erotic.

3

From an unrepentant book a day fiction reader of some 70 years experience, Diana Gabaldon, the author of the Outlander historical fiction/time travel/romance series, is the penultimate author of romance. She has written a book on how she writes sex scenes. I got it from my public library~the description of how she does it is as engaging (and delicious) as actually reading her romantic sex scenes. She’s a PhD science professor (behavioral ecology who started writing as a hobby in 1988).

from Wikipedia:

… Her books merge multiple genres, featuring elements of historical fiction, romance, mystery, adventure and science fiction/fantasy.[2] A television adaptation of the Outlander novels premiered on Starz in 2014.[3][4]

Worth your read as a ‘how to’.

I don’t even like romance or time travel fantasy but Chapter 14 and especially Chapter 15 of her first book in the series Outlander, hooked me good and proper. Chapter 15 is “Revelations of the Bridal Chamber”. Best sex scenes and romance writing from the point of view of a woman protagonist ever!

9 fat volumes later, I’m breathlessly waiting for the last book to be released, the culmination of the series. This fall, they promised. The miniseries on Starz is equally masterful but I read it first in dead tree books.

4

I read the first of her books! So I am familiar with her work. She took a lot of creative risks that I appreciate.

I had no idea she wrote a craft book. I am definitely going to read it!

Yeah, you’re right. I was thinking I might have made things a little too safe and distant from the danger for it to work. Maybe that’s what’s not working about the scene. I’m going to look at this again, thank you!

5

In general, when reading erotica, I dislike the trope about people having sex, or about to, and then the phone rings or someone barges in or something similar. IMHO, it is annoying rather than tension-building.

I’d rather that the sex just happen without interruption, or no sex at all.

6

I’m not a fan of romance fiction. I’ve hardly read any books in the genre making my opinions about it necessarily uninformed. That aside…

My mom goes through romance novels like tissue paper. When I lived at home, I’d pick one up at random and open it to about three-quarters of the way through. Nine times out of ten, it would be a sex scene (“the” sex scene for all I knew).

Imo, too many sex scenes becomes tedious. Sometimes only one sex scene is tedious.

These two preferences may not be compatible within the framework of the story (or genre). Perhaps one or more of the main characters could dream/fantasize explicitly about having sex under duress, but when actually placed in such circumstances, they behave very differently.

Much better if it’s a character thing, otherwise it might feel like an imposition, i.e., the author’s heavy hand intruding upon the story. One way to go would be to couch the reason for holding back in humor, later revealing a dramatic reason behind it. This might allow your characters to bond in a more compelling way than simply having them sleep together because it’s a convenient time to spice up the story with a steamy sex scene.

Emotion matters.

7

Romantic thrillers are a very popular genre. Adrenaline is adrenaline. But this story in particular is enemies to lovers (my preferred trope) so they have to build trust first. And they have, by this point in the novel.

The issue I’m really having is, if they have sex at this point in the story, what’s left in terms of internal conflict? They are about to go into a situation where they can’t be with each other the way they want to be. And we will also see the introduction of a supporting antagonist who comes between them. So that alone might be sufficient.

I just got an idea to try out. If I hold off on the sex until they are actually in that situation of having to hide their relationship, you’ve got a forbidden romance angle.

It looks like I need to cut some scenes.

That is a guiding principle of all my books. Scenes must be grounded in the emotional reality of the characters and there needs to be an organic reason for everything that happens. If the sex wasn’t an important part of the story, I wouldn’t write it in. Thus I want to avoid the trap that many romance writers fall into where they just have the characters spend the rest of the book having sex. That’s what their readers want, I guess, but I find it incredibly dull.

Both of the characters in the book are survivors of trauma, the hero more recently than the heroine, but they’ve both got sexual issues to work through. I’d see sex in this circumstance to be symbolic of a willingness to face those issues with each other. That’s especially significant for the hero because he’s been in denial for the majority of the book. But it’s also important to the heroine because she’s taking a chance after being alone for a long time.

Sometimes I think my problem as a writer is I have too many emotional considerations to ponder. I often become paralyzed by what emotion to bring out in what scene. If the hero is feeling five different things right now, how is that shown, what’s going to be primary, what’s the best direction to take? So I write twelve versions of the same scene and can never decide what to do. My biggest obstacle as a writer isn’t my prose, or my storytelling, it’s the constant second guessing and revisions that makes it take years for me to finish anything. I haven’t figured out a way around it yet.

I’m going to run all of this by my writers group tonight. We are resuming meetings again after nearly losing each other because of COVID. They aren’t all romance writers and it can help me get a fresh perspective.

But ultimately I’m writing for readers of romance.