Lana Sky and Simone Coleman are two aspiring writers who hope to make their mark on the writing world, doing what else? Stripping their characters all the way down.
So your characters have graduated from hand holding to snuggle fights. Now what? How do you take that plunge beneath the sheets that will turn your rating from simply PG to 13 or higher? Well, the first question you need to ask yourself is…
Does THIS story need THAT type of scene?
Believability
Lana Sky: As a long-time smut fiend and a certified reader and writer of all things deranged, one of the biggest mistakes I notice when it comes to smut (which is my preferred slang term for a sex scene when I’m trying to be serious because of my immaturity. I just snickered writing that, by the way) is that way too many authors try to jam in steamy scenes to either make their writing seem more mature, more “marketable” or to lure more readers. The result is usually a stiff, awkward scene that drags down the pace of an otherwise good read. Never base including smut on the question of popularity. Instead, look at it in the simplest terms of: is this what my characters want? It can help if you apply the same terms of consent used for sex between your characters that are used between healthy, consenting adults. (if your plan is more dark romance where consent becomes murky we’ll discuss that in another post)
Simone Coleman: Sometimes, you just have to put yourself in your Health Ed teacher’s shoes, sit down with your characters and ask, “Are you really ready for this?” If your characters aren’t ready — if it’s too soon, the scene isn’t right, they don’t *want* to bump uglies and are resisting your pervilicious typing — then this will come across on the page and readers will wonder WTF is happening… just like if your character decided to eat an entire cake right after breakfast. If they’re not a glutton for cake (sex), then why the fresh hell are they eating it so much?
Secondly, although romance tends to lend itself to a lot of suspending disbelief, there’s still some details you can’t shirk on… like protection. Protection is SEXY! It can be incredibly jarring to dive right into a sex scene where the characters start bumpin’ uglies, and there’s no mention of condoms, health checks, HIV, or BABIES. If it hasn’t been addressed by the HEA, you’re leaving readers in the lurch as to their health & welfare. How can I believe Ken and Barbie will last 5ever and ever if there’s a chance Ken’s bits might be covered in warts? Generally, a reader’s first port of call is to jump to the instant pregnancy conclusion, but a girl’s got bigger problems when her honey pot isn’t producing honey, if you get what I’m sayin’? And chlamydia is a silent danger!! Some women don’t show symptoms, so their baby making factory may have bit the dust without them ever realizing. HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO BARBIE? Wrap it up — or let them roll irresponsibly in the hay and pay the consequences, visit a health centre, talk about STD checks or at least allude to some fears of gonorrhea. There’s a reason it rhymes with diarrhea!
Lastly, if you want to be super thorough, it’s okay to do research. Read Cosmo. Google sext tips. Even AskMen has some helpful articles on how to improve your sex life and you can incorporate that into your scene. Or, if you really want to go all out, google some porn and soak up the damage. It doesn’t have to be seriously crazy porn — there’s plenty out there geared towards the ladies if you know where to look. I notice a lot of male characters are written to be sexually adventurous and the best damn lay ever… yet they never seem to move out of missionary. How is anyone supposed to believe that your boy is a sex god when he spends the entire scene gazing into her eyes and thrusting away like a jack rabbit? Sometimes, the heat of the moment calls for some jack-rabbiting and out of control, wtf-are-we-doing sex that translates to missionary on the floor with their clothes still on… but what about next time? Climb into your character’s head/bed, think about their motives and their personality, and figure out how their sexual style might correlate to that. You never know what you might uncover O.O
Also, teeny-tiny secret: manwhores, especially manwhores in college, are generally terrible in bed. If they’re sleeping with everyone they can, they’re not taking the time to learn what makes a girl feel good, what gets her off and what makes her scream. They’re just acquainting their dick with as many vaginas they can before it falls off and their mothers pressure them into settling down. But your heroine can teach them, yeah? ;)
Mood
Lana Sky: Are your characters delirious love birds? Love/hating enemies? Friends with benefits? A random hook up? Whatever the reason, there has to be some overriding emotion coming from both characters. Love, lust, passion, shame, desperation, affection, ect are a few examples and once you decide on the overall tone of the scene it becomes much easier to plot and make it more specific to each character’s mindset at that moment. Are you writing a steamy one-night stand between a shy college freshman and a brash, confident playboy? For a second, let’s say you are.
Breaking down each emotion for that particular set of characters might look something like this:
Character 1: They might feel shy. Insecure. Excited. Character 2: Confident. Bold. Cocky. Maybe even a tad selfish.
Blending these two emotions into one seamless smut scene can be both a challenge and a clever way to add more depth and growth to your characters. Never look at a smut scene as bit of filler or a fun distraction but as a way to show your character’s personalities while exploring the depth of a relationship. That should be your primary goal before any clothes are removed.
Simone Coleman: In short, sex is like a really weird conversation between one body and another body (or three or four or five). Nobody ever has the exact same conversation, says the exact same things, asks the exact same questions — or the conversation goes stale, friends are lost, nobody ever wants to talk to that person again. Sex works the same way. Some people are great at strolling on up to a stranger and engaging them in conversation (or sex), some people stutter and stammer and blush at the ground when a stranger approaches, some people are cold and sarcastic before they get to know said stranger (which could easily translate to being a corpse in bed for the first few times :P ). Think of it as your characters… chatting. With their love cave and wonder wand.
And sometimes…. Sometimes, us creepy pervs behind the proverbial curtain don’t actually need to hear that conversation, unless there’s some vital information hidden in their… words. If the ‘conversation’ serves no purpose, then we don’t need it. Give it the snip!
Detail
Lana Sky: This is something that should be specific to not only your preference as an author but the personality of your characters. If your narrator is a straight-laced prude, then using crude terms like p*ssy and c*nt and other terms that could make a nun blush might seem out of place. Then again, if your narrator is a horny playboy and he’s talking about “plundering the womanly cave of his ivory goddess,” you might have your readers wondering if they’ve stepped into a 19th century bodice ripper.
The best way to determine your preferred terms is to read and familiarize yourself with them. Try a raunchy erotica and top it off with a sweet, delicately described romance. Whether it’s fade-to-black or no-holds-barred once you determine your comfortability with certain terms, it’s easier for you to adapt them per character. I usually try to put myself in the character’s mindset and describe whatever they would be comfortable describing in their own words.
Simone Coleman: Like I said above, sex is like a conversation and you need to approach how much detail you want to use in the same way you’d approach a conversation between your characters. Firstly, decide what genre your romance slots into. Erotica? A cute rom com? Angsty, etc? Is most of your character development sex-based? Do they discover themselves, uncover buried trauma, etc whenever they’re having sex? Is your character’s emotional well-being dependent on whether or not she can screw around without engaging her feelings… but then the unthinkable happens and she’s broken by a magical dick? These are all great reasons not to wind up dropping the curtain and doing a fade to black every time your characters have sex. But if your sex scene serves absolutely no point — then cut it. Fade it. We don’t need to read it.
If the scene is necessary — then you need to look at how much you’re going to show the reader. Do we really need giant paragraphs full of descriptions of how he played with her boobs? Sometimes less is more, and generally what makes a sex scene ‘hot’ is the emotion that drives it. Think about the last sex scene you read that made you think, “Holy shit, that was hot.” There are definitely some ‘things’ that characters do that come across as hot — like the guy wanting the girl so much, he pushed her up against the wall as soon as they got inside the house, but what makes that so hot isn’t the wall sex. It’s the fact that he wanted her that badly, he couldn’t wait to find a bed. It’s the emotion behind it. Back when I used to steal my mother’s romances, she accidentally bought a book she promptly threw out without reading more than a chapter. Me being me, I nicked it from the bin and flipped through it. It was explicit from the get-go, the heroine and the hero were doin’ it every which way and the writing was great, but the hot factor? Zilch. They were doing it in hot positions, throwing down all the heat in the world, but I was completely unmoved by it… and it was because there was no push or pull emotionally between them. He said he wanted her but I didn’t believe he wanted her, because it read like the book form of an emotionless one night stand.
Finally, on a more ‘shallower’ point — for the love of all that is holy, unless you’re writing a book that is intended to be humorous, please don’t use words like ‘honey cave’ or ‘wonder stick’. There is nothing worse than reading a light-hearted (or angst ridden) romance novel, getting yourself all worked up over the conflict, only to encounter words like, “He thrust his wonder stick deep in her hoo-hah.” Your word choice should reflect the tone of the overall book; if your heroine happens to spend a lot of time fishing or building fishing rods, maybe she might compare his penis to a rod of magnificent destruction but if not… maybe it’s time to kill it?
Opportunity
Lana Sky: For me, I know my characters are ready to strike “third base” when they both…well, demand it. The best sex scenes occur spontaneously and I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that you need a bedroom, darkness and seclusion to create the right atmosphere. WRONG. Sometimes, finding the right opportunity can be just another layer of the plot. Do your two sworn enemy characters succumb to passion right before they face off in some kind of challenge? Are your long term sweethearts feeling frisky after a rather boring day of bliss? For me, deciding when is all part of the fun—but the characters HAVE to be the ones to initiate it. If you’re writing and they can’t seem to keep their hands off each other then, by all means, let them see where they take it, even if it’s in the back of a car for a quickie. However, if you think that a hot car scene will garner you reads and you try to force it upon your otherwise straight-laced vanilla characters, then you have a problem. Know your characters and let them say when is the best way to have a more seamless scene, just like any fun plot element.
Simone Coleman: So your characters are emotionally prepared, they’ve been pap-smeared and health checked, their chemistry is off the charts and you’ve got your language right and ready to jump on the page… but where the hell are they? It’s the middle of the day! They’re in public! Or maybe there’s family around. How did this happen? You start to panic — BUT THEY’RE READY NOW.
The thing about opportunity (that I am well acquainted with), is that it’s really bloody inconvenient and sometimes you have to let your characters create that opportunity for themselves. Like say… they’re at a reunion. They’re surrounded by family members. Their relationship is secret. But they’re really horny and they wanna do it right that second. Sometimes you have to just… let them go. Take them upstairs to a bathroom, shove them in the closet. If they’re in public, find a secluded alleyway. On the other hand, maybe you have the perfect setting for your little tryst… but they’re not ready yet. If you try to force it, it won’t work. It’ll come across as forced. The setting might be perfect, but unless your characters are ready it’ll fall flat.
If your characters are ready, let them push you to the opportunity. Work your scene around it.
Tips and Tricks
Well, now that you’ve got the basics down, here are a few of the tools in our arsenal that we use to help “set the mood.”
Our Read list:
Lana Sky
The Professional — Kresley Cole
This book. If you want to broaden your “sexual terms” repertoire you need to read this, preferably in some place private where your constant furious blushing won’t catch attention. I devoured this book.
Bared to You — Slyvia Day
I LOVE this series, this book especially, not because of the BDSM aspect, but the characters. Both are so flawed and their romance is tailored to their own comforts and they both know when to draw the line and just say no. This is a great book to read in order to get a clearer grasp on boundaries, especially when it comes to more “risqué” erotica.
Dirty Angels — Karina Hale
I LOVE this book not only for its raunchy fun, but the honest way it handles some pretty extreme violence when intertwined with romance. With incredible chemistry between the two leads it’s a great study on build-up.
Simone Coleman
After the Abduction — Sabrina Jeffries
It’s been years since I first read this, but it contains one of the few seduction scenes that sticks in my head. The scene itself wasn’t incredibly adventurous or insane — but the emotion behind it, and the emotional conflict between the characters made it incredibly hot and poignant.
Dirty Rowdy Thing — Christina Lauren
I’m not a huge fan of BDSM (I read BDSM & dark novels for a whoooole ‘nother reason than the whipping and the butt smacking) but this book sold me on ropes.
The Final Move — Victoria Denault
I love this book for sooooo many reasons other than the sexual aspect, but there was one blow-job scene that fits this article perfectly because it was just needed. It needed to happen. And it was tailored to the characters perfectly: it couldn’t go any further than oral, and it had to happen the way it happened.
The Master by Kresley Cole
Unlike Lana, I preferred this one in the series :P It was a full-on sexual romp but it had all the angst aspects that I crave in books more so than the first. But all of the sex scenes just worked.
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About the Authors
Simone Coleman
Simone Coleman is a twenty-something year old author from Waterford, Ireland with a Bachelor’s in Music Technology & English, and is currently a Social Media for Business student. The first story she remembers writing took her to the North Pole, where she and her friends got into all sorts of trouble looking for Santa. There were five sequels. Now she juggles full time education with late night writing, and may be more than a little addicted to caffeine.
Lana Sky
Aspiring author with dreams of someday drooling over the hardback pages of all my books.