Let's Talk About SEX Baby! (Awkward Writing 1)

My next blog series, titled Awkward Writing, is in honor of getting so many new followers from Tessa's Blog Hop: The Life Fantastic and her most recent blogfest. This series will focus on areas of writing that some writers shy away from. Perhaps that is too strong a word, but it's the areas that writers beat themselves up over, deciding to no end if their novel can carry such a theme or scene.

Before we begin, a few announcements:

Any comments made on this series will be thrown into a contest. I will be doing at least 3 posts of the series, possibly more. If you comment on multiple posts within the series, you get multiple entries.

Tessa's Blog Fest: The Life Fantastic is still ongoing and is the perfect way to score more followers, subbers and writerly underlings (I mean friends).

At the end of this week, Donna Hole is hosting her Milestones blogfest. This is been another invaluable tool for me on the cohort-gathering front.

What am I currently doing? Answer: Blogging (of course), enjoying my third cup of coffee and playing Leapfrog Math Missions with my three-year-old cousin.

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So let's talk about sex. We've all made it through sex education in school, the most grueling and unforgiving class any of us was forced to take. Now that we're adults, or most us, what really prevents us from writing in those tender scenes into our manuscripts? What is the hold-up? More often than not, the scene you want to write are not to showcase your future erotica-novel that you're currently querying (WHAT @.@), but it is to show how two characters interact in that next thin line of scene writing: Love. It isn't smut or a porno. It isn't even lust (or maybe it is for those sex-crazed vampires), but it's a display of how your two choice characters have grown on each other.

If you've chosen to add a sex scene, ask yourself if you are first making the right decision. Are your characters who will be involved on the right "level" with each other? Or are you purely doing it to get it done. Let's nudge away the latter.

Never write a sex scene into your manuscript just to have it there. Why put yourself through the trouble explaining a blow-by-blow intimate encounter when you may not really need it at all? I am currently facing that issue and at the level I have been drawing my characters, I'm not sure if my protagonist and his love-interest are there yet. Are your characters there yet? I have added a sensual scene and that might be enough, but only time will really tell.

Don't shoot to impress in the scene. We don't need to see how you are in bed through your character. That may sound awkward, but we want to prevent this at all costs. At no point do you want paragraphs of thick, raw sexual description. No-one really wants to read that and be drawn away from the story and what brought the characters to this point. We want to see an encounter that we can enjoy, love and feel pleasure over. We want to cheer for our hero/heroine when they find that love they've been looking for.

So, there's a lot to consider when you want to write a sex scene. Make it beautiful, short and with descriptors that can creatively describe the most stressful part of writing intimate characters together. Never divulge into dark, sexual crap writing for the sake of just showing you can do it. Your writing will suffer, but more importantly, the fortitude of your plot arc may be thrown off.

Question to the Cohorts: Do you currently have a sex scene written or are considering one? Have you made all the preparations, creatively and mentally, to write intimacy into your manuscript?

I'm very curious for your responses.

Bye for now!

JWP