What's S-E-X Got to do with it? (Muse Monday!)

(...What's love but a second hand emotion? (Tina Turner))

I've been captivated with the topic of emotion rising out character interaction lately. I'm coming to believe that the white space on the page is every bit as important a means of communicating character passion as that bit of paper which is filled up with words.

As a romance writer, I am often caught up with different ways to describe the wild and wooly act of "doing it". Preferably, I want to communicate those moments in such a way as to stir my readers both emotionally and physically. Doing this in a way that's fresh and new is a challenge far easier said than done.

The spectrum of human emotion during the act of having sex is huge. One one end, we have down and dirty, pawing and groping animal sex. On the other end, we have tender, reverential physical manifestations of love between two people. A million different scenarios fall in between. And I won't go into the criminal manifestations of the act, as those have nothing to do with romance. :)

When I write love scenes, I'm trying desperately to communicate my characters' relationship and lovemaking to my readers in a way that they have not experienced it before. But honestly, how many ways can a girl find to say pebbled flesh and rising length?

Not that many, right?

I'm learning by deconstructing love scenes that have appealed to me that for the characters involved, the act of making love isn't *just* about the sex, at least not at first. It's about a character attaining an end goal that has little to do with the act of sex itself. Like the sexual act that frames such scenes, the build up of conflicting goals makes for a lot of delicious tension between the hero and heroine. Working those goals between the sheets can make for more than just sizzling sex--it can also advance story.

No more gratuitious sex!

Ah. Bingo. I'm thinking of Deanie and Bud in the classic film, Splendor of the Grass , as I write this. For Bud, sex was about sex and spending some of the pent up testosterone that his love and lust for Deanie has fired in his nubile, young, studly loins...

Oh, wait, I digressed...

For Deanie, at least at first, having sex wtih Bud was about something else. It was about keeping Bud from "doing it" with anyone else. It was about feeling in command of a relationship that spinning out of her control.

In pouring over clips from my favorite movies,and scenes from some of my favorite novels, it has occurred to me that the most successful moments do not rely on words to carry the emotional impact of the act. The best scenes set up in advance thecharacter motivations for making love in the first place.

I hope you find this scene from Splendor in the Grass as useful as I have.




**reprinted from my blog at Inked-In, the net's best (and probably most published!) social network for writers and artists.

Some Like it Hot

Sometimes I feel that as a writer of super sensual romance, I'm working against putting the proverbial cart before the horse when it comes to explicit scenes.

Recently, I've been a bit troubled by calls for submissions that request more explicit sex scenes, more graphic sex scenes, and more frequent sex scenes between characters. Many authors are reporting in that their editors are requesting that characters engage in sexual acts in opening scenes, and sometimes even on the opening page.

As I recently told a friend of mine, I would never get in bed with a guy before page fifty. Why would any of my characters? And that tends to run true with even the hottest of my stories.

Somehow, I wonder if the editors demanding the wild and wooly on page one have missed the boat when it comes to defining just what the book reading public really means when they say they want their romantic fiction to have higher "heat levels".

It seems to me that the emphasis on erotic romance is falling away from romance.

Are readers truly asking for an increase in the page one kink factor, or are they asking for an increase in the sexual and emotional tension b/t the hero/heroine. Isn't it that build up to consummation what leaves our readers all that much more delighted--and turned on--when it finally does occur?

I don't believe erotic encounters can function within the framework of traditional HEA romance without strong emotional connections between heroes and heroines. As a reader, I want to cheer when that relationship comes to fruition. As a writer, I want to take that journey with my characters and milk it for every bit of emotion I can muster.

And I believe it takes more than a few pages to believably build that connection. And lately, I'm finding my full length romances focusing less on the bedroom scenes and more on the tension leading up to them. And I like it that way. :)

What's your opinion? Where does romance end and erotica begin? How do the recent calls for hot and hotter impact what you're reading or writing? I really want to know!