Sex Scene Show and Tell

When I had the idea for this blog, I thought it would be fun. Maybe even funny. I would pick a few random lines from various of my romance books, and we could analyze them. Then, as I started to look for the juicy lines, I realized I needed to compare like with like. I couldn’t say one line was good and another wasn’t as good, if they didn’t relate to the same thing. Writing a climax scene and writing a first kiss scene are totally different, and the language is different too. Overwhelmed by my material, I decided to choose the first kiss / first sexual advance scene in the books I picked (I ended up cutting three out, because things were getting too long). I also wondered how I would feel if someone did this to my work, and I realized things weren’t going to be that funny, after all. Or maybe they are, you decide . I have taken a few books, each from different genres, from my bookshelves (titles and authors to remain anonymous) so we can hopefully see what works and what doesn’t.

First, read the excerpts:

Example 1: Historical romance

His embrace wandered, caressing her boldly. She moved into his touch even while the path of his hands startled her. Over her stomach and bottom, down to her thighs, he pressed and claimed all of her. His touch moved more shockingly, teasing through her gown along the cleft of her bottom, venturing to the pulse that maddened her, making the pleasure sink and throb.

***

Example 2: Romantic suspense

He didn’t assault. He didn’t attack. He lowered his mouth to hers slowly, but Mari did nothing to stop him. She gasped a little at the first touch of flesh to flesh, and he took advantage, easing his tongue into her mouth slowly, deeply. She shuddered at the blatant carnality of it, but did nothing to stop him. She felt caught in the pull of some incredible magnet, unable to draw away, unable to stop her body from responding as he tasted her.

***

Example 3: Contemporary romance

She turned her face up to his, but her half-felt protest became a moan of surrender as he drove his mouth down on hers with a hungry kiss which splintered her senses.
He reached out to remove the clip from her hair, murmured his warm pleasure as it fell in a red-blonder gleam around her shoulders. ‘See how your hair glows like fire against your skin. And how your eyes sparkle like pure, clear aquamarines.
She had never been seduced by words before, had never known their sweet wanton power.

***

Example 4: Paranormal romance

He buried his hands in her hair, kissing her, and suddenly it was utterly insignificant that he stole artefacts, that he’d taken her captive, that he lived outside the law. She cared only that his tongue was in her mouth, and how it made her feel. The world ceased to exist beyond that.
Slow, deep kisses, erotic nips with his teeth, his mouth gliding, slipping and sliding over hers. He caught her lower lips and tugged lazily away, returned to catch it again, then slanted his mouth firmly over her, plundering.

***

Example 5: Hard to define romance / suspense / romantic comedy

For an instant, she was too surprised to react. She inhaled the warm, male scent of him. It acted like a powerful drug on her senses. She could feel the strength in his arms and the sleek power in his body. She could also feel the hard bulge in his close-fitting trousers.
Harry wanted her.
The knowledge inspired the choir of female hormones that had been humming inside Molly all evening. They burst into full throated song once more.

***

Now, the only one I really don’t like is Example 3. Any scene where the hero says stupid things like “Your hair is the colour of sunshine’ or ‘Your eyes are like emeralds, shining in the dark’ (I made these two up), I actually blush with embarrassment for the author. I don’t know why, but that kind of thing just makes me want to skip the scene. It sounds false, it sounds overly dramatic, and it doesn’t ring true. The other thing I don’t like is the yes I do, no I don’t thing going on in Example 3. She turns her face UP TO him, but moans in half-protest. Then she should have turned her face away from him. And the final death knell for me is the ridiculous phrase about the sweet wanton power of words. I can accept words being sweet, but wanton? It just sounded good to the author at the time, in my opinion, but I think words matter. They should actually make sense.

Now, feel free at any time to jump in and tell me you disagree. I enjoy a good debate .

On to the ones I did like and why. Let’s start with Example 1. Of all these examples of a first kiss, this is the boldest. Its shock value is terrific. The hero doesn’t just kiss this woman, he runs his hands all over her body, he invades her most private places. He jumps over the degrees of intimacy in a huge, leaping bound and just takes what he wants. He’s read his heroine well, he knows she wants him too, and so he just jumps right in there. Love it.

Example 2 and Example 4 are similar, in that in both cases the hero is both extremely turned-on and very annoyed with the heroine. And in both cases the author does the unexpected, and suddenly tones things down. The sentence before these excerpts rang with high emotion and anger, and then suddenly, quiet. A gentle kiss, or in the case of Example 4, just a kiss, no adjectives. This is effective, I think, because it suddenly focuses the reader’s attention on the sexual advance. We go from shouting to soft kissing, and that stops us in our tracks. Oooooh, we think, there is a warm, fuzzy side to this angry, alpha male.

Where I think these scenes are slightly let down is by the old, she was powerless to stop him, caught in a magnetic force, device. It is so overused. We need to be thinking fresher, more innovatively here. The heroine needs to be more of a player in the scene.

Finally, Example 5. Like Example 1, in category of its own. Because it rocks. We learn that the heroine delights in this advance by the hero. No half-protests or powerlessness here. This lady is a true partner in this love scene. She wants it, and we get the feeling she’ll be more than happy to jump in and contribute. In the others, the heroine is the passive recipient of an advance, which seems to be the norm. Having the heroine initiating the scene would be good, but in Example 5 the author does the next best thing, she shows us the heroine is taken unaware by the hero’s advance, but is only too happy to receive it, because she wants him just as much.

Okay. That’s my sex scene show and tell for today. I might do another one looking at climax scenes some time in the future.

Now, next Tuesday we are having a very special guest blogger. Educational psychologist Dr Cheryl Smith spent a lot of time visiting jails and places of safety in Durban, South Africa, interviewing street children. She wanted to hear their stories so that she could help to develop educational syllabi for shelters that took street children in. She lectured at the University of Durban-Westville for many years, and ran a private practice. She is now a senior psychologist for the Isle of Man’s Department of Education.

The reason I’m telling you all this now is that Dr Smith has kindly agreed to play psychologist to your fictional characters. You can send in a question to her regarding your character’s motivation, and she will apply her twenty years experience to the answer. Which will hopefully give you a more real, more complex character for your book. I need the questions by Friday morning, so I can send them to Dr Smith to look at over the weekend. If there are too many questions, we may answer them over two separate blogs. And finally, you may be asking yourself why Dr Smith would agree to do this. The answer is simple. I asked her to, and she’s my Mom . You can send your questions to me at michellediener AT gmail DOT com (no spaces).