Wednesday's Classroom

Adding Steam to Your Love Scenes - Lesson #3

© 2010 Lynn Crain

Here we are, back again with the third lesson in my Adding Steam to Your Love Scenes class. I do hope you are enjoying this as I haven’t gotten much feedback so far. But what I’m seeing is allowing me to make this class better!

Please enjoy this lesson!

Lesson 3

Add love scenes when the characters want to make love, not when you want them to make love.

This is one of the hardest things that an author has to do and that’s called pacing. Again, I relate it back to your own experiences. What happened when you rushed something? Did it work out well? Chances are it didn’t. It’s like rushing a cake; if you take it out too soon, it’s not done, too late and it can be burnt to a crisp.

Everything has a pace, be it fast or slow. When you truly listen to your characters, they will tell you when they need to make love and when they need to argue. Part of adding steam is to know when things are right for the characters, not when a ‘formula’ tells you a love or sex scene needs to be added.

I’m a pantser and all of my stories are character driven.

Some of you may have heard of this term and some of you may not. When I started my writing career, I was anal about planning. I had charts on characters, charts on plots, I played the ‘what if’ game and twenty questions for each of my chapters. I would plan every detail to the nth degree because I wanted things as perfect as I could make them.

Now days, I write by the seat of my pants most of the time because I work things out in my head and follow that plan but not so stringently because I’ve learned to listen to my characters. I know more about them sometimes than I do my own kids. I write what the characters want me to write, which is their story. Nothing more, nothing less.

It is true, however, that there are some stories I still plan to the nth degree and those would be my heavy fantasy or futuristic stories. Those are just as much about the world building as they are about the characters or the plot for that matter. If you don’t plan those, you can get caught in your own plot pitfalls because you haven’t done your planning.

What is right for the characters needs to be right for you as the writer.

There are times when your characters might ask you to write something controversial or not right for you to write. I know it sounds strange but if your characters need to do something that you find objectionable, then maybe their story needs to be written by some one else.

Now this isn’t the same as you being embarrassed over a love scene or something of that nature. When first learning to write love scenes, they can be very disconcerting if you’ve never done that before. I know that the very first time I wrote a BDSM scene, I would get up, walk away from the computer and mutter, ‘I can’t believe I just wrote that’ and mean it. It wasn’t until I had been writing the story for a month that I felt comfortable with it.

Part of the reason that I could continue to write their story was that I didn’t feel bad about writing something done in an adult consensual situation. Adults can and do make their own decisions. My characters were adults. They had adult minds and adult thoughts. They could handle what was going to happen to them. True, you say they were just characters but to me they weren’t and it’s all about perspective.

Listen to your characters as they will tell you what they need.

This is just as important as any other issue talked about here. Characters will tell you what is important to them. In the story I mentioned above, the heroine needed to have a deep, dark fantasy fulfilled to fall in love with the one man she could. I gave her that situation and what happened in it was fulfilling for her.

Your characters need to be as satisfied with the outcome of your story as you are. Sometimes it won’t be a happily ever after but it will always be satisfying.

Exercise

1. Give me a scenario where a love scene would be appropriate for your characters.

2. Give me a scenario where a love scene would be inappropriate for your characters.

3. What type of writer do you want to be and why? (Pantser or planner)

4. Why do you think it’s appropriate to listen to your characters?

5. When wouldn’t it be appropriate to listen to your characters?

See you all next week for Lesson #4 in Wednesday’s Classroom!

Lynn

Wednesday's Classroom

Adding Steam to Your Love Scenes - Lesson #2

© 2010 Lynn Crain

We’re back for lesson #2 in the Adding Steam workshop. I sure do hope you all are enjoying this as I do love to share my information!

Lesson #2

Use your own experiences

I’m sure at this moment, you are wondering just what am I talking about. Your own personal experiences can’t be what people want to really see. Well, I’m here to tell you that they do. People must relate to your characters; they must find some common ground or your characters will be meaningless to them.

Have you ever caught yourself while reading a book saying some thing to the effect of, ‘I can see myself doing that’ and know you mean it?

And I don’t mean using the experiences literally…you all remember that blush first being in love…use it, use it to your best advantage because people like to read about other people. How many of you are sick of the heroine or hero always being perfect? I know that I am. Why? Because people are flawed, even the really great people have flaws. They put their pants on the same way we do. They wear underwear, they shower, they go to the bathroom and for heaven sakes’ most of them fart too.

But the point is that you know and can relate to all those things. Use what you know. There is an old saying ‘Write what you know’ and the reason is that if you write about what you are good at, it comes more naturally.

If you are writing romance, there are some things that only women know. Most women remember their ‘first time,’ so use it. You can remember what it was like seeing your spouse for the first time. I do. I thought he was crazy because it was freezing and he was wearing shorts. I also remembering me thinking he wasn’t bad looking and maybe I should get to know him. I’ve used different version of this again and again.

Another one, most women remember the first ‘real’ date they were on, so use it. My husband and I didn’t date at first, we gang dated meaning we went out with a group of people. And we always seemed to pair up differently. Sometimes I look at my husband and don’t know how I ended up married to him. But I do know I worked my butt off to get him. This is something I can use.

The same can be said for men. When I decided to write from a man’s point of view, I realized I was out of my depth. I don’t know what a man feels during sex. But I do know my husband and trust his judgment. When I’m writing from the male point of view, he reads everything. He tells me things like ‘a guy wouldn’t think that emotionally about this’ or ‘no way would a guy do that.’ To be accurate, you have to have resources you can fall back on.

You can use anything you have experienced to make your writing richer and fuller. Everything you do in this mode just makes it so a reader can more readily identify with your characters. If the reader can’t identify with your characters, they won’t finish the book or maybe they won’t even pick it up.

Exercise


1. List ten experiences that you can use in a novel, be it romance, erotic romance, sensual romance or just a regular book.

2. Take one of those experiences and write me a whole paragraph about one of your characters doing the same thing.

3. What did you get out of the experience? Can you apply this to your writing.

4. List one outside resource you can use when you need it. It can be a person, a book, a library or even a place on the internet. The point here is to get you thinking about how you can find out the information you really need.

See you all next Wednesday!

Lynn

Wednesday’s Classroom

Last week I told you I would be adding a free class to my lineup of fantastic blogs. I remain true to my word. Here is the agenda for the class which will be held over the next nine weeks. We will be doing a unit every week for the next nine weeks. They will go along with this agenda and the only thing I would like from you is participate. Just comment on the class and participate by doing the exercises at the end of each lesson.

Also, you can ask me any question you wish as I am available any time I’m at my computer. That’s every day, almost nine to midnight. LOL! It really depends upon the family and if I can keep focused. Sometimes when a story is close to the end or I have to work out a scene, I will often break for a day. But I always check my email.

Adding Steam to Your Love Scenes – Free Workshop

© 2010 Lynn Crain

I have been asked recently by more and more people just how I add steam to my many love scenes. In the course of a few years, I have put together what works for me. I’m hoping to share those ideas with you all over the next few weeks in this free workshop. So please, pass the word around to all your friends. We’ll have fun!

Here’s what we’ll be covering with each week building on the previous one:

Set the mood for both you and your characters.

• Read books the day before in the genre for which your writing.
• Listen to music while you write that all important scene.
• Look at phrase books. 
• Look at sexy pictures.

Use your own experiences

• I don’t mean literally…you all remember that blush first being in love…use it.
• Most women remember their ‘first time,’ so use it.
• Most women remember the first ‘real’ date they were on, so use it.

Add love scenes when the characters want to make love, not when you want them to make love.

• I’m a pantser and all of my stories are character driven.
• What is right for the characters needs to be right for you as the writer.
• Listen to your characters as they will tell you what they need.

Get some good research material.

• Good research books are invaluable.
• For erotic, things like the Kama Sutra are a must.

Details are everything.

• If a character is fantasying about a certain body part, can you imagine what happens when they actually get that body part?
• Know the temperature of their skin – hot, cold, clammy or warm and inviting.
• Know how the characters should look when making love – pink cheeks, rosy lips, closed eyes, opened eyes.
• No wandering body parts.

Don’t ever write sex to fill up pages.

• Sex needs to happen when it needs to happen and not before.
• Readers can tell when a writer has had to ‘force’ a love scene.

Remember that as an erotic romance writer you are writing hot, sizzling love scenes and not just sex.

Sometimes less is more.

Make each love scene emotional.

• At least one of the two characters has to have some sort of emotional attachment to the reason they are having sex.
• It’s not always who you think it should be and it doesn’t need to be revealed right away.

Take note of the anatomical details.

• Characters have to be anatomically compatible.
• Huge men will never fit into a small, child-like woman. Not happening.
• Know what is and isn’t humanly possible.

I hope to see you all next week when we begin setting the mood!

Have a great week! Until then…

Lynn