How to Write Memorable Sex Scenes in Romance

In eight years of being a romance editor, I have never done a post on writing sex scenes! An oversight I will be rectifying now.

So what makes a sex scene one of those ones that a reader will bookmark and come back to again and again? It can be a setting (an unusual, unexpected place or moment, e.g. carriage sex), an object being used in the scene (e.g. Haunting Adeline—iykyk), another person present (e.g. in a voyeuristic sense or a group sense), a position (let’s go tamer for this example: something like the man who never submits down on his knees), and of course, words that become iconic (if it has an acronym that BookTokkers can identify without any help, e.g. stfuattdllag).

But all these are really just gimmicks (which I’m not knocking—you gotta sell this book, and sex scenes can be great marketing), so let’s get into what’s really going to connect with the reader in these scenes in terms of craft.

Choose the right POV

For any scene, your POV character (if you’re do alternating POV) should be the one who is most vulnerable or has the most to lose in this moment, and this is especially important in a spicy scene. There’s a stronger emotional impact if you show your POV character leaning into that vulnerability or how the other character helps them let go by making them feel safe or uninhibited.

Be comfortable with what you’re writing

Choose your steam level. How descriptive are you going to go? Are you worried about your mom or your grandma reading it? Here’s one time I will say not to write with an audience in mind—just go straight from the id here and write what you think is sexy. If you’re feeling way too self-conscious writing about sex, scale back or even just fade to black—your words will probably come out stilted and readers know when you’re holding back.

Engage the senses AND the emotions

Sensory details are important here—what’s going on with sight, sound, taste, hearing, touch? Unexpected details can make a scene much more memorable—for example, the scratch of lace against skin and the reaction that feeling provokes in the partners. If you’re a writer who falls prey to white room syndrome (i.e. description isn’t your strength), this is a good opportunity to stretch a bit! 

Start with the sensory to ground the reader in the scene, and then get into the feels. What kind of emotions are these physical details evoking? Sex can bring up big emotions—are they overwhelmed? Are they afraid of feelings and wanting to run? Are they feeling affirmed or at peace by the end? Play with the tension between the physical and emotional.

Match the tempo of the scene to the writing

Pace your scene based on the kind of sex the characters are having. If it’s a quickie, the pace should feel fast to match that intensity. (My favourite trick for this in editing is to take out commas where I can—commas are there to pause for a breath, but we ain’t got time for that!) If it’s slow and languorous, you can draw out the sensuousness of the moment in the pacing. 

Should the sex scene move the story forward?

This is a debate: can you just write a sex scene for the sake of writing a sex scene, or does it have to move the story forward? Some claim the former is too gratuitous, but I come from fanfic where there is literally a sub-category for this: PWP (either Porn Without Plot or Plot? What Plot?). I think it’s easier to get away with this in fanfic, but as an editor, I lean toward the sex scene doing some kind of work for you—either moving the plot forward or showing character growth.

(By the way, I swear that any innuendo that you think you see here was purely unintentional.)

How do you write sex scenes? Are they fun for you to write or stressful? 

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Is it time to discontinue your romance series?

I did a presentation to the Ottawa Romance Writers’ group earlier this month about The Dos and Don’ts of Being a Romance Novelist, and one of the participants asked a great question at the end (and one that I’ve been meaning to write something about for a long time!).

The question was: How do you know when you should stop writing a series that doesn’t seem to be getting any traction?

I’m sure as readers or consumers of media, we’ve all experienced the frustration of not getting the end of a series. We can all name a TV show that we loved that ended on a perpetual cliffhanger, never to be resolved, or perhaps less often, a book series that a trad publisher decided not to continue to put money into. But what about if you’re on the other side of that as an indie author?

So here are some considerations to help you decide what to do:

1) Why is it that the series hasn’t gotten enough traction?

Be very, very honest with yourself here and analyze what’s going on. Are the covers not giving the reader a good first impression? (Are they on trend with other covers in your subgenre?) Are your blurbs and marketing materials not intriguing or unique or clear enough to get the reader to buy? Are the books priced too high? Have you put in the work to market them and get them in front of your target audience? Is the quality of the writing and editing not as good as it could be?

Do your research, ask your readers and impartial observers, and be very real with yourself. Are you willing or able to put in the work to fix these problems? That might get expensive—i.e. recovering all the books so far in the series, re-editing, doing additional marketing, etc. Which begs the question…

2) Is it worth it to continue to put the time and money towards this series?

Not only to revamp the previously published books in the series, but also for the ones to come. More books in this series means more money put towards editing, cover design, and promotion, and it takes you away from books that you could write that might be more successful. And if the books you’ve already written in the series aren’t helping to fund much of the next books still to come, do you have the budget to continue? The books in this current series may be the books of your heart right now, but if they’re not selling, it might be time to consider how you can rework the larger ideas of this series and eventually repurpose them for a different series that might do better for you down the line.

3) Do you have a full series already?

A complete series is a great thing to have in your backlist. If a new reader falls in love with your writing and goes back to read all your old stuff, they might buy the full series immediately to consume, rather than one standalone book at a time. And if all your books are linked in the same extended universe (which I do usually recommend doing!), a full series is even more of an easy sell. So, is it worth it to finish off the series in this case?

4) How do you feel about this series?

When you’re an indie author, it’s all on you to decide if it’s worth it to continue the series. Are you happy with the quality of the writing? Have you had good feedback from readers, or has it been crickets? Are you still excited to continue the series or get to that final book? Especially if you haven’t had a ton of great feedback from readers about the series, you may have lost enthusiasm for it—that’s normal. It’s time for some soul-searching about whether you should keep going with it.

Even if you do decide to discontinue a series, I do not want you to feel like it was a waste of time or that you didn’t get anything out of it. I especially do not want you to see this as a failure AT ALL. Every single writer, even the most popular or successful, has books that just don’t hit. And every book is a learning experience. Writing those books has improved your writing skills, has made you more aware of the things in your author career that you might have to spend more time/energy/money on, and is going to make your next book and/or series stronger. As much as I’ve asked here “is it worth it?” to help you decide whether to continue the series or not, I think there is always something worthwhile in the experience of getting these books out into the world.

Have you ever discontinued a series? What made you decide to? (I genuinely want to hear! Let me know in the comments!)

Fast publishing is here—but are we fooling ourselves in thinking that it's new?

I don’t know about you, but it seems like quality in everything is tanking these days. (God, I feel so old in saying that—“back in my day,” etc. etc.). Granted, I’m not shopping at high-end places most of the time, but things that used to be decent are either more cheaply made (clothes), sneakily smaller (food packaging), or built to fall apart quickly (electronics).

So how do books fit into this? Or do they?

Buckle in, because we’re talking about fast publishing today!

Probably everyone and their mom has read Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and its sequel Iron Flame this year. The unexpected success of Fourth Wing, released in May, sold the book out in hardcover—it was impossible to find on bookstore shelves this summer—and caused a frenzy for more. But when Iron Flame was released in early November, fans were quickly up in arms about the quality of the book, both in aesthetics and in the writing—there were misprints, pages missing, typos, and poor writing and editing alleged. (The latter two are subjective—personally, the writing doesn’t blow me away and she crams every romantasy trope and cliché in there, but I did find it propulsive as hell and I flew through it; the editing…was rushed, let’s say, and it probably didn’t have as many passes as it should have for one of the most anticipated books of the year). But this has led to the rise of discussion around “fast publishing.”

Fast publishing makes the comparison to fast fashion, where fashion trends are quickly identified, produced, and rushed to market to capitalize on them while they’re still hot, but the quality of the garments is sacrificed, and the end product is essentially disposable once the trend fizzles out or once the garment falls apart, whichever happens first. 

The pearl-clutching about fast publishing has really only come about because the intense popularity and anticipation for Iron Flame and the trad marketing machine behind it has brought the issue to the fore. (Fashion historian Abby Cox talks in this video why this comparison doesn’t actually hold.)

But the writing to market, racing to release to keep up momentum, and cutting corners in quality is nothing new. We’ve been seeing this for years in indie publishing, especially in indie romance, with rapid release schedules that have some romance writers churning out multiple books a year, sometimes employing ghostwriters to keep that breakneck pace and doing everything they can to keep readers’ attention and game the KU system to continue earning big bucks (remember when a romance writer was giving away diamonds??). This practice goes way back to pulp writers in the ’50s who had to write books fast to make a living as a writer, and even further back to Victorian dime novels (see the Abby Cox video above for more on this), but we’ve been doing it in modern indie romance for a long time.

And if you’ve been with me for a while, you know I’ve been raising the cry for many years that this system is dangerous for romance writers and for the romance industry as a whole. Rapid release is almost a necessary evil in romance if you want to make a living as a full-time indie romance writer, especially when you’re just starting out and building a backlist—but it can lead to serious author burnout and mental health issues, declining quality in the work, and less innovation in the stories (which mean they’re not as often recommended and won’t earn you as much).

A lot of the time, I think that readers don’t really care about quality—if you’ve marketed yourself well that readers know exactly what to expect from you and/or you’ve established yourself well with a solid reputation for putting out good stuff, lots of people will read whatever you write. Note that I put the marketing first, because frankly that’s what will get you in front of the most people and get them to buy. But that’s the short game. If you want longevity as a romance writer, you need to be able to continually build on your craft and produce quality work to keep those readers long-term without them dropping off.

So what do we do when we’re being forced to rush but still want produce quality work?

We are seriously torn between capitalism and what actually makes sense for us on an individual level—you want to make money (especially in this economy), but you also have to prioritize your mental health and creativity and your own standards. I know you don’t want to put out crap—these books have your name on it! So you really have to take this at your own pace. If you can put out three to four books a year, great—I literally sell Series Architecture based on this premise (but full transparency, this is just a marketing tactic; if you can’t do three books a year, I’m absolutely not going to force you to!)—but I want you to put out books you can be proud of and that readers will want to read AND recommend. And listen, I read a ton, and there are very few books that are actually memorable to me because lots of romances are following a formula (which is totally fine!) but not doing anything interesting with it. The ones that stick out are the ones that do something innovative, i.e. an unexpected twist, an unusual setting, etc.

It's very, very easy to stint on quality, especially right now when we’re in a cost-of-living crisis and don’t want to spend money, and when it seems like the fast pace at which romance readers consume makes quality inconsequential. But I can’t tell you how many romance books I’ve read lately (mostly indie, but also trad) that I think “this could’ve used a good line edit.” And I think most books benefit from a developmental edit as well—there are very few that I’ve seen that have been in good enough shape to go straight to a line edit. You need quality from the writing to the editing to put out a great book.

And you need an actual person to edit, not an AI. I’m on the record as very anti-AI for lots of reasons, particularly generative AI for creative pursuits. I don’t use Grammarly or ProWritingAid, both of which I believe have an AI component to them—if generative AI is made up of the patterns that the AI is fed and people more often than not are making the same mistake, the AI takes that aggregate as normal enough to be considered right, making the mistake acceptable to its checks.

Also, AI can’t tell you why the errors it flags as errors are wrong—any good editor worth their salt should be able to give you a reason why they made any change they did. AI also misses on the art of editing because it's not a human that understands human nuances. Following a style guide to be technically correct is fine, but if AI put commas exactly where they’re supposed to go in a frantically paced sex scene, but it would slow down the action that way, and the cadence of the scene would be off. As an editor, I’ll run Word’s spelling and grammar check once because the squiggly lines bug me (and I usually reject most of their suggestions because it misunderstands the context), but I’m mostly relying on my trusty Chicago style guide and my own knowledge of language to edit.

All this to say:

• Fast publishing ain’t new, and indie’s been doing this for quite a long time.

• It actually sucks that we’re still doing this and running great romance talent into the ground by encouraging an unsustainable pace of production.

• Prioritize your own mental health and creativity first and go at your own pace—if it means you can’t go full-time writer sooner, that’s okay!

• Quality is ultimately going to be what you’ll fall back on, so it’s worth paying for, whether it’s in editing or in education and training to build your craft.

So what do you think of fast publishing? How else can we manage the capitalist hellscape that is modern publishing? Truly, I think about this so much, and I would love to hear your thoughts!

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