Writing the love scene in a romance novel.

I find writing the love scene in a novel difficult because I want my reader to understand or realize that when I write a love scene, it goes with the novel.  I don’t write sexual scenes simply to get a following.  The most important thing to me is the telling of the story, and in the telling of the story, if it’s a love story, there have to be love scenes to culminate love’s wonderful experience.  I don’t want to have sex on every page to sell a book.  I want to have a great love story with some love scenes to equal the telling of a great story.

Love scenes have changed so much in the romance novel.  In the past, people did not want to mention anything that had to do with the body.  However, love and love scenes have existed since the beginning of time, since the beginning of man and woman.  In the earlier novels, the writer went through the telling of the lovely romance story and left the love scene to the imagination of the reader.  That is also very exciting.  No one can deny the exciting moment when Rhett Butler in “Gone with the Wind” in a moment of anger picked up feisty Scarlett in his arms and carried her up the stairs  to her bedroom.  The reader didn’t have to be told that they were going to her bedroom and that they had wonderful sex.  It was all there in the excitement of the moment, the violent conversation between them that led Rhett to pick up his angry wife and exercise his marital rights.  The next morning, we see a radiant Scarlett singing to herself, stretching, luxuriating in bed, and the reader didn’t have to be told that she had a great night.  Another problem, in the past, people were less informed about sex.  Of course, there are some who are more knowledgeable than others, but people did not speak about sex to their daughters until just before they married.  Today, the reader is more savvy about sex.  They want to know how the love story develops.  They want to know when the moment the couples’ love culminates and the couple has wonderful sex.  They want to be in on all the details.

In the early part of the Twentieth Century, one would see a movie.  The scene would show the couple sleeping in twin beds.  The man could only put his knee on the bed.  There were all kinds of rules in a love scene so as not to offend the person watching the film.  The love scene graduated to explicit sex.  Now, we see people naked on screen making love.  The romance novel has done the same.  From simply letting the reader imagine the sexual scene, the writer now tells the story going into the love scene.  I feel that there is a disagreement among writers of the romance novel how much to write about sex without spoiling the story or making the novel seem cheap with an exhibitionist goal to make money.  Some readers like to read novels with a lot of sex, the more the better.  Other readers read for the story.  They want to see the culmination of the couple’s love in wondrous sex scenes but they don’t want to readit in every page.

I personally want to tell you a great love story.  I want to guide you through the romance stage to the culmination of the couples’ love in several love scenes.  And it is always difficult, how much you should detail in that sex scene.  I personally think making love with the loved one is beautiful and I do describe in detail the love scene.  I guess the most important thing to remember is that the romance novel is a book of the heart, and everything written in it is something that will touch us all.  It is a novel that instructs the reader on matters of the heart, the hearth and in other things that affect life because it does take from life.

Write to me in my blog about your love story.  I would like to hear about it.  Don’t worry that anyone will critique it because my website and blog has been set up for you.

If you belong to a book club in southern California and would like for me to come chat with your club members about the romance novel, love and my recent novel, “For a Taste of Morgan,” write to me in my website blog.  In the future, I look forward to visiting other states to do the same.  Cheers, and in Karen Sunde’s quote: To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.