From Susan/Miranda:
Romances are love stories. They follow the relationship between a man and a woman from that first meeting to the all-important happy ending or HEA (Happily Ever After in romance-writing parlance.) And somewhere in the middle, or the end, or maybe even on the first page, will be at least one love scene.
“Love scene”: how can two little words be so loaded? Readers expect them, editors demand them, many writers dread them. Used books fall open to them. They’re the scenes that non-romance-readers ridicule the most, and often with good reason, too. They can bring out the purplest prose (His throbbing manhood! Her furled petals of femininity!), or embrace words that used to get your mouth washed out with soap. They can turn heroes into raging bulls ready to perform all night and then some, or reduce them to such paragons of sensitivity and consideration that it’s a wonder the poor guys can perform at all. They’ll make heroines writhe, moan, weep, cry out, thrash their heads, flail their limbs, and see bright stars explode across the velvet night-sky.
But that’s nothing compared to what love scenes can do to writers. Ideally, love scenes should flow from the story, a natural extension of the relationship between the hero and heroine. In reality, they’re often the hardest part of a book to write. Balancing emotion and passion while finding a suitable vocabulary can be a mind-numbing challenge. It’s establishing that elusive “comfort zone” not just for the characters, but for the writer as well. Add to that the pressure (especially for newer writers) from publishers to write more and more explicit sex, and you have a good many writers moaning, writhing, and thrashing their own heads over their keyboards.
Writing historical love scenes can be even more difficult. Yes, I know, I know, sex has been around as long as people. The 1960s didn’t invent sex any more than the 1660s did. But even the most jaded 18th century rake wouldn’t have been exposed to the level of general sexual information that’s commonplace to us today. (Surely the members of the Hellfire Club would be stunned by the wonders of the internet, and likewise stunned that it’s available to inquisitive wives and daughters, too.) But how do you write a love scene that’s both faithful to your historic time period, yet sufficiently satisfying to sophisticated modern readers?
For once research, that cure-all for every historical quandary, comes up short. In the past, "sex" meant gender, as in the Fair Sex. "Making love" was more courtship than consummation, and "sleeping together" was, well, sleeping. Only English men mention sex in their private journals and diaries, and then it’s usually sex as sport or conquest, with emphasis on how often and how impressive the performance was. Giacomo Casanova was more forthcoming (a LOT more forthcoming) with details, but then he was Italian, and hardly representative of the stalwart English lords who currently predominate historical romances.
English ladies remain mute on the subject in their own writings, or use so many allusions to Venus or Cupid that it’s impossible to tell exactly what happened. (Be honest: before the professor explained it, did you realize that the “little death” you kept reading about in that Elizabethan Poetry class meant an orgasm?) Even Fanny Hill was really a man, and besides, I can’t see any of us referring to a man’s “sweet dart of love” or worse, the “engine of maiden’s destruction” without earning a big, fat, red-penciled query in the margin of the manuscript.
In some ways, it’s been a relief for me to write novels like Duchess and Royal Harlot. No one
expects Lady Castlemaine to use euphemisms, and she doesn’t. (whoo-boy, but she doesn’t.) But I still have to wrestle with the love-scene-beast in my Miranda Jarrett historicals, and it never gets any easier. Every couple is different, and finding that magical, elusive mix of love and passion, tenderness and hotness, humor and devotion and discovery is as rare in writing as it is in life.
So what about you? If you’re a writer, do you find love scenes a trial or a joy? If you’re a reader, how much information is too much? Do you look forward to love scenes as the best part of a love story, or would you rather writers could once again close the bedroom door?
The two pictures illustrating this blog are details from a pair of paintings by William Hogarth (1697-1764) from the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Aptly named “Before” and “After”, the paintings show that sometimes one (or two) pictures really are worth the proverbial thousand words.