Writing Good Love Scenes (PG 13)

Is it the focus of your story?

No.

I think you should just write it. Let it reflect your sensibilities and if you're still uncertain as to how it reads, let a couple of trusted beta readers have at it.

Unless the protagonists' love is central to the story or their physical attraction important to the plot or character development, I wouldn't stop everything to have a big sex scene. But you can write a perfectly appropriate scene that conveys everything you need it to in one or two paragraphs. We all know what goes on during sex, so you don't need to describe the physical actions--just let us know what emotions your main character is feeling.

You can have a meaningful scene that's neither graphic nor coy, but it may take some rewriting to get it exactly right.

I'm fresh off of reading The Thorn Birds for the first time, so in a very biased way I recommend it to study the sensual style of the love scenes in it.

I suppose you need to decide on a style here. Is it important that the love scenes are described more mechanically? Are you going for raw passion, or elegance, or would the use of metaphors/analogies or symbolic imagery better capture it? It all depends on the context of the story. Stephen R. Donaldson's The Gap series has some very graphic sex scenes laid out in pretty raw fashion. There's no way it would have worked for him to write them in some frou-frou manner.

What impression should the reader be left with? If it's super mechanical, he/she may only be titillated instead of being hit with the deeper themes of the novel that the love scene could bring to the surface. I guess there's a lot of different ways to describe it. Maybe write two or three different ones with varying levels of detail and see what fits. Good luck!

I think it is already clear to you what part sex plays in the story--why leave that out? However in the end you should probably just sit down and write that scene as best you can.

I don't think you need describe anything in detail, just a general description of what's happening. it's not being coy, it's leaving out irrelevant information. in a top-down overview rather than detailed blow-by-blow, tell the readers what's happening andf how she feels about it. that's how i would handle it, anyway.

Last year I gave myself an assignment: to write a graphic, straight vanilla sex scene that was hot, but above all NOT funny. It turns out that the most valuable device was avoiding creative labels for tab 'A' and slot 'B'. Mostly, if the reader doesn't know what body parts you're talking about, then they aren't old enough to be reading it. Liberated from that, it really wasn't that difficult and turned out well enough that my beta-reader asked me to print out that part for her to take home and read again at her leisure.