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As I'm continuing my revision, I decided to make the love scenes a bit more powerful. I didn't really know much about constructing a love scene that hit emotionally, and I know now I can do much better than my last attempts. So, I sit down and answer several questions about the relationship between Bodhi and Britta. As I'm beginning this sexual tension audit, I do a little accounting.
Britta has way more sex than Mari, my heroine from Otherworld, does. It's appropriate for the story, after all, Britta lives as an adult in the past for six years, is very sexually open in many ways, and has more opportunity and less conflict about having sex with Bodhi than Mari has with Rand.
At first I freaked, thinking I'd over done it. But the nature of Spellbinder is vastly different from that of Otherworld, and when I settled down, I realized that both have the right amount of love scenes for the tone of the manuscript.
Romances tend to be attacked as being porn for women. I'm not sure I'd take that sitting down if I were a writer of Inspirational romances or sweet historicals, where sensuality is usual slim to none and sex is never portrayed beyond a kiss. Yes, there is sex in my books, but I don't make them "insert tab A into slot B" type of things. They have meaning and deepen the relationship and further the plot. Very much like sex in real life does.
Sex is a catalyst, but more than that, it's essential to the way people relate to each other when they are deciding to fall in love. Sex can be an argument that ends in an unexpected kiss, and it can be a reconciliation between distanced partners. Sex can be the thing that unifies an otherwise estranged couple, and it can be the thing that hails the beginning of a new set of troubles for a couple, as well as an era of peace.
More than that, I'm a firm believer that people getting naked is symbolic for people stripping themselves down to their most essential self, just for one other person. Inperfections, scars, blemishes can be hidden by clothing, altered to the eye by the shape of the outer- or even undergarments. It is always a different person who stands before you unclothed. They have nowhere to hide.
Now, I'm not saying a naked person never tells falsehoods or lies, but in the realm of storytelling, there is so much scope for using sexual encounters between characters as something that resonates about who they are and how the characters are relating, I'm hard pressed to find a real reason to not include it in the stories I concoct.
Still, I have on the back burner a lovely traditional Regency period romance, where there are kisses -- two -- and that's it. Sex doesn't have to be more revealing than that.
So, you might ask, if I can do sex with two kisses in one manuscript, why write sex in my other novels? Because I want to portray reality, and not every era nor every relationship can develop in a chaste manner. I embrace diversity, and I try to put that in my writing.
Thanks for letting me share.
Live in your heart,
Sandra
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