So you’ve got your anticipation going. You’ve explored the physical chemistry, the internal and external impediments, and now it’s finally happening: Your characters are doing the do.
Now, a thing that frustrates me a little about romance novels is that the ratings are a little…hard to understand. There’s a lot of talk about “heat level” or “spice level” which is helpful, I guess, but sometimes misleading. I would feel weird about calling the sex scenes in my book “spicy” given that there’s generally an emotional core to them, but I still do it because that’s the language we have. Romance.io, a cataloguing site for romance novels, has a “steam rating guide”, which I find significantly more helpful in figuring out what a book actually provides. In general though, in the book market, you’re not going to get anything as clear as, say, AO3’s rating and tagging system. This is not least because of the way books are marketed and tagged on social networks and with major retailers. Authors tend to compensate by marketing using taglines or graphics that indicate what tropes a book contains, which can read like AO3 tags. I have mixed feelings about all of this, but I digress.
This is your first choice as a reader and writer, though. What kind of heat level are you looking for? Do you want something with frequent sex scenes? Do you want something with kink? Do you want something with romantic sex scenes?
It is, imo, an unfortunate side effect that the more focus there is on the romance, the less there is on sex and vice versa. In a book with a high heat level, there are generally a lot of sex scenes and they frequently come at the expense of the emotional build. Plot elements are glossed over and I’ve read more than one romance novel where a pivotal scene for the resolution of the impediments just kind of happens off screen. Vice versa, something I’ve noticed about more overtly romantic stories is that a) if there is a sexual relationship before there is a romantic one, once the romantic relationship comes to fruition, the sex scenes drop off, and b) kink becomes less likely. This is not to say this is true of all romance novels! These are just some trends I’ve noticed, especially in the popular/well-marketed stuff.
The next question is: how do you write sex? Literally, in the sense of how do you put the words on the page.
1. Choreography
Back when I was mostly writing 2-5K oneshots, writing sex scenes was mostly about the individual acts being done. In that case, it’s a pretty straightforward process. How do your characters start, what do they do, write the orgasms, finished. There’s a context, a build-up, but it’s mostly implied and not the core focus. Depending on the romance novel, early sex scenes that are mostly about exploring a dynamic or about physical attraction can be like that.
In that case, choreography is one of the biggest concerns. Nothing pulls a reader out of a sex scene like having to pause and reconfigure the mental image of whose limbs are where; your job as a writer is to make sure that changes in position reach the page. This sounds like an easy task but it gets a lot harder when you start writing. For one thing, writing is always a translation effort between reader and writer, what you see in your head while writing will never be exactly what readers see. Sometimes you’ll get caught up describing one physical aspect (usually something to do with the genitals) and forget something basic, like that the characters turned around, or someone hitched a leg over someone else’s shoulder to make this work. It also really depends on your style as a writer how you do this; I’m not a very visual thinker, so I’m usually caught up in the internal aspects or the feelings and have to remind myself that I need to add on whether one character is on his knees or on all fours.
Then there’s the neverending issue of “I already used the word “cock” twenty times on this page”. For what it’s worth, my stance on this is that I’d rather read “cock” and “dick” twenty times than a zillion awful synonyms. I already have a hard time with historical fiction that uses words like “cockstand” or “manhood”. (For your reading pleasure: list of horrifying synonyms used for genitalia from fanfiction). Another way to avoid the parade of synonyms is to treat the genitals as an extension of self, no matter how weird that sounds, and use phrasing like “he can feel himself leaking”.
Basically, describing the physical mechanics of sex is important so that your readers can imagine what’s actually going on beyond the abstract if you’re going for an explicit scene. If you want to keep it deliberately vague, that’s cool too, but you’re then writing what I would call a fade-to-black, or a mature instead of an explicit sex scene.
The thing about getting the physical mechanics down is that in a vacuum, it’s a lot like writing an instruction manual for flatpack furniture.
2. But how does that make you feel?
Making sex less clinical is mostly about getting really into the headspace of the character who describes it. Part of this is the larger context; I like to outline my stuff these days, and that involves considering the emotional stakes of each sex scene. What’s going on between the characters? What’s going on in the larger world outside them? Classics here include the uptight character who needs to get taken out of their head via sex, the bi/gay awakening plotline where “it’s never felt like this before” or the couple who are allegedly having no-strings-attached sex but who can’t help feeling all these things about it.
This can be matched up with the sex acts you choose; especially in terms of the whole “who’s on top” thing with MM fiction it’s easy to match up emotional vulnerability. This brings a whole host of other issues about how anal sex is mapped onto gender roles, but that’s a whole different thing. Very frequently, trust is also expressed through protection and whether or not it’s used. It’s also maybe worth considering how this differs from FM fiction; my experience is that when it’s not subsumed in a story about virginity etc., first-time vaginal sex between a couple is treated far less as if it were about deep-seated trust than first-time anal sex between two male characters. Which is maybe worth considering. What’s also worth considering is how anal sex is often treated as the pinnacle of pleasure between two men even though a) people of all genders can enjoy anal sex and b) plenty of men who have sex with other men don’t enjoy anal sex at all.
Anyway, part of the “but how does that make you feel” question is about that—bringing the emotional stakes of the story into the sex scene. If you don’t, it frequently feels like the story grinds to a halt for every sex scene, or even like there is no real story, just a bunch of interconnected sex scenes between two characters culminating in an unwarranted “I love you”.
The other part is remembering that describing emotions and describing body parts isn’t enough; you should also be talking about what feels good how! I’ve read sex scenes where you’re given a physical description of what body is where but at no point does the author describe how it feels for either character and it’s just…weird. To me, at least, it’s barely even hot, it’s just a series of actions on the page. I said above I’m not much of a visual thinker, and maybe if you are a visual thinker this works better for you; for me, I need what’s going on inside the characters to really get into it.
In one of the sex scenes I wrote for the sequel to Heart First, it’s very much about Tony’s perspective of something he’s doing to Daniel, and that’s where his attention is. But about halfway through, I realized I had barely described how Tony was feeling, what sensations he was getting out of it, what it was doing for him even though he was the POV character. So I went back and edited to explain why it feels so good to him to do something to someone else, and I think the scene is much stronger for it because it conveys a sense of urgency on Tony’s part and also shows how much it affects him that he can make Daniel feel this way.
Finally, I would like to petition that writing orgasms is important. You’d think this would be obvious, but a lot of sex scenes kind of just have one line. I think it’s worth lingering! Worth describing the physical sensations as well as you can (describing orgasms is hard, especially without lapsing into clichés or awful metaphors), and worth describing how it makes the characters feel. Especially if you’ve been building to this scene for a long time, it is literally an anticlimax for it to end with “then I came. Hard.”
3. Realism?
Do sex scenes need to be realistic? No, absolutely not. We’re all reading and writing for escapism. And as I’ve mentioned above, a lot of tried and true tropes of explicit fiction aren’t all that realistic at all, especially when it comes to the emotional weight some sex acts are given. Sometimes they even play into uncomfortable gender norms, or racial stereotyping, or society’s general obsession with the concept of virginity, and it’s very worth examining that in depth.
But depending on what you’re writing, you might want to have sex scenes that feel a little more like something that would happen in real life. It’s not suited to every book in the genre obviously (more obviously, omegaverse and anything featuring monsters comes to mind), and most readers and authors alike want to read about steamy sex that is a lot easier than it is in real life. Sometimes, though, it can be nice to read about something a little more real, especially if the tone of the book is more serious in general.
So, what’s the line of writing something without it getting too real? Probably most readers don’t want to read about the realities of prepping for anal sex. Like, if you’re having anal sex and you’re scared of accidents happening and you or your partner not being perfectly clean ~in there~ then you should definitely not ditch the condoms because MM fiction taught you that was fine. Equally, a lot of readers probably don’t want to read an in-depth anal douching scene prior to an anal sex scene – not that anal douching is always necessary or even good, there are some health questions about it — but the truth is that jumping into super spontaneous anal like people do in MM fiction with no regard to whether someone has showered in the last day or so, or has used the bathroom recently, is not super realistic. Personally, I appreciate when this kind of thing is mentioned, I find it more believable and in that way, it pulls me into the story more.
There’s a fandom classic set of articles here (careful, nfsw images included) about the realities of gay sex which goes through a few things like how in real life, what MM fiction has canonized as the right way to prep someone else isn’t the only way to go, how topping and bottoming don’t mean the same thing in real life as in fiction etc. which is well worth reading when you’re writing about gay culture. Statistics tell us that most writers of romance, both het and M/M, are white women who are attracted to men; like any other time you’re writing about a culture not your own, research is important.
Something I personally also like doing, which I think lends at least a little realism to fictional sex scenes, is to include the stuff that doesn’t work. Like when someone’s leg gets pushed up too far and their hamstrings can’t take the stretch, or when a cramp happens, or when the characters’ skin sticks together and it hurts when they pull apart. Little things, not enough to take you out of the scene, but enough to ground the reader in the idea that these are real bodies doing a real thing that isn’t always super easy or dignified.
As a last note though: you don’t owe your readers realism. Much like people shouldn’t go to porn for sex ed, they also shouldn’t go to erotica for it. Some of us enjoy realism, some don’t. We read and write about sex for pleasure, not for education. For me, knowing enough about the realities of sex means that something very unrealistic or something I think is a bad idea in real life will pull me out. This is especially true of rimming scenes for me, I always feel kind of relieved when those are set during or directly after a shower. (There is a non-zero number of sports romances that include rimming scenes directly after a game or an intense work-out and describing someone’s ass as “musky and smelling like them” is nice and all but I am here to tell you that a sweaty butt smells the way you think a sweaty butt will smell. Some people are into that, that’s cool! I would still recommend showering prior to mouth-to-anus contact for hygiene reasons. Similarly, any time a toy, a dick or a finger moves seamlessly between ass, mouth and vagina I cringe internally.) But that’s just me as a reader, and for plenty of readers, the sense of urgency overriding what would be safe sexual practices is a lot hotter—and that’s just fine. It’s erotica, not a how-to guide.
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