"WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!" If you were a studio audience and this blog were a sitcom, that's what you'd be saying after you finish reading this post. Excerpted here from the book Writing the Great American Romance Novel is Catherine Lanigan's advice on writing the love scene. So please be mature about this and don't squeal too much. If you want to read more of Catherine's advice, you can pick up her book here at Allworth Press. By the way, a few people have asked me about the photo here and I got it off a Google image search for "love scene." It is a still from the Marlon Brando/Rita Moreno flick The "Night of the Following Day".

In a romance novel, the love scenes are one of the most
critical pieces of writing you will do. Be assured that your audience not only wants these scenes in the book, but they are paying very good money to the authors who deliver them well.

Love Scenes and "Head Action"

The action, dialogue, and pacing in the love scenes are unbelievably important. Again, you will need to refer back to or keep in mind the sub-genre you are writing.

If this is a spiritual- or religious-based story, your love scene is not going to be graphic in detail. Your dialogue is not going to hint at anything racy or spicy. You will want to keep the Victoria's Secret underwear in the drawer, but that does not mean that your characters would be prudes, either. There is nothing more beautiful than the human body.

No matter what the genre of romance you have chosen, your hero and heroine should always have respect for each other in bed. Their dialogue will be loving at all times.

They can have fun and kid around, but loving respect is what makes a hero and a heroine.

Even in the raciest love scenes you can write, the best part of the scene is what is going on in the heads of the protagonists.

It is best to break the love scene down into four parts.

First is the kiss.

Second in the love scene is the proposition of sex.

Third is the sexual act.

Fourth is the action after the lovemaking.

The kiss is the most romantic part of the romance. The action, dialogue, and backstory all lead up to when the hero will kiss the heroine. The next block of action leads up to when the hero will kiss the heroine again. If you've ever read a Judith McNaught romance, you know what a great kiss should be like. Judith writes fabulous kissing scenes.

In hers and any good kissing scene there is a lot that the characters think about and react to as they kiss each other.

The kiss is considered by many to be more intimate than the sexual act. The kiss is sharing, caring, and it is sweet. Your choice of how you want to execute the first kiss between your protagonists will depend on their character. Should it be quick and impulsive? Anticipated? Filled with love? Filled with regret? Blatantly humorous? The options for the kiss are endless.

The kiss is an end in itself. It does not have to lead to anything more than what it is. The decision for the action of the characters to go beyond the kiss will be determined by the characters themselves and what the kiss means to them and its placement in their lives.

If you ever saw Last Tango in Paris, the movie set the cinema world on its ear because two strangers in Paris have sex in the first scene. They don't even know each other's names, but they have sex. The rest of the movie then reveals who these people are. Half the romance movies ever made and most westerns don't have a kiss until the last scene, when the cowboy gets the girl and rides off into the sunset with her.

The placement of the kiss then depends on the characters and their development.

The second part of action in the love scene is the proposition of sex. This can be implied and it does not have to have culmination to be effective. In the movie French Kiss, the Meg Ryan character is forced to sleep in the same hotel room as Kevin Kline. For a brief moment we believe there might be a proposition of sex between them because the setting itself (the hotel room on the French Riviera) sets us up to believe Kevin will propose to have sex with Meg.
Instead, Kevin leans over the bed, takes a bed pillow, and then lies down on the couch on the other side of the room.

In your novel, you could write a romantic comedy by using the proposition of sex being ever present, but the main characters can never find a place or time to be intimate. The quest could be hilarious and frustrating, and yet it would finally have to end with the third part of the love scene structure, the sexual act. During the sexual act itself is when you must use more than the details of lovemaking to make your story interesting. This is when you can reveal a great
deal about who your characters really are.

The heroine might be a virgin. If this is her first time to make love, is she married? Single? Is she in love or just experimenting? Is this a magical experience? Or does she wish she were shopping instead?

As a general rule, for most of the love making scene you will want to stay in the heroine's head. It is her reaction to him that we are most interested in. It is through her heart and her eyes that the reader is experiencing the story.

You will need to have some of the head action be in the hero's head, but it should be kept to no more than a third.

I remember writing a love scene in which I literally split the head thoughts fifty-fifty between the hero and the heroine. My editor quickly let me know that that was not the way to do it.
There are times when you might want to have all the head action in the hero's head to garner empathy for him or to reveal elements of his character that he has kept hidden from the heroine. This is a good place to do it.

The dialogue in the love scene can be funny, moving, loving, tender, and even hot. Never make the mistake that this is the place for profanity. It will get edited out. I have always used the rule that if I even use profanity, it should come out of the mouths of the villains.

Most of the dialogue in love scenes is saved for the aftermath. At this point you can have your hero, if he's a commitment-phobe like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally, jump out of bed and race home.

Or, it is a good time for the hero to reveal his deep devotion out loud to the heroine. There are no hard-and-fast rules about this. I've heard advice that the hero should never reveal his love until the very last scenes so that the heroine is kept guessing.

I have also read some great romances in which the hero tells the heroine that he loves her in the very first pages and it takes the entire book for the two to get together and finally have a life together. Frankly, this last one sounds like real life, doesn't it?

The structure of the love scene is laid in stone.

The placement of the love scene probably depends on the sub-genre you are writing.

The execution of the love scene is what defines the tone of your work and may be the yardstick by which your readers measure you.

The love scene is the internal combustion of the romance. Your reader picked a romance because she expects there to be a romance. If he/she wanted a straight mystery, that's what they would buy. The love scene is the most difficult scene to write as you move from your first novel to the tenth. Keeping your dialogue fresh and the action exciting is challenging, because lovemaking has specific elements and there are no surprises for the reader. Your choice of vocabulary, the scene setup, the physical surroundings, and then the characters' emotional reactions after the sex act are what make your work unique and memorable.

For example:

George closed the door with his foot, balancing a tray holding two glasses of champagne. "I brought you something," he whispered to sleeping Janet. Opening her eyes, she pushed down the cream-colored satin sheet enough to lift her hand. She took the crystal flute, smiled wickedly, and then pushed the sheet past her naked breasts, down to her abdomen. Slowly, she poured the champagne between her breasts. "Wanna toast?"

This is a cute setup. The dialogue is tight and minimal, but the action is playful and spicy without being glaringly erotic.

These two characters are familiar with each other and there is no tension.

This could be the last scene of the romance novel we have already written.

Now, let's make the characters more complex. In the following love scene there will be commitment but no sex. There will not even be a kiss; however, we can see an even deeper commitment between two strangers than we had in the above scene between two familiar characters. We have the elements of a love scene in that there is a bed, someone undressing, playful, sexual banter, and a whisper of devotion.

Brad entered the dingy mountain cabin where Janet sat in the tattered lounge chair
he'd owned since high school. She clung to the shadows as if they were safe harbor