How to Write a Love Scene
Mid-Week Extra: Happy Valentine's Day!
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I have a loooong post on writing scenes out of order that I’d planned to post today but then I realized it’s Valentine’s Day. So I wrote this post instead. And in the spirit of the holiday, I’ll keep this one free for all readers. In the future, these mid-week posts will be for paid subscribers only. So if you’re interested, upgrade to paid.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
In honor of this holiday, today I offer a post on writing about love. Specifically, love scenes. But even if you are not a romance writer, I think you should read it. Not just because I wrote it, though there is that. Rather, because as editor Shawn Coyne says, the love story is the fundamental genre, and nearly every story is a love story at heart. Beyond even that, the points I make illuminate a writing process of going from the first flush of getting the idea on the page to a finished scene, a way to progress through various drafts.
A definition before we start: by love scene, I mean anything from a couple professing their love for each other, to good old fashioned hot sex. But I’m not writing exclusively about sex here, so no worries. This post is safe to read at work. And a love scene could also be a scene between child and parent, BFFs, any kind of human relationship that exists, because we all know that love really does make the world go round. But I will focus mostly on romantic relationships today.
I got the idea for this article through working with my clients (where all my best ideas come from). They’ve trusted me enough to send me raw love scenes and then I can see them shrinking as I gently tell them they need to tone it down, pull it back, rein in the purple prose. But in thinking about it, I realized that my first passes at love scenes are full of purple prose, and florid language.
And that is how it should be. Because great—or even good—writing does not come from being timid. It comes from being bold enough to experiment, from being brave enough to write a really, really, really bad scene. It comes from being willing to start with that purple prose. Because, as Jodi Picoult says, ‘You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
I’ve named the stages I go through writing a love scene below. Parsing it out in this way might make it seem more complicated than it really is. So remember, we’re talking about a scene here, likely a couple pages at most. And none of these passes represent major rewrites. It’s more like taking the scene and tweaking it, one pass at a time.
The First Pass: Cringe
In a love scene, your first words on the page are going to be schmaltzy and sentimental. Maybe even cringe-worthy. This is okay, desirable even. Why? Because sentimental and cringey mean raw emotion on the page. This first draft of your love scene is meant to lay it all out there: hearts thumping, chests heaving, time stopping, tongues touching, inability to rip a gaze away, etc. Get it all onto the page. Do not stop to consider how terribly teenage first love it sounds. That’s what you’re actually going for. Pro tip: think about how you felt last time you were in love. (Maybe you’re in it right now! Go, you!) Think about the first flush of love and attraction when all you could do was think about your beloved, when the thought of him or her or them made you shiver all over, when time dragged beyond comprehension while you waited for an assignation. That. Put that, and more, on the page. Make it corny. Make it eye-rolling. The only rule is to let it be emotionally true.
Okay, people this is truly the important part. Most of us—me included—are afraid to put our emotions on the page. So we pull back. We sugarcoat things. We make it neat and presentable, shaping our emotions in lovely words and carefully crafted sentences. Don’t do that here. Nobody ever has to read this but you, so throw it all on the page. There’s something very healing about giving the characters in your head these full-on emotions. If that’s the only thing you take away from this post, I’ve done my job.
The Second: Physical
Next, let’s focus on staging. In your first blush of a draft, you got the raw emotion down. Now, let’s get clear on the physical staging. Where are hands and lips and other body parts going? Does the lovely couple start out standing across the room from each other and end up hugging on the couch? Or vice-versa? Which body parts touch which and when and where does this happen? This can be as simple as a chaste peck of a kiss or go full-on to some hot loving.
Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in the gushiness of it all that the physical aspects of scene get confused. You can solve this problem by making a list, such as: 1. He walks in the door and sees her. 2. She runs toward him. 3. They hug. 4. They kiss. 5. They retire to the couch. And so on. You get the drift. Now that you have this clarified, go back to your raw emotion of a scene and straighten it all out.
(Many, many scenes of all sorts that I read suffer from confusion of staging. Making a list like this can clear that right up.)
The Third: Emotional Arc
Back to emotions, but this time we’re looking at the emotional arc. Something I’ve been seeing a lot lately in my people’s work is wonky character arcs. Characters profess one thing than a paragraph later profess something else. They say one thing but do another. Yes, a character can be confused and go back and forth—especially when it comes to love—but that needs to be shown so the reader does not get confused. Because if the reader is so confused that her head is whipping back and forth like she’s watching a tennis match she’s going to put down the book and quit reading.
And remember—you want your reader to feel what your characters are feeling. A confused reader feels nothing.
In an arc, your character starts out in one place emotionally and ends up somewhere different. It’s especially important in love stories because, as we know, “the course of true love never did run smooth.”* Some example of arcs: the protagonist starts the scene determined to resist the love interest but ends up kissing him (see excerpt below); the proto expects a passionate interlude but instead gets an argument; lovers kiss but one tells the other she can’t for some moral high ground reason, and so on.
Many writing experts claim that every scene should have an emotional arc, and it’s a good idea if you can pull it off. Should you come across a scene that feels flat, check the emotional tone of it and see if there’s an arc. Does it end emotionally in a different place where it started? If not, do some editing so it does. It’ll make a huge difference.
The Fourth: Word and Style Choice
Writing a love scene is all about word choices, which alone will go a long way toward toning your lovely excesses down. So it’s time to reread it. If you’re feeling brave, read it out loud. But prepare thyself: you’re going to die of embarrassment. That’s okay! It’s good, actually. Remember: raw emotion! But now it’s time to dial the scene back from the precipice of schmaltz.
Or maybe not. Maybe if you’ve worked on the physical and looked at the emotional arc, you’ve probably done some editing along the way. Either way, now’s the time to focus on the sentence level.
Words matter. They tone down, they amp up, they make your readers blush or laugh or cry. It’s worth the time to make sure you have the correct one. And sentence construction matters. Many’s the time I’ve puzzled over an awkward sentence structure because the awkwardness of it hides the meaning. And you don’t want your protagonist’s declaration of love to get lost.
The Fifth: Put it All Together
With all of the above work, you are likely pretty much there, except for some rough edges, awkward sentences, clumsy constructions. All that remains is the smoothing, the tinkering, the re-reading and tweaking. And as we all know, this could and does go on forever. Which happens because every time we re-read a scene, we notice something else to fix. And then when you fix that thing, it affects other things….and this could go on and on.
But don’t let it. At some point, you have to call it good and just stop and let your lovely words go out into the world, where people like me are waiting to read them.
Wee Example
Years ago, when I was querying my first novel, Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior, I got a lot of responses from agents who felt that EJ was too unrelatable because she was brash and sassy. (She was ahead of her time, it was a few years later that the run of bad girl movies and books came out.) Almost to a woman, though, agents ended their rejections with a comment to the effect of, but I loved the sex scenes. And so I decided to present part of one of those scenes here. I think this is my favorite paragraph in the whole book, and one of my favorites that I’ve ever written. You can see a bit of an arc happening even in this short excerpt and there is some physicality as well.
And that is when he leaned down to kiss her. Next thing she knew they were kissing, madly, deeply, passionately, in a way she hadn’t been kissed in ages. She broke away from him. Even though it was the most wonderful sensation ever, she would now tell him to stop. Except he pulled her face towards his again. And she didn’t resist, couldn’t resist, because it felt too good to feel his lips on hers, his tongue running ……
(Bleeped because I promised this post was safe for work.)**
And finally…
The main point I want you to get here is this: write that crappy first draft with as much emotional energy as you possibly can. Make it awful. Make it terrible. Make it horrendous. Because then, and only then, you can edit it up into something gorgeous and beautiful and meaningful.
And this goes for writing love scenes—or any kinds of scenes. What I’ve presented here is a microcosm view for revising in general.
Do you have any tips for writing love scenes? Scenes in general? Please do share in the comments.
Notes
*William Shakespeare (duh), Act 1, Scene 1, A Midsummer’s Night Dream.
**You can get your own copy of Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior here.
***Reminder: I’ve got one free month gift for the Year of Writing Dangerously left. First person to hit reply and request it wins.
Ok, this one is a save in my tutorial file. This is not one of my stong points. I can do gratuitous violence all day long, but love? That's a big nope for me.
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