Learning to Write Smut – MuseTracks Guest – Juliana Ross
Historical erotic romance author Juliana Ross is our special guest today, and she’s going to give us a lesson in writing sex. Not just any sex, but GOOD sex.
Welcome, Juliana!
When I began work, early last year, on the novella that would eventually become Improper Relations, I was hoping to push myself. Throw out the rule book. Write a story that stretched—even demolished—the limits I’d been setting for myself as a writer.
I wrote in the first person, something I’d never tried before. I set the book a half-century earlier than anything I’d ever written. And I decided that the heat level had to be off the charts. Not just hot, but “turn on the fan, it’s boiling in here!” hot.
There’s a big difference, however, between planning to write a smoking-hot sex scene and actually doing so successfully. As I wrote, I learned—usually by watching my sister do exaggerated spit-takes while reading my latest draft—that writing about good sex is really difficult. In fact, it’s really, really hard. (No pun intended.)
By the time I’d finished the first draft of Improper Relations, I’d learned a lot about what works—and what doesn’t work. And I’m still learning!
Here are just a few examples:
Use anatomical terms that don’t awaken your inner 12-year-old boy. If you can’t read a word without smirking, it’s likely your readers will have the same reaction. Humor can be wonderful in sex scenes, but readers should be laughing with the characters, not at them. This can be a tall order when writing historicals, since common 18th- or 19th-century terms often sound silly to modern ears.
After much dithering, I settled on a synonym (I won’t repeat it here) that was commonly used in the Victorian period to describe the male sex organ, and is still widely used today. Then and now, it’s not fit for polite company, but the alternatives made me dissolve into giggles every time I typed them out.
Avoid descriptions that are excessively clinical. In an early draft of another novel, I referred to the “clever surgeon’s fingers” of my hero, a doctor, in the context of foreplay between him and the heroine. This set off alarm bells for one of my beta readers, a lawyer who has more than a passing familiarity with medical malpractice suits. “You have to take that out,” she told me. “It makes him seem like some pervy Dr. Feelgood. Yuck!”
When it comes to descriptions of sex, I learned, neither of the participants should come across like a doctor—even if one of them actually is a doctor. Remember that clinical is the opposite of dirty. And dirty, in this context, is good.
Descriptions of how things sound can be problematic: Most readers don’t simply picture a scene—they hear it in their head as well. So restrain yourself when offering cues for the soundtrack to a sex scene, and when it comes to moments that might squick people out, turn the volume waaaay down. This is particularly true for anything involving, ahem, bodily fluids. (I find “moistly” especially troublesome.)
As I said above, these are only a few examples – but I’d love to hear your take on the principles of writing Good Smut.
Those of you who are writers: did you encounter a steep learning curve when first writing sex scenes, or was it smooth sailing from the beginning? And what about the readers out there? Do you have any suggestions on what writers should avoid if we want to keep you reading?
I’ll be giving away three copies of Improper Relations to MuseTracks readers this week—just leave a comment below to be entered in the draw.
An editor by profession but an historian by inclination, Juliana Ross lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and young children. In her spare time she cooks for family and friends, makes slow inroads into her weed patch of a garden, and reads romance novels (the steamier the better) on her eReader.
You can find Juliana on her website , Goodreads , Twitter , Facebook and—her newest obsession— Pinterest .
You can buy Improper Relations through Carina, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and All Romance.
