Teaching about Writing about Romance Scenes

Literally not sure I can say the word I want to say in the subject line lest your email client zap this message to a bad folder?

Week 5

Dear Readers,

Last year I started teaching romance writing as an eight-week course. This developed organically out of a couple things: giving so many notes on romance manuscripts as a freelance editor, and running the HEA WTF? workshops with my friends and incredible teachers Aminah Mae Safi and Zan Romanoff. My friend Kerry Madden encouraged me to expand it and teach it as a course out of Vroman’s, and somehow that is exactly what happened.

The overall structure of the class is based around story beats. As I laid out each week’s lectures and exercises, the section about writing sex scenes ended up in Week 5. In the HEA WTF? workshops, Zan runs the sex scene portion, and I always feel so grateful to learn so much from her as well as for the frank vulnerability she gives to all of us. I hoped I would be able to bring even a fraction of that to my teaching.

I am—as I assume most-to-all romance authors are—extremely sex-positive. That said, I am a woman in our current culture who was raised extremely Catholic, and untangling all of this can be complicated. That said, I genuinely was excited about teaching writing sex scenes.

I began my writing career as a young adult author, and back then I assumed I would stay in that lane forever. So I never thought much about writing sex scenes; when sex happens in YA novels it’s much more about emotions and coming-of-age discoveries, definitely not there for all the purposes these scenes can function as within romance novels. I mean, in short, YA sex scenes are not supposed to be hot!

So when I started writing for adults, initially I was thrown by this topic.