How to Write a Sex Scene

My buddy Erika Veurink simply wrote a romance novel (!), and on Thursday I’ll be in conversation with her on stage at the Strand, should you’re free and wish to come hang around with us. My most burning query for her shall be…

…what’s it actually like to jot down a intercourse scene? How do you shrug off inhibitions and describe a scene in actual element? How do you draw readers in whereas figuring out your dad and mom are amongst them?

“I assume I ought to have thought a bit more durable in regards to the inevitable writing of intercourse scenes earlier than I signed as much as write a romance novel,” Erika informed me. “I assumed ‘the act’ occurred as spontaneous combustion, like 650-ish phrases on a web page as an outpouring of divine inspiration. But it surely seems, the phrases need to be written.”

Right here’s how she did it, in her personal phrases:

1. Rid your self of the notion that the scene you’re about to jot down shall be learn by anybody you’ve ever met. Truly, let’s simply assume this scene is destined for a dusty field beneath your mattress, by no means to see the sunshine of day. That’s a great place to start out.

2. Mild a candle. An costly candle. The sort of candle that lives in a pale pink vessel you save for dinner events and different grown-up endeavors. That is its precise use case.

3. Put together for the interior critic, who loves nothing greater than a intercourse scene unwritten. Sauntering into your unconscious, he’ll supply heartless reminders of your highschool ex-boyfriend and common notes in your incapability to carry out any process in entrance of you. Kindly see him out.

4. Assemble some supply of exterior braveness. I go for darkish chocolate chips, however this may be the time to go full-tilt Hemingway with a finger or two of whiskey or a cute little jam jar fizzing with a crisp white.

5. Be comforted by the books you’ve assembled — like, Honey and Spice, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, First-Time Caller — that tower symbolically round your writing area. Different individuals have written intercourse scenes and lived to inform the story.

6. You’ll need poetry, and many it. As a result of nobody is as unapologetically attractive as poets.

7. Discover a playlist with out phrases and many craving (assume: Sade and Prince). Play it on the softest quantity attainable to drown out your neighbor’s crying child or the sound of oil simmering within the kitchen whereas your husband makes dinner.

8. You’ll want to jot down a really shitty first draft. Dive in headfirst. Don’t lookup till the scene involves a detailed. Reward your self with the aforementioned deal with.

9. That is the time to recall the best way it felt once you heard him shout your title throughout a summer time rainstorm on Bowery. Now’s the second to retrace the steps of her fingertip throughout your knuckles beneath the open Vermont sky. Settle into the reminiscence of splitting a martini in your couch, his lips dragging throughout your neck, whispering “all mine.” Each second of electrical want and bodily starvation has led you to this.

10. And when it’s over, promise your self you’ll by no means need to ever write one other intercourse scene so long as you reside.

By no means one to shrink back from a query, I additionally requested Erika how she found out which phrases to make use of for physique elements. “Fortunately, my editors have been very a lot a useful resource,” she informed me. “Early on, I used to be like, ‘How do you discuss penises?’ They have been like, your two choices are d- or c-. There’s no ‘member,’ which I appreciated.”

Thanks, Erika. Find her romance novel here, and please come join us on Thursday evening, should you’re free. We’d like to see you!

P.S. Nine couples with the best on-screen chemistry, and is this the sexiest podcast?

(Photograph of Erika by Christine Han, as a part of her house tour.)