So today I read over the sex scene that I wrote last week and thought, “Yes it does read as cheesily as it wrote.” I also noticed that I had the poor Angel married to Michael in the beginning and to Luke at the end. Oopsy. That girl did get around, I guess.

There are a couple of things rattling around my head about writing sex scenes, though. One is that if you write a sex scene and there is no context, it’s always going to feel cheesy. My sister, who read that blog post said it was stupid. “I don’t read stupid stuff about people gasping for breath,” she told me. (She’s very good about communicating what she really thinks.) Well, that’s probably a cliché—the lack of oxygen bit—I don’t really know, because I don’t read this stuff very often myself.

But my sister had read my last manuscript and had cried at the end—I was watching her. She kept whispering to herself, “This is so good. This is so good.” And she didn’t once say, “This is stupid. I don’t read stuff like this,” when she got to the kissing parts.

I’m pretty sure I had an oxygen deprived character in a couple of scenes. It must be a cliché. I must have heard it somewhere, because now that I stop and think about it, I realize that I’ve never experienced having the air sucked from a room and I’ve never forgotten to breathe when I kissed someone. Where did I get the idea that this was a good way to describe intense emotion?

Back to my sister, though. Why didn’t she complain about the scenes in my novel where my character didn’t breathe as she was kissing? Because she was invested in the characters and it was good and natural that they should kiss and that they should be feeling wild emotions.

Context matters.

I’m tempted to leave out the kissing scenes because I’m embarrassed for my characters who are kissing and calling each other pet names, thinking all the while that they’re alone. They’d never act that way if they knew we were all watching them. I’m tempted to skip battle scenes, too, because I don’t like violence.

But readers need to have the big emotional scenes as pay off, I think. If they are bonded with the character, they want to weep when the character weeps and rejoice when the character rejoices. They want to live through the battle and sing the song of victory.

What do you think? Have you ever read a book that left you feeling cheated because the writer backed off and didn’t deliver the big emotional punch you wanted?

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