This will sell, right?
The odds are this story might not have any better chance of selling than it did in the first draft. In fact, the addition of all those extra scenes will likely result in a quicker rejection due to a plot line that seems to have pointless elements.
Just because a story is considered a romance does not mean that the characters have to be jumping into bed every chance they get. Some writers try to pawn this off adding sexual tension because one or both of the characters feels guilt or anxiety over the incident. This is far from sexual tension.
Sexual tension is nothing more than two characters who want to move the relationship to a new level and the passion between them is amazingly hot, but they are continually finding the relationship with a road block from outside or one that comes from either the hero or heroine.
If you think of the really hot characters in great novels or movies, the characters simply ooze sexual energy and when the characters are getting near each other, the tension becomes even stronger.
Now don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong about adding some great sex scenes in your book, but they have to be there for a purpose. Like anything else the characters might do during your story, there has to be a reason for the sex to happen. Just because you feel the characters haven't hopped in the sack yet is far from a good reason.
Scott
Yet, sex still seems to sell a lot. I can't tell you the amount of people I know who read historical romance, myself included, that say without the sex it all gets boring. We like the gorgeous peers going after the prim damsels and descretely taking them into the garden, etc. One of my favorite writers, Stephanie Laurens, does this a lot in her books.
ReplyDeleteI agree! And 'good sex scenes' are not that easy to write either, ie to make them really compelling and erotic, not coy, crude or just 'silly'. And they should flow integrally with the plot & the characters. In my own recently published novel I felt I was able to achieve frank erotic & realistic engagements between the two main protagonists, but these were seminal to the development of the main character 'heroine'. I felt pleased with the result. The first book (an historical novel to be published) was rather less adventurous in terms of erotic scenes, although certainly adventurous otherwise; so I decided to 'up the ante' in the second!
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