Yes, another revisit. I’ve been busy! I promise, I’ll have a new entry next week! But this is for all you romance writers out there.

We’ve all read about them. Those incorrigible, gorgeous rakes who don’t give a damn about stealing your company, raiding your trust fund, double-crossing the best friend or breaking your heart. He’s the one with the best lines even though they slice to the quick, telegraphed from a mouth crooking sardonic and eyes that flash and burn. He’s always the snappiest dresser with the shiniest shoes and the most expensive jewelry, more often bought with your line of credit. If he gets in a fight he wins without mussing a hair, and that slight nick high on his cheekbone only makes him more dashing. His voice is smooth as silk and it rumbles through you like an electric charge, as he’s talking you out of your clothes and everything in your wallet. He’s on everyone’s A List, is invited to all the best parties, frequents the finest restaurants and clubs, and is only seen with the most beautiful woman. He has the tightest abs and the broadest shoulders, is tall and lean and impossibly gorgeous. He’s the consummate lover but he’ll never fall in love, yet he’s what every woman wants and what every man wants to be. In film he’s Gordon Gekko the ruthless arbitrageur of Wall Street, in romance, he’s the pitiless rake, Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, in Lisa Kleypas’ wonderful novel, The Devil In Winter. And for all their cunningly manipulative ways, we are unabashedly drawn to them like magnets to metal filings. We worship them, adore them, envy them, lust after them. Only to be cut down and debased and betrayed over and over again. So why in the world are we continually drawn to this bad, bad boys?

Because oh…how we love to see them fall!

And when they do, it’s usually spectacular, a crash and burn of epic proportions. But then we get to witness the most marvelous thing– their redemption–and what a fascinating thing that is, watching these fascinating creatures evolve, scrabbling their way back to the top–and to us. It’s a precipitous climb, full of switchbacks and reversals, but when they finally learn their lesson, we get to wallow in their devotion, their bad, bad ways making them oh-so-good exactly where we need them.

Romance writing is all about the resolution of conflict between two protagonists so love can bloom, and there’s nothing like a rake whose odds are so out of favor, it almost seems impossible he’ll ever end up redeemed. But it also  makes the most compelling reading. Give me a good old bad boy any day, as they’re the most challenging and certainly the most fun. Because as everyone knows, that’s all we girls really wanna have anyway.

Sex scenes are as integral to spicy romance as whipped cream is to sundaes (or to use-your-imagination), but quantity hardly speaks for quality. A proliferation of ins and outs and seductive banter are only the more apparent components of saucy scene-writing. Truth be told, there should be much more going on before the point of contact than during. A romance writer should never forget to keep an eye on the romance if she’s ever going to make the scene truly sensuous. So how to accomplish it?

Romance is mostly written by and for women, and because of that the prose has to be approached with their sensibilities in mind. Women take their cues from the images they form in their mind as their senses are acted upon, rather than visuals observed as men are more apt to do. This is the greatest difference I’ve noted between sex scenes written by male and female authors, and the biggest flaw when male authors get it wrong. (Not that it’s universal in male authors, as many get it exceedingly right. Ken Follett still writes the best sex scenes of any male author I’ve ever read. To see what I’m talking about, read Night Over Water.) Let me give you an example.

I once read a sex scene written by a man which included the male character receiving stimulation to a very male part of his anatomy. While the prose was quite good and very descriptive, the writer’s observations were not only in the male character’s point of view, but within the confines of a man’s sensibilities. He described the woman’s breasts and her voluptuous figure, as well as her lipsticked mouth gliding up and down him. He also described rather graphically how it looked when his climax reached its er…finish, using some very active verbs and sticky adjectives. I don’t know about you, but I was a tad put off by the scene’s ickiness, and I feel quite safe in saying there would be more than a few women who’d share my opinion. Now, while this would be considered just fine if it were written primarily for a male market, it doesn’t work for women, and I’ll tell you why.

Part of the explanation is obvious, as most heterosexual men would consider a description of a woman’s feminine pulchritude essential, while most heterosexual women would not. But it’s more subtle than that. When writing for a female audience (and I’ve found this point valid with lesbian romance as well),  it’s more important to show not what the woman observes but what the character’s lover reacts to.  Although she may be just as interested in the male’s anatomy and what he does with it, her senses are more roused by the male’s sexual reaction to her. The more arousing he finds the heroine, the more arousing it is for the female reader. Take male-centric scene mentioned above. Written for a female audience it could be just as sexually charged and graphic, but the focus would be more on how excited she felt doing it, as well as how passionate her partner reacted because of it.

Simply put, as far as the males are concerned in female-centric sex scenes, they should always be more aroused by their woman’s reaction to them, than by how they feel by the act alone. Every woman, no matter the shape or looks or age, wants to feel that she alone can cause her lover to lose it, her own uniqueness being the most potent aphrodisiac of them all.