Crafting Passion: How to Write Authentic Scenes with Incredible Sex

Crafting passion may be the most difficult thing to write in fiction. That’s what I hear from fellow writers. Sex. It’s intimidating. It’s fear-inducing. It’s anxiety-ridden. But what if I told you it didn’t have to be? What if you knew how to write authentic scenes that included incredible sex? It’s all in a little education and rethinking the definitions of scenes-with-sex.

In crafting passion, ask, what is a scene-with-sex?

Most people will be surprised I phrased my question this way, using scenes-with-sex instead of sex scenes. That’s because most of the time with your characters, sexuality is a part of a scene, just not the up close and physically intimate parts. If we look at sex as a part of sexuality, then there is always something interesting going on internally or externally about sex or within the banter of characters together.

Sexuality encompasses areas like intimacy, physical touch, body image, affection, interpersonal relationships and gender roles. Sex is the physical manifestation of these things which you’ve probably written about in your story. You are on course if you recognize those things as setting the stage for physical intimacy.

In crafting passion, ask, what is the meaning of your scene-with-sex?

When I supervised child development students and therapy students, every time they had an interaction with a child or with a client, I asked why did you do what you did? What was it based on? Why do it now? I ask those same questions for creating the physical scenes-with-sex? What drives them? Why put them in at this moment? What does the sex mean in the context of the story?

With questions like this, it is easy to see how your sexuality builds as the story goes on. It is not a “let’s put it here” situation. Like you were pulling sex from a shelf and inserting it into a story. The scene creates itself from meaning. Meaning is about emotions. What emotion is driving this particular get-together? If you ask yourself this question, then your scenes-with-sex will be highly individual to the situation and to the story. Just like sex is as individual as our fingerprints, the embodiment of the physical sex will be different every time based on the meaning behind having it.

Heather Whitaker’s 5 Cs of Scene

My writing coach, mentor, and friend, Heather Whitaker, helped me understand the necessary elements within a scene. She called them the 5 Cs of Scene. They are: catalyst, complications, crisis, climax, and consequences. The catalyst is what causes change. Complications add tension and conflict. The crisis is the clarity of choice for the character. The climax is where the character makes a decision and then acts on the decision. The consequences give us the resolution and new information to carry into the future.

I like to think of these as the spine to the scenes and the spine to your story. These ideas fit in a macro and micro level. Macro-the story. Micro- the scene. Because you are building the scenes, it is important to understand why skipping the scene with physical sex and writing it later might not help you. Since a character can learn something about themselves through the sexual interactions, to skip the scene means you, the author, don’t get the valuable info you need to move forward.

Take Aways On Crafting Passion

You can shift how you write about sex with a new mindset and information.

Expanding the idea that sex is a part of sexuality will help you get more for your characters.

Working with the meaning behind the sexual activity will give the readers the authentic and incredible sex. We want to connect to the emotion the characters experience and be there with them.

Find your structure with the 5 Cs of scene and build the movement in your story and in your scene.

I’m happy to share that I put all of this together in The Fiction Writer’s Sexuality Guide.

If you just landed here for the first time reading the FWSG Blog Post, here is FWSG Blog Post 1.