Creating wonderful sexual tension between my characters was one of the hardest things for
me to learn as a writer. At first I forced the sexual tension. I randomly
added passages of intense attraction between my hero and heroine in scenes where it wasn't
appropriate to the story or my characters and their conflicts.
In my mind I thought this is what romance readers wanted to read. They want
characters who are hot for each other. They want characters who have incredible
chemistry. They want characters whose pheromones mingle and catch fire. Right?
Yes and no. We all love to read those books where the hero and heroine practically
leap from the pages. As we read we can feel the intense attraction between them, the
push and pull, the resistance to what they are feeling.
When you were single and dating, did you ever meet someone whose chemistry spoke to your
chemistry in the most elemental way? A person who made your libido sit up and howl?
When this happens, chemistry can be your worst enemy. It can make you say and
do things that the sensible, rational part of you is screaming at you not to do.
But, you can't resist. Why?
Okay, this happened to me several years ago before I moved to Colorado and met my husband.
The results were disastrous. I knew this guy would take my poor heart and
stomp it into something unrecognizable before he was finished with me. BUT, I let
myself be lured by the attraction between us and the conflicts going on in my life at the
time. Two things were at work. One: Basic chemistry, physical attraction.
Two: My emotions.
When I met my husband the thing that attracted me to him from the beginning was an
immediate sense of inner strength. I knew instinctively that no matter what came
down the pike later on he would stand beside me and we would face it together. This
inner strength was very important to me because of the lack of a strong male influence in
my life growing up and a total lack in the men I had chosen to become involved with up
until that point.
How do we as writers balance chemistry and emotions between our characters without letting
one overshadow the other? An editor told me that sexual attraction between
characters should be natural. It should grow from your story and the conflicts
between your characters. This is the key. For me, the sexual tension and
attraction between my hero and heroine is a delicate mix of "want to but can't"
(physical contact) and each characters emotional stakes (emotional contact). They
touch emotions deep inside each other that they don't want to be touched.
Here is an example of one of my fumbling attempts at creating effective sexual tension.
My hero and heroine have a secret baby together plus they have some intense
conflicts in their pasts, which I won't go into here. In the first draft of this
book, all my hero and heroine thought about or talked about was basically this: "I'm
sexually attracted to this person."
They spent most of their time kissing instead of talking and thinking about their goals,
motivations and conflicts both external and internal. I'm telling you that I wrote
chapters and chapters of nothing but this! A different setting, but the exact same
thing over and over. Then finally toward the very end of the book, I decided now was
the time to tell the reader some important stuff about their past and their conflicts.
Duh!
In retrospect, I am glad I made this monumental mistake because I finally learned how to
create sexual tension without making it forced or inappropriate. I learned where the
primary focus of my scenes needed to be: on my characters internal GMC. I re-wrote
the book with wonderful results. This particular story is in the semi-finals of the
Molly.
Touch your readers' hearts. Pull them "heart first" into your story by
touching the hearts and emotions of your characters. Then add the pheromones.
Your readers will love you for it.
Cher Gorman writes long contemporary romance and is currently at work on her 6th novel
while revising two others. She hopes to get "the call" one day, but in the
meantime she writes simply for the love of it.
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