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Thanks so much for having me stop by today.
And hello readers, I’m glad you tuned in to hear what I have to say about
writing a good Erotic Romance.
Writing a good erotic romance is equal parts
really easy and really hard to do. First let’s chat a bit about the erotic
romance industry in a post-Fifty Shades
world. After the book blew up all over the place – hitting best-seller charts,
spotlighting at many a book club, and being talked about everywhere – there was a huge change in the way erotic romance was
shelved in bookstores, at least the ones I’ve encountered since then. Erotic
romance was suddenly front and center in the middle of the romance section,
right alongside paranormal, Harlequin’s lines, and behind closed door romances.
That’s a big deal. But, as many readers will tell you, the Fifty Shades books are not the best books ever written. So now, we
turn to how to enjoy this surge in the industry and produce excellent books!
This is the easy part… and the hard part. To
write a good erotic romance, you have to do everything you have to do when you
write a good book, no matter its genre or subject matter.
That’s it folks – write a good book, with
lots of hot sex, and if it’s a romance, with a happily ever after!
Of course, that’s much easier said than
done, so I want to share a few specifics. I’ll give some examples from my
current book, Awakening Submission,
which is a dark erotica with BDSM. There is a romance, but as this is a series
with the same hero/heroine, the happily ever after comes a bit later.
1 – Plot – the book has to have a plot line.
It can’t just be a bunch of love scenes connected by a few pages of dialogue
and characters walking down the street for absolutely no reason. For Awakening
Submission, there are two major plots going on – the first is Jacey
learning to be a submissive. Learning what she likes or doesn’t like, learning
how to be both a feminist and a submissive at the same time. That all leads to
lots and lots of sex. There is then an external plot that drives things forward
– Jacey’s practice as a sex therapist, and the deadline for her new book
focusing on incorporating kink into the bedroom to improve your relationship.
These two things tie together closely so that one can drive the other and vice
versa
2 – Characterization – the book’s hero and
heroine, or heroine and heroine, or hero and hero, or whatever iteration you
have in your book, must be likable and they also must not be perfect. No one
wants to follow along on the shoulder or in the head of someone who is perfect.
Perfect people are annoying. Perfect characters even more so. Jacey, the heroine in
these books, is far from perfect. She’s contradictory in her own head. She’s a
sex therapist who has hangups about embracing her own sexuality. That
juxtaposition of her character really helps wit the overall push and pull of
the novel. It works for her character growth, but also helps drive the plot
forward, too.
3 – Conflict – this kind of goes along with
plot (what happens in the book) but it takes that concept a step further.
Without conflict, everyone can be happy right from the start of the book. As a
professor of mine once said, “Only conflict is interesting.” Who wants to read
a book where nothing happens? Conflict is all about
putting what your characters want in opposition to each other. So for Jacey and
Clayton, he wants a submissive, she doesn’t know if she wants to be a
submissive, or once she does, how she
can be one. What she wants and what he wants from one scene to the next can
change, but having their wants pulling against each other can create fabulous
conflict.
4 - Love – the book MUST have a love story,
an emotional element even among the hottest of scenes. It also must have a
happy ending. This is where the line is drawn between erotica and erotic
romance. An erotic romance must be a romance first and erotic second. If the
people don’t get together in the end and stay together, the book is not a
romance. So, confession time, Awakening Submission doesn’t quite fit the bill of a romance. This
really is more of a dark erotica than erotic romance, simply because it takes
Jacey and Clayton more than one book to reach their happily ever after. But
they do reach it, I promise!
Those are really the big ones that every
book needs, no matter the genre. Love is the only requirement added for
romance. And sex is the only additional aspect for erotic romance, and while
these scenes may have a lot of page time, they’re not the main part of the
book. Past that, the book has to be well-written in terms of grammar,
consistency, concision and all of that jazz, but all of those things happen
during revisions and editing.
Author
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Rachell
Nichole is a contemporary steamy romance author, who loves writing sassy sizzling
romances about memorable characters who have to fight to hold on to love.
Rachell lives in Pennsylvania with a mountain of books and the love of her life.
Giveaway
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