Sex, Is Less More?

I'm currently working on one of my adult series YA spin-off novels.  Since the main character has a love interest (of course), I have been working on softening the physical contact while escalating the emotional angst and indicision. The intended audience is toward older teens and twentyish readers, but it still made me really think about how much sex I should include and how explicit the horizontal scenes should get.  Yes, yes, I need additional decisions and indecisiveness associated with my writing.  I do know though that anyone who decides to write romance in their novels must make this decision up front.

If it's a straight-forward romance, this decision must be made so you can target a line (i.e. audience with certain expectations). But even if your novel doesn't focus on the romance exclusively, you need to make a decision. It makes a difference to how you want to market your work, and even how far you are willing to go publicly...haha. Is it a sweet romance where there is no sex, no mention of a penis or other taboo language, or erotica? Most likely your work will fall somewhere in between.


What I had to do was reread love scenes from some of my favorite novels and pay specific attention to detail. Personally, I found that leaving a little more to my imagination is actually more romantic.  It's like Stephen King says, "there is no monster as frightening as the one in our own head." That's why it takes so long to actually see the monster in the most frightening movies and why reading the book is even more terrifying. YOu simply imagine what it must look like in the same way you imagine what the characters are feeing or doing with very little inuendo.  Let's face it, yada, yada, yada would be boring, but we don't need arrows pasted to the pages with point A inserted into point B either.


That said, what do you think?


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