Emotive Language: What Most Stories Miss!

So, one thing that I have seen a lot when people try to write sex is that they tend to focus on the physical over the emotional. Now, now, I get what some of you might say. ‘’Bronze, what a girly thing. Who cares about emotions? Just get to the fucking!’’

But, hypothetical person, what if I told you the emotions are important? They help you to invoke the scene, they build the characters and the momentum. The fucking - the physical act - is the climax of the story but you need to make your readers want it.

Think of it like this. There are only so many ways that you can write ‘’They fucked and it felt good.’’ As a commissioned writer, I swear I’ve done nearly all of them by now. when you do it a lot, you start to realise how, well, limited it is. You find yourself writing the same things again and again because there are only so many ways to convey the pleasure, the spikes, the peaks and valleys of the act. By focusing only on the actions, you deny yourself an avenue of description and flavour that you can use to break up the direct action of the scene. Added to this, grounding your readers via the use of emotion is sexy!

For some kinds of writing, it can be downright vital!

Let me give you two examples:

‘’Davis reached over to her, running his palms along her naked body. Sarah shivered; her body crying out for more. She shifted, spreading her legs for him, showing him how wet she was. How much she wanted him in a way that he couldn’t miss.’’

Now, the above passage works. It’s what I’d call passable. I mean, I wouldn’t show it to a client, but for a first draft? It’s solid enough. It gets to the point pretty well and tells you that these two are about to fuck.

Now let’s do it again with a splash more emotive writing!

‘’Sarah trembled, excitement and dread corded her muscles. She couldn’t believe this was happening! The air caught in her throat. Her face burned, and she wanted to look away. Davis leaned over her, his palms tracing her naked body. Discovering and exploring, his touch sent little sparks of heat flashing through her mind.

‘’She swallowed. She wanted to speak. She wanted to beg for more. She wanted him to fuck her like he never had before. She felt like a schoolgirl exploring herself for the first time. When words failed her, Sarah spread her legs, exposing herself to him. Embarrassment washed across her face, the dripping wetness of her pussy made her want all too plain.’’

You can see that it’s basically the same scene but with the added emotive flare, it draws you in and locks you down. You can feel how **** Sarah is, how turned on she is. The fact that she is conflicted, torn between want and confusion. Unable to ask for more but **** to take things further.

That’s the power of emotive writing. A lot of erotica that I have seen online - and I don’t mean specifically here - focuses super hard on the the actions. On the solid. The fucking, the motion, the scene. But the really good erotic blends both emotion and scene. By laying out how your characters feel, you heighten the sexuality.

Humans are emotional beings, we respond to emotions. Emotion is a tool that any writer should learn to use. When someone comes to me to ask how to write better sex scenes, I always say that this is the first step.

Don’t just tell, show.

Now of course, just like any literary technique, this can be taken too far. The dreaded purple prose waits just down the road and if you don’t control yourself, you can drown out the action with the emotive language. You need to strike a balance, find exactly where you should perch. Too little emotive work and your sex scene is dry and uninteresting. too much and you never actually get to the sex.

Want to know what makes it even more bullshit? Depending on the type of scene, the optimal mix will change! For example, if you’re doing someone’s first time or something that’s supposed to be highly charged, emotive writing should skew way to the fore. It gives the impression of how supercharged they are, how they are in turmoil, or so excited that they can barely think. But if you applied that sort of detail to every scene, it would quickly get annoying!

You gotta do you. You gotta find the right balance for your own particular style and for the genre and type of scene that you’re working on.