How I Write Sex Scenes That Sizzle as Someone Who Hides My Sensuality: a guest post by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

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I Love Romance Blog

9 min readAug 31, 2024

How I Write Sex Scenes That Sizzle as Someone Who Hides My Sensuality

The slow-burn romance between my two main characters had been simmering for 200 pages and enough was enough. It was time to give them the magical night they’d both been longing for: their first dinner date, their first kiss, their first everything.

I knew exactly what should happen during The Sex Scene. How she’d let her dress fall to the floor. The way he’d look at her, almost pained, as if her beauty was more than he could bear to behold. I knew right where he would kiss her just as I knew the particular strain of ecstasy that would sweep through her body the longer he did. Theirs would be a culmination of ten years of longing and the most satisfying physical, psychosexual, spiritual experience of their lives!

But as soon as I got them in bed, I balked. I left them there — naked, on the cusp of a kiss — telling myself these characters deserved their privacy. On the next page, I began a new chapter: “The following morning…”

My beta readers were ready to strangle me.

“I wanted more!” my friend Heather scolded. “You gave me literary blue balls.”

The last thing I wanted was to leave the reader unsatisfied, so I swung in the polar opposite direction, writing down everything — and I mean everything — in graphic detail. The shape and heft of certain body parts. How those body parts interacted with other body parts. The viscosity that resulted from the interaction. I was blushing at my keyboard, and I had to take frequent writing breaks to let the blood rush back to my brain.

But when I thought about someone else reading what I wrote, I was filled with dread, embarrassment, even shame. There was nothing shameful in what my characters were doing, but had I gone too far in describing it so explicitly and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination? I consulted romance novels, literary love stories, anything and everything with a sex scene, and I concluded that even at my most graphic, what I had written was relatively tame. Had my love scene been available to stream on Netflix, I doubt it would have even earned an R rating. I worked up the nerve to let Heather read the revised scene, and she gave it two thumbs up. Hot, she said. Yes. So why was I still uncomfortable with the idea of sharing the scene with anyone else, let alone everyone who might someday read my novel?

It wasn’t writing about sex that scared me so much as being the writer of a sex scene. In the same way that writing a novel exposes the lens through which the author views the world — their tastes, fears, prejudices, and quirks — writing a sex scene exposes the writer’s sexuality, putting their most intimate sexual self on display for anyone to read. The sex we write about might not be our personal preference but its polar opposite. It could be social commentary, satire, even repulsion at the act of love. But by including a sex scene, the writer naturally editorializes on the nature of the sex they describe, whether that’s to praise it, criticize it, or pine for it IRL.

In my case, I wanted to write about the Best Sex Of All Time. What could be more subjective? I worried no one else would find it sexy. I feared it would read like I had created these characters as puppets to play out my personal fantasies on the page (not entirely untrue). Writing about bad sex — realistic sex — would have felt safer. But to write a love scene that would transport the reader into my own personal fantasy world required more courage than I thought I had.

That is, until I actually gave it a try and discovered that writing good sex scenes is less about ‘letting it all hang out’ and more about taking ownership of who I am — and who my characters are — without apology.

*Photo by Caique Nascimento on Unsplash.*

Accept thyself.

One of the major themes of my novel centers around self love and self acceptance. As my heroine learns to accept and even celebrate those parts of herself she’s always loathed, I found myself on a similar journey, daring to admit and write about what I found desirable without apology.

Draw the line between not enough and too much.

When I got really honest with myself, I didn’t like those graphic descriptions I wrote for Heather. I found some of them repulsive, others downright comical. There had to be some middle ground between ending the sex scene before the sex and being so explicit it was pornographic (and not even my kind of porn!).

After dozens of rounds of revisions, I found what I hope is a satisfying mix: being crystal clear about who is doing what to whom, how they are doing it, and how it’s making the other person feel, all while leaving the most intimate anatomical details to the reader’s imagination. The result is, I hope, a scene where passionate sex becomes an expression of deep love, or what I like to call Soul Mate Sex. Call me vanilla, Pollyannaish, even a prude — but that kind of sex is the sexiest I can imagine. After five years of working on a story about self-love and acceptance, I’m no longer afraid to admit it.

Let your inner world come out.

In embracing what turned me on and what I found sexy, I took ownership of not only the sex scenes, but the entire novel. I learned to let my inner world come out, and to think of my ideas, tastes, and desires as worthy and valid — even if they’re different from Heather’s and everyone else’s.

I hope there are readers who will find the love scenes in my novel as sexy and satisfying as I do.

But if I’m alone in my tastes, it’s okay. I’m no longer afraid to be the only one sizzling.

Nice! Some great food for thought for our romance readers and writers alike! Like me, I’m sure most writers have had those uncomfortable moments when the page we just wrote feels a bit too close and vulnerable to handle.

Thank you, Rebecca, for this useful article. ♥♥♥ Let’s take a look at this author’s latest book…

About the Book

NEW YORK TIMES essayist and 2024 Reader’s Choice Award winner Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s stunning debut.

In The 23rd Hero, an ordinary woman with an extraordinary memory travels back in time to sixteenth-century France to stop climate change before it starts and return to the man she loves.

In a world ravaged by climate change, a mysterious time travel agency known as the Program sends carefully selected Heroes back in time on missions to reverse the course of history, preventing environmental damage before it happens.

Sloane Burrows secretly longs to be a Hero and restore the natural world of her childhood, when gulls still soared above Coal Harbor and fish still swam in the sea. It’s a world she can envision with absolute clarity because of her superpower memory, which makes her exactly what the Program is looking for in a Hero. But her white father raised mixed-race Sloane to believe her “freak memory” is a shameful flaw that should be hidden from the world.

Sloane stuffs her dream of being a Hero and conceals her memory to the point of making herself sick. Her only respite from the constant nausea and shame is the recurring dream she’s been having for nearly a decade. In the dream, a breathtakingly beautiful man makes her feel accepted and loved in a way she never has in waking life — not despite her memory, but because of it.

But when the man in the dream shows up in real life, Sloane’s world is turned upside down. Not only is Bastian a flesh-and-blood person, but he’s from the Program, and he wants her to do the one thing that will shatter her chances of ever winning her dad’s love: become a Hero, travel back in time to sixteenth-century France, and use her superpower memory to save the world.

So, what are people saying about this book?

“Rebecca Anne Nguyen is so fierce, funny, rollicking, racy…The 23rd Hero is a page-turning, wild and marvelous ride.”

— Susan Choi, Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award Winner for Trust Exercise

“Fans of time-travel romance are likely to find this…Outlander-esque adventure… deeply satisfying.” — Kirkus Reviews“A unique and remarkable novel…a time-traveling adventure like no other.”

— Reader’s Choice Awards (2024 Bronze Winner for Best Adult Book)

“Rebecca Anne Nguyen is…unsparingly insightful about our talent for making a mess of things and irrepressibly optimistic about our chances for fixing them that she makes us eager to follow her anywhere, whether to times past or futures newly imagined. The 23rd Hero is a page-turning, wild and marvelous ride.”

— Susan Choi, Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award Winner for Trust Exercise
“With an intriguing plot, beautifully written prose, and plenty of humor, this is a unique and remarkable novel. Fans of time-travel, eco-dystopian fiction, history and romance will love this story.”

— Reader’s Choice Awards (2024 Bronze Winner for Best Adult Book)

“Nguyen’s razor-sharp humor, gorgeous prose, and lush world-building had me turning pages late into the night.” — Jessica Pearce Rotondi, author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers

“A breathtakingly original and gripping story — a fabulous debut!” — Melodie Winawer, acclaimed author of The Scribe of Siena and Anticipation

“A thrilling, escapist ride through time, an old-fashioned romance…and the story of a woman finding her purpose. This is a delightful page-turner by an exciting new voice in fiction. ” — Mandy Berman, author of The Learning Curve and Perennials

Grab a copy today!

Universal Reader Link: https://books2read.com/u/mB7D9v

GUEST BIO

Rebecca Anne Nguyen is an award-winning author, playwright, freelance writer, and speaker. She is the author (with Tom Voss) of Where War Ends: A Combat Veteran’s 2,700-Mile Journey to Heal the 2019 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Silver Award winner for Autobiography & Memoir. She is also the 2024 Readers’ Choice Book Awards Bronze Winner for her fiction debut, THE 23RD HERO.

Rebecca’s nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, Insider, Mamamia, Coffeelicious, Indeed Design, and in the Military Times. Her fiction has appeared in Defenestration, Wintermute Lit, and Write Launch, and her humor has been published on Slackjaw, Points in Case, and Frazzled.

Rebecca’s short plays and one acts have been produced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami. Staged readings of her first full-length play, Hypotheticals, have been produced as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, Cincinnati LAB New Works Festival, and Epiphanies New Works Festival in Waco, TX, where Hypotheticals was the 2023 festival winner.