From the workshop by Karen Drogin aka Carly Phillips, Janelle Denison, Julie Elizabeth Leto, and Harlequin Editor, Brenda Chin presented at the Arizona Desert Rose Conference, 2000

Elements of a Strong Love Scene

The title here is pretty self-explanatory! How do we go about adding emotional depth to scenes without doing two pages of looooong flashbacks (or, as someone from my last workshop put it, "whining and pining") about the past, or what the hero, my mother or so-and-so did to me 5 or 25 years ago?

Yep, I said it: SEX. The hot-and-sweaty, no-holds-barred, tangled-sheets or on-the-floor, down-and-dirty three-letter word that terrifies some of us so bad we write, "put love scene here" on a page and move on in seconds! Yet sex scenes can be so vital to the story (unless you're doing Tender Romance or Inspirational, of course), if they're done right: they can emotionally connect the hero and heroine like nothing else, and raise the emotional stakes so high between them that a reader MUST keep going to finish the story, even if it's 3am!

A skill that leads straight into strong, emotive writing is Deep Point Of View. And I mean deep. This is often a very hard skill to conquer, but it's so effective I felt it needed a whole day's work. Deep POV is an art, because it's putting yourself so totally into the character you basically don't appear (and by this, I mean what is commonly known as "author intrusion"); it's all the character.

Today, we're finding physical stimulants to finding an emotive response. These are triggers, if you will. Some people feel they need to work in silence, but for me, that's impossible. I need triggers! There are many different ways to trigger emotion, but most of these involve using your senses -- touch, sight, sound, smell -- even taste.

Today we're dealing with working at knowing your characters, so the emotional depth comes, not just from you, (though that's vital) but also from within them. And if this sounds nuts, it isn't: if you want your book to live, so must your characters! When you learn your characters, they start to "speak" to you, the emotions and the writing flow.

How many rejection letters have we all had, stating that our writing lacks those two awful words, "emotional punch"? I know I've had more than a few in the past. But it would leave me puzzled for a long, long time. What is emotional punch? People say to write the book of your heart and it will come naturally. But which book, since we love them all, is the book of our hearts?

I believe writing from the heart is definitely a plus...but sometimes it takes more. Think of that "book of your heart" -- any book -- as a whole body: and a body needs several parts to really live. Like we do. So, what makes up the "body" of a truly emotional book?