A Love Hate Relationship With Love Scenes

I hate writing love scenes. I’ve probably mentioned this before somewhere. Unless it happens to be the light-hearted, some-what snarky chick lit variety–and let’s face it…no matter how much I enjoy reading chick lit, it’s not what I write. So how often is it easy to write a love scene? Yeah, right…practically never. I’ve gotten over my issues with writing them (thinking that I totally suck at it), so that’s something. But it’s still like pulling teeth.

I’m trying to write this incredibly emotional scene that’s over ten years in the making (they’ve been apart that long–and actually I hadn’t planned on this for another 50 pages or so but, whatever) and there are all these factors that play in to their emotional states, where their heads are. The tone isn’t at all like the original first love scene I wrote (which was 100 pages later) for these characters–which is probably because they aren’t the same anymore–so no help there. They had a sort of fight at the end of which both of them thinks the other one can’t forgive them and there’s no possibility for redemption or second chances. She leaves, gets in a situation with the killer, Collin comes running–there’s this thank God you’re safe kiss, and then I’ve got this thread of sexual tension running all through the next chapter while they do their jobs until they can get back to his place. It has taken me 3 days to get them from the foyer, upstairs to the bed, at which point last night, I watched Collin start singing All I Ask Of You–which he’d never do. :head desk: And this isn’t like Pot’s extraordinary 20 page love scene with Matt and Alex in WOTM where there’s at least a lot of–stuff–happening. We’re talking 3 days for a measly 1k+. Such a pain in the ass. I keep running into logistical issues–got through a whole paragraph this morning and realized–well crap, he can’t get her jeans off if she’s still wearing her bloody shoes. Go back and work that in somewhere… I always wind up having issues thinking about reality based stuff when writing love scenes–which is probably why I do better at the funny ones because, let’s face it, a lot of what really goes on in the bedroom can be funny. How many of us manage to remember to get socks removed? We’ve got priorities right? But this isn’t sexy.

I want to do this justice. It’s a really important scene and will have a lot of ramifications for Kensie and Collin on several levels. I’m hoping I can wind this up tonight while hubby is at band practice–that means no TV and hopefully no distractions. I can throw on my playlist of romantic music and see if I can find something with the appropriate tone. Maybe some emotionally drenched arias.  Puccini or Strauss.  Or some of those heart wrenching string compositions from Mozart.  Needs to be something without lyrics or at least not in English…otherwise I start seeing my characters break into song and that’s hardly helpful.

Please tell me I’m not the only one with this problem…

Anybody got tips?  Suggestions?   Some way to make this easier?