Three Paragraphs. An Entire Day. Send Help

Yesterday, I spent the entire day writing three paragraphs.

Not three chapters. Not three pages. Three paragraphs.

I would love to tell you that these were particularly complicated paragraphs involving an intricate political conspiracy, some elaborate piece of world-building or a scene that required me to research the finer points of Norland's legal system. Unfortunately, they were three paragraphs of a relatively short sex scene.

ALL. DAY.

And, because apparently I enjoy making my own life difficult, I am a romance author.

The thing is, sex scenes do not come easily to me. I know there are authors who write them beautifully and seemingly effortlessly, who can make the whole thing feel natural and intimate without getting tangled up in the logistics of where everyone's hands are or whether the language has suddenly become unbearably awkward. I admire those authors enormously. I would also quite like to know what they're putting in their coffee.

I, meanwhile, spent yesterday writing a sentence, reading it back, deciding I hated it, deleting it, trying something else, deciding that was worse, and then returning to a version remarkably similar to the one I'd started with. Occasionally I would get up, walk away from my computer, do something else for a while and return with renewed confidence that I had figured out the problem.

I had not figured out the problem.

What makes this particularly funny to me is that I never actually set out to become a romance author.

Even as a reader, romance isn't where I naturally gravitate. I love thrillers, mysteries and horror. Give me something unsettling, a mystery I can't quite solve or a story that makes me deeply suspicious of everyone involved, and I'm perfectly happy. I do read romance, of course, but it has never been the genre I instinctively reach for first.

And when I started writing, I wrote horror.

I also wrote poetry, because I've always written poetry and suspect I always will, but fiction was largely an opportunity for me to write something disturbing. I loved horror as a child, which wasn't necessarily appreciated by the adults responsible for educating me. I got into trouble at school for some of the things I wrote, and looking back, I do wonder how much that contributed to my eventually drifting away from the genre.

There are only so many times a child can be told that the things she enjoys imagining are inappropriate before she starts wondering whether she should imagine something else.

I don't say that with any particular bitterness. I understand that a child enthusiastically writing horror stories might occasionally concern a teacher, depending on what she's writing. And I certainly don't think I've lost that part of myself forever. I suspect there's still a horror author lurking somewhere inside me, waiting for an opportunity to make everyone uncomfortable again.

She'll probably come back eventually.

For now, though, I genuinely love writing in the Norland universe I've created. I love the characters, the relationships, the politics and the fact that the world keeps expanding every time I think I've finally figured out how many stories I want to tell. Romance became part of my writing life almost accidentally, but it has given me an enormous amount of creative satisfaction.

Except yesterday.

Yesterday I hated everything.

I think part of the problem is that writing Even the Fire Loves You Until You Are Ash has been a very different experience from writing On the Edge of After, particularly when it comes to character voice.

Beau was relatively easy for me to write. Not because I'm anything like him in every respect, but because there are parts of myself in him. His moral compass, especially, feels familiar to me. And then there's the fact that Beau is also, to some extent, the fantasy of a man written by a woman. I am perfectly comfortable admitting that. I created him, I like him, and I think he's rather wonderful.

Merritt, meanwhile, is essentially me, but with a foul mouth, competence in her career and better boobs.

I love Merritt.

I also feel that she has made some excellent improvements to the original material.

With Even the Fire, however, I'm spending much more time developing three characters who are considerably less familiar to me: Avery, Justine and Luca.

They're very different people, not only from Merritt and Beau, but from me. They have their own personalities, histories, desires, insecurities and ways of interpreting the world. The things that motivate them aren't necessarily the things that would motivate me, and the ways they experience their relationships aren't necessarily the ways I would experience mine.

I find that fascinating, and it's a large part of what has made this book so interesting to write. But it also means that I can't simply sit down, imagine how I would feel in a particular situation and write from there. I have to work much harder to understand what the situation means to the character whose perspective I'm occupying.

Which brings us back to yesterday's three paragraphs.

Writing an intimate scene requires a different kind of understanding from writing an argument, a conversation or even a character's private thoughts. I have to consider what the character notices, what they want, how they interpret the other person's behaviour and what they're willing to reveal about themselves in that moment. I also have to make sure the language feels like it belongs to the person experiencing the scene rather than to me, the author, desperately trying to make it sound good.

And when the characters involved are people whose minds feel entirely foreign to my own, that becomes quite a challenge.

I can't borrow the familiarity I have with Merritt and Beau. I can't rely on the same emotional instincts or use the same language simply because it worked in another book. The scene has to belong to these characters, and that means understanding intimacy through their particular perspectives, even when those perspectives are nothing like mine.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that I also find sex scenes inherently difficult to write. I can spend hours happily working through complicated emotional dynamics, political manoeuvring or the psychological motivations behind a character's behaviour, but ask me to describe two people taking their clothes off and suddenly I seem to forget how the English language works.

There are only so many ways to describe a kiss before you start wondering whether human beings have too many lips.

And don't even get me started on the logistics.

At one point yesterday, I was so frustrated that I genuinely considered abandoning the scene altogether. I wondered whether I could simply close the bedroom door, leave everyone to their own devices and return when they were finished.

Unfortunately, the scene matters. Not because I think every romance novel needs a certain number of sex scenes, or because I feel obligated to include one, but because there are things happening between these characters that I want the reader to experience. Their physical intimacy is part of the story, and removing it would mean losing something I actually want to explore.

So I kept writing.

And deleting.

And rewriting.

And occasionally staring at the screen with the sort of resentment normally reserved for people who park across two spaces.

By the time I finally stopped, I had three paragraphs.

Three paragraphs that had consumed an entire day of my life, tested my patience and briefly made me question every decision that led me to becoming a romance author in the first place.

But here's the thing.

I think they're good.

I read them again after I'd finished, and for the first time all day, they sounded like the characters I was trying to write. The language felt right. The perspective felt right. The scene was doing what I wanted it to do, and I could finally stop moving the same collection of words around as though one more rearrangement might reveal the secrets of the universe.

I don't know whether those paragraphs will survive every round of editing. They might change again before the book is published. It's entirely possible I'll open the manuscript tomorrow, read them with fresh eyes and decide I've written complete nonsense.

But yesterday, after an entire day of fighting with them, I finally felt as though I'd managed to write the scene I wanted.

And I suppose that's something.

I'd love to finish this with a profound observation about the creative process, but I don't really have one. Some days I write thousands of words and barely notice the time passing. Other days I spend hours working on something that occupies approximately half a page, and I have absolutely no reliable way of predicting which kind of day I'm going to have.

Yesterday was a three-paragraph day.

Today, I'm hoping for four.

At this rate, Even the Fire Loves You Until You Are Ash should be finished sometime around my ninety-seventh birthday.

Peace, love, and inspiration,
Britt 💚