Some like it hot... some not!
MANASI Y MASTAKAR asks some bestselling national and international romance authors about how they tackle love and lust in their writing
Lust is important, too
Lust is, usually, what brings the couple together, unless it is a friends-to-lovers trope, as it does in real life. Love is what will keep them together. In a romance, these two feelings need to happen, otherwise there is no love story to be told. Lust is important for a relationship to flourish and then comes the admiration and respect the characters will find about each other, then love will follow, with a Happy Ever After. As in life, if you lust for someone and you fall in love with said person, the love will keep you together and the lust will keep the romance alive for a long time.
Some like it, some not
Lust has to be an organic part of the story. I always show the growth of the trust between characters in a sex scene, the way they connect. A sex scene can’t just happen randomly — there has to be a reason for it to be there. A few tasteful love scenes, where the feelings are more important than the body parts, add to the developing of the relationship between the characters.
Sometimes those feelings are blown up to immense, surreal proportions; like for example in my first romance series, Shades Of Trust or in The Diaries series, where the sex is hot, racy, fun, and sometimes even dirty. Other times, they are rendered on a smaller, more intimate scale that looks more like traditional realism. One of my books, Forevermore, had reviewers saying they could see themselves in the story and that was exactly what I was aiming for, since the romance had a sick child in it. Readers know that every relationship has its own, unique dimensions, and making one work is often the delicate, frustrating, repetitive work of picking apart a tangled child’s necklace.
A matter of feelings
When you say romance, who is the first couple that comes to mind? Romeo and Juliet, right? Written by Shakespeare, who also wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream...Oh, and what to say about Dickens’ Great Expectations? Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary? Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or the contemporary Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day? Or Jane Austen and the amazing Brönte sisters, who are considered marks in the English literature ... Romance is area land valid literary tradition with its own tropes, conventions, goals and preoccupations that address real complexities in people’s lives. They can differ in execution, but romance is not only “wanting to marry the royal billionaire”.
Serious romance writers are advocating one thing or other with their words. For example: female pleasure is one of the most culturally significant features and most radical aspects of that advocacy. But the genre’s true subject, great concern, is feelings. Not just romantic feelings, but feelings about one’s family, one’s friends, oneself, and most important, the love relationship in question.