# LIFESKILL: HOW TO WRITE A SEX SCENE

Diana Gabaldon is the author of the wildly successful Outlander novels (about a time-travelling nurse and her 18th-century Scottish paramour). They’re filled with meticulously researched history, lovable characters... and some seriously steamy moments. We asked this New York Times bestseller to school us in a skill set that wasn’t covered in Creative Writing 101: “A good sex scene is actually not about sex. It is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids. In fact, it’s essentially a dialogue scene of emotional intensity with physical cues. You can take for granted that most of your audience

know how sex is accomplished, so you don’t have to go into a lot of graphic detail about what exactly is going on. You can just use very small sensory details to orient the reader. Humans are wired to appreciate sex, and any kind of sexual context will heighten the narrative in that scene because people will be paying rapt attention.”