How I Write Love Scenes Without Dying of Embarrassment
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Why this take?
Someone asked me at a book event how I write love scenes. My face went the color of a fire truck. Not because I'm a prude — I write romantic suspense with significant heat, and I'm proud of every page. But there's something about looking a stranger in the eye and discussing fictional intimacy that makes my brain short-circuit.
The honest answer is: I write them the same way I write fight scenes. With careful choreography, emotional stakes, and a deep understanding of what each character needs from the moment. The embarrassment is just part of the process. Like tax season. Unavoidable, uncomfortable, ultimately necessary.
Emotion first, always
Here's the secret that took me three books to learn: the physical part isn't what makes a love scene work. Readers don't remember Tab A and Slot B mechanics. They remember the emotional shift. The moment a character drops their guard. The exhale. The thing that was said — or deliberately not said — while everything else was happening.
I draft every love scene twice. First pass: emotional architecture only. What does each character want that they can't ask for? What are they afraid the other person will see? What lie do they tell themselves to make this feel safe? Second pass: sensory detail. Temperature. Texture. Sound. The physical wraps around the emotional framework like skin over bone.
The headphones rule
I cannot write love scenes in public. I've tried. I spent forty-five minutes at a coffee shop staring at a blinking cursor while the barista made aggressive eye contact. I kept imagining everyone could see my screen, which is irrational but also the entire reason I own noise-canceling headphones and a privacy screen protector.
These days I write them at home, usually late at night, with music that matches the tone. Something atmospheric for slow and tender. Something with a beat for urgent and desperate. The music does about sixty percent of the heavy lifting for getting me into the headspace. The remaining forty percent is coffee and sheer willpower.
What I've learned about heat levels
Different stories need different heat. That sounds obvious, but it took me a while to internalize. Early on, I thought every romance needed to hit a certain temperature to be "real." I was wrong. Some stories need the door closed. Some need it wide open. The right heat level is whatever serves the characters and the emotional arc.
In my Fallen Hearts series, the love scenes are intense but selective. Aria and Darius have been through war, betrayal, and grief. When they're finally together, it matters that it's rare and deliberate. Flooding the book with intimate scenes would cheapen what they fought to build.
In Lethal Hearts, the heat runs higher because the dynamic demands it. Nyx and Declan communicate through action more than words. For them, physical intimacy is where the emotional honesty happens — it's the only language they're both fluent in. Pulling back on those scenes would have been a disservice to who they are.
Where the technique actually gets tested
The clearest example I can point to from my own work is Aria and Darius in Fallen Hearts. Darius doesn't remove his mask in front of her until chapter eight, and they don't become physically intimate until chapter fourteen. That gap is not pacing for pacing's sake. Aria is a woman who does not let anyone in until they've proven they won't flinch from her, and every scene in between chapter eight and chapter fourteen is doing quiet work: establishing exactly what kind of trust has to exist before the physical catches up to it. When the love scene finally arrives, the reader has spent six chapters learning what it costs Aria to be touched at all, so the moment carries weight a scene without that runway never could.
Nyx and Declan in Lethal Hearts are the opposite problem, and I write them differently on purpose. Where Aria withholds until trust is proven, Nyx and Declan communicate through action because words are a language neither of them fully trusts. Physical intimacy, for them, is where the emotional honesty actually happens — it's not the reward for emotional openness, it's the delivery mechanism for it. Writing the same craft goal (make the reader feel what the characters can't say) through two structurally opposite characters taught me that there's no single correct architecture for a love scene. There's only the question of what this specific person, on this specific page, is actually capable of saying versus doing.
The line I won't cross
I have one rule that overrides everything else: a love scene has to reveal something true about the characters that the reader didn't already know, or it doesn't earn its place in the book. If I write a scene and realize afterward that I could swap the two characters in it for any other couple in any other book and lose nothing, I cut it or rewrite it from scratch. That's happened more than once. It's the least fun editorial note I ever give myself, and it's also the one that's saved the most manuscripts from feeling generic.
The awkwardness is the point
I think the embarrassment I feel writing these scenes is actually a feature, not a bug. If I weren't a little uncomfortable, I'd be phoning it in. The discomfort means I'm being honest — writing something real instead of something safe. And readers can tell the difference.
So yes. I write love scenes. I do it with headphones on and my door closed and my face slightly red. And I wouldn't trade it for anything, because those scenes — when they work — are some of the truest things I write.
What I tell newer writers who ask
The question I get most from other writers trying this for the first time is some version of: how explicit is too explicit? I don't think that's the right question, and I try to redirect it every time. The right question is whether the reader can tell the character wrote this scene from the inside of their own specific fear, or whether the author borrowed a generic version of intimacy off the shelf. Heat level is a dial. Specificity is the thing that actually makes a scene land, and specificity doesn't require more explicit content, it requires more true content — the detail only this character would notice, the thought only this character would have at this exact moment.
I also tell them the embarrassment doesn't go away. I am on book eleven and I still close my laptop screen at coffee shops. I have just stopped treating the discomfort as a sign I am doing something wrong. It is the tax on writing something that matters, and I would rather keep paying it than write scenes so safe they cost nothing to write and give the reader nothing to feel.
That's my take on things, anyway.
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