This is a writer side of me blog. No recipes. No dogs. I know, kind of odd!
Ah, Intimacy. Such a necessity for Romance, and all too often the bane of Romance writers. You’d thinking writing about intimacy would come easy. Yeah, you’d think. Look at all those ‘intimate’ books to choose from. But are those depicted relationships intimate?
Because a blog needs pictures, and this was a particularly lovely sunset
Truth is, many of these stories are about sex. There is nothing wrong with sex, in a book, on the screen, or personally. Not one thing. Especially not when the sexual relationship is part of an overall increasing intimacy. But if the so-called sexual revolution (and birth control!) taught us nothing else, it was that sex without intimacy is often fun but it’s not really enough. And once you experience the ‘whole ball of wax’ whatever that actually means (I’ll let you look it up, it makes for a great time waster) you realize what you’ve been missing. And you look for more in your stories, written or read.
For me, intimacy with the characters, where I feel like I could know them, makes a good story. However:
PHYSICAL INTIMACY + EMOTIONAL INTIMACY = A GREAT STORY
Particularly when the emotional intimacy comes first. Although physical intimacy with a segue into emotional intimacy can be satisfying, if well written. How do we write this?
Certain gestures: pushing hair back, brushing the back of the hand against the cheek, lingering while assisting with the coat show intimacy. Heck in these days just helping with the coat is a biggie. All these gestures have been used to show growing intimacy or an attempt to establish intimacy. Has anyone ever reached out to touch your hair without asking? Especially a stranger? Yup happened to me and I was not pleased!
Recognizing preferences: how someone takes their coffee, if they want just a bit of ice or a cupful, shows an attention to the other person and helps establish intimacy. In A Question of Trust, Adam discerns in one day that Lana prefers hot water, with a slice of lemon, and not the coffee she pretends to like. In one revealing (to me) scene, Ty realizes he’d never noticed this, never really paid attention to her preferences while they were married, which has him questioning their time together. This leads to actually talking TO her instead of AT her, something he’d been guilty of until he met Rosalind A Question of Faith Which, by the way, has led to me asking when Ty and Rosalind will marry. Hmmm
Yup, Stormhaven’s back there somewhere
These are some rambling thoughts on intimacy, in my life and in my books. BICHOK my fellow writers. Don’t wait until tomorrow to tell someone you love them.
Mona Karel Author 