"It would ha' been a good deal easier, if ye'd only been a witch."
- Diana Gabaldon
"To some extent, emotions are universal and can be treated that way; no matter what the participants’ orientation or preference, they have sex for the same reasons and can experience the same array of ..."
"Men have external genitalia, while women have internal genitalia. This simple difference makes a lot of difference in how they write about themselves—and how you might write about your characters. Mal..."
"There’s a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional."
"Good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids"
"If you can’t look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why it’s there—take it out or change it."
"Don’t go overboard in avoiding “said.” Basically, “said” is the default for dialogue, and a good thing, too; it’s an invisible word that doesn’t draw attention to itself."
"You want to anchor the scene with physical details, but by and large it’s better to use sensual details rather than overtly sexual ones."
"You don’t need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you’ve written, you should be able to point to any given element—be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a p..."
"As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag."