Writing Cleanly: All aflutter

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. This week is Valentine’s day, the whole reason why I decided not to write a series on love, and I hope that you all have a marvelous one.

Because it’s Valentine’s and I didn’t want to be talking about love in two separate blogs, we’re talking about writing clean fiction—and some of the things that writers struggle with, when writing clean fiction. (by the by, if you haven’t read last week’s post, you should!) As an editor of clean fiction, I can tell you that there are a lot of indie authors who need help in this arena—which is what I’m here for, this month!

We’re tackling some of the subjects that are annoying difficult to brooch in clean fiction, because clean fiction readers can be even harsher than the other ones (and sometimes we question why we set ourselves up for this in the first place).

This week?

Writing Cleanly: All aflutter

Yeah, yeah, I know. I said I wasn’t going to be talking about love—but you know what, love is a tricky subject, when it comes to clean writing. It can be a make or break, for a lot of readers, and it needs to be approached very delicately, from start to finish.

If you hate writing love stories… I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’ll need this information at some point anyway, so you may as well stick around, or at least bookmark this post for later.

Now, before we get any further, I want to have one little aside. If you did want to read a series on love, this month, then click over to the RADblog. I’ll be posting about different kinds of love and how to write them in fiction, all through February and March. It’ll be great fun.

In here, however, we’re talking romantic, guy-meets-girl love.

The trouble with this kind of love, at least in clean fiction, is that it can lead to a lot of red flags, for a lot of readers. Especially when it comes to writing romance novels. Yes, there are clean romance novels. Yes, they actually are quite popular. But ask any romance author how they write their love scenes, and they’ll all give you very different answers.

See, just like with battle scenes, you won’t be able to please everyone when you’re writing. You just won’t. I’m sorry to say it, but you won’t. Some people want erotica and other people don’t—and the lines always blur at some point. Again, I’ll be showing you a couple ways you can potentially write your love stories, that’ll take you right down the middle in terms of what clean fiction readers are looking for, but that’s the best I have to offer. A majority, but not all.

The way I see it, there are two main ways to tell love stories in clean fiction. You can either have the love scenes all be behind closed doors, or you can have your characters be chaste (in whatever definition you choose) throughout the story.

With option one, you write a normal romance novel, only you have all the actual "romance" take place behind closed doors. That means your readers won’t see what’s happening, but they’ll know what’s happening, because you’ve implied it. There’s a lot of innuendo, in this sort of writing. A lot of, you-know-what’s-going-on-but-I’m-not-going-to-show-you, and that can be great way to write a love story. In many ways, you get the best of both worlds: you get to show your characters falling in love, and show what most people consider to be a normal relationship between two consenting adults, but without getting too steamy on screen.

Option two takes a little bit more doing, because you’ll have to put more thought and detail into your characters as a whole. You’ll have to be more intentional with the things you do describe, and the ways your characters think, to “justify” why there’s no “behind closed doors” time between them. Why? Because a lot of readers are expecting that steaminess, and you don’t want them to notice that it isn’t there.

Personally, when I’m using option two, I like the “fade to black” method. I cut my scenes before it can get too deep, before the characters get too far into their time together, so readers can decide for themselves whether or not anything happened—but I’ll make it mildly clear in later text, that nothing steamy actually happened between my characters.

Lastly, when it comes to deciding how much is too much steam… that’s really up to you. I can’t tell you how much steam to include, because it’s hard to say, without having read your story. Every story is different, every story needs something different, and I’m reluctant to give you a scale to measure against.

I will say something very similar to what I said last week, which is that I’ll generally measure my stories by the “would I allow my thirteen-year-old cousin to read this?” scale, and it seems to do well for me.

As for you? Well, you’ll have to find your own scale, because I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you consider clean.

If you’d like specific advice, however, shoot me a message! I’d love to help point you in the right direction!

[love]

{Rani Divine}