But fantasy is always bigger, so when I wrote the books, I made the wall 100 times as high and a lot longer." "I remember standing there on a cold October day – not quite as cold and grey as today – and I stood on that wall and stared off into Scotland, or what was Scotland, and tried to think what it was like to be a Roman legionnaire … at the end of the world. He said he had been coming to Scotland since 1981, the year he visited Hadrian's wall, which later inspired the much bigger wall in his novels.
"I've been planting all these clues that the butler did it, then you're halfway through a series and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it, and then you say the chambermaid did it? No, you can't do that." He conceded that internet speculation and conspiracy theories abound about how the story will unravel – but that did not influence him, even though he had been dropping clues along the way. Martin was relaxed, cheerful and funny – there was no repeat of him replying "Fuck you" to questions about his health.
A writer's real enemy is obscurity, and he had been there, sitting behind huge piles of books in shopping malls waiting for people to come only for them to ask where the cookery books were. The event in Edinburgh sold out quickly and the queue for book signings quickly became one of the longest the festival is likely to see.īut it had not always been the case, Martin said. It is an artificial distinction anyway – literary fiction in its present form is a genre itself." SAMPLE 2 EXPLICIT A GHOST OF A CHANCE Naked heaving breasts came into view the nipples were long, slate hard, and the areolas black against dark skin. The prejudice against sci-fi and fantasy is still there, but is not what it was. You should be reading Silas Marner.' If I'd been reading Silas Marner, I probably would have stopped reading." Why are you reading this trash? They rot your mind. For example, on Will & Grace, everyone is gay, the whole world is gay. "When I was 12 or 13, I had teachers take away science fiction books by Heinlein and Asimov and say: 'You're a smart kid, you get good grades. "I've been aware of this since I was a kid and I take heart with the fact that it is changing. His books are global bestsellers and adored by his fans, but he admitted there was still a kind of literary prejudice against his type of fantasy fiction. Martin was one of the star names at the book festival, staged in association with the Guardian. orgasms and that homophobic bigots think that all queer sex is depraved. If it was a democracy, then Joffrey would have died much earlier than he did." I suspect that to write an awakened sex scene, one may need to be awake to. If the plot lends itself to that, if one of my viewpoint characters is in a situation, then I'm not going to shy away from it, but you can't just insert things because everyone wants to see them. I've had letters from fans who want me to present particularly an explicit male sex scene – most of the letters come from women."īut he added: "I'm not going to do it just for the sake of doing it. "A television show doesn't have those limitations," he said. Or get critiques from other writers of erotic romance.Because none of the viewpoint characters are gay, there are no explicit gay sex scenes in the early books. When you come back to it, read it through and mark down revisions. Put the finished novel away for at least a week. It's your job as writer to make the scenes believable and inevitable. Include at least five very erotic scenes in an erotic romance story that's novel length. Instead, show the emotion and passion behind what's happening. Never give a straight, matter-of-fact play-by-play of sex or foreplay it's boring. Make them explicit and even possibly graphic, but never tasteless. Write the erotic story as you would a romance, but take special care writing the sex scenes. Remember, though, to leave some of the creative work for the writing process. You can do a loose outline that just takes up a few lines or a detailed outline that's pages long. Outline your story from the hook to the climax. Try to be as original as possible - erotic romance readers can be jaded and very picky about their romantic conflicts, particularly ones they've seen over and over. Learn who your characters are.Ĭreate a basic plot that has an exciting romantic conflict.
Give your characters a full history and describe them in your own personal character profiles down to the hangnail on their toes.
Characterization is important in erotic romances, as these are character-driven stories.