How to Write a Kiss

Dear Romance Writers of the World: Please stop with the "mating tongues." Please. Stop. Yeeeurgh.

Kisses are really hard to write. What is so enjoyable in life easily translates to the page as... well, a) strange and b) gross. I mean, they put their mouths together, and then stuff happens. Suddenly the writer is seven years old again.

Many writers resort to the technique of using verbs that are supposed to be evocative. He plundered her mouth, he plunged into her mouth. "He slanted his mouth over hers" is the most unaccountably overused sentence in romance. I swear, some old-school writer like Rosemary Rogers or something used that one in 1981, and spawned a plague in which that sentence takes over the entire genre. It must be stopped. It makes no sense, it is neither sexy nor romantic, nor is it even a good piece of description. It is merely oddly geometric and takes me right out of the scene every time.

Kisses in romance follow a predictable pattern. Someone grabs someone else and hungrily devours them (another yeeeurgh), tongues happen, then some groping and feverish blood and maybe the guy cops a feel. A reader can always tell when the writer has had to write one too many kisses under deadline.

Here is how Loretta Chase writes a kiss:

He teased her first, his tongue playing over her lips, then he stole inside, and the world spun as the taste of him swirled inside her, strangely cool and sweet and infinitely immoral.*

That is how it's done.

Here is how Judith Ivory writes a kiss:

Softer than petals. Though a lot better than petals. Warm and round and animate enough to move under the press of his lips. No, this wasn't kisssing. This was brushing his lower lip against hers. Running the tip of his tongue along the edges between her lips. He'd only have a little more then stop...**

In my own novel, I had my hero take his sweet time kissing the heroine. He started slow, very slow, tentative almost, and let it all build up until she was practically crazy. He teased her and he let her take charge. There was no plunging, devouring, or mating whatsoever. What there was was kissing.

Georgette Heyer had a different tactic. In Venetia, the hero (a rake, of course) sees the heroine walking through the countryside, dismounts from his horse, grabs her, and kisses her. That's all the description we get: "He kissed her." No elaboration on where their arms and legs were, what it felt like, or what anyone was thinking. I found myself curious: Did she struggle? Did she push her hands up between them and try to push them apart? Did he grab her by the shoulders, around the waist, or did he hold her head? Why didn't she just turn her head? It engaged me and frustrated me at the same time. It worked, in its way.

Still, I love a good kiss in my romance novel. The good writers make the magic.

*Mr. Impossible.

**The Indiscretion.