Writing Tips: B*gger Embarrassment

This is the one I couldn't remember on Friday. I remembered it (obviously).

Sometimes, your characters say or do things that you wouldn't. Or they do something in hot blood that you have to write and eventually, hopefully publish in cold.

For instance, I wrote a sex scene - sort of: vampire sex means drinking each other's blood - for the first time last week, and it was ... awkward. Not least because I was writing part of it in uni in a gap between lectures, and my computer screen was a bit exposed. Everyone else in the room was either social networking or doing something maths related, and there I was writing ... that.

But even at home, in privacy, it was just out of my comfort zone. I don't think I'm exactly a prude, but I don't generally go around talking about sex in all the gory - literally in this case - detail.

But I had to do it. The story demanded it, and when the story says jump, you say 'how high?' And then you spend an hour or two researching how high and what colour and anything else you can think of plus several things you would never have expected to have to know. Thank goodness for google, is all I can say. But I digress.

What I'm saying is, if you think you need to write something, or write in a certain way, or whatever, that you find awkward or out of your comfort zone, do it anyway. B*gger embarrassment.