Do you ever start writing something spicy and end up with a full-blown romance?

[Maryyy_A]

So I sat down to write a quick, steamy scene just to get it out of my system… and somehow three hours later I had developed full backstories, unresolved tension, and a soft-burn romance between two deeply broken people who make each other whole.
Does this happen to anyone else? You go in with the intent to write heat and end up with feelings? I’m torn between editing it down or just giving in and posting it as a longer-form story.

 

[NuclearFairy]

Just giving in and posting it as a longer-form story.

Do it!

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I did one intending for it to be a quickee. They ending up getting married, but I still kept it short and quick. Stuff doesn't have to get wordy and drawn out.

 

[StillStunned]

Does this happen to anyone else? You go in with the intent to write heat and end up with feelings? I’m torn between editing it down or just giving in and posting it as a longer-form story.

Not so much the intention to write heat, but Fairytale of New York was supposed to be a daft little fairy tale. By the time I was done I was blubbering all over my keyboard.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Happened to me right when I began writing. I wanted a story focused on sexual and d/s, but as I grew to love my characters, romance asserted itself, and I was unable to resist, even though it began to clash with the setup of the story. I ended up deviating from the initial idea to accommodate it, but it made certain chapters fit awkwardly.

I tend to plan a bit more in advance ever since.

 

[FrancesScott]

Within a broad initial framework, I let my characters have quite a lot of autonomy to live their own lives and take their own decisions. Sometimes a story takes a turn as a result.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My first story here. Was originally meant to be a one-shot "brief encounter" kind of thing, then I got into "what happens after?"

 

[jehoram]

Mark Twain wrote something about inventing characters and letting them do all the work, and before you know it your book is finished. A lot of the characters in my stories are like that. For example, "A Very Private Beach" or "Our Family's Little Secret" have characters that I only intended to be one-off stories. But they got busy, in more ways than one.

 

[FrancesScott]

Mark Twain wrote something about inventing characters and letting them do all the work, and before you know it your book is finished.

Yes, it’s a good approach.

 

[NotWise]

Yes, it’s a good approach.

My characters are pretty good at telling stories, but they're terrible at building a plot.

 

[BiDave1962]

More typically, my intro scenes become more elaborate than I intended. It takes time to get to the sex. The setup overrides the intended theme.

 

[FrancesScott]

My characters are pretty good at telling stories, but they're terrible at building a plot.

You need to instill discipline in them.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You need to instill discipline in them.

My characters tend to create stories just by being alive, interacting, being human. Life doesn't have a plot, I see no reason for stories to have one either - my stories tend to evolve from what my characters get up to with each other.

 

[FrancesScott]

My characters tend to create stories just by being alive, interacting, being human. Life doesn't have a plot, I see no reason for stories to have one either - my stories tend to evolve from what my characters get up to with each other.

We all have different objectives when writing. I normally want to tell a specific story, I might meander along the way, but the broad plot forms guardrails. Very occasionally a character convinces me to go outside those limits. Then we are all different in what we do and how we do it.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

My characters are busy digging my plot.

 

[iwatchus]

You need to instill discipline in them.

I was going to say you need to let them roam freer, unless you are writing for BDSM

 

[lovecraft68]

If there was a category for starting off with "This is going to be a quick and dirty stroke piece, this time I mean it!" and ending with 8 pages of slow burn emotional depth I'd be in the Guiness book of records.

 

[iwatchus]

I let my characters roam almost totally free for stories 2-13 of my original series, which only got written because I wanted to see what the characters from my first story were going to do next. As I started each one, I had a rough idea of what the big sex scene was going to be, but nothing beyond that (and they averaged about 15K a piece, so lots of other things happened.) My SO started nagging me that I needed to eventually finish the series, so I started to forcing the plots, I did not like the results nearly as well. Nor did the readers based on ratings. I got. I found a bit of a medium for the last three stories in the series, giving them a handful of checkpoints along the way I would like them to go through. Sometimes they would revolt and I would look the other way. That has been my approach ever since, roughly one plot point every 4K words or so.

But I have a stalled WIP, a romance where the two MC won't fall in love with each other. And my RomanceTron3K dating app gave them a 99.7% compatibility rating, damn it.

 

[MelissaBaby]

So I sat down to write a quick, steamy scene just to get it out of my system… and somehow three hours later I had developed full backstories, unresolved tension, and a soft-burn romance between two deeply broken people who make each other whole.
Does this happen to anyone else? You go in with the intent to write heat and end up with feelings? I’m torn between editing it down or just giving in and posting it as a longer-form story.

Why would you edit it down?