I figured it'd be a good idea to ask you, since you do it so well: how do you write convincingly about the process of two people falling in love? It's difficult to build from an initial meeting and not jump straight into bed, especially in writing. (Especially when it's two friends who realize they're in love, which is one of my favourite tropes but apparently also my Waterloo.)
I've thought about this for a long time -- 2 months in fact! Since you sent the ask in, and I realize what I'm about to provide what is likely to be a deeply unsatisfactory answer, but probably the only one I can give.Â
I think that trying to describe something as personal and changeable as falling in love is next to impossible. It must vary so much from person to person, and we're all trapped with these impossible distances separating people -- you can be skin to skin and still miles away.
I think what I try to do is reach for the things you can touch and smell and see and taste. It's the concrete things, like waiting around for hours in the housewares section of a store for someone because they're happy there, and you like seeing them happy, or following them around a museum, listening to them talk about the same painting for the eighth time. It's how that coffee burnt your tongue when you looked up at a person and saw something different for the first time. And none of those are directly about the intangible, ineffable something that is probably love, but they're things that people reading your story will be able to relate to. I think the key is the give them enough of the structure so they can fill in the realities of their own love stories -- and then they'll be convinced, they'll really buy it.Â
But beyond that, on the subject of process, I think that it goes down to your characters -- are they the type of people who burn fast and hard and would jump into bed immediately? Or would they be shyer, less sure? I don't think there's a right or wrong way to write it, as long as it feels honest to you. But given the density of certain tropes in fandom, beware that even if it feels honest to you, sometimes going with your gut leads you to writing something a million others have done so before -- at that point, it's your job to make it stand out by having it be exceptional in some other way, and that all comes down to execution.
Or I guess the intensity of the smut.
Like I said, probably deeply unsatisfying, but it's what I got.
