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Topic : Describing a strong sexual attraction (on first sight) I wish to describe strong physical attraction on first sight by a human towards an alien. A Human meets an Alien but the Alien is extremely - selfpublishingguru.com

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I wish to describe strong physical attraction on first sight by a human towards an alien. A Human meets an Alien but the Alien is extremely beautiful (sorry Humans!) and would wipe the floor of the most beautiful Human.

What I have written is:

They were obviously viscerally attractive to Humans of that there was no doubt.

However, I am not sure this phrase conveys what I want to describe. What techniques can I use to better convey this attraction?


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Are you trying to describe this in a clinical sense, or are you trying to get the reader caught up in the feeling?

Forget aliens for a moment, suppose you are just trying to say that a human woman is pretty. You could write, "Sally was very pretty", or "Any man who saw Sally was immediately impressed by her physical appearance." Or, "Sally's physical appearance tended to elicit an automatic physical response from most men who saw her." Etc. Okay, that conveys the idea, but frankly, it's not very interesting. Unless you WANT to sound very clinical and scientific, I wouldn't say it that way. I don't claim to be a great poet, but I could easily do better. Not original, but I heard once, a character says to his girlfriend, "Once I looked up at the sky and it was the most perfect shade of blue, the most beautiful color that I could imagine. Later I said to myself that it must have been a dream, there couldn't really be such a color. And then today I looked into your eyes ..."

BTW I think you'd need to justify your premise for the reader to find it convincing. I can look at a mountain or a wild animal and say, "Wow, that's really beautiful", but I don't think of that in a romantic or sexual sense. If someone asked me, "Which is more beautiful, the Milky Way at night or your girlfriend?", I'd say that such a question is impossible to answer. They're two different things. Both beautiful, but each in its own way. There's no way to compare the two. Unless your aliens look just like people, I doubt it would occur to anyone to compare their beauty to the beauty of people.


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You are telling that the human is attracted to the alien. Why not show instead? A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, so why not create that picture?

Consider what attraction feels like - is there a physiological reaction? Are there thoughts the character is suddenly thinking, that have nothing to do with the situation they are in?

You might want to take a look at how other authors describe a character's response to supernaturally attractive creatures. For example, from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series:

The newcomer was the real thing. She was grace. Beauty. Art. As such, she was not so easily quantified.
[...]
Thinking back later, I couldn't clearly remember her facial features or her body, beyond a notion that they were superb. Her looks were almost extraneous.
[...]
Or maybe the hunger was mine. In the space of five seconds, my attention to detail fractured, and I wanted her. I wanted her in the most primal sense, in every way I could conceive. Whatever gentle and chivalrous tendencies my soul harbored suddenly evaporated. Images swarmed over me-images of unleashing the fires burning in me upon willing flesh. Conscience withered a heartbeat later. (Jim Butcher, Blood Rites, chapter 12)

You can also describe the alien itself. However, @Amadeus is not wrong - different people find different things attractive. You therefore need to consider whether the alien is question is extremely attractive to one particular character, or somehow attractive to many characters with different tastes.


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There's too many adverbs and phrases that are equivalent to adverbs (of that there was no doubt). Why not show, rather than tell? Something akin to:

'Their features were soft, inhumanly so. As strange as it was, humans were outright ugly compared to them.'


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