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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25592
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25592
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

As always in literature, it is all about the setup. In literature as in life, we interpret actions as our previous experience has led us to interpret them. If you want a reader to react to something in a particular way, you set up their expectations such that when the event occurs, they naturally interpret it in the way that you intend. In the case of this hug, therefore, the reader will interpret it based on all the previous interactions they have seen between these two characters. If there have been signs of building sexual tension, they will see it as sexual. If there have been signs of mutual respect and friendship, they will interpret it that way.

But it will also depend on how both these characters have interacted with other people in the story, all of which tells us how they typically behave and what their behavior means.

This is a climactic moment in your story, and so it must be the moment to which the whole story has been leading in some way. It is not in how you write this scene, but in how you write the entire novel. Indeed, if you wrote this scene in a way that is inconsistent with the whole of the novel preceding it, people would not believe the scene, not matter how you told it.

Original score: 6