by Jean Roberta

Teaching creative writing to young adults (second-year university students) is an instructive experience for the instructor as well as the students. Lately, I’ve been reading stories and poems that overflow with passion: usually the frustration of rejected love, or a desperate need for someone who responds with indifference. For someone who has had this experience for the first time, it must feel as monumental as Hamlet’s dilemma when he asks himself, “To be or not to be? That is the question.”

Let me state here for the record that I haven’t become too old or jaded to feel moved by expressions of anguish by young writers. I remember being their age, and my life didn’t run smoothly either.

However, my current frustration with student writing is triggered by extreme expressions of emotion that seems way out of proportion to the situation, as set forth in the work itself. Readers can empathize with Hamlet because we know that he came home from university to find that his father had died under mysterious circumstances, and his uncle had suddenly married his mother. If such things happened in our own lives, we probably wouldn’t be happy.

The writer T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote a famous essay setting forth his theory that emotion expressed by characters in literature should always be based on an “objective correlative,” some circumstance that makes it seem logical and appropriate to the reader. (He complained that Shakespeare didn’t really succeed at that in Hamlet.)

Poetry by beginning writers often looks like a stream of consciousness, focusing on negative feelings. This semester, I’ve noticed a lot of screaming in student poems. (“I could have screamed, “Screaming, I cried.” “I screamed at the dark sky.”) In most cases, the cause of the screaming is briefly referred to, and it doesn’t seem to me to justify such an extreme reaction.

I’ve been looking for the objective correlative, often in vain. This can be a sensitive topic to bring up with student writers that I interact with in person. I don’t really want to know all the details of their lives, and some things are none of my business. I don’t care whether the events in their work have been made up; making up stuff is what creative writing is all about. However, I don’t want to read page after page of first-person descriptions of screaming that seem to be “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I’ve read erotica that reads that way too. An attractive stranger walks into a room, and the first-person observer almost comes. I’m willing to let the writer take me into his/her imaginary world, but I need to be persuaded. If the observer woke up feeling horny, having dreamed about sex all night, her/his reaction to the attractive stranger would make sense, and I would probably accept it.

Maybe the attractive stranger looks exactly like a celebrity that the observer has admired for years, or maybe like an old crush. Maybe the “stranger” really is the old crush, and he/she has matured into a more glamorous, more successful person than before. All this could make the observer’s reaction not only logical, but almost inevitable. But the reader/voyeur needs to know the details.

Screaming in orgasm is likely to be a peak experience for the screamer. It’s probably something that doesn’t happen each time the person has sex. So if this happens in a sex scene on a page that I’m reading, I need to know what is unusual about this conjunction of bodies. The stars must have been aligned in just such a way that the friction feels exquisite.

I’m sure I’ve rushed into sex scenes in my own writing, especially when pressed for time. When the deadline for a call-for-submissions was last week and I’ve been given an extension by a generous editor, the characters need to get it on, fast. However, if a story or a poem doesn’t work for readers in general, or if the piece only makes sense to those who know the writer’s personal history, it just doesn’t work. I’m grateful to my students for reminding me of that.
——————–

by Kathleen Bradean

Like Donna, I had a topic in mind this month, but after I read Garce’s entry on dialog a week ago, I was inspired to switch too.

During my morning commute, I’ve been listening to old radio programs from the late 40s and early 50s such as Suspense, The Shadow, Gunsmoke,  The Falcon and Johnny Dollar. I’ve also listened to broadcasts of movie scripts such as Treasure of the Sierra Madre that were edited for radio and performed by the motion picture casts. No matter what genre it is, each of these programs are masterpieces of tight writing. Every line establishes or reinforces character and moves the plot along. With only the help of a foley artist and actors, the illusion of action is created. It’s really quite miraculous and wonderful.

On the other hand, in a novel or short story, you can’t get away with some of the crutches you can in a play, tv, or a movie.

For example, it’s considered bad writing to have an “As you know, Jim” passage where a character explains something to another character for the benefit of the reader rather than for the other character.  

“As you know, Jim, you were my college roommate. After graduation, we went to work together here. We were the best of friends. Then I dated your sister and after not-fully-explained-bad-event-in-the-past-that-caused-your-sister-to-take-up-with-a-yak-herding-cult there was a big rift in our relationship but we’ve got to put that behind us right now because the fate of the entire planet hangs in the balance!”

But that sort of dialog is often in plays and movies. While I grit my teeth at it, I’m sure most people in the audience don’t realize how ridiculous it is for, say, a CSI tech to explain to another CSI tech why they’re lifting latent prints off an item found at a crime scene.

That’s not the only way prose writers are more constrained by  the form they work in.

While His Girl Friday is an amazing movie, writing overlapping dialog in a short story rarely works well. (I tried to write an example. It sucked. If you don’t want to take my word for how difficult it is, watch His Girl Friday or any other Howard Hawks movie then try to recreate one of the more manic scenes on paper and see how far you get.)

Dialog in prose has the disadvantage of not being spoken. (Although I strongly suggest reading all your work, not just dialog, out loud before you submit it anywhere.)  Tone and meaning have to be conveyed through the reader’s imagination rather than benefiting from the skills of an actor to bring out that meaning for the audience.

Dialog is a strange form of art. The writer isn’t trying to replicate the way real people talk, Real people take too long to get to the damn point, say um a lot, and spend far too much time talking about things that aren’t the exciting plot points of their lives. So what we’re aiming for is a completely artificial construct that serves the story but is worded in such a way that the reader could imagine a real person saying it. No. They have to be able to hear it in their imagination in that character’s voice and it has to ring true or your readers are going to roll their eyes.

No pressure.

If you can, try to listen to a few old radio broadcasts and pay attention to what those writers were able to do with dialog, a foley artist, and maybe and organ riff or two. It’s not the same as writing prose, but it will give you new respect for the power of dialog.

For the Oh Get a Grip blog, for which I’ve been writing for years along with Lisabet Sarai and others, I tried an experiment, a writing exercise I would recommend.

This Friday I’ll be attending a play I wrote, being performed downtown and the experience of writing a play and how it differs structurally from narrative fiction is profound and its worth your time to explore.  Essentially you’re telling a story in pure dialogue.

Dramatic – that is theater – dialogue is of a very specific nature in sound and voice because it written for the human voice, not the mind’s voice.  In real life, people speak a certain way, in short punchy sentences very often with phrases repeated over and over.  Its worth learning to tune your ear to this.  I studied by standing in grocery lines and coffee shops, noting the cadence with which people naturally speak to each other and writing it down verbatimn to examine.  I listened to plays and movie dialogue to get a sense of how the pros do it.

Then, for practice, below, I wrote a story roughly 90% in dialogue with only minimal narration.  Try it.

                   “Enter the Angler”

“Pick your era,” he says.  “We
have flagellation brothels, sword and sandal, Roman slave girls.
 Gladiators.”

“What era did Dracula live in?”

“What, when he was alive, like Vlad the Impaler
alive, or when he was a vampire?”

“The book,” she says, “that was
Victorian right?”

“You feel like Victorian tonight?  We’ve
got Victorian.  And Roman slave girls. 

“‘Hold high your succulent quim, he
ejaculated,’.”

“We’ve got this roman slave girl thing,”
he says.  “I can read that to you.”

“You have such an un-liberal thing for slave
girls,” she says, “You scare me.  What is it about slave girls?

“I think slave girl stories are sexy.”

“Why?  Because they can’t say no to you?
Right?  You just switch it on and off you go.”

“Maybe.  A little.”

“You’re very passive, you know that?”

“Oh stop.  Not that again.”

“No, you are.  You want a woman who can’t
say no to you.  That’s your passive fantasy.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes!  It really is.  That’s the very
description of a passive male.  You either want women to do you, or you
want a woman who can’t say no to you.”

“Is that supposed to be getting me hot?”

“I don’t know.”  She waved her
hands.  “Hold the slave girl stuff for a while.  Hey – did you
know there’s this story in the Bible where these two daughters commit incest
with their father?”

“That’s seriously fucked up.”

“Oh, the Bible, its amazing what’s in
there.  Pass it to me.  I know where it is, somewhere around Sodom
and Gomorrah.”

“Oh, I’ll bet.”

“No – these were the good guys.  The ones
who got away.”

“God spared them and they fucked their
father?”

“Absolutely.”

He reached down to the bottom shelf where the larger
books were kept.  He lifted out a heavy white leather bound Bible and
tossed it to her.  She caught it in her arms.  “Show
me.” 

She checked the concordance in the back, caressing
the pages thoughtfully with her fingertips, as he watched, suddenly admiring
her.  She still had her girlish habits from her school days.  He
waited wondering if she would still do it – was she – yes – there it was. 
The pink tip of her tongue, touching the doorstep of her lower lip as she
concentrated, the way she did when they met in study hall half a lifetime
ago. 

She flipped through the Bible with scholarly
authority, ran her finger down a column.  “Here.  Genesis
19:30.”

“Tell it sister.”

“The Bible sez – ‘Now Lot went out of Zoar and
dwelt in the hills with his two daughters for he was afraid to dwell in Zoar so
he dwelt in a cave with his two daughters.  And the first born said to the
younger ‘Our father is old and there is not a man to come into us after the
manner of all the Earth.  Come let us make our father drink wine and we
will lie with him so that we may preserve offspring through our father.’ “

“Whoa!  They fucked him?”  He
gasped, thought.  “That is kind of hot.”

“Oh my god you’re gross.”

“No,” he says, “you’ve got these two horny
women living in a cave.  They don’t want to fuck their father but what if
a guy came along, say, me, came along, ‘hey there you girls in the cave all
alone’.  I just killed this deer.  Let’s cook it up and spend the
night.  Want to have some kids?’ “

“That’s passive!”

“What’s passive?”

“You know these girls are going to come after
you with all they got.”

“That’s sexy as hell.”

“That’s passive male behavior.  You’re not
working for it.”

“I’m bringing them dinner.  Why they want
to fuck their old man anyway?  What’s that?”

“It’s about lineage.  The old tribal
people were serious about preserving lineage.  They were trying to do
their father a favor by not letting his blood line die out.”

“Yeah, but its nasty.”

“You didn’t think so a minute ago.”

“And passive.”

“If you read Matthew these people were part of
Jesus’ blood line.  Really.”

“Jesus was descended from these father-fucking
people?”

“Kind of.  Yeah.”

“God is good.  I guess.  So does that
get the machinery humming for you?  It kind of does me.”

“The machinery isn’t humming yet.”

“You’re a tough sell tonight.” 

“What else?”

“Chinese.”

“Oh – pass the soy sauce.  What is
it?”

He went to the middle book shelf, ran his hands
along the spine and drew out a thin book “Ten Questions on Joining Yin and
Yang”.

“To master the Eight Pluses, rise at dawn,
lengthen your spine, flex and relax your buttocks.  During the joining of
yin and yang through intercourse let your spine be loose, contract your
perineal muscles and conduct the seven energies to your sexual organs below the
Tan Tien. Exert pressure downward.  This is called Accumulating
Energy.  Do not go in and out too rapidly or with too high frequency. 
Thrust in and out gently and gliding and with control.  This is called
Gentle Moistening.  When finished, withdraw the Jade Stalk erect. 
This is called Stabilizing the Erection.  These are called the Eight
pluses.”

She was sitting with her mouth open.  “Oh
my gawd . . . “

“Yeah?”

“That is the most unsexy thing I’ve ever
heard.  I feel like doing the laundry now.”

“Its actually good advice.  Just a little
clinical is all.”

“That is the most mechanical shit.  It’s
all about number.  The eight what?  Why eight?  Why not twelve
or fourteen? Its like that thing you read in the Kama Sutra that’s supposed to
make the woman bark like a dog when she comes.”

“You scream for Jesus when you come.  You could
bark like a dog.”

“You don’t even vocalize.  I wish you would
sometimes, just let it out and yell like Tarzan.”

“I can yell like Tarzan.”

“Hey – want to hear the first horny thing I ever
read, ever?  Pass me that Desmond Morris book.”

“This?”

“The little green paperback with the naked
guy.  Yeah.”

He hands it to her.  She flips through
it.  “When I was in junior high?” she says, “Someone passed
this around.  It was the first time I ever read what happens when people
fuck.  ‘In this particular instance we know that the female of the species
has developed a particular susceptibility to the sexual stimulation of the
clitoris.  When we remember that this organ is the female homologue of the
male penis this does seem to point to the fact that in origin at any rate, the
female orgasm is a borrowed male pattern.’ “

“That’s not true!” he says. 
“Its the other way around.  All embryos start female.  They
become male in the womb.  Fetuses start with a clitoris and testosterone
turns it into a dick.  He’s got it backasswards.”

” ‘ This also explains why the male has the
largest penis of any primate.’ “

“Now I like him.”

” ‘Copulation starts with the insertion of the
male’s penis into the females vagina.  The male then begins a series of
rhythmic pelvic thrusts.’ Really.  You can’t beat that.”

“Like Hemingway.  Like Updike and
Hemingway together.”

” ‘The copulatory phase is typically much
briefer than the pre copulatory phase.’  Yeah, especially with you. ‘The
male reaches the con. . . conson . . . con-sum-ma-tory act of sperm ejaculation
in most cases unless deliberate delaying tactics are employed.’ “

“Consummatory.  Wow.  I wanna
consummate your ass.”

“Wait for the copulatory phase to begin
first.”

“When?”

“Soon.  After the precopulatory phase is
over.”

“How will I know that?”

“Sometime after the commencement phase of nipple
erection as a variation of sexual signaling.  I’ll make sure you
know.”

“If you say so.”

“Actually I really like this,” she says
“It still gets me.  I wanked off with it when I was a kid.”

“So it’s about muscle memory.  I really
like slave girls.”

“There’s something creepy about you.
Really.”

“Okay, now that we agree.”  He pulls
a paperback with a girl on the cover in a torn Roman tunic, climbs onto the
bed, leans back and rests his head in the valley between her breasts, snuggling
side to side close.  He feels her chin touching the top of his head as her
hand strokes his hair.  “Page 57,” he says,  “‘You are
my property girl, know you that, he said, smiling cruelly.’  How do you
smile cruelly?  Is it like this?”

“Please don’t do that again.”

“The weeping girls face flushed crimson as his eyes
bored into her- “

“Ouch,” she says.

” – bored into her – “

“Like with a power drill?  From Home
Depot?”

“Shut up.  Bored into her. His eyes bored
into her with a Black and Decker drill and a 35mm auger bit –

“Baby you’re so big – “

“So his eyeballs, they do this boring and he
says ‘turn around and lean against the table. If you move or cry out I’ll flog
you.”

“Flog me.  Copulate me.”

“Yes,” he says.  “Slap slap,
spanky spanky.  Now – ‘ slowly she turned, blushing with a hint of hidden
desires and the possibility of secret delights.  Grasping her tunic,
Lucretius wrenched it away in a single swipe of his powerful masculine hand and
exposed his throbbing member. Roughly he parted her knees and with a groan he
entered her.”

“No!”  she says 
“Stop.  Stop, just stop, now you’ve blown it.”

“I didn’t write it, what have I blown?”

“Entered?  Really?  With his
member?  Member of what?  Club Med?  Does your member ever
throb?”

“No, but I –“

“Do I make you throb?  Do I make your member
throb?”

“Not exactly.”

“Christ.  Why does he – “

“She.  It’s a she wrote this.”

“Why the fuck does she or he or it always have
to say ‘enter’?  How do you enter someone?”

“You just enter them.  Maybe groaning
helps.”

“I mean, even Lot’s daughters, they let their
dad ‘come in to’ them at least, ‘like all manner of the Earth’, whatever that
is.  That’s nice.  Poetic.  They didn’t make him enter
them.”

“Like entering a hotel lobby?”

“Enter me!  Enter me, baby, enter me
now.”

“Hold still while I insert myself.”

“Yes!  Insert yourself!  Enter
me!  Insert me!  Now!  Now!”

“Shall I insert your bags upstairs after I
enter you?”

“I hope you’re not expecting a tip after you
enter me, I don’t carry cash.”

“What if,” he said, “what if a guy
could enter you and then, like, move in?”

“What?”

“Live there right inside your pussy.”

“Just enter me and set up housekeeping in
there?”

“Like being born but in reverse.  I enter
you, warm up my dinner, maybe room service down in there, snug at home inside
your pussy.  After I enter you, that is.”

“Take your shoes off after you’ve moved into my
pussy and close the door when you poop.  Don’t leave your hairs in the
sink.”

“Turn on the TV, looking for HBO after I’ve
entered your pussy and unpacked, catch up on Game of Thrones and take a nice
hot shower inside your pussy.  Or the adult channels.”

“So you’ve entered my pussy and unpacked your
stuff and you’re eating Chinese food in your underwear living inside my pussy,
all tucked away and watching porn? And whacking off?  In my pussy? 
Shouldn’t you eating my pussy instead of Chinese food?  Passive!”

“No, wait, let me check the air conditioning,
its humid here inside your pussy.  Maybe I should call the desk.”

“Hey!” she says, seriously. “Isn’t
there a fish?”

“A fish?  In your pussy? 
Kinky.”

“No.  Is it there?”  She points
up at the bookcase.  “There was this fish you showed me.  Black,
really ugly black fish with glass pointy teeth.”

His eyes glazed over for a moment thinking. 

“With this thing on his head,” she says,
“Looks like his dick is hanging off his forehead.”

“Angler fish!”

“Yes!”

He goes back to the bookcase, runs his finger over
the spines.  “Here,” and pulls out a large flat science textbook
of marine life.  “And actually it’s the lady angler fish that looks
like she has a big prick growing out of her forehead. A long one that
glows.”

“That’s very handy having a dick where you can
reach it.  I could go for that.”

“As long as she doesn’t try to give herself a
blow job.  Ow.”

He passes her the book, open to the page on the
anger fish and she looks.

“ , , , When ceratioid males are ready for
reproductive activity, with their extraordinary olfactory sense they follow a
dedicated pheromone to a female, who will often aid their search further by
flashing her bioluminescent lure. Once the male finds the female, he bites into
her belly and drools a chemical that dissolves skin effectively fusing his jaws
in the area of her ovaries within. Their skin joins together as do their blood
vessels, which allows the male to take all the nutrients he needs from his host/mate’s
blood while exchanging a perpetual ejaculation of sperm to her ovaries whenever
she ready for spawning. The two fish essentially become one body until death. .
. “

She looks at him hard.  “I just think
that’s so fucking hot.  Just think – he fucks her forever. 
Forever!  Without ever stopping.  That’s all he does ever.  And
not just one – more than one.  A whole Fire Station battalion of
them.”

“God is good,” he says.

“Come here,” she says, holding out her
arms.  He lays down beside her, his hand slipping inside her nightgown,
finding her breast.  “Angle me,” she says.