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fifty shades of grey

Finally, Fifty Shades

by | January 18, 2015 | | 15 Comments

By Donna George Storey

I finally read Fifty Shades of Grey. I’ve avoided doing so for years. The youngest of three daughters, once I figured out I didn’t have to do everything my older sisters did, I’ve been fairly stubborn about following my own path. Just because everyone else was reading the book, for pleasure or market research, didn’t mean I had to. The disappointed, and often scathing, reviews by people I respected certainly supported my boycott. And I knew enough about popular literature to roll my eyes when someone insisted I had to write my own trilogy that was “better” to show the world what really good erotica was and thus earn myself more money and glory than E.L. James could ever imagine.

Then, this past Christmas, someone close to me bought me a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. As a gag gift. Ha, ha, ha, I laughed. But as I stared down at that glossy gray tie on the cover, affixed with a label that the book was “Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture,” I decided that this was a sign from the universe that I must judge this publishing phenomenon firsthand.

So, what do I think?

I can see why so many readers find the story appealing. And, while it’s not the greatest book I’ve ever read, I’m finding it raises interesting questions for me about writing, and is even, at times, a compelling story.

Granted I came into the experience with rock-bottom expectations. But I understand why a classic story of a rich, handsome man discovering that an unassuming young woman is the one person on earth who can truly touch him would find a wide audience.

Mind you, all the criticisms of the book are true. The characters are unbelievable. The plot is uneven. The endless repetitions of lip biting, eye rolling, and capering inner goddesses are seriously annoying. The real endurance test for me is the overuse of “mutter” and “bemused.” Holy crap, what’s wrong with the beautifully invisible “said”? And could you dig a little deeper for some other reaction from your characters? My writing group would have had a field day with the prose and likely would have had poor Ms. James in tears.

I have no doubt the book gives an inaccurate portrayal of BDSM, an area in which I have no expertise. Any of the things I do know about—majors at Princeton, for example—are equally inaccurate. Then again, I can’t tell you how many times people told me they “learned a lot about Japan” from Arthur Golden’s equally fantastic Memoirs of a Geisha. Talk about enduring pain.

I know that there are many, many erotic books that are better written in every way and are far more authentic representations of the BDSM world. But for better or worse, E.L. James wrote the first erotic blockbuster. Try as we all do to learn the dark secret of its success, I’m not sure anyone really knows why. If we did, the publishing industry could seamlessly move from one mega-bestseller to the next, yet the next phenomenon always takes us by surprise.

Above all, reading this book underscored a lesson I’ve been learning since I began to seek publication. An individual editor may insist that every word be chosen with the care of Flaubert, but The Market doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the “quality” of your prose. It wants a story that grabs readers’ hearts. Fifty Shades got the romance audience with its Twilight sensibility spiced with explicit sex scenes. It roped in the not insignificant group of readers who thought they might be getting a glimpse into an unprecedented world of forbidden sexual delight and decadence. A lot of the scathing reviews judged an unpretentious romance as literature, an erotic fantasy as some earth-shattering sexual breakthrough. Of course the book would disappoint on these terms. The results are what you’d expect from the restaurant critic for The New York Times giving McDonald’s a serious review.

Now, I have very much enjoyed the snarky as well as thoughtful critiques of Fifty Shades. But on another level, why judge the book as if it wants to be more than it is? It clearly doesn’t. If we want it to be more, then scolding or mocking Ms. James or her fans won’t help. The only thing an erotica writer can do is take it upon herself to write the book we want it to be. More believable? More critical of capitalism? A female character that a self-respecting twenty-first-century woman can relate to? All worthy, but, sorry—I’m talking to you, my friends who want me to get rich–that book will not make anyone a fortune.

The good news is that now I know what I’ll tell people the next time they ask me what I think of Fifty Shades of Grey, as they always do when they learn I write erotica. I’ll say I thought the book was Jane Eyre, modernized, sexed up, without literary pretension (except a few references to Tess of the D’Urbervilles). Okay, maybe there’s a generous dollop of Heathcliff thrown in, too. Basically it’s a riff on the classic stories that lie at the heart of all novels with a huge readership—redemption (A Christmas Carol), an underdog who prevails (a personal favorite and always popular), a quietly lovely girl with a good heart who wins a powerful, yet lonely alpha male (most romances ever written).  And perhaps on a broader level, the book allows all of us to play out in fantasy a deeper social truth: that we’re all getting screwed by our plutocrats, except, unlike Ana, we don’t have any choice in the matter nor do we get at least three orgasms a day in the bargain.

Another happy outcome is that I have a new appreciation for E.L. James. Apparently she didn’t set out to make millions nor to give ordinary women the world over the permission to admit they’d read a book with explicit sex scenes—which may indeed be the most lasting impact of the book. James simply devoured the Twilight series in “one sitting” and was inspired to write her own romantic fiction. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, her husband (not coincidentally pimping his own novel) said somewhat defensively that she wrote Fifty Shades to entertain herself and a few friends and that she had a lot of fun writing it. As a writer, I sense her commitment to and pleasure in the story. This is not always the case with more “important” literary novels I’ve read.

So, yes, having finally read it, I won’t and can’t write a “better” Fifty Shades of Grey. I will continue to write stories that express my sensibility in both content and style, and I will continue not to give a damn about how much money I make from writing. Yet I can still share with E.L. James the love and joy of writing a tale that I hope will give those readers I do touch, however many or few, a pleasurable reading experience.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Expulsion: Love, Men and Female Objects of Desire

by | August 13, 2014 | | 5 Comments

Historically, erotic art (visual and textual) was produced primarily for men, by men.  Yes, there have been exceptions, but the ones that survive are rare. It was only in the 20th century, and mostly in the latter part, that women began to produce erotic fiction aimed at women. This has been portrayed as emancipatory and, unarguably, it is. It filled a vast and silent gulf. For millennia we have known what men wanted, what they fantasize about, what arouses them.  In a recent conversation on Facebook about Fifty Shades of Grey, Kristina Lloyd commented:

I think the reason the book spoke to so many women is because precious little else in our culture does when we’re talking het female desire. Give a bone(r) to someone starving, and they’ll pounce on it. The success of the book is about the failures in our culture. I wish we could chart a similar moment when it was suddenly acceptable for men to access and enjoy adult material without recrimination. 1970s? 18thC? Forever? 1

Once a book has sold 100 million copies, this is a pretty definitive sign that it has become acceptable, in the mainstream, for women to access material that arouses them. 2

It isn’t accidental that, since the 1960s, as the production and consumption of erotic material aimed at women gained momentum, so has the criticism of how women are presented in male-centered erotic material. It is only when both flavours are readily available that one can see the differences between them.  In the past 50 years, feminists have raged against the objectification of women as objects of desire.  We are more than the statues, the Madonnas, the Whores, the bountiful breasts and the warm wet holes you make of us.  We’re not just breeding stock, or somewhere to put your cock. We are not that simple.  See us – desire us – for what we truly are, instead of the facile, two-dimensional caricatures you’ve made of us! It was a legitimate demand.

Who would have thought that, suffering as we have from this diminishment, we would in turn come to produce material that commits the same sin? Yet, from the heady days of the explicit bodice busters until now, we have, with some laudable exceptions, fallen into the same trap. The spectre of the inscrutable Alpha male, with his money and his power, and his somewhat-but-not-impossibly-large-cock, his insatiable sexual appetite, his obsessive desire to please only the heroine and – by extension – us, has dominated the world of female-centred heterosexual erotic content. Christian Grey is its poster-boy, but his clones are everywhere. And, quietly, they always were. Consider Mister Darcy.

And there is little sympathy for the few male voices that speak up to complain about it. Partially for the same reason that very few women in earlier eras spoke up against female objectification; we are torn between our need to be known for who we are and our desire to be desired, even if imperfectly.  Moreover, and like many women through the ages, men have participated greatly in their own objectification. It does seem a little whiny, after two thousand years of Venus De Milo, to complain that being simplified as a brainless, lust driven cock with a wallet is unfair.

But a few men have spoken up. Like their counterparts, they speak in the language of their own desire. Don’t we all? Nonetheless, the subtext is clear: please don’t make me a caricature. After trying his damnedest to get through volume one of Fifty Shades of Grey, my friend and sometimes co-writer, Alex Sharp, has recently written a piece I think every female erotic writer who sets out to craft male characters – especially the non-vanilla variety – should read: “I am he, and he is me.”

Good fiction writing embraces realism, even in its most dramatic flights of fancy. And, in my opinion, well-written erotica should attempt to embrace the eroticism in the entirety of the character or, at least, attempt an honest fictionalization of the problems of desire and objectification. I think that is the challenge that separates erotic fiction from pornography.

Admittedly, I’m torn. Desiring someone in all their complexity is a laudable aspiration, but I have several well-supported doubts as to whether, in the moment that lust takes us, this is even possible.  Perhaps it is only now, with all our objects of desire so flagrantly on display, that we can begin to come to terms with the dilemma that so haunted Kant, the schism between desire and full knowledge of another. Jacques Lacan said that there is no ‘sexual relationship’; our projected desires are the product of the symbolic, muted world of controlled meaning that bears little relation to the real humans upon whom we heap our fantasies. Being a romantic, despite himself, he felt that only in love, in the terrifying Real of love, could we hope to overcome the watery barrier of symbolism and step out of Plato’s cave and into the blinding light of day. 3

So love in erotic writing should be the answer, right? Lord knows, the genre of erotic romance has well and truly eclipsed the erotica genre. It has all but swallowed it up, in no small part because Fifty Shades of Grey was marketed as erotica rather than romance.  A large proportion of those 100 million sales have been to women who’d never read ‘erotica’ before. Now each time they pick up an erotica novel, they’re expecting romance.

The quandary, as I see it, is that love itself has been objectified.  The very presence of the inevitable happy ending diminishes and even denies the terrifying truth of love: that it is seldom forever, that – like everything else – it changes, that its very volatility and instability is what makes it a dangerous place but also one of greater knowledge.

I’ve often contemplated the Judeo-Christian myth of the Garden of Eden, so often used as a metaphor for a state of perfect love. Its portrayal of humanity in a state of innocence, nakedness, and openness, before we ate from the tree of bitter knowledge, offers us an aspirational but ultimately impossible and fantasmatic vision of love. And I’d argue that most fictional romance presents this state as the final one; the scene fades on Adam and Eve, in all their natural glory, hand in hand in the garden of delight.

But isn’t love is more fittingly portrayed as the Expulsion from the Garden? That fruit we tasted was not only the knowledge of good and evil; it was the knowledge of ourselves and of each other. Love is the struggle to keep holding hands while carrying the burden of that knowledge on our backs. Assuredly, it has its idyllic aspects, but it also takes us through the rocky desolation of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland.  If we are to truly know each other, we must work to find erotic love in that dark and sometimes barren place as well.

So, I want to challenge you, as fellow writers of erotica, to try to forge the erotic there in that far more realistic landscape. We’ve spent too long in the garden; time to get out into the real world.

1 Lloyd, K. (2014) Comment in response to ‘I’ve Just Watched The FSOG Trailer’ Facebook post. Accessed 3 August, 2014 https://www.facebook.com/Remittancegirl/posts/10203583569204376?comment_id=10203584398105098&offset=0&total_comments=57↩
2 Flood, A. (2014) Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy Has Sold 100m worldwide, The Guardian Online. Accessed 3 August, 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/27/fifty-shades-of-grey-book-100m-sales↩
3 Lacan, J. (1988). On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX, Encore 1972-1973. (B. Fink, Trans., J. Miller, Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.↩

Abberant Romances and the Rise of Erotic Fiction as a Self-Help Guide

by | July 13, 2014 | | 9 Comments

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m addicted to House of Cards.  I remember being equally addicted to the original 1990’s UK series, but the US Netflix adaptation is, surprisingly, even better than the British original.

Yes, the writing is excellent and the characterizations are superb, but what I most like about House of Cards is that it represents a very realistic but seldom written-about form of relationship.

The relationship between Frank Underwood and his wife, Claire, is a strange one.  On the surface it appears to be a marriage of convenience – neither is sexually faithful and there appears to be nothing but a cool sort of companionship of purpose between them – but as the series goes on, we get glimpses into something more complex.

This is a portrait of two people who feed each other’s jouissance. Leaving the moral aspects of their individual actions and aspirations aside, this is love at its most powerful and revolutionary. 

In her amazing TED Talk on the secret to desire in long-term relationships, Esther Perel points out that distance is essential to desire. Being able to see your partner from a distance, doing what drives and impassions them, allows you to maintain the stance of an admirer. It allows for the preservation of a certain level of mystery and of uncertainty, which keeps the embers of desire burning hot. 

As married characters, Frank and Claire Underwood watch each other pursue their ambitions, execute their nefarious plans, as if they were each secret admirers of the other, aroused by their individual acts of ruthlessness.

When they finally come together, there’s an amazing erotic tension between them. It is never a ‘dutiful’ performance of marital obligation. They come together to give each other a sort of carte blanche absolution for being the reprehensible creatures they are.  It’s a bit like watching scorpions mate.

After the never-ending parade of superficially written, poorly characterized and formulaic love-bonds that seem to be the norm in almost all narratives these days, it is refreshing and exciting to see a well-wrought portrait of something that isn’t pabulum.

Another interesting and complex relationship I have stumbled across recently is the novelized version of Macbeth by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson. They’ve done a magnificent job of digging into and expositing the compelling power dynamics between Lord and Lady Macbeth. Again, ambition definitely comes into it, but so does desperation, mania and regret. In this case, although Lady Macbeth is the instigator who gets the transgression ball rolling, there is a clever portrayal of how one hideous act leads inevitably to another, and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

So many modern fictional romantic narratives are offered and consumed as models to aspire to, especially in erotic fiction.  In this I see a tragic loss of  the potential of fiction to examine the places we should never go in real life. This current need to make all kinky scenes safe, sane and consensual; this obligation to never represent negative, abusive relationships without clearly condemning them within the fiction, places all our fictions within the genre of YA or as thinly disguised self-help paperbacks.

It is as if we have decided that adults have no capacity to distinguish between fiction and reality and must be guided in their fictional adventures by an overbearing, authoritarian hand whose job it is to constantly nudge the reader towards a post-modern sort of ‘right thinking’.

This might be tolerable if most contemporary fictional love relationships were represented with any realism and complexity, but they’re not.  Consequently, we are encouraged to judge our own relationships in the light of those that are not only fictional, but ones that aren’t realistic and revel in their own formulaic qualities. 

In her book, Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best-Sellers and Society, Eva Illouz breaks down the phenomena of the erotic novel as self-help guide:

“some narratives are not only symbolic rehearsals of social dilemmas and of the solution to these dilemmas: they are also performative structures offering ways of acting and doing.”

To me, this is the anathema of contemporary erotic fiction. It is a closing off of the possibilities of using fiction as a refuge from the rules of social reality. Instead, it has become a place where we are schooled, counseled and given exemplars of how to ‘do it right.’

The Sexiest Movie You’ve Ever Seen

by | July 18, 2013 | | 11 Comments

by Donna George Storey

I happened to be leafing through a rather thick folder in my filing cabinet labeled “Ideas for Writing,” when I found an article I’d clipped from the November 28, 2008 issue of Entertainment Weekly: “50 Sexiest Movies Ever” (and this predating the elevation of the number fifty to erotic heights by several years). The authors guaranteed it was a list of “the hottest films you’ll ever see.”

I’m sure I kept the article more as a study of what mainstream America considers sexy rather than a source of ideas for future stories—not that there’s anything wrong with theft if you give the story your unique imprint. As I did the first time I read the article, I skimmed the list for movies I’d seen, comparing my reaction to the official score of the squad of journalists. For each movie, they’d also chosen a “sexiest moment,” which invited another opportunity for comparison.

I can’t say there was all that much agreement on either score, although a few movies did bring a nod of approval. In the Mood for Love, a Hong Kong film set in 1962, with Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as cuckolded spouses who slowly develop their own achingly unconsummated passion, did indeed show that “what doesn’t happen is just thrilling as what does.” sex, lies and videotape is another personal favorite, especially those interview scenes, and The Year of Living Dangerously and A Streetcar Named Desire both had a smoldering, but doomed quality that only sharpened the erotic edge.

I had not yet seen Out of Sight with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, the number one choice of the journalists, so, as a matter of professional duty, I rented it. Most of the movie was routine thriller, but to my surprise, the climactic erotic scene—the flirtatious conversation in the hotel lounge at night—was one of the sexiest bits of celluloid I’d ever seen, porn included. And it was all talk and innuendo. Words, words, words. I guess I am cut out to be an erotic writer after all.

Many of the other movies didn’t work so well for me. Little Children, a less-restrained story of adulterous love between Kate Winslett and Patrick Wilson, gave us intercourse on the washing machine (pretty ridiculous, actually), but made sure to lay on the anti-sex message by throwing in a disgusting sex-addict husband, a pedophile predator as villain and (spoiler alert) just punishment for adultery with a freak skateboarding accident. And I never really got the excitement about the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct, where Sharon Stone flashes her pantyless crotch at a line of drooling cops who somehow decided a standard room with a table wasn’t a good idea for this particular suspect. Are men really that sex-crazed that they would let a woman get away with murder because she isn’t wearing underwear?

Possibly, but I sure hope my local detectives are a little more conscientious.

Whatever the lack of agreement, I do believe our favorite erotic scenes in film are clues to our erotic imaginations, just as favorite erotic stories offer clues to what makes our libido tick. Clearly for me, the exploration of erotic desire through words and suggestive images are more powerful than the often disappointing realization of sex on camera. But was I so different from the rest of America in finding no more than few of these “sexiest movies” (let’s add my check mark for Don’t Look Now, Body Heat, Maurice, and The English Patient) at all sexy?

Then, in that lazy way summer leads to fortuitous connections, I remembered a chapter in one of my favorite, but alas out-of-print, sex guides, Are We Having Fun Yet?: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex by Marcia and Lisa Douglass. In their “Pop Porn” chapter, they describe a fictional couple watching a typical Hollywood sex scene. The focus is on the impossibly gorgeous woman’s body and her reactions while the male body is shrouded by shadows and clever positioning–camera as desiring male gaze. Thus “foreplay” is essentially the display of the female’s body. Intercourse itself takes less than a minute and involves the man thrusting and giving a long final groan of release, while the woman arches her neck and closes her eyes and doesn’t do anything to suggest an orgasm happens, but seems satisfied all the same. After the show, the fictional boyfriend exclaims that the sex was hot, while his date knows she’s supposed to agree, but is annoyed by the lack of consideration for what she finds sexy.

He gets his fantasies fed along with his movie snack, she has to make do with “pop porn.”

Douglass and Douglass define pop porn as “the pervasive panorama of female flesh—the high-heeled foot, breasts spilling out of a low-cut gown, the pouting red lips, the sultry stare from under a thick mane—that is the everyday stuff of popular media.” Although many of us think we can avoid porn by staying away from the X-rating, we’re still getting eroticized visual entertainment aimed chiefly at straight men everywhere we turn. Most of us are so used to the bias, we barely notice it, but on an unconscious level, we’re getting the message that is what Sex Is.

The good news is that erotica today does offer more for female readers. Fifty Shades of Grey, whatever one’s opinion of the writing, clearly satisfied female desire on a wildly popular scale. It remains to be seen what the Hollywood version will do with this female fantasy cinematically. I’m not expecting a revolution of camera work, but will certainly read the reviews to see whom they satisfy, if nothing else. I’d be even happier if some of the work by ERWA writers was translated to the big screen. Perhaps that day will come and Entertainment Weekly will have some real gems to review?

In the meantime, I’m curious if you, dear reader, have any movies you’d recommend for subtle, simmering or even believably desperate and passionate sex scenes? Many long, hot days and nights of summer still lie before us. I myself would add The Lover, Raise the Red Lantern, and the “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” scene in To Have and Have Not.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman (recently released as an ebook) and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Why I Don’t Want E.L. James’ Royalty Checks

by | December 18, 2012 | | 6 Comments

By Donna George Storey

Recently I’ve been pondering the influence of celebrity culture on the life of an ordinary artist, in other words, the majority of us who have not “made it big,” but merely continue to create with more down-to-earth rewards like a publication in an anthology a few times a year.  While our society has supposedly done away with hereditary aristocrats, we seem to have created glittering replacements whom we alternately worship and depose: actors, musicians, very rich businessmen, and the occasional throwback scion like Paris Hilton or John F. Kennedy, Jr.  The perks and pitfalls of celebrity are of course most pertinent to the famous themselves, but I think the values and fantasies that support it affect us common people, too.  Venture into the creative arts and you are immediately judged by the standards of national stardom.  This was brought home to me when my novel was published back in 2008, and a good portion of the congratulations were spiked with questions such as “When will it be optioned for a movie?” “How is it selling?“ or “Are you rich yet?”  In other words, instead of celebrating what I had done—actually finished and published a novel I was proud of–I was being reminded of the definition of “true success” that only comes to a tiny percentage of writers.

Back in 2008 I could argue that erotica was a ghettoized genre, and Big Money would go nowhere near such a frankly sexual story as mine.  But now along comes E.L. James to prove that a lie and to rekindle questions as to why I’m not making as much money as she is when I know more about U.S. geography.  Although Remittance Girl’s latest post here is chiefly a thought-provoking discussion of how erotica and erotic romance are binary opposites, due to my own recent musings, her opening sentence in particular lingered in my head:

“There are probably a number of outstanding erotica writers out there who have written delicious novels full of BDSM kinkiness wondering why their royalty checks don’t look anything like those of E.L. James.”

There is, of course, the issue of popularity (meaning tons of money) versus quality of writing (what we’re told is important but often apparently is not), which is another column, but I’ve also heard/read many authors off-handedly remarking that they would certainly like to be raking in that kind of dough.  But, surprisingly perhaps, I most definitely would not.  I have a number of reasons for this, which I would like to share in the hope you may take heart and possibly use these arguments the next time a drunk at a party corners you and asks when you are going to dethrone the lady who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey.

Reason #1: Rich people have to buy nine houses.

I’m serious.  Rich, famous people seem to be required to have residences all over the country, nay, the world.  Once I tried to work out why anyone would need so many houses.  Okay, so there’s the main residence, then the ski cabin and the beach cottage.  Possibly an apartment in a city where you visit often for business.  A castle in Ireland, that would be fun.  But then what possible need would you have for the other four?  I have trouble keeping my two-bedroom bungalow presentable as it is. 

Reason #2: The kids of rich people are destined to be miserable.

I had my first taste of this phenomenon my freshman year at Princeton when I encountered the children of U.S. Senators and famous writers as well as the descendants of legendary industrialists.  These kids had tasteful, expensive wardrobes and the habit of leaving dirty coffee cups around for weeks for the maid.  They spent summers studying art in Florence or sunning in San Tropez instead of working as a secretary at the IRS like I did.  But in spite of having everything they wanted, they seemed perpetually dissatisfied.  Could it be that having less makes you appreciate what you have? 

Reason #3: Rich people suddenly see distant relatives for the first time in forty years.

I once read that Oprah was constantly fending off relatives and old friends who tried to hit her up for “loans” once she had ascended to fame and fortune.  I come from a large Catholic family with thirty cousins, all of whom have families.  If I did my duty by them and their doubtless valid needs, the E.L. James-sized royalty checks would shrink to nothing as fast as you can say, “Nice to see you again, Cousin June… and Ben… and Jim…and Karen….”  Better to keep the contact to Christmas cards once a year.

Reason #4: Contrary to what you think, rich people always have to worry about money.

Sure, you’d think those royalty checks would mean the end of money worries, but the problems are just beginning.  Not only do you have to buy eight more houses, you have to pay folks to manage them, plus your twelve vintage cars and your yacht.  (You don’t want to be a cheap-looking rich person, do you?) And that great agent who always returns your calls?  Do you think that will continue if your future doesn’t look as lush as your past?  You don’t want to be a one-hit wonder, nor do you want to make of fool of yourself like J.K. Rowling, naively attempting an adult novel with actual sex in it.  Shudder.  You’re famous now and you have a reputation to build higher and higher to the stars. 

Reason #5: To keep those checks coming, you will have to let others define your success.  Indefinitely.

In his memoir Who I Am, Pete Townshend ruefully described how every time he wanted to go off and do an independent project, his business advisers would try to convince him to involve the other Who members which would automatically make the endeavor a financial success.  Sometimes he succumbed, other times he didn’t.  He still made money solo, but not Big Money, enough to make those who skim off a percentage really, really happy.  And remember, even if you try your best to give your audience what they want, not everyone responds with adoration.  Very successful writers may have their time in the limelight when all the mean kids they knew in middle school will regret their bullying because said new celebrity obviously really was cool deep inside (and maybe old Donna will be good for a loan now that she’s rolling in it?).  But success always brings out the sharks and critics.  Soon enough the insults will be hurled again.

I don’t know about you, but after all considering all of these rich people woes, I feel relieved I typically get $50 per story sale.  Think of all the problems I don’t have!  Instead I can love my little house, teach my kids the joy of economizing, and write what intrigues, amuses and inspires me. Some writers do make a living with words, albeit that very few of them are fiction writers, and I respect what they’ve achieved.  I do have my own particular yearning—to connect with readers who “get” me.  I’ve been lucky enough to meet some.  But in the end, the greatest luxury is to travel to a space where money and “success” don’t mean nearly as much as creating new worlds and reveling in the beauty and power of words and ideas.  Those royalties flow every time I sit down at my computer to work on a story, tax-free.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman (recently released as an ebook) and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Small Flashlight, Big Darkness?

by | October 30, 2012 | | 4 Comments

By KD Grace

Today’s post is a hard one for me to settle into because it
could so easily devolve into navel gazing, and one of the promises I made to
myself and to my readers back when I wrote my very first ever blog post was
that I would keep the navel gazing to a minimum. There must be a gazillion
writer and write-hopefuls blogging, and each one is convinced that their
journey to writing success is totally unique and must be shared. Well maybe not
each one, maybe I’m only speaking for myself, in which case, I blush heartily
and apologise.

My point is that all of the energy, angst, fear, adrenaline,
exploration of dark places, exploration of forbidden places that used to go
into the pages and pages of that gargantuan navel-gaze that was my journal now
go through that strange internal filtering process that takes all my many
neuroses and insecurities, all my deep-seated fears, all my misplaced teenage
angst and magically transforms them into story.

That was sort of my little secret — that I alone, in all
the world, suffered uniquely and exquisitely for my art. I took all the flawed
and wounded parts of myself, parts I wasn’t comfortable facing, examined them
reflected through the medium of story and found a place where I could view them
and not run away screaming.

Where is all this borderline navel-gazing leading? There was
a BBC article about ten days ago asking the question, is creativity ‘closely
entwined with mental illness?’ I shared it on Facebook and Twitter to find
that lots of other writers had shared it as well and the general response was
simply that it sounded about right. There were some very moving conversations
that came out of those sharings of that article along with the realization — something
I’ve long suspected — that I am not all alone out there in my vibrant unique
neurotic bubble. And really, it comes as no surprise that one has to be at
least a little neurotic to be ballsy enough to try to bring, in one form or
another, what lives in our imagination into the real world and to attempt to put
it out there for everyone to see.

As the article was shared around and the responses mounted,
I found myself thinking of C.G. Jung’s archetype of the Wounded Healer. The
healer can only ever heal in others what she herself is suffering from. Empathy
goes much deeper than sympathy. The human capacity for story is as old as we
are. Before the written word, story was the community archive. It was our
memory of who we are, our history, our continuity, our triumphs, trials,
sufferings, joys, all memorised, filed away, and kept safely in the mind of the
story teller. That had to do something to your head, knowing that you were the
keeper of the story of your people! How could storytellers be anything other
than neurotic?

It’s a lot more personal now that we have the written word.
No one has to dedicate their lives to memorising the story of their people. Now
we tell our own story, the story of the internal battles that wound us, the
story of those wounds transformed. We all tell our stories in our own personal
code. What may well start out as a navel gaze into the deep dark wilderness of
Self can be transformed into powerful, vibrant story, and we’re healed! At
least temporarily, or at least we’re comforted. And hopefully so are those with
whom we share our stories. When I journalled my navel-gazes, I wasn’t
interested in anyone else seeing what was on those pages. It was a one-sided
attempt at a neurotic house-cleaning. Sharing the story is a part of the
healing; sharing the story is a part of the journey. The Storyteller had no
purpose if she didn’t share the story with her people.

As a neurotic living among other neurotics, I doubt that
there’s anything we’re more neurotic about as a people than sexuality. I don’t
think it’s any real surprise that there’s suddenly a huge market for erotica.
Last night I sat on a panel of erotica authors, editors and publishers at the
Guildford Book Fair – something that would have never happened before Fifty
Shades of Grey, and even at 9:00 in the evening, we played to a full house.
Each of us had a story of how we came to write erotica. We shared our stories
with a roomful of people, who then took those stories away with them to
possibly be shared with others. The archetype of the storyteller is alive and
well. And I believe writers live out the archetype of the wounded healer on a
daily basis.

Most of the time I write my stories because it’s just too
much fun not to. That’s the truth of it. I seldom consciously dig deep to find
those wounded, neurotic places. Really, who would want to do that deliberately?
But the wounded places find me, and they end up finding their way into the
story. And what surfaces is never quite what I expected, always more somehow,
even if started out to be nothing more than a little ménage in a veg patch.

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