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Remittance Girl

Writing in the Red-Light District

by | March 12, 2014 | | 3 Comments

I’ve been considering the genre of erotica in historical context as a way to understand where it came from and what it has become. From a European perspective, it seems fair to begin with the Greco-Roman poetry of Sappho, Ovid, Juvenal and the Dionysian spectacle of the Satyr Plays (of which we no longer have any clear records). But we have a problem: it is almost impossible for us today to truly grasp what kind of a relationship the ancient Greeks and Romans had with sex. Judeo-Christianity and, later, the Enlightenment and rise of rationalism have had profound effects on the way we contextualize desire and sex both in relation to ourselves and to our society. We often represent the Greeks and the Romans as being a lawless bunch of reprobates, but this isn’t true. There were very strong prohibitions and social rules about how one conducted oneself as a sexual being and how that reflected on the overall character of a person. They were just very different from ours.

Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the 12th Century –  a collection of tales which borrowed mostly from earlier erotic folk stories as well as westernized oriental narratives. The Tale of Two Lovers, an epistolary novel of the 15th Century, was penned by a man who later became a pope. The Heptameron was written by Marguerite de Navarre in the 16th Century. All these writings are bawdy and explicit in their exploration of human sexual adventure. But it is also fair to say that they are not simply detailed descriptions of sex. To one extent or another, they all contain a good deal of humour and there is a considerable focus on the licentious behaviour of characters whose social status demanded they be modest. They were often about the secret sex lives of the rich and celibate. Eroticism, politics, and social satire it seems, went hand in hand.

The libertine movement of the 15th and 16th centuries was an interesting evolution. Written by aristocrats for aristocrats, it represented the pursuit of pleasure as a radical philosophy in itself. Its comparison with earlier writings is interesting. For all its sexual excess, its humour is more curdled and jaded and, for all its explicitness, seems more aimed at offending sensibilities than representing the pleasures of the flesh. (It always reminds me of people desperately trying to fuck on way too much cocaine at four in the morning. Take my word for it, it’s not all that much fun.)  Then we get to Sade,with his lists of debaucheries and his blatant attack on Catholic mores. These books are pornographic in the sense that they are explicit, but as Angela Carter pointed out, they are also aimed at honestly representing the almost unlimited power of the wealthy and the violent and dehumanizing use of the poor. Sadean writing may be erotica, but it is also heavy handed social critique.

The Victorian era saw a new age of confessional erotic writing. For the most part, there isn’t much obvious attempt at social commentary, other than the adolescent glee of writing explicitly about sex acts in a society that had developed an almost psychotic fear of discussing it in public. Certainly there was pleasure taken in writing and reading about what was socially forbidden. But it lacks the confrontational nature of earlier erotic writing.

Although I would include Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs,  it was not really until the 20th century that we see the use of erotic writing as a tool for exploring or defining the self in relation to society.  In the works of Miller, Nin, Nabokov, and Duras, you begin to see erotic stories that have deeply psychoanalytical dimensions. They all, to some extent or another, pit the individual’s pursuit of erotic desire against the prevailing environment. As conscious, revolutionary acts of disobedience in pleasure. And yes, the sex matters and the sex is erotic, but it is also a private struggle for inner structure in the face of a confusing world.

I’d like to stop here and say that there has always been pornography, both visual and written, whose sole purpose was as an aide to sexual arousal. Certainly most of the Victorian works could not really be viewed as having other uses. And the sexually explicit pulp erotica of the 50s and 60s served the same purpose. But the literary and financial success of novels like Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, and Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor put pressure on writers in the 70s to add more explicit sex to their work in order to sell more books. It was no longer a revolutionary act to describe a sex scene in detail, it made monetary sense. 

It is ironic that the genre we now call erotica hasn’t really been around that long. Until the early 70s, writers either considered they were writing pornography as a sex aid (and usually for the money) or they felt they were writing literature which, as a function of exploring the human condition, explored the characters erotic lives as well. 

The post-modern literary world has, with the exception of some outstanding Queer writers, mostly portrayed graphic sex in their writing as a site of alienation. From Michel Houllebecq to Ian McEwan, it seems that authentic characters shouldn’t ever have good sex, or sex that informs them of anything other than the emptiness of the act. Intelligent people, it seems, have uniformly awful sex, according to the literary world.

So erotica, as we know it, is a genre that has tried to serve many interests. There are still writers and readers who see the job of erotica to simply provide stimulating imagery for masturbation or spicing up a couple’s sex life, but are uncomfortable with consuming what is clearly labeled pornography.  There are also writers and readers who see erotica – particularly erotic romance – as a way of narrating romantic stories more realistically, including the sexual aspect of the evolving romantic relationship. And then there are those of us who feel that exploring the complex erotic desires and actions of characters continues to offer a landscape in which to reflect on the human condition as a whole.

It’s hardly a wonder that readers get disappointed when they pick up an erotica book and falls short of their expectations. As a society, we still feel the need to shove our written explorations of eroticism into a single, literary red-light district. It is a crowded little enclave, with many agendas.

Overwriting

by | January 13, 2014 | | 2 Comments

I have a confession to make: I’m a chronic over-writer. In fact, unless you are one of those very few people who do almost all your editing while you are writing the first draft, you do too. There isn’t anything wrong with over-writing. It’s a mistake to think that you can leave it as is. And this is a sin I do find a lot of new writers (and many old ones, too) commit.

To put it simply, over-writing is using too many words, and not the right ones. Or it is mistrusting language not to do its job or mistrusting your own use of words. Sometimes you’re too damn anxious to get your point across. Sometimes over-writing happens because you’re attempting to describe something complex and nuanced and you take a number of runs at it. So over-writing is very much part of the process of writing: it’s fertile, it allows you to play with the way you get things across, but it’s not okay to dump that onto a reader. This is where thinking poetically is very helpful. Poets often aren’t good at constructing a plot, or characters, but they are excellent at using language carefully and strategically, and we can learn a lot from them. I will get to an example of this in a minute, but first I want identify some of the common places where overwriting happens. I want to make it clear that this isn’t something you should ever be thinking about in your first draft. This is the test to which you should put a piece of writing once the first draft is written.

Adjectives:
To be pedantic, let’s define what they are. Adjectives are words used to modify nouns. I’m not saying they’re bad. We need them often, to be precise about what qualities the noun has. ‘A soft bed’ informs the reader that the bed has the quality of being soft, not hard. But before you settle on the phrase, consider if there is a noun that will allow you to dispense with the adjective. Could you use nest, or cocoon? Could you use a noun that implies both bed and soft? Or could you use an adjective that did more work for you? Something that added more meaning to the phrase? A cosy bed? Cosy is an adjective that is going to imply soft, if we’re talking about beds, because hard ones aren’t cosy at all but, more than that, it’s also going to add a sense of rightness and belongingness to the phrase. Or what about ‘hard edge of the table’? Have you ever met a soft one? The hard here is simply not needed. Same with ‘a big gulp of coffee’ or ‘a big gulp of air’? A gulp IS a large amount of liquid or air taken down at once. You don’t need the ‘big’.

Adverbs:
I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged on this one before, but I’m going to do it again because I read far, far too many erotic stories where someone ‘lightly brushes his fingers over her skin’. For some reason, I really overreact when I hit phrases like this. ‘Brushes’ implies light, soft strokes. You don’t need the lightly. Same with ‘whispered softly.’ A whisper is soft. You only need to use an adverb when you want to use the verb in an unexpected way, i.e. ‘he whispered viciously (hoarsely, harshly, gratingly).

Redundancies:
The room was empty. There was no one there.
Yeah, don’t laugh. I’ve read this. And we all do this sort of thing while we’re writing a first draft. It’s the ‘circling around’ I spoke of earlier.

She screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.
I think I may have actually written this one. What’s with the ‘and screamed‘? I guess I wanted you to know she really did do a lot of screaming, but the modifying phrase ‘until her throat was raw‘ does the job.

He wept. The tears rolled down his cheeks.
I’m absolutely certain I’ve written this. It’s stupid. And either sentence is so much more powerful on its own than the two combined. More isn’t better. More gums up the writing for the reader.

Erotic description:
One of the acknowledged problems for anyone writing erotica is that, although English offers us a wealth of options when it comes to many nouns and verbs, it isn’t particularly generous when it comes to sexual vocabulary. There is no other word for a kiss. Consequently, we do need adjectives and adverbs to fine tune the meaning. What kind of a kiss was it? Languid, intense, rough, studied, thoughtless, hungry? Sometimes, I try to do without it. She pressed her closed lips to his navel, his hip, his thigh. All the while watching his cock creep to life.

Repetition:
As much as the ‘again and again’ problem is giggle-worthy, it’s also important to recognize that repetition is a powerful form of rhetoric. Where would Churchill or Martin Luther King Jr. have been without it? We’re back at poetics: not what the words mean, but what impact may be had from they way they are used. Repetition can reveal character, it can deepen the immersive experience of a written description. And, as speakers, we repeat ourselves when we talk. It can signal indecision, insecurity, anxiety, desperation. It can alert us to a character at the edge of language, where it fails to be enough. Here repetition informs us, not of the meaning in the words, but of their inadequacy. This becomes an issue of a writer’s honour. Are you being lazy or are you making a conscious choice?

Evil words:
I call them evil, because they sneak into my writing all the time and I don’t notice I’m doing it. Some are common to many writers and some are highly individual. My evil words are just, really and even: I’ve (just) right this minute done a word search through this post and found five instances of ‘just’ that didn’t need to be there at all. WriteDivas has a lovely list of over-used and unnecessary words, as well as some examples of cliches and pat phrases. A good way to brutally edit your work is to take each of those words and phrases, and do a search for them in your document. You’re not going to want to delete every instance of the word ‘really,’ but at least 80% of them go. The 20% that you make a conscious choice to keep is the birth of your style as a writer.

Style:
Style is really one of the hardest things to define in writing. It is a combination of so many aspects of writing that, like porn, it comes under the ‘I know it when I see it’ headings. But what it isn’t is accidental. It might start off as accident, but by the time you get to call it style, you’ve recognized what you’re doing and made a conscious decision to keep on doing it. This is why it usually takes writers many years and a good deal of experimentation to acquire a ‘style’ of their own.

I bring this up because there are excellent reasons to completely disregard everything I’ve said above, in the right circumstances. When you, as a writer, judge the circumstance to be right to consciously over-write, then you are making a stylistic decision. That’s fine. Just don’t over-write because you were too lazy to edit.

Poetry as an aspirational exemplar for prose writers:
I’m going to offer you the second stanza of the poem “Men” by Maya Angelou. Her language is gorgeous and fierce. There is repetition, there are adjectives and adverbs, but they are all used consciously, to produce a powerful effect.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world. Then
They tighten up. Just a little. The
First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.
Soft into your defenselessness. A little
More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a
Smile that slides around the fear. When the
Air disappears,
Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.
It is your juice
That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.
When the earth rights itself again,
And taste tries to return to the tongue,
Your body has slammed shut. Forever.
No keys exist.

Metaphor and simile:
The last thing I’d like to point out is that sometimes correcting your over-writing means writing more, not less. Notice in the stanza of the poem above, Angelou is opting to use similes and metaphors instead of resorting to adjectives or adverbs to deepen meaning. And it is so much more vivid.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world.

The simile of the ‘last raw egg in the world’ is just so much more powerful than writing ‘he held me gently.’ True, she’s using more words, but she forces you to imagine exactly how precious, how breakable the last raw egg in the world might be.

Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.

Here we have adverbs galore, but it resolves into the simile of ‘the head of a kitchen match’ bursting into flame. It is a brilliant and terrible piece of imagery. Erotic, incandescent and also destructive.

It is your juice
That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.

And here is the metaphor to end all metaphors. It’s just so fucking clever and so fertile. You probably recognize the allusion to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Lemon Song’ but they stole it from Robert Johnson and Arthur McKay. She’s appropriating the phallocentric metaphor of ‘squeezing lemons’ and juxtaposing it. Your juice, in this poem, is more than sexual body fluid: it is hurt and pride and hope and wasted love. And those stained shoes, in the next stanza, just keep on walking by.

My point in deconstructing that last piece of poetry is to remind you that even in prose, if getting rid of your adjectives and adverbs and redundant words is frustrating you, try building a metaphor or simile to get the meaning across instead. It’s almost always stronger writing.

Process:
Over-writing is only a problem when you don’t recognize it as an early stage of the writing process. Think of writing as trowing pottery on a wheel or sculpting. The first task is to shape it roughly and explore the possibilities that material has to offer. At this point, it’s important to have too much of whatever it is. You want enough to be able to go to the next stage, which is to judiciously refine it into a final version.

I meet so many first time writers that believe they can sit down and write something brilliant in a single sitting. It’s certainly possible to do it, but very unlikely. Be prepared to approach your work in three stages. Write it out in as full a way as you can and let it sit for a while. Go back with an eye to purging it of over-writing – get rid of all the repetitions, redundancies, cliches, memes, etc. Then let it sit a while longer. Finally, revisit it for a final proof reading and an eye to adding back the things that will make up your unique style.

Question from one of my students: “Isn’t there a quicker way to do this?”

My answer: “No.”

The Paradox of 'Normalization'

by | December 12, 2013 | | 5 Comments

If we wore these everyday, no one would think they were sexy.

The term ‘normalization’ (and the verb ‘to normalize) has become very popular of late.  It has a number of meanings, but its most current use in the media refers to a process by which exposure to something renders it ‘normal’ in the minds of those who are exposed.  For instance, it has been proposed that the preponderance of photos of women’s legs, showing them with a gap between their thighs has ‘normalized’ a body type that is not normal (Jones, 2013), and video games ‘normalize’ violence against animals (Hochschartner, 2013).

Of course, we’ve spent years hearing about the way pornography – any kind of pornography – normalizes the view of women as sexual objects and encourages violence against them (Horeck, Days, & Don, 2013).  Attempts to verify this through research have resulted either in highly ambiguous results, or actually contradicted these claims.  A literature review of a large number of studies has concluded that porn is not even a co-relational factor in violence against women (Ferguson, 2013). In fact, there is good data to suggest the opposite; that the more widespread the access to pornography, the lower the violence to women (Amato & Law, n.d.).

As of January, 2014, it will be illegal in the UK to possess material that contains eroticized depictions of rape. Not possession of photographs or videos of actual rape – that was always illegal, but material containing fictional depictions of rape (Zara, 2013).  According to many sources, including the Prime Minister, David Cameron, exposure to this kind of pornography ‘normalizes’ sexual violence against women (Morris, 2103).

My problem with the word ‘normalize’ is that it has been widely interpreted to mean that exposure to whatever it is that is currently offensive to us will cause us to think that it’s okay.  They’ll stop having negative feelings about it, and embrace it as part of their everyday lives. I’m not disputing that constant exposure to something will change the way we think about it – that would be cognitively impossible for that not to occur.  What I’m disputing is our assumptions about two things.

The first is a widespread assumption that fictionalized versions of horrific realities are interpreted by the brain in the same way as witnessing or experiencing those realities.  I can accept, for instance, that small children might have difficulties telling the difference between a fictionalized, mediated version of war and war itself.  But adults reading “War and Peace” or watching “Saving Private Ryan” don’t believe they are actually experiencing war.  Admittedly, we do suspend disbelief when we read or view fiction, but we don’t mistake it for reality.

The second assumption is that repeated exposure to mediated forms of real horrors will cause us to feel neutral or even positively about them.  This has no basis in fact either. Indeed, in the last century, we have been exposed to more mediated versions of reality than in the whole of human history. More war, more death, more rape, more everything.  And as much as the media would like you to believe you live in a terribly dangerous time, the truth is that we are safer, healthier and longer-lived than we have ever been.

As a woman, a writer of erotic fiction and a questioner of received wisdom, I do believe that the widespread availability of explicit sexual imagery must, indeed, be having some effect on us. I just don’t accept that it is either wholly positive or wholly negative. For instance, I’m pretty sure that far fewer people today feel that there is anything fundamentally evil about sex; I think porn has played a part in this.  I think the quantity of mediated sex out there has allowed many more people to admit to watching and enjoying it. 

I also believe – although I have no hard evidence of this – porn has served to ‘model’ what sex should look like.  After all, for many people, it’s the only sex they see (other than their own).  And porn sex is, by its nature, exaggerated and dramatized. I think there are people who may (because they aren’t having the sort of sex that looks like the sex in porn) feel a greater sense of dissatisfaction with the sex they do have.

In the Middle Ages, children learned what normal sex looked like by witnessing it – either seeing it, or hearing it in a darkened room because private space was at a premium. Today we’d call that child abuse.  These days, other than porn, the only way to see real sex between real people is by being a voyeur, which is loaded with its own taboos.  It’s hardly a wonder that amateur porn became so popular. There is some sense that this is real sex. Sadly, because of the fact that it needs to stand up against produced porn, more and more commercial porn memes creep into amateur porn. Conversely, commercial porn producers have sought to make their product look more ‘amateur’ in order to appeal to amateur porn viewers. They tend to fail miserably.

What I’d really like to dig my inquisitional fingers into is the idea of ‘normalization’ as it applies to the erotic. I want to make a distinction between the sexual and the erotic, because I am increasingly coming to believe that there is the biological urge to scratch the itch, which requires nothing other than a relatively functional body and no imagery or semiotics at all, and something else.  This something else is the intersection between that biological imperative and language. Not language in the sense of words, but language in the sense that, as our brains mature, we process reality through the veil of language.  There is nothing fundamentally sexy about a black, patent leather, high-heeled shoe.  It is language in the larger sense, in the way we make relational linkages and chunk feeling and meaning together, that has made the ‘fuck-me-pump’ the iconically sexy item it has become.

I’m going to call this ‘the erotic’ as distinct from ‘the sexual.’ The erotic is heavily dependent on limits: on what is allowed and what is forbidden (Bataille, 1962; Foucault, 1980; Paz, 1995).  There is a reason for why the adjectives we use about the erotic ideas that turn us on are negative: naughty, filthy, dirty, forbidden, nasty, sinful, obscene, perverse, wanton, illicit, etc.  We want, most passionately, the things we shouldn’t want.  It doesn’t mean that we act to get them, or need to transgress socially accepted behaviour in order to be sexually satisfied, but our mind goes there.  Of course, positive things can also be erotic: beauty, love, devotion, affection, perfection, purity, faith, truth… but even as I type these words, and even as you read them, it starts to become obvious that erotic desire feeds more voraciously off the forbidden than the allowed. 

Here’s the paradox:  things that become ‘normalized’ can no longer be the stuff of erotic fantasy.  So, I’m not arguing that normalization doesn’t occur. I’m suggesting that it is a self-limiting phenomenon.  I’m suggesting that we are twisted little creatures who don’t get off on the ‘normalized’.  And so our fears as to its consequences may be somewhat hyperbolic.

My greatest antipathy towards the ‘normalization’ of the erotically forbidden is that it will lose its power to be erotic.  I believe that our inner, transgressive, politically incorrect and ugly erotic desires are part of who we are as human beings.  Our ability to understand that these things we want,  things that when acted out in the real world would be atrocities, are part of the mechanism that preserves our inner and outer worlds as separate.  Like fantasy, fictionality affords us a playground for our deeply unsocial selves.  It doesn’t school us in what is acceptable in the real world. It underscores and helps to contrast between the two. 

References

Theme: The Good, The Bad and The Preachy

by | November 14, 2013 | | 9 Comments

I seldom walk out of movies. When I find myself in a movie that doesn’t particularly draw me in, I tend resort to viewing it critically: identifying the story arc, the character arcs, the nuts and bolts of the construction of the story. 

Two nights ago, I walked out of Ender’s Game.  I’ve never read the book. Although I am a massive sci-fi fan, there are certain areas of the genre that don’t turn my crank.  Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card just never did anything for me.  Nonetheless, big budget, hyped marketing campaign… I bought my ticket, sat in my seat, and stuffed my face with popcorn.

At some point – about an hour into the film – I caved to the overwhelming urge to be out of the cinema. Later, when I tried to analyze why I couldn’t bring myself to sit through it, I realized that it was the way the theme of the story was being presented that I found almost suffocating.

Without a strong theme, stories are soulless. They feel fluttery, airy and insignificant.  But when the theme of a story is so obvious and so constant that it eclipses the story, the characters and the plot, it becomes like treacle. It gums up everything.  Theme can, if you let it, suffocate every other aspect of your story.

Recent cultural and literary theorists have had a very low opinion of theme.  Post-modernism rejected the idea that stories have any responsibility at all, to anyone. Being a staunch modernist myself, I’m rather glad to see this era of the glorification of the totally meaningless pass.  But when I sat in that theatre and choked hard on the dominant theme in Ender’s Game, I could see why they wanted to kill the beast dead.

I teach writing at college level, and theme is one of the hardest things to teach.  It is easier to say what theme isn’t than to say what it is. And, of course, there are stories with more than one theme.  Time and culture can deeply influence the themes that come to the fore of a story and how they are perceived.

No matter what the story structure, the theme should be what the reader takes from the story as its overall message. In archaic structures, such as fables, the theme is the moral of the story. In parables, the theme is the ‘wisdom’ it imparts at the end.  Old story structures demanded that the theme was an answer to a universal question.  In more modern, adult story forms, the theme shouldn’t offer answers, but encourage the reader to a deeper consideration of some serious and universal question.

Because of its broadness of scope, erotic fiction has the capacity to offer a valuable exploration of many aspects of the human condition in depth and at a very personal, concrete level.  So often, themes in erotic fiction deal with issues of ethics and morality, of embodiment, of identity, of loneliness, of abjection, of mutuality. Deep, deep stuff.

Erotic writing represents an entirely culturally constructed part of humanity (our sex drive is animal and focused on reproduction but, as cultures we have abstracted and reinterpreted that drive to the point where the things that trigger our arousal are entirely constructed.  Horniness may be biological, but eroticism is the meaning we’ve layered on top of that biological imperative).  So it would seem that erotic fiction is a great place to explore theme. We bind our sense of the erotic to so many elements that don’t have a biological foundation.  Here, in the rarified air of lateral and obtuse relations between intellect, the emotions and groin, theme can run riot. That’s a wonderful garden to explore.

Choosing a theme can help you make decisions as to how to carve a peace between your characters and your plot.  It can guide you to where a story needs to go. And yet, if you let your theme dominate your story, it will leach all the colour, all the texture, all immersive ‘hereness’ from your story. Themes are abstractions. They should sit at the foundation of the story, but never on the surface.

Let me give you a very simple, obvious example: I want to write a story with trust as a dominant theme.  BDSM seems like a perfect fit. My characters are going to learn that the only way they can explore the outer reaches of their erotic imaginations is to trust each other.

However, if I keep bringing up ‘trust’ in the story. If I keep placing the words into the mouths of my characters, into their brains, if I keep bringing something as abstract as ‘trust’ to the fore of the story, it will lose every ounce of heat it might have had. You may end up with readers nodding their heads in agreement, but you’re preaching to the choir. You’ve just produced a piece of rhetorical propaganda, not a story. 

Of course, the issue of trust needs to be there. But it needs to operate below the surface, like a current in the river, driving the story along invisibly.  You can show your reader the ultimate results of a lack of trust. You can show your reader what its presence can enable. But if you bring it directly into the text of the story, you treat your reader like a child. You don’t allow them to discover the theme and its implications on their own. You need to let your theme inform your story, but not dominate it.

If you do, your reader will come away from your story not only having had a good, immersive erotic experience, but also with a head full of ideas and questions.  For me, this is the ultimate goal of writing anything.

When you start thinking about a new story, do you consider its theme? How do you weave it in?

Immersive Proximity and the Luxury of Space: POVs in Erotic Fiction

by | October 13, 2013 | | 14 Comments

Justine by de Sade, the first two editions were in 1st person,
the final version in 3rd.

I took a quick poll last night on my twitter stream to find out which point of view was the preferred one for both readers and writers of erotica.  As you might imagine, no one behaved themselves and I didn’t get a definitive answer. 

Now, you’re asking yourself why this question might not pertain to other genres equally. Of course, POV is always significant to the reader’s experience of the narrative.  But there are both historical and cognitive reasons why it is of greater interest to erotica writers than it would be, say, to murder mystery writers. 

Before the 20th Century, much erotic writing was written in first person and often presented to the reader as a candid confessional.  The choice of this voice is significant because it was, in literary terms, the equivalent of the money shot. First person was felt to convey veracity and solicit reader empathy.

Narrative theorists, novel critics, and reading specialists have already singled out a small set of narrative techniques–such as the use of first person narration and the interior representation of characters’ consciousness and emotional states–as devices supporting character identification, contributing to empathetic experiences, opening readers’ minds to others, changing attitudes, and even predisposing readers to altruism” Suzanne Keen writes, leading to narrative empathy. (1)

Certainly confessional memoires like ‘My Secret Life,” by Walter, strove to create the effect of a confidence being shared between ‘men of the world’ about the forbidden landscape of sexual experience.

The firmness of her flesh impressed me, whether I put my finger between the cheeks of her arse or between her thighs I could with difficulty get it away; she could have cracked a nut between either.  (2)

This approach survives to this day, with the same strategy to convey genuineness and confidentiality to the reader in letters to the Penthouse Forum.

She started out by telling me that she loved me, then asked, “Honey, what would you say if I told you that I wanted to have sex with some other guy?”

I was thrilled with the thought, but needing to act like I was maybe too macho for that, I asked, ‘Where did you ever get an idea like that?'”  (3)

But before you start to think that first person erotica just results in downmarket pseudo porn, it’s worth remembering that Henry Miller wrote “The Tropic of Cancer” in first person:

At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. … I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love.  (4)

Interestingly, de Sade’s two first versions of Justine were written in first person, but for the final publication, La Nouvelle Justine, he changed it all into third person.  (5)  Considering how long it is, this must have been quite task. It should tell you something about how important he felt the POV was to the way he wanted the story read.

In an interesting meta-strategy, although the stories in Anais Nin’s “Delta of Venus” are in third person, the collection starts off with an intensely first person narrative prologue in which she talks of how the stories came about and how she wrote them, which cleverly assures the reader of the author’s personal erotic investment in the work, while presenting the stories as her own intensely narrative sexual fantasies set at a distance to allow the reader into her lascivious world.

She was a very, very clever writer. She gains the confidence of the reader in the same way that first person narratives do, but her use of the third person POV in the actual stories works an interesting magic. First person erotic narratives work very well when the reader finds it easy to empathize with the narrator.  Walter, de Sade and, I would hazard a guess, Miller, all assumed their readers would be men. Men like them. 

Nin not only set out to write beyond her lived and (perhaps) autobiographical experience, but take the reader into erotic fantasy and position both she  – the writer – and you – the reader – as voyeur. Third person narratives allow the reader enough distance so as not to be put off by the gap between fiction, the fictional characters, the erotic fantasy and the reader’s sense of self.  Moreover, the third person narration makes it possible to present male protagonists without jarring the reader with the reality that the writer is female.

“Now the Baron, like many men, always awakened with a peculiarly sensitive condition of the penis. In fact, he was in a most vulnerable state.”  (6)

Some erotic writers find themselves compelled to tell a story and it presents itself with a voice in which to be told and they remain faithful always to allow the story, in essence, to ‘tell itself.’

However, after I’d been writing a while and I began to get stalled on stories that didn’t seem to slither off my fingertips with the fluidity I had hoped for, I began to take more notice of POV. I realized that sometimes a story wasn’t working because it wasn’t being told by the right character. This is what really prompted me to think deeply about POV.

I realized that sometimes my stories didn’t have the level of conflict I wanted because I had started out writing the story in the POV of the character who was least conflicted. This gave me a more reliable narrator, but a less exciting story.

When I began to venture into writing male protagonists, I stuck to third person for the same reason Nin did. I wanted to acknowledge my unmaleness as a writer, and underscore the fictionality of the story.  But more recently, in stories where I felt I really could truly empathize at a deep level with the male protagonist, I have attempted first person.

It is often said that ‘literary’ works are usually written in third person and, if you take a look at the literary canon, a large portion of them are, but by no means all of them.

I think one of the reasons for the perpetuation of this myth is a legitimate one. Literary fiction attempts to ask the reader to, in a way, be conscious of the writing while reading. It asks the reader to split themselves in two – immersing in the narrative but also always remaining a little distant in order to afford the reader the opportunity to read critically at the same time.

You might think this has no relevance in erotic fiction, but I would argue that there are times when it can be very effective.  Say, for instance, you are writing a story involving a paraphilia or fetish that the vast majority of your prospective readers might not share. You want to tempt them to glimpse in at the eroticism of it, but you don’t want to assume their compliance, from a literary perspective. Third person affords readers the space and distance to intellectually acknowledge the eroticism of something they might not want to do in real life but might be aroused by in fiction. So, if you want to write a watersports story that is not aimed at readers who you know will get off on it instantly, third person is a great way to afford them wiggle room and allow them to indulge in the erotic descriptions of it without feeling like they’re living it personally.

On the other hand, I have at times wanted to intentionally disorient the reader, to prompt that fine line between disgust and lust, and a first person narrative can be much more immediate and immersive for this, forcing them into the world and the scene for narrative effect. In a way, intentionally violating their comfort zone.

Most people who have been writing a long time make POV decisions very consciously. They’re well aware of the pros and cons of each voice.  If you haven’t tried to go against the grain of your instincts yet, give it a try.  Even if, after a few attempts, you decide to return to your favourite POV, at least you will have had the experience of wielding the power that the decision of POV can offer you.

____________________

 1. Keen, Suzanne. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative. 14.3 (2006): 207-236. Web. 13 Oct. 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/v014/14.3keen.html>.

 2. Walter. My Secret Life. 1. Amsterdam: Privately Published, 1888. Web. <http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1880s/1888_my_secret_life/vol_01/index.htm>.

 3.  T.P. “A Fucking Good Time.” Penthouse Forum Online. GMCI Internet Operations Inc., 28 Apr 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013. <http://penthouseforum.com/2013/04/a-fuckin-good-time/>.

 4. Miller, Henry. The Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Print.

 5. “Justine (Sade).” Wikipedia. N.p., 18 Jul 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_(Sade)>.

6. Nin, Anais. Delta of Venus. OCR. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Web. <http://optimisinglife.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/nin-anais-delta-of-venus.pdf>

In Defense of Long Sentences

by | September 13, 2013 | | 18 Comments

Composition classes have been lauding the short sentence for
about 80 years. I’m not going to tell you the short, sweet and tight is bad; it
isn’t. I love it, often employing a consciously clipped style myself. It’s
effective for the gritty, brutal narrative and it affords a great deal of space
for the reader to root around it.

It’s been Hemingway vs Faulkner in the world series of
wordsmithery forever  but, if you do
a little investigation, you’ll find that Hemingway wrote some very long
sentences and Faulkner wrote some very pithy short ones. That’s probably why, even
after all this time, they’re still considered paragons of literary style.
Because, although they are each known for their radically different sentence
constructions, they both knew when to switch gears and break out of their own
stylistic niche to good effect.

Just the facts, ma’am and no purple prose. The popularity of
the short, sweet sentence arose with the emergence of the journalistic style,
evolving the way it did, partly due to technological limitations and partly for
clarity. When news stories were first transmitted by telegraph, there was a lot
of drop-out on the lines. The shorter the sentence, the less likely it would be
cut off. Hence the inverted pyramid format. And, hard as it is to believe now,
literacy was still relatively low at the dawn of the 20th Century. The press
was part of a democratization of information – particularly in the US – and
that effort included writing in plain, simple language.

Now it’s simply a matter of acclimatization to style. In
genres that place an emphasis on hard and gritty, you see the preference for
short sentences and unadorned language. Thrillers, horror, hard crime fiction
and any other genre that relies heavily on action tend to preference the short
and sweet. Unless the writer is very skilled, too many sub-clauses can gum up
the tension and slow down the pace. But allow me offer you an alternative.
Here, from the master of the short sentence, is a long one, pure action, with
all the tension and fluidity you could ever hope for:

George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling,
one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some
insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling,
trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs
shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks
accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.

Yup, that was Hemingway with a 75 word sentence.  Did the sub-clauses slow it down?

There is a place for short, staccato sentences in erotic
fiction, but when I encounter erotic writing devoid of any long sentences, I
find it effective but not affective. My intellect engages, but my emotions and
my senses don’t. Lots of erotica leaves me not very high and literally bone
dry. Writing style is often the prime culprit.

Long sentences with a kernel or root clause and subsequent
sub-clauses that elaborate on the main one are a way to pull the reader into
the moment affectively. They offer substance, direction, rhythm and texture,
engaging the emotions, the senses and the reader’s ear. It complicates ‘the
facts’ with the meat of human experience; it offers shades of meaning to what
is happening in the story.

For those of you went to school after they stopped teaching
grammar, the kernel or root clause is the main subject, very and object of the
sentence.

Tracy adores cunnilingus.

 Now we’ll add on a sub-clause:

Tracy adores cunnilingus, since it’s the only way she can
orgasm.

Now a one more:

Tracy adores cunnilingus, since it’s the only way she can
orgasm, regardless of her lover’s technique in other areas.

We’ve put significantly more substance in the sentence, and
you’ll notice, there’s also a direction. 
We start out with the root clause ‘Tracy adores cunnilingus’ and then we
are elaborating by adding modifiers after that statement. But we could easily, perhaps
more elegantly, shift things around and add a little more:

Regardless of her lover’s technique in other areas, Tracy
adores cunnilingus, whining for it like a persistent cat in heat, tugging on his hair to drag his face down to her cunt, since it’s the only way she can orgasm.

The problem with long sentences is that there are a lot of
words in them to misuse. Run-on sentences are often painful because they’re
poorly constructed. The reader loses her grasp on the kernel clause, even on
the subject itself, and can’t remember what all this modification was actually
modifying. But, as you can see above, we haven’t lost the plot. This is still about Tracy’s love of a good licking.

Well written long sentences should enhance the reader’s
depth of understanding of the subject, not lose it. The addition of sub-clauses, either
free modifiers or bound ones, should deepen the in-the-moment ‘thereness’ of
the reader instead of jerking him out of the narrative in a tizzy of
‘lost-the-plotness.’

No matter what composition teachers tell you, language is
not like mathematics. In mathematics, elegance is based on simplicity and
compactness, but language is an additive beast. The more details you get, the
more you know.  I’m not saying that
the mot juste is not important. But
when language gets too clean, too pithy, too simple, it can lose its humanity.
It can also lose its rhythm.

This is particularly true when it comes to writing sex
scenes with a view to arousing the reader. Literary fiction writers will often
stick to a description of the mechanics in a sex scene. It’s about as sexy as
jumping jacks or watching dogs fuck. The whole thing is rendered like a series of
short, sharp stabs. All showing and no telling. If they’re scared of being
accused of purple prose at any time, they’re terrified of being accused of it
during a sex scene.

But erotica writers know better. When you write a good sex
scene, you fuck the reader. And good erotic fiction writers are, at least
mentally, accomplished lovers. They vary the pace by varying the length of
their sentences. They vary the sensory experience by glancing the subject in
some sentences and going in for the hard and deep plunder in others. They’re
not under the illusion that a ripped body and a 8″ cock used artlessly is going
to ever compete with the delicious rollercoaster ride of a well-executed
mindfuck. A hot quickie is pleasant, but a good erotic literary mindfuck is a
memorable thing. It requires that you make ingress into the reader’s affective
mind, not just their imagination of the narrative physical event.

The chief problem with long sentences is that people feel
they need to use prepositions and pronouns. If they don’t bind all those
sub-clauses together, it won’t be logical.  So, you get this:

 He
pressed his open mouth over her left breast, then stroked the tip of his
searing tongue around her nipple in a circular fashion before sucking the
entire area into his mouth, afterwards leaving the indentation of his teeth
behind on her skin.

Admit it, you felt the need to take a deep breath,
right?  It’s cludgy. When possible it’s better to set your modifiers free (bound modifiers attach to the sentence using joining words or prepositions, free modifiers don’t use them).

You need to trust that your reader is smart and with you.
They understand that the progression of words is the progression of events, and
they know enough about anatomy and how tit sucking works not to need half that
crap. You’ve already established who is doing what to whom, so you can be a little less concerned with locating everything in time and space.

 Pressing an open mouth to her breast, he circled her nipple with a
searing tongue and, sucking hard, marked her skin with his teeth.

You can’t get rid of every pronoun or every preposition, but
you really don’t need most of them. 
Although a good deal shorter, it’s still 25 words long . Not exactly short. I admit to having written much longer
sentences and I could easily slow down the pace and be languid in my
description of this, using more adjectives, an adverb or two if needed. It
depends on how I want the reader to experience this particular piece of intimacy.

Sentence length should be about depth of knowledge, direction, pace and rhythm.
Just as there is a place for the short, hot, meaningless fuck, there’s a place
for the long, slow, pulsating, eviscerating annihilation of the flesh and mind. And your ability to execute either of these
depends on your ability to be flexible in the way you construct your sentences.

If you’re up for it, there is rather deeper examination of the topic of sentences and especially of modifying sub-clauses written by Frances Christensen. “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence” linked here. It’s a pdf file.

I Often Write About Love. You Just Don’t Recognize It.

by | August 12, 2013 | | 13 Comments

I was really stuck for a topic this month. I tweeted the question ‘what is hard about writing’ and got back an overwhelming number of really good answers and many of them were familiar: finding time, finding inspiration, the grind of editing, having a story stall out on you, uncooperative characters, not believing in yourself as a writer or trusting your voice … you know them all. I could and probably should have written on one of those, but instead, I thought I’d write about the one thing no one expects me to write about.

Love.

People don’t think I write about love. They think I write about sex. I write erotic fiction, not erotic romance, so people assume I don’t think love is important or worth writing about. They often assume I’m a cynic about it. But the truth is, there’s love in almost all my stories. It’s not explicit, and it’s not always sane, or permanent, or perhaps it’s not a kind of love you recognize, but I believe it’s love all the same.

The media has perpetuated a very idealised, standardised model of love.  The lovers look into each other’s eyes and they know – they KNOW – this is love, this is real, this is forever. Cue the violins. And post-modernity hasn’t done a fucking thing to advance it. It’s just commoditized it. We may be all for same-sex marriage now, but we want their love to look just like that love too. Eternal, monogamous, spiritual, the foundation of a family unit. Heck, even Sookie Stackhouse can’t fall in love with the next vamp until she’s fallen out of love with the last one. And the most meaningful, best sex is the sex you have with the person you love. 

We want to believe that love is universal, but I’m here to challenge you on that. I think the thing we call love is a cultural construction. I’m not going to go all biological on your ass and talk about love as an evolutionary strategy. Mostly because the jury is a long way out on that one. Nor am I going to say that we are imagining the feeling we identify as love, although I don’t think it matters whether we are imagining it or not. It has massive real-world consequences all the same.

I’m saying that there is most certainly a phenomenon that humans experience that destabilizes us as hermetically sealed individuals. We allow another in so deep that it breaks the seal on our individuality. They bleed into us, and if it’s reciprocated, we bleed into them. We stop being ‘alone’ in the the big sense of the world.

It is the culture we are born into that uses models and language to help us order that experience in our brains. Although love occurs in all cultures, how we identify it – the rules we expect it to obey – bear the marks of how our societies seek to order themselves.

Let me give you an example. I know this 24-year-old Vietnamese woman named Tuyet. She was born down in the Mekong Delta in a tiny little village. Grew up dirt poor. Her mother died of cervical cancer because the family had no money to treat it. She came to the city bone thin – not starving, because no one starves here, but rake thin from a poor diet –  looking for a job to support herself and send money home to her family.

It’s a very common story in developing countries. She found a day job, but she became a part-time sex worker because the money was much better than anything she could earn with her lack of education or qualifications. In the course of her work, she met a 68-year-old American named Burt. Divorced, overweight, balding, bit of an alcoholic, not a prince by any means. And they marry.  He gets all the sex he’s ever dreamed of and she gets the kind of financial security she’s never even dreamed of. She says she loves him. He says he loves her.

To Western eyes, there are nasty words for this sort of a relationship. In the West, loving someone for giving you sex is not love. In the West, loving someone for giving you economic security isn’t love. But to people in developing countries, you DO love someone who is willing to take care of you, and keep you safe, and pay your medical bills, and has the wherewithal to feed your family.

I’ve lived in foreign cultures long enough not to judge. They are giving each other what they need. They have allowed themselves to be vulnerable and dependent on each other for things that each of them find very important. If they call it love, then… it’s love.

One of my co-workers is Indian. He’s from New Delhi. His marriage was arranged. He met his wife once before they got married. Both their families each believed that they were two kind, decent people and they would make a good match. Both he and his wife believed that their families had their best interests at heart. They’ve been married seven years now, and have a little boy. The wife, Medha told me that she fell in love with him about 6 months into the marriage, after she was already pregnant with their child.

These are models of love we don’t understand because our understanding of love is culturally proscribed. 

I have fallen in love a number of times, and out of love fewer. There are people I loved who I continue to love, even though I’m not with them anymore. Even though I was only with them a short time. And I have never ever loved two people in the same way. There isn’t one kind of love. There is a love for every love you fall into. There are people I fell in love with fast, and out of it fast. But in the moment, it was love. Our belief that only long-lived emotion is love is also culturally proscribed.

It’s incredibly ironic that we all agree that love hurts, but we taught to yearn for a love that doesn’t hurt. In Western concepts of romantic love, it only hurts in the short term, but in the long term, it turns into a kind of endless warm jello bath.

Another interesting Western belief is that love needs to be reciprocated. If it isn’t, it’s not love. It’s pathological obsession. It’s sick and unhealthy. We also believe that love needs to be physically consummated. If it isn’t, at some point, then it’s tragic and pathetic. But that’s only because it falls outside our cultural construction of how we’ve defined romantic love.

I’m not saying that because you adhere to your cultural understanding of love you’re wrong. I just want you to consider that it is a construction. It’s not the TRUTH, it’s a truth. It’s the truth of love in your culture. You can chose to insist upon it, but you can also reject it, and decide on another definition. A personal one.

I guess that’s the point of my post. I want to encourage you to consider that the definition of what love is isn’t static or etched in stone. And perhaps write about alternate versions of it.

Positioning the Reader: Who Do Erotic Writers Address?

by | July 13, 2013 | | 7 Comments

photo by sp333d1

You will often hear writers say that they write for themselves, and surely this is true for most writers. We are our first readers and often our harshest critics. Nonetheless, I think there is a definite progression to the development of ‘a model reader’ amongst writers in general and quite a specific progression among writers of erotica.

This post is by necessity going to be personal and anecdotal.  A model reader is the person you imagine reading the work while you’re conceiving of the story, writing it, polishing it or getting it out there.  Getting a firm sense of who that is will give you a better, more realistic sense of how many readers you can attract and some guidance as to how to classify yourself within a genre.

However, there is one very interesting difference between other genres and erotica.  A great many erotica writers write their first stories, not as forays into the art/skill of writing, but as masturbatory entertainment. They write something that they cannot find written elsewhere (in the tone or to the standard they require for their arousal) that turns them on. Many others write their first stories as a tool of seduction – to arouse a specific lover – an intimate, handcrafted, experientially endowed gift. I am sure there are probably writers in other genres who make forays into erotica just to test their skill at writing explicit sex, but I’d guess this is probably not where the majority of erotica writers start.

My first piece of erotica (a happily doomed novel) embodied some of my most deeply held erotic fantasies.  It wasn’t very well written, and the plot was a complete mess, but if I have to be entirely honest, I was writing for my own arousal. I had no reader in mind. I wasn’t seeking an erotic conversation with anyone.

As I developed as a writer, and especially after I joined ERWA’s ‘storytime’ list, the understanding that this act of writing was a form of communication – an attempt to transfer information from me to a reader through the text – became more apparent.  There is nothing like having a story critiqued to give you a solid understanding that your writing is ‘received’ and, sometimes, not in the way you intended.

But the experience also taught me that, on a list as diverse as ERWA’s, there are times when it is not a case of having written a bad story, but that it has ended up in the wrong person’s lap. I am speaking here of stories that contain good grammar, fleshed out characters and a reasonably adequate narrative structure.  One of these areas of disjunction was immediately apparent even at an organizational level.  Non-consent lies at the heart of some of the most erotic themes for me as a writer. ERWA forbids the posting of non-consensual material. [“Storytime Guidelines” Erotica Readers & Writers Association Website.  (Accessed June 21, 2013) ] So, at a most simple level, there were lots of stories I simply couldn’t post.  But, at a broader level, when I posted stories on my blog, there were readers who for reasons of ethics or life-experience found my work did not speak to them at all.

Eroticism is one of those areas where lust and disgust nestle in very close proximity. [Stoller, Robert J. Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975]   For some readers, the mention of a golden shower will ruin their experience of the whole story – so strong is their gut-level disgust of the act. For others, it’s not something that arouses them, but they can feel neutral about it and still enjoy the other parts of the story.  For some, you’re ringing their dinner bell at such a basic level, that you don’t even have to describe its eroticism to have them in your pocket.

When I got these radically positive or negative reactions to the things I wrote, I did start slowly to form a picture of my model reader. They were someone who thought critically enough to defer immediate disgust reactions if the eroticism of an act could be made apparent to them in the story.

Time to fess up. I am never going to go out and buy an anthology on watersports.  It doesn’t, as a rule, ring my bell. However, the two instances in which I read erotica that contained it and was aroused, were so different and yet, in some ways, so similar, they deserve examination.  The two works in question were “My Wet Pet” by Julius (sadly nowhere to be found on the net now) [ Julius. “My Wet Pet” Erwa Storytime Listserve. Date Unknown] and the novel “Darker Than Love” by Kristina Lloyd. [ Lloyd, Kristina. Darker Than Love. London: Black Lace Books (1998)]  Neither of these writers assumed a reader with a kink for watersports.  They both eloquently focused on the sensory experience rather than just shoving the kink at the reader and both leave the semiotic implications of urine as part of a sex act open for the reader to interpret in their own way.  Admittedly, in both these instances, it is the female doing the peeing and the power dynamics in both texts are strangely reversed. That might be why it works for me, but I doubt it.  I simply have never read a heterosexual BDSM description of a golden shower where the male was the urinator that didn’t textually assume it would automatically arouse me as a reader. None of them came close to describing the sensation, the power dynamic, the emotional paradox of the experience. I’m sure there must be some out there, but I’ve never encountered one. When I do, I’ll let you know.

In the last decade of writing, I’ve also come to understand that many readers are looking for very sex-positive, very uninhibited erotica where the characters suffer not a moment of ambivalence in regard to the sex.  On a personal basis, I find it very boring to write sex without paradox.  I like my fictional sex with drama and I like the drama to be in the sex itself or at least its consequences or emotional ramifications.  I write for readers who feel similarly.  And that cuts down the number readers I can expect to ever have significantly.

When I conceive of the story, at stages during the writing and, most especially, during the polishing, there are about five people I have in mind as model readers.  I don’t write for them, but I realize that I do write to them, in the intentional manner of a correspondent, if not in that precise form.

These are the readers I want to arouse.  In that sense, these readers are lovers. It is not my aim to bring them to orgasm through the act of storytelling, but I absolutely want them hard or wet and mentally aroused as hell at times, during the reading of a story. I want the paradoxes I pose in my stories to be intellectually erotic teases for them.  I want them to yearn for it all to come out right even if, knowing me as a writer, they know it probably won’t end in a happily ever after.  I want the story to leave them feeling a bitter-sweet yearning in the same way a real lover kisses you at a corner to take their leave.  It’s a good kiss, a kiss that speaks of possibilities, but it’s a complicated pleasure mixed with the pain of parting.

Most of all, if I had to describe my model reader in a single paragraph, I’d say that she or he is someone who can truly enjoy a story without having to absolutely identify with the characters. They are people who are excited by otherness.  They enjoy a level of realism that many erotica readers aren’t looking for.

Of course, I get many more readers than this. And I can see by their comments often that I have not satisfied them. For instance, many women who read romance love my male characters but despise my female characters. They cannot identify with her adequately enough to step into her place in the story and instead feel a subtext of sexual competitiveness.  Similarly, they get very upset when, at the end, the story doesn’t end happily.  This doesn’t bother me. They made read some of what I write – they may even enjoy some of it a great deal, but they aren’t my model reader.

The truth is I’m never going to sell a lot of books. And for many erotica writers, especially with the success of books like ‘Fifty Shades’ and ‘Bared to You’, there is a pressure to sell books and make money. We live in a period where this is the predominant measure of success.

But, for those of you who are struggling to accommodate the marketplace, I’d like to offer this thought. A very few of us are ever going to make a living doing this.  There is a valid and, to my mind, essential success in identifying who your model reader is and making them a happy and satisfied reader. No matter how small that readership may be, once they’ve found you and you have found them, there are life-long conversations had and an untold number of delicious seductions in  your future.

While pondering this topic, I realized that other writers would have completely differing opinions in who they felt they were addressing when they wrote. I asked two colleagues, Kathleen Bradean and Raziel Moore for their takes on the issue:

Kathleen Bradean says:

When I’m imagining a story, there’s a group of people I envision reading and enjoying it. Most of them are erotica writers who think erotica can be literary and that erotica can be used to explore uncomfortable truths about humans. That may sound highbrow but it’s more like the flesh under a scab you’ve picked off—sometimes nearly whole, sometimes tender and sickly, and sometimes weeping blood. That rawness makes many readers uncomfortable. I envision the reader who won’t look away.  I want the ones who lean in.

But that’s when I’m thinking about the story. When I write, the reader fades away. In a short story, there isn’t a lot of room to maneuver around, so each sentence has to be technically sound as well as develop character, evoke setting, move the plot forward, stimulate the senses, and arouse or disturb, worry…  My focus is on the craft of writing so I get that right. What good is an idea if you don’t communicate it the best way you can?  As if that isn’t enough to demand, hopefully my work has some aesthetic appeal. I am not a baroque wordsmith, nor a spell caster of ethereal mental imagery. My style is more like a Shaker chair. And while not fancy or embellished, it still requires craftsmanship.  I can’t possibly focus on all that if I’m distracted by mental images of the reader enjoying each passage. I can see why a writer would though. I can see other writers using their words to seduce, or like love letters. That’s a rather charming idea. But it isn’t me.

Raziel Moore says:

Back when I started writing smut in earnest – I really can’t call it erotica at this point – I had one main motivation and one main audience. The motivation was to write stuff I found personally gratifying, mostly as wank fodder, partly to see if I could write anything at all. The target audience was me alone. Mostly. I wrote as self exploration. To name, and understand, and own the angels and monsters in my head.

If it had been _only_ me, though,  I’d never have posted it to usenet forums, or eventually to free erotica sites like ASSTR. I wrote for myself, but also to show “them” what I could do. And I got feedback, in dribs and drabs, and eventually, fans.

Knowing that there were readers out there who react to my stories changed how I wrote. I didn’t think about it consciously for a long time, but it was there – this extra pause sometimes considering the possible reaction of someone besides myself. it grew on me slowly, unawares. Until I actually became correspondence-friendly with a couple readers.

When I know how someone _specifically_ reacts to my words, and I have a relationship with that person – even casually, or subject-specifically, my consideration of them as my reader is pretty unavoidable. I can anticipate, when I think about it, their eyes on the story. It doesn’t necessarily shift things hugely or overtly, but it is a partially known shape or shapes that I am pouring my words into, and there’s a desire to fill that shape the best I can.

Nowadays, I have several good writer/reader friends, and things have shifted again. These presences take a much more active role in my writing. They are almost internal checks and balances for certain aspects of style, or characterization, or craft. These people I write to, in addition to myself, are people I want to _get_ my stuff (As well as get wet or hard at the right spots). For the most part, it drives me to write _better_, but I’d be untruthful if I said my knowledge of what they liked – the buttons I’ve learned or gleaned – didn’t influence some of the details of what I wrote. I write for these readers as well as myself now, and I think I’m better for it. And, as I move forward and write more, perhaps there will be more eyes over my shoulder, more shapes to fill with words.

______

Although not specifically referenced here, these works informed this essay in essential ways:

Umberto Eco  (1996) “The Author and His Interpreters,” The Modern World: Porto Ludovica Website. http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_author.html (accessed 21 June, 2013)

Lucie Guillemette and Josiane Cossette (2006),  “Textual Cooperation”, in Louis Hébert (dir.), Signo [online], Rimouski (Quebec), http://www.signosemio.com/eco/textual-cooperation.asp (accessed 21 June, 2013)

Roland Barthes. The Pleasure of the Text. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1975)

The Past is a Foreign Country

by | June 12, 2013 | | 12 Comments

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
J.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Setting stories in the past is an interesting and sometimes strangely satisfying exercise in futility.  The past, like memory, is always partly fiction. We can do all the research we want, but because we are viewing the past from here and now, we will never see, never ‘read’ it like the people who lived in it when it was the present for them.  We can never unknow the fact that the earth goes around the sun, or that the world is four and a half billion years old.  We can never unlearn what it is like to experience communication that’s instant over great distances.  We will never be as brave as those who knew that a simple infection could kill them, or that losing a baby in childbirth was a regular occurrence, or that being unmarried and pregnant made you a social outcast. We can know those facts intellectually, but because we can’t unknow our current reality, our emotional understanding of the harsh reality of the past is always wrapped in the cotton wool of time’s comfortable distance.

Moreover, there are simply facts that are not at our disposal at all, because they didn’t seem important enough to record. Those things are lost in the sea of time. We have to make them up if we want to write into the past. We have to use our best guess, based on a belief that human nature doesn’t seem to change as fast as other things, like technology.

No matter how many facts you can accumulate, and no matter how sensitive you try to be to other points of view, and other ways of experiencing the world, if you want to write a story set in the past, you need to be brave, do the best research you can, and then just make some stuff up.

One scholar who is worth reading about how to interpret the past, and especially regarding sexuality, is Michel Foucault. Honestly, any erotic writer who writes stories set in the past and hasn’t read his masterful work The History of Sexuality, needs to get off their butts and read it. Particularly of interest is the part power has played in our understanding of sexuality in a cultural context through the ages. It has changed radically. Get all three volumes. Used. But read them.

On the bright side, the people reading your work are also not in the past. And, so although they too might be fascinated by it, presenting a reality that is too alien to them might very well make your story unreadable.

There are periods I like to think of as fictional pasts. So many romances have been set in the Regency period that there are now two of them: the one that actually took place, and the one that exists in most Regency romances and is familiar to their faithful readers. Most Regency heroines own more dresses than the female members of the monarchy did at the time. Those ball gowns were exorbitant. And no one bothers to mention the menstrual blood staining the floor of Elizabethan dancing galleries.  Readers often have limits to the amount of authenticity they’re willing to tolerate.

Most challenging of all is the writing of social attitudes of the time when then clash wildly with ours. When I wrote a story set during the Cowpore Uprising in India, a number of my readers commented on how racist the character Calum  and other members of his regiment were.  But the reality was that they were, by our standards, very racist. Not consciously, not maliciously but they were acculturated to believe that white Christians were superior to all other races.  And yes, there were extraordinary individuals who rejected that sort of prejudice, but those people were few and far between. I was torn between a need to write the characters in a way I felt would be historically accurate, and knowledge that my readers might not make allowances for the realities of historic racism and find him completely unlikable.  I’ll never know if I made the right decision. I just did my best.

This month, I’ve invited two other authors, both of whom write stories set in the past to discuss their process and their thinking. I felt we probably all went about it in different ways, for different projects and I thought having three people’s take on the task was more informative than having mine alone.

 * * *

My first guest is Aleksandr Voinov, who writes mainly m/m erotica, much of which is historical.  Here he reflects on his novel Skybound, published by Riptide Press.

On Skybound

When I had the idea for Skybound, I was in trouble. I had no idea about any of the things I was going to write about. Telling a WWII story from the German side, too, was a bit of a leap. Even Germans like me are used to seeing and reading about the other side, thanks to Hollywood, and what stories there are on the German side, they tend to be told from the heterosexual viewpoint. But the sources are all there, and even though I specialised in Medieval History at uni and gave Modern History a wide berth, I still had the “historical method” at my disposal. So I did what I loved to do at uni and started digging and accumulating material.

Above all, I wanted to get it “right”. I wanted to do justice to all sides and be as accurate as possible. Some of the people who lived through it are still alive, and their children and grandchildren, too, which I think adds an extra burden to be accurate and respectful.

I started by reading a history of the Luftwaffe (German air force), but that provided just the backdrop. I dug deeper, looking at fighter planes. My characters, a fighter ace and a mechanic (one of the so-called “Black Men”, thanks to his black coveralls) would care deeply about the planes, so I learned about the Messerschmitt Bf 109, how and why it was developed and how it was used. I spent time staring at the cockpit layout in one of the technical books, trying to transpose my mind into it. I dug deeper still and read a biography by a fighter ace; while lacking in grace in terms of prose, it did have the telling details that I needed, and a couple anecdotes that I took for my own use (I attributed the things I didn’t change). I’m blessed that there’s a the Imperial War Museum in London and there I exposed my Muse to the WWII fighter planes suspended from the ceiling there in the great hall–physical manifestations of memory, half warning, half forgotten nightmare. While they don’t have a Messerschmitt, the Focke-Wulf fighter-bomber still helped. I’m a total immersion kind of writer (I guess the equivalent of a method actor), I just gorge myself on impressions and details and generally soaked up the energy, filtering that one and all the WWII air warfare exhibits all through my rational mind as well as my emotions. What kind of man would fly those? And how would he be seen? How would propaganda make him look?

Now, German fighter pilots were heroes–as problematic as that term is–a very special breed, and while their record is distorted by years of easy victories against technically and tactically inferior forces, German fighter pilots had hundreds of kills and were the very top performers of WWII. Most came to grief, were lost, but some survived and entered German civilian aviation after the war. Knowing all this, my decorated fighter ace was easy, but I’m telling the story from the point of view of a mechanic. I couldn’t find any autobiographies of mechanics (nobody really cares about the small people, maybe?), though I did find something about the high regard of pilots for their ground crews in the pilot’s biography. All I had to do was “flip” that inside my head.

Felix is a romantic, a failed pilot (I researched how fighter pilots were trained and hence knew why he wouldn’t qualify), he’s even a bit of a poet. As a child of his time, in what terms would he express himself? What is his voice and what is it influenced by? The obvious choice is Karl May, a prolific German pulp adventure writer of the late 19th century who is still being read by children and adults. His work is overwrought, passionate, romantic, heart-felt, definitely kitschy, but it has a sense of adventure and honour and “for thee, brother, I shall die” homoeroticism that presses lots of buttons. Hitler loved May. Felix would have loved him, too, and I imbued some of his voice with a dash of May–a romantic hyper-reality that clashes with his job and the war situation in 1944/45, but it also clearly an escape from the drudgery and the hopelessness of the late war.

For his actual job, I watched lots of YouTube clips. There’s lots of German propaganda newsreels on there, and I got a few DVDs too that were using German footage of the time. The interesting thing about those was that while it was definitely propaganda and “rah-rah-rah, we’ll smash them!” and “look how awesome we are!” I also saw the actual work being done, which was a lot more useful–no source is just a source, often reading it against the grain opens up treasures a writer can use. I watched ground crews pushing planes into line, refuelling, loading the bombs and machine guns. It was hard physical work, for one, but watching them helped me understand Felix. Then I watched modern footage of air shows to get the sound of the historical engines right for the scene when my airfield is being attacked by the Allies–no plane sounds alike, and my characters would be able to tell the difference. I spent a happy half hour talking to a British plane geek to work out which planes would be attacking and in what strategy and how these would perform against the German planes.

All in all, the story doesn’t have one sentence that’s not deliberate and researched to the best of my ability. Lots of writers might find these weeks and months of research for a mere 13,000-word story excessive. In that time, I could have written a novel quite easily.

But what the research did was allow me to write with authority and confidence about a world I knew nothing about. I feel like I’ve done the actual historical people justice, and I learned a great deal–I ended up completely fascinated, true to what my professor said when I challenged him on a boring assignment. He said, “Drill down deep enough into anything, and it becomes its own amazing little world.” It’s a small little world I learned to move freely in, building my story around and inside that framework. It was a fun challenge, and I can’t wait to go back.

* * *

My second guest author is Justine Elyot, who has recently finished her novel Fallen, which will be published by Black Lace in early 2014.

On Fallen

History is a strange thing. It has happened – it is fact. And yet it’s also highly open to interpretation. It seems paradoxical, but how many times have we opened a newspaper to find that something we had long held to be true has been found to be false? One of the lessons of history is that lots of it is a pack of lies, or at least, a jolly old London pea-souper of misconceptions and misapprehensions.

Writing historical fiction opens up yet another hall of distorting mirrors. What I am really writing about is my perception of that time. It’s been sewn together, piecemeal, through years of absorbing material, both fictional and non-fictional, about that period. I am viewing the past through a lens, and that lens is unlikely to be clear.

A fear of getting it wrong put me off writing anything historical for years until one day I grew tired of all the Victorian-set stories taking up houseroom in my head with no signs of buggering off and decided to do something about it.

Ever since I walked through Madame Tussaud’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ street at the age of ten, I’d wanted to replicate that feeling of being there in the past – without the waxwork corpses, but with the sense of immersion. Historical fiction offered me that opportunity. My favourite books took me to another world where people spoke, dressed, acted, thought differently and made me feel that I was there. This was what I wanted to give the reader in my neo-Victorian erotic novel, Fallen.

In a way, the preparation for it began at Madame Tussaud’s. From there, I went on to read everything I could relating to the 19th century (I remember the librarian raising an eyebrow at my borrowing Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor at the age of 12). I’m still doing it now.

But in Fallen, I am not only writing a historical novel. I’m also writing an erotic romance, so I have to try and be as true as I can to the Victorian erotic sensibility as well. This isn’t always easy – my protagonist writes pornography and it’s of a standard Victorian type, full of flagellomania and characters with names like Lady Whippingham. Much of what I’d read, in The Pearl, or elsewhere, was so far from anything most of my contemporaries would find sexy that I had to tone it down.

It’s a balancing act as much as anything. Be convincing, but be sympathetic to a modern ear. Write in a style appropriate to the period, but don’t go overboard with the multi-clause sentences and lose your audience. I don’t know if I’ve got it right – but if you want to find out, Fallen is published by Black Lace in early 2014.

Kill Your Darlings

by | May 13, 2013 | | 14 Comments

“I’m beautiful, I’m literary, please don’t hurt me.”

It was William Faulkner who said it. The venerable Samuel Johnson said something very similar. It really refers to lines or phrases, but can sometimes involve whole scenes.  Received wisdom is that, if you come across a line or a phrase that makes you puff up your chest at your own literary or poetic brilliance, many accomplished writers and editors believe it probably needs to die.

First, I want to own up to the fact that I have not always followed this piece of writerly advice and I still don’t. But I think I’ve come to understand the rationale behind it a little better, and I have killed my fair share of darlings more recently, and shifted others.

I’m concerned with the ‘literariness’ of my writing.  I care a great deal about the poetics of my work. I spend time frantically trying to avoid the many cliches to which it is so easy to resort when writing erotica. When I write sex scenes, I obsess about approaching them from at least a slightly fresher angle than most of the erotica I’ve read. I don’t believe my reader needs to be given a blow-by-blow description of intercourse, and I have a deep faith that language itself can evoke eroticism, and that you can brew metaphors that become new sites of eroticism for your reader.

But pride comes before the fall. I’m going to sound utterly arrogant when I say that I have forged erotic imagery that felt like it shone on the page, that made me think, ‘wow, you’re a fucking good writer’. The problem is that a lot of readers thought so too.

How can that be bad?

Well, it can. Because the moment you’ve forced a reader to look away from the story and think, ‘fuck, what a brilliant writer I’m reading, how poetic, how eloquent!’ is the moment you just kicked them out of the story. You’ve just interfered with your reader’s engagement with the fictional world in order to show off.   It’s literary narcissism and it means you’re more concerned with literary bukkake than telling a good story.

Let me give you a brilliant example of a darling that sorely required execution. It’s from Rowan Sommerville’s “The Shape of Her.”

“He grasped the side of her hips, pushed her away and pulled her to him with a slap. Again and again with more force and velocity. Tine pressed her face deeper into the cushion grunting into the foam at each thrust.

The wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”

After being awarded the Bad Sex Award for this passage, Sommerville defended himself by saying it was a literary allusion, an homage to Vladimir Nabokov, who had been an avid amateur butterfly collector.

At this point, I hope you’re saying ‘who gives a fuck about your literary allusions?’ because you have every right to. Readers deserve better than literary in-jokes and canonical masturbation. The last line is both literary and fucking awful.  If you were anywhere near being aroused by the passage, that line killed your mind erection stone dead, unless you happen to be one of the very few entomology fetishists out there.

Admittedly, I’ve never written anything quite so eloquent or out of place as that. But I once described an orgasm thusly:

“I can feel my orgasm long before it arrives, a plane in the distance and my body the control tower. The landing lights in my belly light up to guide it in. Gary’s cock has grown huge inside me and there’s a pleasant dull pain each time he thrusts upwards.”

Oh, good god, what possessed me? Landing lights? Control tower? What was I thinking? And yet, at the time, I thought it was a wonderful metaphor. It just felt so ‘right’.

Another problematic darling is the encapsulating and eminently quotable line. Rather than kill it, consider shifting it to either the beginning of the story, chapter or scene, or the end of one of those. It probably is a great line but if you impress your reader so deeply with your pithy, perfectly worded brilliance, same deal. You impress the reader with your linguistic abilities, but you interrupt their relationship with the story.

And this is not about you or how brilliant you are; it’s about the story. So, when it comes to your edits, read through your piece and find those lines, phrases or passages which make you want to give yourself a manly, Hemmingway-style pat on the back. Ask yourself who is truly served by that line or phrase. Is it serving the story or  your own writerly ego?

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