The Write Stuff
by Ashley Lister

Inspirational

One of my writing tutors brought some bread into class last week. It was a profound experience.

The writing class was littered with the usual Tuesday afternoon scribes and wannabes. I was sitting behind a half-used notepad facing two damned good writers and sandwiched between the class cynic and a very deep young lady who writes exceptionally emotive poetry.

The other members of the class were sat around like peripheral players at a high rollers’ poker game.

“Take a piece of bread,” the tutor told us, handing the loaf around. “Tear it with your hands. Observe how it looks. Remember the texture. Notice the smell. Listen to the sound it makes when you chew it. Savour the taste.”

They were good instructions. The senses are important in any description. In erotica an erection is just an erection until someone strokes their tongue against its sweat-soaked length. In erotica a nipple is only a nipple until it’s tweaked between a teasing finger and thumb. In the classroom a piece of bread is only a piece of bread until it’s been experienced and described.

And so, fresh from our experience with the bread, we were expected to write. Fifteen minutes were allowed. We could use whatever genre we wanted, poetry, prose—even a scene for a screenplay if that was how we preferred to work. All that was required was that we thought about hunger and used our recent experience with the bread to help us write something descriptive.

For fifteen minutes the room was silent.

That’s a lie. It wasn’t totally silent. The sound of pens scratching at paper was a constant. The mutterings of writers saying, “Fuck! No!” and “Fuck! Yes!” were a permanent undercurrent. The electric tension in the air was charged from people desperate to do their best and determined to outdo each other when faced with this opportunity to show off their prowess.

When the tutor said the fifteen minutes were complete someone swore. A pen was slammed down hard against a desk. And the tension in the room got thicker.

“Are you all finished?” the tutor asked.

Three of us preened. The analogy of the high rollers’ poker match still fits because the three preening were the ones who were still in the game. We all knew when the tutor asked us to read our work, we would stun the entire room. In a card game, we would have been smugly tossing our chips into the centre of the table.

“Has anybody produced anything they want to read?”

I settled back in my chair and allowed someone else to up the ante. One of the damned good writers on the opposite side of the room was anxious to go first. With a rustle of paper, and a delivery that was just a little too anxious, she narrated an autobiographical piece.

It was a cohesively structured story. The tempo could have used a little slowing but that would have worked itself out in the rewrites. Overall, her reminiscence of being hungry on a day when her parents were moving home was cleanly presented and it ended to polite applause. In a card game it would have been worthy of presenting two pairs.

I glanced at the deep young lady to my side. She held a piece of poetry that looked to be half the length of my ode. Gallantly I offered her the floor but she shook her head. I shrugged and figured I had made the effort to be chivalrous—now I could clean up completely.

I then read out my ode to the pie.

It was a comic piece. Before writing I’d figured that the rest of the class would be tackling hunger from a negative perspective. Thinking outside the box I’d tackled the subject of hunger from a different point of view. I’d written a humorous ode, lavishing stupendous and exaggerated praise on a simple savoury pastry.

The response made me realise I had shown a full house—and all of them picture cards. Laughter shook the window frames. By the time the reading was finished the applause was loud enough to make me blush. If we’d been playing poker I would have been reaching for the stack of chips and pulling them towards my pot.

But someone with a better hand would have stopped me. The poet by my side read her piece. Carefully, she laid out a royal flush.

I almost felt guilty for having written a comical piece. Whilst I’d been writing daft rhymes about pies, she’d been creating the most moving story about having spent time on the streets, knowing a hunger so fierce it felt lethal, and describing a severity of starvation that I never wanted to know. The class cynic by my side wiped something from his eye.

And, as the rest of the class applauded and praised her, I mentally pushed the chips toward the poet.

And I mention all of this for two reasons:

I mention it firstly, to show that we all work in different ways. Given a piece of bread to explore three of us produced three vastly different pieces of work. Whilst I’d tried to think outside the box to earn the empty accolade of having the day’s best piece of writing, I hadn’t stood a chance against a brilliant poet who had been properly inspired. And, such was the quality of her writing, I didn’t mind taking second place.

Secondly, I mention this as a reminder that we can all take different things from inspiration. The tutor’s exercise was genius because all of us were so familiar with bread that considering it through all five senses was something we hadn’t tried in ages.

And I mention it thirdly to set the following exercise.

Kiss someone. Consider all five senses during the kiss: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Then, go and write erotica for fifteen minutes. It doesn’t matter whether you write male/male, male/female, female/female or any combination of men, women or transgendered characters. Spend fifteen minutes writing on the subject of arousal.

Ashley Lister
March 2008

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"The Write Stuff" © 2008 Ashley Lister. All rights reserved.

About the Author: Ashley Lister is a UK author responsible for more than two-dozen erotic novels written under a variety of pseudonyms.His most recent work, Swingers: True Confessions from Today's Modern Swinging Scene (Virgin Books), a non-fiction book recounting the exploits of UK swingers, is his first title published under his own name.
Ashley’s non-fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines, including Forum, Chapter & Verse and The International Journal of Erotica. Nexus, Chimera and Silver Moon have published his full-length fiction, with shorter stories appearing in anthologies edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Rachel Kramer Bussel and Mitzi Szereto. He is very proud to be a regular contributor to ERWA.
Email: Ashley Lister
Website: www.ashleylister.co.uk

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