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Dishing It Out and Sucking It Up: Critique and Reviews

by | September 13, 2012 | | 14 Comments

There is a general perception that our genre is an embattled one, unfairly ostracized and intellectually snubbed for the explicitness of what we write and the sexual arousal that our texts seek to invoke in the reader.

But it is not entirely fair to lay the cause for all the derision layered upon the genre at that door alone.  Nor is it useful, since you and I are not going to stop writing erotic literature, and the Western world is (GOP convention aside) becoming more and more inured to the shock of sexual explicitness.  We have a generation of teenagers growing to adulthood who’ve been watching porn on the net for years.  I’ve just finished the first season of Spartacus, which has, I’m convinced, set off a new craze for fucking up against walls.

A serious and completely resolvable part of why we’re looked down upon has to do with the quality of writing pervading the genre.  Remember that a huge number of readers meet their first erotica on blogs and listserves and other places where no editorial oversight takes place.  The quality of much of our published work is certainly no worse than a lot of bestselling thrillers, which is neither a boast nor a criticism. But then, the thriller genre doesn’t have the added challenge of overcoming social stigma as well.

One of the best ways we can hope to raise the standard of writing in this genre is by critical engagement with the work. As givers and receivers of clear, fair, constructive criticism.

Most people fear criticism. They have a very hard time separating themselves from their work. This is especially true for erotica where much of the subject matter may be partially autobiographical or may hint at the writer’s own sexual tastes.  I don’t have any pat solutions for this. I think only time and acclimatization take away the sting of a rough crit or review.

But I’d like to ask you to think of it another way.  Wholly positive and laudatory crits or reviews of your work will never make you a better writer. They may make you a more confident human being, but that shouldn’t be the business we are in here. We should be in the business of improving our craft and the genre as a whole, not nurturing the egos of our fellow writers.

Critiques and reviews are two different things, and I’d like to make those differences clear. A critique is done upon an unpublished work where changes can be made to the text before publication. A review is a response to an already published work, which will not, usually, be subject to change.

Critiques

Critiques are a cooperative process embarked upon with a view to making the work stronger. The target audience for a critique is primarily the writer, and sometimes other writers who read it and identify mistakes that they also make.  Finally, critiques are a strong learning tool for the critiquer, because you can often see the flaws in the writing of others that you find hard to see in your own.  But the process teaches you how to look for those flaws in your writing later.

Critiques should point out both the weaknesses and strengths in the writing.  They can be as practical as finding spelling, typing and grammar errors, address issues of voice, style, POV, characterization, motivation, plot structure, poetics, believability and realism, and, to some extent, intended meaning.

Subject matter is not the purview of a critique. What I mean by that is, if heavy BDSM generally offends you and you feel that you cannot see past that to read the work with a modicum of objectivity, you have no business critting it.  On the other hand, if you find the subject matter so arousing that you cannot overcome your wholly positive feelings, then, again, you’re probably not the right person to give the piece a strong critique.

In any case, it is always polite to start a crit by owning any factors that might cause your criticism to be overly subjective. “I loved this story and found it so erotic, I’m not sure if I was able to give it the critical eye it deserves,” or “I’m afraid that I’ve always found watersports profoundly disturbing, so what I have to offer might be coloured by that limitation.”

There is no such thing as a wholly objective criticism, but we have a framework of solid aspects of good story structure and good writing practice to help us be as objective as possible.

In giving a crit, you are entering into a partnership with the writer, where the shared goal is to make the work the best it can be. It isn’t a kindness to overlook errors with a view to nurturing a new writer.  It gives them a false sense of security that will, inevitably, be blow apart at a later date, to their dismay and you won’t be there to take part of the pain. It’s not nice to set someone up for an ambush, which is exactly what you’re doing.

Finally, offering solutions to problems in the work can be problematic. For beginners, it can be very helpful because they don’t yet have the craft to figure out how to fix the problem themselves. For more advanced writers, an offer of a solution can sometimes seem like an offer to re-write their work and appropriate their story.  On the other hand, I always like them, and will sometimes ask for them. There are multiple was to solve a problem and the more I know, the wider my options are.

Taking criticism is as much an art as giving it. There are a number of things it is good to keep in your mind: the person giving you the crit is doing you a service that is entirely voluntary and aimed at allowing you to produce a better piece.  Even if you disagree entirely with their critique and implement none of the changes suggested, you need to acknowledge that this person is a reader. Their reaction is a reaction to your text. So if they have ‘misread’, you need to acknowledge that other readers might, too.  Yes, of course, all texts can have multiple readings, but if your critiquer’s reading strays too far from your intended meaning, then there is a problem you need to fix.

Yes, all critiques are subjective, but so is your writing, and so is a reader’s reading. We are in the very business of eliciting subjective reactions in readers, so not all subjectivity makes a criticism invalid.  And positive subjective readings can be – in fact, usually are – far more misleading than negative ones. Positive feedback is wonderful, but it doesn’t actually improve your work. And that’s what you’ve gone into the process to do, isn’t it?

Ultimately, the writer is responsible for their work.  It comes out under their name. So the choice to take and implement any given criticism is yours. It is very hard for another writer not to want to read something the way they would have written it.  It’s just the nature of the beast.  As a receiver of a critique, you need to decide what to keep, what to change, based upon a voice that is true to you.

Reviews

Reviews should not be aimed at the author. The target audience is potential readers of the work, or readers who have already read it and want to compare their reading experience with the review.  Both are equally rich interactions with the work.

There are a lot of shoddy reviews out there, and I’m not particularly skilled at them myself.  But the basic aim of a review is to contextualize the published work for a reader, give them some options for how to approach it, highlight elements that the reader might miss. The point of it is to enrich the reading experience, not to ruin it.

Often good reviews will survey a particular author’s work in the context the author’s entire oeuvre, or they may address it the context of other works within the genre.  Rarely does a review address the novel in its entirety. Once past the short synopsis, reviewers will pick out and discuss the dominant themes in the novel. But I’ve seen amazing reviews that only addressed the writer’s use of poetics, or archetypal characters.  A review of a book doesn’t need to be everything to everyone

Any review that starts with “I hate BDSM and I hated this BDSM novel” is not really a review at all.  Similarly, “I don’t usually read m/m romances and now I know why,” is a sign that the reviewer did not approach the novel with an open mind.  One of the reasons why many of the recent literary reviews of Fifty Shades of Grey are so illegitimate is because they off by stating that they don’t think explicit sex has any place in a novel.

If you’ve never written a review of erotica, I urge you to consider doing it.  The rise in the phenomenon of the user-review and its varied implications is a topic too long for this already huge post.

However, before you give your writer-friend five stars and a glowing review because she’s your friend and you love her and she wants to sell her books, please consider the cumulative consequences of doing so. It does not serve our genre, and doesn’t encourage excellence in writing.  There is no such thing as a perfect book, and so there should be no such thing as a perfect review.

Solid critical reviews are a tremendous compliment to the author. Someone has taken the time to truly care about your work and deep-read it. No author should be upset that someone has pointed out the flaws in their book. Every book has flaws. And having a reader know what they are in advance will often lessen the impact of them. “Well, the character of the husband is weak, but I knew that was going to be the case. Read on.”

Our genre desperately needs us to take it more seriously.  We need solid criticism and robust reviews. We need to believe that we are strong enough to take them, and to stop thinking that every negative criticism is going to imperil our existence. It won’t.

But, most of all, we need to believe we are worthy of being treated as equals within the larger literary community.

Finishing What You Started

by | August 15, 2012 | | 5 Comments


Last month, fate and a friend gave me an ultimatum: finish my novel, Beautiful Losers, or lose the opportunity to see it published by a prestigious press.

As much as I say I don’t care about being published, the confrontation was a reality check. Was I going grab opportunity by the balls and get this book out there, or let it wallow in the digital swamp forever? Was I a competent writer or just a pretender?  It seems, to my surprise, that a deadline is my friend.

So I finished it: the four final chapters in two weeks.  Admittedly, I had known how the book would end for over a year (come on, you KNOW how it ends), but the motivation to sit my butt down and write it had eluded me.

I suspect I’m not alone in this strange hesitation to close what’s been opened.  Some writers fervently create and cling to outlines as a way of making sure they push themselves to the last period.  I sequentially put my inability to finish down to a lack of planning, a fear of saying goodbye to the characters, a lack of discipline as a writer, etc.

It turns out that none of these were the problem at all.  My problem was a fear to revisit a level of writing that I believed I had surpassed. I didn’t want to spend time in the pool of my own earlier inadequacies.

But when the two-week deadline forced me to get my head back into the work, I found a vibrant, optimistic, and charming voice there. Perhaps a little over-exuberant, perhaps a little addicted to adverbs, but nothing that a stiff bout of editing could not cure.  I made peace with the fact that this was a younger writer.

So here, for what it is worth, is the recipe to how I edited and finished the book:

  1. Chapterize the objectives
    I knew how the story would end, but I knew I would lose interest in doing the job if I thought about it to much.  So I didn’t really outline the ending. I simply typed sentences of WHERE the story needed to be at that point.  That would allow me to be creative about how the characters got there, but still forced me to get there.
  2. Revise and Edit.
    I knew one of the challenges was going to be getting back into the headspace, storyspace and the voice of the story. I spent one whole week revising and editing the first 50,000 words.  When I say ‘one week’, I don’t mean a 40 hour week. I figure this phase took me about 70 hours.

    a.     First read through with a pen in hand, noting every time I winced or shuddered and why.

    b.     First edit to fix discontinuities or plot issues that needed earlier strengthening. I used my notes from the first read-through and would jump back to shore up character traits, reactions, settings.  I fixed any discontinuity issues, and sometimes I added nuance. Dialed down foreshadowing in places, strengthened it in others.

    c.      The second edit was all about language: grammar, punctuation and style. I have a propensity to over-use certain words, phrases and sentence structures.  I used http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp to identify repetitions.  Then I’d search for the word and fascistically decide if it really needed to be there at all, or if a synonym might do (‘very’ and ‘really’ are two of my sick addictions). I also searched the whole document for *ly . I looked at every adverb. Did it need to be there? Was there a better verb?

    d.     Read-through again for fluidity.  I work on a mac, so I use the read-aloud function, but you could easily just force yourself to read aloud.  I listened for jarring rhythm, overly long sentences, and anything that interfered with smooth reading.  It also is good for listening critically to dialogue.  I corrected as I went along.

  3. Write the final chapters.
    By then, I was deeply into the zone. I felt comfortable about the tone of the writing and wasn’t so worried that the last chapters would sound too different, writing-wise.
  4. Repeat step 2 a, b, c and d with the new writing.
  5. Last read-through.
    At this point, I knew I wouldn’t recognize a good novel if it crawled up my nose and took a bite out of my brain. All I was concerned with was ensuring it held together fairly well.
  6. Other eyes.
    I sent out a call for beta-readers. Luckily, because I had serialized Beautiful Losers on my blog,  there were many people willing to read the draft, because they wanted to know the ending. In exchange, I asked them to note down any typos, grammatical errors, and anything else that really jarred them storywise.
  7. Went through all the crits, reader by reader, and corrected any errors they found. Thanked the readers profusely.

This did not make the perfect novel. And, had I had the time, there were some plot structure things I would have liked to change, but my two weeks were up and my deadline loomed. I sent the MS in to the publisher.

In an even midly sane world, I would have really liked a professional editor, but I knew I didn’t have the time to work with one.  I would have received great feedback and been unable to incorporate it. And I knew that would make me feel like shit.

I’m pretty sure there is a better way to finish a novel. But this was the way I did it. I hope there is something of value in my experience for other writers.

Why Fifty Shades of Grey Matters

by | July 14, 2012 | | 28 Comments

Vanessa Redgrave as the masochistic nun
in Ken Russell’s The Devils

On the social consumption of sin as spectacle & its exploitation in the marketplace

I’ve run across a number of erotica writers who’ve said they haven’t and won’t be reading Fifty Shades of Grey.  In all honestly, this blows my mind. You can try to dismiss it, as many critics have, by calling it ‘mommy porn’. You can deplore its writing style – lord knows, even die-hard fans don’t attempt to defend the poor quality of the prose. But you can’t ignore the fact that it has now sold over 20 Million copies in the US. In the UK it became the fastest selling novel of all time.

As writers, it is important for us to interrogate its success and to attempt to understand what it means for the genre, for levels of explicitness in mainstream fiction, and for the way publishers are going to inevitably behave in the light of it.

I have a theory.

Less than three years ago, some very prominent writers and agents in the publishing world told me, flatly, that there was no market for erotica. It was unsaleable. It was a niche product that held little interest for them and would tick along at its own obscure pace. You can put sex in your murder mystery, or your sci-fi novel, or your romance, they said. But a straight-up erotic novel, with sexual desire as a central theme, was simply not saleable.

But they were wrong. I think that the rising levels of explicit sexuality in film, television, and the ubiquity of porn on the web meant that there was a large mainstream audience whose tolerance for and interest in fiction with heavy erotic content had been growing for years. And it is a comment on just how out of touch mainstream publishers have been with their market that, with a very few exceptions that were associated with individual authors, they did not cotton onto it. Many, many well written erotic novels, with good character development and credible plots, came across their desks and they slush-piled them.

Along comes Fifty Shades of Grey. A novel that started off as Twilight fanfic, and gained a considerable devoted audience within that context. Its author, E.L. James, is a retired television executive who had some advantages over most erotica writers. She knew the media landscape and the concept of ‘audience’ very well. She understood her own work as ‘marketable property’. She had a keen sense of how to pitch the work just right to convince publishers that they should reconsider their ambivalence toward erotica. But mostly, I think she had an instinctive understanding of how a mainstream public needed to find engagement with kinky sex, while providing them with a moral escape clause.

Fifty Shades of Grey does an interesting dance with the explicit. It revels in the details of the taboo of BDSM while seeming to condemn it. Like the torrid pseudo-journalistic pieces written about Tiger Woods’ illicit affair, it whispers to a rather creepy corner of the mainstream psyche which has a propensity to enjoy the titillation inherent in a sin while, at the same time, censuring Mr. Woods for being such a faithless bastard.

And many, many readers love this. They can masturbate furiously to the scenes played out in the Red Room of Pain, while waiting for the heroine to cure Mr. Grey of his perversions.

 I am reminded of the masses who enjoyed the spectacle of the Salem Witch Trials or denunciations of heretics during the Spanish Inquisition. 

“She consorted lewdly with the Devil!” the inquisitor proclaims, partly for the judges but loudly enough to entertain the masses. He lovingly details the proof of her perfidy. The women gasp and feel a quiver between their thighs right before they all scream, “Burn the witch!” If you’ve never seen Ken Russell’s “The Witches“, based on the historical events of the trials of the witches in Loudun, France, in 1634, you should. He understood and then illustrated the eroticism and hypocrisy that plays out in these sorts of public discourse on morality and sin with an insight that few others have.

I don’t think a large portion of mainstream society has evolved much since then. And for erotica writers, who usually situate themselves firmly in the sex-positive camp, this is very hard to comprehend. We write novels about how erotic experience and the exploration of new sexual territories helps us grow as individuals. For us, sex in a doorway. Very often our themes are about revelation, completion, redemption through experience. Not through shame or rejection or closing down our sexual options.

From the point of view of mainstream publishers, Fifty Shades of Grey is simply a very successful product. In the last year, in the editorial boardrooms in London and New York, large publishers have spent time analyzing the success of the novel and figuring out how they can get on the bandwagon.  They may not be risk-takers when it comes to new literary product anymore, but they’re damn good post-game quarterbackers. The moral dynamics that underlie FSOG will not have escaped them, nor will the poor quality of the writing.

If you had hoped to produce a ‘better written Fifty Shades’: “Thirty Shades of Grammar” or “Eighty Shades of Character Development” or “Twenty-Six Shades of Plot”, I don’t think your efforts are going to be appreciated.  Publishers have proof that the vast majority of people who have bought, read and enjoyed the series simply don’t care about the quality of the writing.  In fact, its very hamfistedness may play a subtextual role in convincing the reader of Anastasia’s innocence and her genuine desire to cure the perverted Mr. Grey.

Of course, in the over 40 million world-wide readers, some of them will wish for and seek out better written erotica. And there will be some who are emotionally and sexually honest enough to admit the BDSM in the novel was what drew them to it and felt unaccountably let down when the heroine finally succeeds in leading Mr. Grey into the vanilla light.  It will not be a large percentage of them. And, consequently, there will be something of an upsurge in erotica sales for years to come.

But I don’t believe it will be the explosion we are hoping for. I genuinely hope I’m wrong in this, but I don’t think I am. Nonetheless, we may have gained a few more intrepid souls.

Stepping Outside Yourself

by | June 13, 2012 | | 5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, Jean Roberta wrote a marvelous post on what it’s like to sit on the other side of the desk and act as editor. It got me thinking about some specific aspects of how I teach writing in class, and the flaws I see on a fairly frequent basis in the writing of even well published authors.

I’ve bemoaned the demise of the old-style editor before. When I hear accounts of writers being edited today by editors at their publishing houses, I find it sort of chilling. There was a time when every manuscript submitted to an agent or a publisher was considered to be ‘in the raw’. There was an understanding that each piece of creative writing could benefit from a good, stern editor. But in those days, editors weren’t proof readers or line editors; they were more like distillers of fine perfume, taking fresh, recent blooms and turning them into rare essences. They were often writers themselves who had subsumed their own aspirations in order to make other people’s writing better.  But most of all they were readers. They could spot the difference between a brave stylistic approach and a mistake a mile off. To have this kind of regard – love, even – for another’s work is an unusual calling.

Those days are, for the most part, over. If you want your writing (not just your spelling or your grammar) to be good, you’re going to have to do the bulk of this work yourself.  A considerable amount of it you can simply avoid at the outset, by interrogating your plan before you start writing.  Some of it you need to do after you have finished the work and have allowed it to sit for a while, once you have some distance from it.

Different editors have different hot buttons.  I have two major ones: unbelievable characters and bad dialogue.

People will often say that you should separate yourself from your writing. That a bad review is not a bad review of you, but of the work. The difficulty with both the problems above is that they can sometimes point to the psychology of the writer, rather than a flaw in the writing. These are dangerous waters, but fertile, also.

Let us be honest, all the characters we write are, in some small way, part of us.  Just by virtue of the fact that we create them, this must be true.  There’s no use saying this is bad practice and we should stop it.  It does help if you are writing, for example, main characters with a gender different to your own, or a large age gap, but not much. We invest ourselves into our characters like Geppetto breathed life into Pinocchio. We can’t write living characters unless we imbue them with our lifeforce, but if we invest too much in them, we impede their potential to be ‘all that they can be’ and we are reticent to see them put at the kind of external and internal risk that makes for really good conflict in a story.

One of the first exercises I give to my writing students is designed to allow them the pleasure of writing themselves as characters. I ask them to write a portrait of a character who could easily be them.  Go to town on it, I say. Give your character all the attributes you think you have, wish you had, or hope you have. Make them beautiful, sexy, clever, agile, strong, virile, courageous, rich, etc.

Now think of the most awful, most humiliating, most unfair or tragic thing that could happen to them. They could lose all their hair overnight. They could find out they have HIV. They could suffer from a bout of explosive diarrhea at the dinner table in front of their date. Whatever it is you most fear, take your character there and put them through it.

Next, write a scene in which your character willingly, consciously does something absolutely reprehensible to you.  Make them steal, lie, cheat, sell themselves on the street for $20.  Whatever it is you think would be the worst thing that you could do in life, put your character there and make them do it. Don’t make it something they have no choice about – don’t allow them to be the innocent victims of circumstance. Write them doing it willingly.

These are some of the hardest pieces of writing my students ever do.  You cannot imagine how violently they balk.  Well, in fact, if you try these exercises, you probably will. And if you find this easy to do, then you probably didn’t need to do the exercises.  But I will bet most of you will find it very hard. I know I do – I always do.

But once you’ve done it the first time, you never forget how to get yourself over the hump of reticence to really put your character at risk. You know you’ve done it and can do it again. And every new beloved character you create will be freer to be what they need to be in your story afterwards.

The other big problem for me is dialogue. I read a lot of stilted, unnatural dialogue, and not just in my student work. I find it lurking in places it has no business being: between the covers of books published by some of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses in the world.

Bad dialogue is written by people who don’t listen.  I have noticed that as writers grow older, usually, their dialogue gets much better. Steven King used to write atrocious dialogue. So did William Gibson. Now, both those authors write wonderful, vibrant, realistic interchanges between their characters.

The cure for this is eavesdropping.  Get yourself to a place where you can overhear conversations and listen, and watch. It’s not helpful to do this in social situations where you know most of the people there. Because our prior knowledge and our relationships can deeply interfere with our objectivity. So, public spaces with a lot of strangers is the best option. Coffee shops and quiet bars are good because people often go there for the express purpose of talking. Notice how we speak to each other. Notice how, the closer we are to our conversation partner, the more telegraphic and abbreviated the sentences become. Notice how people establish their social position by what they say and how they say it. Notice how people put ‘spin’ on the ideas and opinions they’re trying to promote.

The second part of the exercise is observation. And for this, you need to be able to put yourself somewhere you can stare at people. Which is why I love airports. People are stuck there for hours. Everyone is people-watching.

A great deal of our communication is nonverbal. Watch interactions between people. Look at the space they make or close between themselves and others. Look at the way they tilt their heads, nod encouragements to continue, apologize. Departure areas and arrival areas are interesting, too. How people say goodbye, how they meet. Not just what they say, but how their bodies speak. Those meetings and partings are hardly ever the cliched tearful farewells or ecstatic embraces of welcome you expect. I once saw a woman say goodbye to her departing husband at the entrance to the international departure area. All her gestures to him were exactly what you’d expect, but the minute he walked through the doors, the relief on her face and in her body was shockingly obvious. And I’m sure you can guess just how fertile my mind grew after seeing that.

Finally – this is the hardest one – take a trip down memory lane to the most painful interchanges you’ve ever had with others. Force yourself past what you felt, to get to what you heard, and then to what was actually said. What words, inflections, gestures triggered the most discomfort in you? There is a clear mechanism at work there. You need to find it. You need to discover how word-choice, inflection, context and back-story fed into the ways that you were vulnerable to those interchanges. Words can open us up, but they can also close us down.

Both these sets of exercises may help to make your writing better, truer and stronger. Both involve a significant amount of self-examination and there is undoubtedly going to be discomfort.  But I’m a firm believer that good writing is seldom painless.  In fact, I have a theory about the link between masochism and good writing, but that’s another post.

Are we Dead Yet?

by | May 13, 2012 | | 15 Comments

I’ve been fortunate to have played host on my blog to a very interesting discussion on the rise in popularity of ‘cipher’ characters – protagonists who are blank slates. The most topical one at the moment is Anastasia – the female main character in Fifty Shades of Grey. She is, by no means, the only one.  Increasingly, I’m coming across characters, in both erotica and in erotic romance, who have no goals, no aspirations, no talents, no agency. This is especially true when it comes to sexually submissive characters.

It goes against everything I was taught as a writer, and against all the most celebrated literary characters who are held up as exemplars of brilliant characterization.  And yet these novels are wildly popular. Too popular to simply discount as literary flukes. Too well-liked to attribute their popularity to a readership lacking in discernment.

I think it behooves us as writers to examine how it became not only acceptable, but desirable to deliver up protagonists with no personality, no agency.  And then to examine what has happened in our culture to support or encourage this change. Finally, I think we are required to consider the ramifications of this shift.

As interactive media evolved, it allowed for a very different kind of relationship between the story and the consumer.  There were always role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, but the rise of the computer game enabled the creation of story-space that required the immersion and active participation of the player.  The once maligned 2nd Person POV became a necessary narrative device for interactive gaming.  Writing games necessitated the author to, in essence, make a hole in the storyworld where the player could insert themselves, and allow enough flexibility of plot to make the player feel like he or she had invested enough agency to care about the outcome of the story/game.

Post-modernism greatly influenced many aspects of creative content creation.  There was a thorough democratization of the validity and worth of opinion and experience. Expertise, craftsmanship, authority of the subject were rejected in favour of the lived experience of the common man/woman.  Entertainment types like reality TV have become very popular, valorizing the experience of the everyman – and turning it into spectacle. It also is very cheaply produced entertainment. It doesn’t require a lot of the creative expertise of earlier forms – actors, writers, set designers, etc.

From a literary theory perspective, the rise of new ways of understanding the author’s role in the narrative exchange between the text and the reader forced us to examine where meaning-making lies. And in the latter half of the 20th century, it was generally agreed that the reader played a much greater part in the reader-text-writer relationship than previously acknowledged. Readers internalize the written text and then, essentially, re-write it into their own experience.  This allows novels to have the intensely personal impact that they have on us.

This has influenced writing enormously. Writers began to accept their roles as proposers of fictionality rather than transferrers of truths, and attempted to write increasingly more ‘open’ texts, in which the reader was left to formulate conclusions themselves.  It no longer matters what the novel meant to the writer as he or she wrote it. Now all that matters is what it means to the reader through the filter of their interpretation.

So, in a way, it’s not all that surprising that startlingly vapid characters like Anastasia, are as popular as they are.  As one commenter on my blog said: “I like to immerse myself into what I’m reading and imbue characters with my own thoughts and ideas.” And what better way to do this than to provide the reader with an essentially empty vessel? As another commenter wrote: “…she will be easy to step into as an identity character because so little of her is really fleshed out.”

 It occurs to me that this is a reflection of a greater sociological polarization.  Not only does it seem we are, as a factionalized society, unwilling to listen to an opposing argument or consider that any part of it might be valid, but now we can no longer even tolerate the fictional portrayal of characters who cannot be easily made into ourselves.

It would be foolish not to acknowledge that there are deeply feminist implications in the rise in popularity of female characters who have no goals or aims or aspirations other than to be a compliment to the male protagonist in the story, but I don’t really want to get into that discussion.

The desire for empty vessels into which we can insert ourselves literarily has broader implications that go beyond gender.  At its heart, this relates to a society in which individuals have no interest in the experiences of others.  It is not enough to sympathize with or be co-travelers on a character’s fictional journey. We have to have space made for us to be in the starring role.  And I have to wonder whether this is a fundamental product of a consumer culture in which the customer’s voice is, ostensibly, the only one that matters. Have we had our consumer egos pandered to with such intensity, that we cannot tolerate the other, the alien, the different?  If it is not our story, is it unconsumable to us now?

I think Barthes was simply a little premature. The ‘Death of the Author’ did not occur when we relinquished the role of meaning making to readers. But when writers can no longer write rich, complex, evolved main characters and are compelled, if they want to be popular, to write empty vessels instead, then it really is the death of the author.

It is fairly easy to program a computer to spit out a sequence of fictional events. And certainly, most of the scenarios we create in fiction are not all that new.  The thing that afforded writers creative space was to write interesting characters who transgressed through those familiar landscapes in new and interesting ways. Now, it seems, we are not required to do that either.

Are we dead, yet?

The Voices of Others: Genders, Sexualities and Beyond

by | April 13, 2012 | | 12 Comments

Nikos Kessanlis, The Crowd, 1965

There are some very divergent schools of thought when it comes to the subject of writing in a gender or a sexual orientation other than your own.  Let me paint out the arguments:

1) Don’t do it. Follow the old advice: “write what you know”.

2) Heck, you’re a writer. You can write whatever you feel like.

3) Don’t appropriate the voices of others.  Let them speak for themselves.

4) If you are going to do this, do it with respect and a lot of research.

I’m going to discount the first one. If we only ever ‘wrote what we knew’, there’d never be any sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, horror, etc. I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty staid and it that’s all I wrote about, it would bore people to death.

The second argument has value from an anti-censorship perspective, but doesn’t address issues of quality in writing or social justice. Of course you can write whatever you want: it just may not be any good.

The third argument is a complicated one and deserves some explanation.  With the rise of critical theory in the late 70s, smart people started asking whether it wasn’t just another form of oppression to appropriate the voices of social and cultural minorities for intellectual gratification. 

Feminists argued that men had put words into women’s mouths for far to long already, and should stop it. They pointed to canonical texts: Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc. in which women and their motivations were represented in very flawed manners because these people weren’t women – they had no real understanding of what it meant to be a woman or experience the world through a woman’s eyes.

Similarly, the Post-Colonialists pointed to writers like Kipling – white Englishmen – who put words into the mouths of other members of cultures and races while having little or no understanding of what it means to live under colonial rule. Intellectuals like Edward Said argued that the West had sexualized and fetishized ‘The Orient’, using non-European characters as stereotyped puppets with which to play out their own unrealistic fantasies of a life unfettered by Christian guilt.

Many Queer scholars felt similarly: for far too long, straight writers had stereotyped, misrepresented and even defamed gay, lesbian or bisexual characters to perpetuate mainstream prejudices against homosexuality. Or simply used them as a vehicle with which to dishonestly explore their own repressed same-sex leanings.

This third argument has some real meat. Women, gays and lesbians, and people of other races and religions HAVE been horribly misrepresented in a lot of fiction in the past. I would argue that it’s still happening, especially in film and television.

But at the core of this argument against ‘appropriating’ voices is the belief that we, as humans, do not have the flexibility of mind to adequately imagine what it must be like to be the opposite sex, the other sexual orientation, or wear another’s skin. It says: we cannot walk in each other’s shoes enough to write the voices of ‘others’ convincingly and fairly.

This is why, ultimately, I come down on the side of argument number four.  As a writer, I have to believe that, with enough intimate knowledge, research and respect, I CAN know what it is like to see through the eyes of another, to feel through their skin.. because, if I can’t, then all the fiction I write that is not autobiographical is illegitimate.

I cannot write with the voice of, say, an African American gay man without considerable effort. I can’t rely on gut instincts or assumptions about what it might be like to grow up as black and gay. I have to enter this territory with an initial acknowledgement that I lack  fundamental experience of what that life is like. But I can find out. I can ask. I can research and explore and learn and use that learning to write something approaching legitimacy.

My argument stems from the fact that it is not safe to assume I know what any other straight, white female’s life is like, either.  Some of our experiences might have commonalities, but there will be a tremendous amount of divergence between the lives of ANY two people.

And so, my advice is really very simple: never write ‘types’.  Never start your story with, for instance, a character that is ‘a lesbian woman in her early 30s’. Base your characters on individuals you have known and known well. Look at their personalities as a whole – not just their ‘Queerness’, their ‘Islamicness’ or their ‘Maleness’. People are more than just their gender or race or sexuality. In fact, it may be that the part of them that makes them different from you plays a surprisingly small part in the way they define themselves. 

This is the basic advice that is given for character development for any kind of fiction, but when it comes to writing the other, we often forget it. We rely on generalizations, classifications, and information chunking when we venture into the unfamiliar. It’s a basic human instinct to do it and, on a daily basis, it makes life navigable.

But when you write in the voice of the ‘other’, more is expected of you. The ‘other’ should never really be the ‘other’; they should be an individual first, with a name, a body and a fully fleshed identity, before their ‘otherness’ even begins to play a part in your understanding of the character.

Madness, Shame and the Reason We Write on the Edge

by | March 13, 2012 | | 6 Comments

Today I ran across an artifact. It’s a letter written in 1985, by Charles Bukowski to the journalist Hans van den Broek, responding to the news that his book, ‘Tales of Ordinary Madness’ had been banned from a public library.

He wrote: “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.”

I’m surprised that no one, as yet, has written on the ERWA blog about PayPal’s pressure on eBook sellers to remove erotica containing taboo subjects such as incest, pseudo incest, bestiality, underaged sex and rape.

Finding this letter in the middle of what is happening today was strangely poignant. We are still in a world where people hide actualities from themselves. We don’t really like the fact that some people find fiction that disgusts us erotic.

It is very easy to look at those taboo labels and wonder who in their right might would ever find any of it erotic? Aren’t they sick, deviant, in need of psychological care? It turns out that over 40% of women have rape fantasies.  The average age of first sexual intercourse is 17.  One of the primary reasons why we find tales of werewolves so appealing is the eroticism of their beast-like nature.

When writers write on transgressive topics, especially when they look at them through an erotic lens, they are digging deep into the darker recesses of our subconscious.  They bring things into the light that may scare and fascinate us in equal measure.

I remember watching a film called ‘The Collector’ when I was young.  Based on the novel by John Fowles, it’s the story of an obsessive butterfly collector who decides to kidnap and keep a girl. I found it both incredibly frightening and inexplicably erotic. I was very ashamed by the fact that it turned me on. I was equally ashamed that I got so wet watching late night reruns of Fay Wray screaming and struggling in King Kong.

I admit it. I really did wonder how he was going to fit that enormous ape cock into little itty bitty Fay. Turned me on no end just thinking about it.

It wasn’t until I was a middle-aged woman that I decided to bring that shame into the light of day, or rather onto the page, and examine it.  I realized that I wasn’t equating my fantasies with the real world.  Having experienced real rape, I can assure you, it’s horrific.  And yet, although the words I used for the fantasies I had pertained to real acts in the real world, their fantasy counterparts were entirely different. Unrealistic, and yet full of semiotic meaning.

What I have concluded was that I had taken realities in the world around me and re-encoded them, appropriated them, retold the stories they way I wanted. And isn’t that, in a way, what a lot of fiction is about?

Murder mysteries aren’t celebrations of the act of murder. Intergalactic wars aren’t celebrations of holocausts.  Historical romances don’t revel in the awful realities of women’s lack of agency and power in the 18th Century. Fiction allows us to retell the things that fascinate and terrify us in ways we can absorb, be thrilled by, enjoy.

I can’t claim to really understand why fiction with edgier taboos turns some people on. I just know it does. As I writer, I am interested in examining why it does. How we take those horrors into ourselves and somehow reprocess them into other things. Words give me the freedom and the safety to get inside the phenomena and dissect it. I think we can learn very important things about ourselves when we write or read those dissections.

I think fiction is a good place to recognize our inexplicable strangeness, to acknowledge that we have unaccountable feelings and ideas.  And history has taught me that we are at our worst when we decide there are things we shouldn’t talk about.

The Landscape of Language

by | February 13, 2012 | | 5 Comments

Most people, and many writers, conceive of writing as a craft. Concrete metaphors of woodworking, pottery, gardening all come up when people talk about the process of writing. They are all helpful models for understanding the approaches people take to writing.

It should follow then that, if we learn and practice our techniques, if we become discerning experts at judging the quality of the raw materials (the language), if we make a full investigation of the market (our target readers), then there is no reason why writing should not be easy. And yet it is never easy.

This is not to say that good grammar, clever plotting, insightful characterization and a deft hand with dialogue don’t contribute to producing a good story. But you can and probably have executed all those things in a story and still end up with something that doesn’t quite shine.

Why is that?

Well, mostly because you can teach students ‘technique’ until the cows come home and only a handful of them will become really good writers. You can conceptualize language as a raw material, but it’s not stable like wood or clay or soil. And readers are not static, passive receivers of the text. These two aspects of writing are very problematic: language and the reader. What makes them both so challenging is that neither of the buggers will sit still.

When we work with language, we need to acknowledge that it is much more like a living organism than like the materials a craftsman might use. Language is growing and changing all the time, language squirms. A word might have a set meaning for you, here, now, at this very moment, but it may have completely different nuances for the reader. In fact, it always does and, what’s worse, those nuances are different for every reader who encounters your work.

Now, don’t spend too long thinking about that because it’s sure to do your head in and make you consider never writing another word. It’s not meant to make the task of writing sound impossible. It’s meant to remind you to cut yourself some slack when you struggle to write something that just doesn’t want to come out right. It’s meant to remind you to shake your head and smile when, after working so hard and putting your heart into something, the piece isn’t received with the enthusiasm you felt it deserved.

I’m going to make a statement that is very untrendy, very unpopular these days. Writers are artists. We are cartographers of human experience. And that, by its very nature, makes us abstract artists.

And when it comes to writing erotica, writing becomes an even more daunting challenge, because our culture has such a problematic relationship with sex. Even in the midst of all this marketized tits and ass, assailing us from every direction, we live in a culture that very rarely speaks openly and honestly about the erotic. And that very reluctance to speak about it has twisted the thing itself.

Borges in ‘On Rigor in Science’ has likened literature to a map laid atop the landscape of reality. It can’t simply be a reproduction of the landscape or it would have to be as big as the world itself and be of no use as a map. It must, by necessity, be an abstraction, a synecdoche of reality.

When it comes to erotic literature, we’re making maps of a very murky landscape. So many of its features are obscured in the fog of gender war, of shame, of religion, of a positivistic modernism that rejects emotion as unquantifiable and, therefore, irrelevant. Whatever maps we make are going to, by necessity, to be imperfect ones. And the features you decide to highlight in your map may or may not find resonance with the reader.

So yes, technique matters. And yes, experience is useful. But ultimately, you can never control how your reader ‘reads’ your story. You can only hope that your particular map gets into the hands of people who are intrepid explorers. You can only invite the reader to take as much delight as you do, in certain features. Beyond technique and structure, what all good writers have in common is a sincere and genuine obsession for the terrain they are charting.

It’s worth remembering that, although maps can be useful guides, they tell us as much about the mapmaker and the culture she or he lived in as they do about the territory they are surveying. And, even when those maps are no longer of any use as guides, they are beautiful works in themselves. They are artifacts and the people who make them are interpretive artists.

Writing Erotic: lived vs mediated experience

by | January 13, 2012 | | 17 Comments

Ashley Lister is not an easy act to follow, but I thought perhaps I’d offer a post on theory to compliment his wonderful post on practice.

It may have caught your notice, for those who venture over into literary fiction, that writers these days produce some very unerotic, hollow and depressing sex scenes. It would be easy to assume that they can’t write sex, but I suspect their representations are purposely unarousing. So, are they all sex-negative prudes? I don’t think so – I just think they’re scared. But scared of what?

When we read, we are re-writers. We take the words of the text and bring them to life in our minds using our own experiences to flesh out the inner story. When we read about something we’ve never experienced, we hybridize the portions of the events we have experienced and enhance it with whatever information we have that might be close. For instance, we’ve never been in a spaceship, but most of us have been in an elevator, have sat in front of a computer, have looked out a viewing window of some kind. We many never have had an adult erotic spanking experience, but we’ve probably been spanked as children and seen a couple of those vintage postcards. We use whatever frame of reference we have – and then we improvise the rest. Our brain performs a brilliant remix of experience triggered and guided by the words we’re reading on the page. At its simplest level, this is why people are often so angry about film versions of books. They’ve already made the film of the book in their mind as they read it. If the one on the screen doesn’t come close, it’s disappointing.

There are two types of experiences stored in our brains. Lived-experience and mediated. They are all memories – everything is a memory once it’s occurred – but there are memories of the things we have lived through and experienced in our bodies and minds ourselves and memories of information given to us through different forms of media – writing, art, music, photographs, TV, Film, etc. We may know about, say, the Holocaust, from books we’re read, films we’ve seen, documentaries featuring survivors. But these are all mediated experiences of the Holocaust. You can only have a lived-experience of it if you’re a Holocaust survivor. And, as you can imagine, those narratives are fundamentally different. The lived, day-to-day experience is much more intense, but also contains experience of grinding hunger, chronic fear, long stretches of boredom between moments or hours of terror that might not make for an engrossing piece of narrative.

Are you still with me?

Looking back on the canon of erotic literature in the 20th century, many of the writers we think of as the fathers and mothers of our genre are also considered significant literary figures. But Lawrence, Miller, Nin, Nabokov, Duras, Bataille, etc. were all writing in times when the world was not filled with images of sex. You had to make significant efforts to find dirty postcards, bits of illicit film.

In the past, when people read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, or “The Delta of Venus”, the images those erotic passages brought up in their minds were memories of the sex they had experienced or witnessed others having. That’s not a large imaginary encyclopedia to work from, but most of the reference materials were of actual, real sex.

Today, of course, we still have our own experiences from which to draw, but we are also inundated with mediated images of sex. Victoria Secret Catalogues, previous erotic writing we’ve read, sex scenes in movies, amateur porn clips on YouPorn.com, stories our friends or lovers told us.

And of course, we have our own sexual fantasies, which we’ve written, directed and produced using lived experience and all the mediated images of sex we’ve consumed.

So, a great deal of our inner encyclopedia of sex is filled with versions that are mediated. Yes, in porn, the actors are actually penetrating, ejaculating, etc. But they are actors. They are having sex in order to produce a piece of entertainment for others. They fuck in positions that allow camera access. They withdraw and ejaculate where the camera can capture it. This is not how people actually have sex. This is how porn actors producing porn have sex.

Wait, you say, what about amateur porn? That’s real. Well, yes and no. Because the very act of deciding to film yourself having sex changes the intention of the sex. Even amateur porn is obsessed with creampies, gaping pulsing orifices. It is having sex for the purposes of capturing a record of it and showing it. Most amateur porn attempts to reproduce some of the common memes of commercial porn.

The truth is, most people don’t see a lot of real human sexual experience, other than our own. And in that way, we are still a very puritan society indeed.

Why does all this matter to you as a writer of erotic literature? Well, if your goal is to produce erotica primarily as an aid to sexual arousal for masturbation, it really doesn’t.

But why I think a lot of literary writers have shied away from erotic sex scenes is because they believe their job is to write about real and profound human experience, whether dramatic or quotidian, and to trigger reverberations of that profundity in their readers. They resort to writing sex scenes that are hollow, joyless, and dissociative, I suspect, because, as yet, no one has bothered to make a lot of mediated versions of awful sex since it doesn’t have a lot of commercial potential. But we’ve all had the occasional bout of rotten sex. So writing it guarantees that what will be triggered in the reader’s mind is memories of the real.

You may feel, as a writer of erotica, that it’s not important whether the images you trigger are real or mediated, but it is to me. I don’t want to connect with my readers over a landscape of commercialized sex. When they read a piece of my erotic work, I attempt, as far as possible, to ensure that what they’re imagining calls to their real memories and lived abstractions, not a porn flick. Because I feel that the story will resonate at a deeper level if my words are associated with their real, felt, lived erotic experiences.

So, how might one go about trying to write work that triggers lived-experience memories? I think it’s damn hard. I think it’s the biggest single challenge erotica writers have. But I do have some ideas.

First, watch a lot of porn. Then watch it until you’re thoroughly bored. Once it stops arousing you, you can start to see, analytically, where porn sex really differs from lived sexual experiences. Have you ever made those sounds during sex? Given a choice, would you actually choose to have sex in that position? Notice how little full body contact occurs in porn. That’s because it’s no good for the camera. Same with settings. I’ve had sex up against the wall in a dark, cramped cupboard. But there’s no way to show that in porn: there’s not enough lighting and there’s no room for the crew. In a thousand ways, porn sex bears little resemblance to the sex we actually have. But because of its ubiquity, it’s definitely starting to shape the sex we’re told we want.

Since the majority of mediated sexual information we get is visual, make this the least important part of your writing. Visual imagery in text tends to trigger visual memory in readers. I have a suspicion that the absence of visual description in the text may force the reader to rely on other senses for which they only have lived-experience. When you do use visual imagery in your writing, spend time on the visuals that are there in the real world but that are seldom focused on in mediated sex scenes. Our inner minds don’t need filmic lighting, or space for the camera crew.

To a certain extent, sound is featured in mediated versions of sex, but it’s often done with little finesse. You don’t hear much heartbeat or breath in porn, the sheets don’t rustle, the headboard doesn’t bang, joints don’t creak. Avoid the sort of dialogue that you hear in porn between porn actors. I understand that sometimes people really do say ‘Oooh, yeah, baby. Fuck me harder.” But writing it in your fiction dialogue is much more likely to trigger mental auditory memories of people saying it on screen than real utterances during sex.

Taste, smell and touch are all senses that, as yet, we have not been able to remediate. These are wonderful things to focus on in your erotic writing because all your reader has to call on to reproduce these in their interior version of your story is their own real experiences.

It’s helpful to avoid sexual terminology that has been used for ‘classification’ purposes in adult entertainment. If we’ve had lovers from other cultures or with different coloured skin to our own, we don’t think ‘bi-racial’. That person is a person to us. We don’t classify our experience with them into a marketable slot. Similarly, most people who have sexual experiences with members of the same sex don’t think ‘Hey, I’m bi now!’ They just enjoy the person their with. They indulge in the new experiences that this may offer, but they don’t classify it.

The chances are, you know what your readers look like and most of them don’t look like ramp models or porn stars. Spend time really looking at people, their faces, the way they move. Chances are, the people we’ve loved and fucked weren’t celebrity look-alikes, but we found what was beautiful in them in our proximity. A really good photographer once told me: “everyone is beautiful in extreme close-up”. Wrinkles become the landscape of experience; pores become the texture of the living, breathing tactile skin. The fine hairs at the base of the spine become the sensory cilia of anemones. Ripples of flesh become the sea of indulgences.

I honestly think it’s fucking rude to make your female readers wish they were thinner, or your male readers wish they were two inches longer. If you really want your readers to immerse fully in your fiction, don’t present them with characters that they could never imagine themselves being. It sets up subliminal feelings of inadequacy. Which is fine, if that’s what you meant to do. But don’t do it by mistake.

Finally, and if you really feel you’ve got a handle on this, you can play with language – interrupting your readers assumptions when you know they’re likely to mentally reference mediated sexual imagery. BDSM is a really good example. It’s fair to say that most people are not living a BDSM lifestyle. So their understanding of it comes from mass media: Rhianna’s video, Cat Woman, that darkly referenced CSI episode with the Domme, BDSM porn, etc. These are mostly visual. So concentrating on describing what it actually feels like to have a crop hit skin or how the muscles ache when limbs are in bondage, goes much further to bringing your reader into the scene than a visual description or a he did this/she did that. To paraphrase Mitzi Szereto, don’t tell us what happened. Tell us how it felt.

I don’t want to pretend for a moment that writing like this is easy or that I’m all that good at it. I’m not. Because, and this is the real head fuck, I am just as much influenced and affected by the mediated experiences I’ve absorbed in my lifetime as my readers are. Not everything I write about in erotic fiction are things I’ve lived either. But please don’t despair; once you’ve started to interrogate your own creative imagination, you can often identify the sources of your internal data quite easily. Just being aware of this empowers your choices as a writer. Also – and this is vital – don’t try to use this critical approach on a first draft. Write your story draft first and then play ‘spot the mediated porn memes’ in the editing stages. Otherwise, you can easily begin to suffer from total creative paralysis.

I think the prospect of arousing your reader not simply at a genital level, but at an existential level, makes the challenge worth the effort. And we, as erotic writers are a brave and intrepid bunch. Literary writers who won’t write erotic sex scenes are, in my view, cowards for not, at least, attempting to integrate the erotic into their work and giving its proper and important place in writing the human experience.

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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