A long, long time ago, in a land far, far away, there was a guy named Nietzsche who had a hell of a time getting people to spell his name correctly. He also had an unfortunate way voicing his opinions that makes him, to this day, rather annoying to read. However, all that aside, some of his ideas were so phenomenally clever (some of them were crap, too, but we’ll leave that for now) that they radically influenced almost all the European thinkers that came after him. And they do, to this day, as anyone who has read Camille Paglia (another thinker with an awkward mode of address) can attest to.

Nietzsche wanted to get past the whole, very Judeo-Christian good/bad divide. He wanted to explore what forces were working on man to account for the way they behaved. Living during a time when people had begun to fear their cultural spirit was flabby and weak, he could see that a great many people were just too civilized for their own boots. And being trained in the classics, he reflected back on his early education and came up with the concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic. He felt (probably because he didn’t know much about how appallingly Greeks treated women and slaves) that the Ancient Greeks had found a much better balance between their instinctual selves and their civilized yearnings.

What the hell has this got to do with erotica? Bear with me.

Apollonian forces are all the civilizing factors that allow us to get along with each other. They favour control over nature, discipline over instinct, rational thought over emotional drive. Dionysian forces are… you know, the opposite: chaos over order, instinct over culture, creative, libidinous, wild, violent, etc.

At the center of every good erotic story is a battle between the Dionysian and Apollonian forces within the characters. This is how great erotica manages to have conflict without writing a sub-plot about battling Nazi zombies.

Now, you might think that something like modern porn is wholly Dionysian – it’s all about giving in to base instincts and indulging in wild pleasures, right? But step back. Porn does have a hidden Apollonian side to it. Porn tells you HOW to fuck. It shows you what you should look like, act like, sound like. It offers a ‘fuck ideal’. Although you may not notice that with your hand around your dick, while the large-breasted blonde gets it up the ass and sucks dick at the same time, believe me, subconsciously, you’re being schooled in how to do it right.  This is why crazy-like-a-fox Slavoj Zizek can say that porn is ultimately a conservative art-form and get away with it.

Similarly, a lot of erotic romance might look like two crazy fools engaging in ton-o-kink, and falling into the chaos of unending love (Dionysian). But actually, if they’re pairing up and planning on negotiating a mortgage together by the end of the story, they’re ending up in a very Apollonian place. Most romances offer the reader a ‘love ideal’.  Society likes those neat family units.

What, I argue, makes good erotica far superior an art form to either porn or romance, is that it refuses to offer ‘ideals’. It recognizes that tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces, celebrates it, focuses on the storm of it, and leaves the reader with that battle unresolved. 

Why do I think that’s good?

I think it mirrors our real, lived experiences far better than either porn or romance.  In truth, we live with those competing forces all our lives.  Even poor, uptight T.S. Eliot was left pondering whether he had the rakish temerity to eat a peach and let the juice dribble down his chin. 

Writing characters who are so wholly committed to either the Apollonian or Dionysian sides of their personality diminishes your ability to take them through a good, meaty story. If your character is too ready to take the plunge, too accepting of all the chaos that indulging in the Dionysian entails, it’s going to be hard to effectively write any tension in the story. On the other hand, if your character is too hell bent on finding the right man with whom to settle down and start a family (or too hell bent on populating the perfect BDSM dungeon), you’ve got the same problem.

Revealing the inner tension of each character’s Apollonian and Dionysian side (and fighting your own Apollonian or Dionysian preferences to get them to a place of static commitment to either camp) will allow you to leave your reader with characters who will haunt them beyond the end of your story, because although the story may have ending, you allowed the universal battle live on.

Now, if you’re a savvy writer who wants to sell books, then right about now you are thinking… I don’t care what you say, Ms Philosopher Name-Dropper, people want ‘ideals’. ‘Ideals’ sell.

Yes, they do. They absolutely do. The public has been fed so many visions of an ‘ideal’ in the media, they’re completely addicted to it. When they don’t get it, they get pissed off, just like any junky who finds out his fix is actually almost all baby laxative.

And this is why I bring up Nietzsche and Zizek, and why I feel erotica is a fundamentally revolutionary, political act. Because I believe that feeding people ‘ideals’ is like handing them smack.  And you can accuse me of being a patronizing, arrogant elitist – that’s fine. But all those unrealistic, ideal-driven narratives accumulate, and ultimately leave people constantly yearning for a reality that cannot exist, or comparing their lives to fairy-tale fictional worlds and feeling like, if only they were cleverer, smarter, richer, better-looking, thinner… everything would be perfect. And ironically, this tends to make them go out and buy stuff that promises to make them all those things. Corporate profits go up and people’s sense of self-worth, purpose and ability to cope with the ups and downs of a real life go to the wall.

When D.H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterly’s Lover in 1928, he did something utterly revolutionary. He wrote explicit sex scenes in a literary world that had never tolerated them. He wrote about sexual love between people from radically different classes in a world where that was a serious social transgression. He wrote the ending it deserved. Not a happy one, but one where the characters were left transformed by their experiences.

There is no use pretending that, in a world saturated in porn, writing explicit sex is transgressive: it’s not. And not only has fucking the help become acceptable, it’s a goddamned porn meme. But writing stories that offer no ideals, and don’t force the battle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian to a neat conclusion… that IS transgressive.

So do it.

http://kdgrace.co.uk

I’m always a bit behind in the technology curve and
even more so in the social media curve. I’m a toe-dipper in the techno-pool of
social and promotional possibilities always testing the water to make sure it’s
not too cold and not too deep. I like to make sure it’s navigable with my
marginal skills before I hop on in. That’s a very long-winded way of saying
that I finally discovered Pinterest over
the Christmas holidays, and I am SO addicted!

The thing is I never thought I would be. I mean my
job is to create pictures with words, right? It all happens inside my head,
right? That’s what having a great imagination is all about, right? And yet, I’m
like a kid in a candy store when it comes to the images on Pinterest. At first,
I found that fact a little bit disturbing, a little bit like watching too much
reality TV. Looking at lovely, brightly-coloured, preeeetty pictures for hours
is – you know – a guilty secret that I really wasn’t sure I wanted to admit in
public.

Oh, it all started innocently enough. It was just
one more way to promote my novels. I put the cover images of my novels up on
individual boards and added other related images that were relevant to the
stories or the characters, and it was cool. But then I started a ‘fun stuff’
board, and a ‘sexy stuff’ board, and a board for myths and inspiration, and a
board for my favourite places and favourite books, and a board for walking, and
a board for garden porn…! You get the picture … er the image.

It’s no secret that I’m pretty neurotic. I’m forever
navel-gazing and trying to analyse just what it is that makes me do some of the
strange things I do — like hurrying to finish my work so I can reward myself
by looking at pretty pictures. That being the case, take my analysis for what
it’s worth – an effort for me to convince everyone, but mostly myself, that
looking at pretty pictures is a good thing, and that I really am okay. Honest!

The powerful parts of story, the parts that I
remember most vividly are the parts in which the image is so clear in my mind that
if I saw it on Pinterest, if I saw it in a glossy magazine, or if it were
shared on Facebook or on telly, I’d recognise it in a heartbeat because I’d see
it with way more than just my eyes. An
image is a representation of the external form of a person or thing in
sculpture, painting, etc. An image is the reflection in the mirror, the
imitation of a thing. And the imagination
is the place where those wonderful word
images are created.

At the end of the navel-gaze, my fascination with
Pinterest and pretty pictures isn’t really all that hard to understand. I see
stories in pictures. By that, I mean what I read or what I write, I see
visually in my head. Though I don’t see the characters in my stories as looking
like actors or famous people, I see images that reflect their personalities,
their actions and reactions to the plot unfolding around them, to the world
they live in, to their response and reaction to each other. Words are the
building blocks for images in story, for pretty pictures and scary pictures and
sad pictures and happy pictures. Words are the finesse for images. Words take
images to the next level by twisting and sculpting and recreating, by breathing
life into those images and bringing them screaming and kicking from the world
of the imagination out onto the written page. There’s a reason why the book is
always better than the film. There’s a reason why the best images only exist
inside my head — as well as the most moving images and the most terrifying
images.

Two years ago in August, my husband and I walked the
Wainwright Coast to Coast path across England. We made the trip with two
cameras and two BlackBerrys. Some days we took hundreds of images. Other days
we took only a few because it was pouring rain and we just wanted to get
somewhere warm and dry. I blogged that fourteen-day journey across Cumbria and
North Yorkshire, from St. Bee’s Head to Robin Hood’s Bay, so I wanted as many
images as we could get for my posts. Even now, two years later, I can look at
those images, and I’m there! I’m there in the Lake District, on the top of
Kidsty Pike in the wind and the mist, I’m there walking through the old mining
ruins on the high level route between Keld and Reeth, I’m there on the North
York Moors looking out over a sea of blooming heather.

Those photos along with thousands of images from
hundreds of walks in the Lake District were revisited, studied and reimagined
in my mind as I wrote the Lakeland Heatwave
Trilogy. Now, so many of those images have stories beyond the stories, so
many of those images take me places I could never go in the real world, but
only in the world of my characters and their stories. Every image has a thousand
stories, stories that I haven’t written yet, stories that I haven’t even
imagined yet, stories that I won’t live long enough to write. So it’s not really
surprising that my imagination is so easily captured by pretty pictures.

The power of image in a story is the power to take
me there and make me want to stay for the whole thing, and not want to leave
when it’s over. The power of image in a story is the power to take me there, then
to make me wish I could leave, the
power that won’t allow me to leave, even after the story’s over. That’s a lot
of power.

I know a lot of writers use an image board, of some
sort, to help them clarify in their heads elements of their story and their
characters. I’ve never done that. The Pinterest boards of my work are all after
the fact. But then perhaps I do something similar in my mind that I’d not
really thought about until my Pinterest addiction reared its pretty head.
Perhaps every story I write is a board of images, images brought more and more
sharply into focus, as I write and rewrite, until they do what I need them to
do, until they make the reader look hard and feel deeply. Well, that’s what I’d
like to think, anyway. Maybe it’s more of a goal really, to make what I write
clear and sharply focused and impossible for my readers to look away from
without being moved in some way without being changed in some way. 

Find me on Pinterest here: http://pinterest.com/kdgraceauthor/