thomasroche

Describing Bodies in Erotica (The Senses Part 4 — Sight)

 Write Sex  1 Response »
Feb 162012
 
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I generally think of fiction as being made up of four elements: action, dialogue and exposition. Exposition is often used as a dirty word by writing teachers, but I consider it a very big category. Sensory description can be part of action, and it can also be mixed in with dialogue, or even included within it (as quotes). But most commonly, sensory description falls within the realm of exposition, if only because it doesn’t fit into either category…and for me, adding another category for it screws up my idea about everything in fiction coming in threes.

Audacious erotica can depend primarily on action or dialogue, but sensory description is usually going to be key to the reader’s experience. It may be an interesting exercise to build an erotic story from just action, just dialogue, or the two of them. Chances are, if you can make it work, you’ll have an innovative story, although I’d caution against trying to do that in anything very long. (Structural experiments and exercises usually work best with short pieces, in my experience – my general target is a couple of thousand words when I try for stylistic innovation, but highly stylized pieces have run to 5,000 words for me.) Most of the time, especially if you’re writing novels, you’re going to need to rely on all three elements.

So let’s keep talking about sensory description for a bit – and what may be the most important sense to engage in erotica – sight.

Remember, there are five senses, with the sixth sometimes thrown in – I’ll talk about that later. I’ve already talked about smell, taste and hearing. They’re all critically important, especially in erotica. But visual description is probably the most important element in any descriptive passage. Vivid descriptions of smells, sounds and tastes can evoke powerful feelings of “being there” in the reader. But most of the time, if the reader can’t “see” what’s happening, you won’t even get that far.

What do readers want to “see” when they read erotica? The answer is, whatever the author feels they need to see – honestly, the reader is in your hands. The expectations may be standardized, but that doesn’t mean you need to stick with them. You can do whatever you want to do in a story, obviously, and whether it works for an individual reader is less important than whether it works for you (as a writer, and when you read it later).

But if you’re looking to strengthen your erotic writing, think about how your characters’ visual experience is being related. In this first column about visual cues, I’m going to talk about describing bodies.

Now, erotic fiction isn’t just about bodies; I’d even go so far to say it doesn’t need to be mostly about bodies. It’s probably strongest and most memorable when it depicts the brains and minds and souls and interactions of the characters, rather than just their bodies and how they fit together.

But any kind of erotica gives the reader permission to think about bodies. That’s where it’s okay for them to read (and for you to write) all those dirty things you wonder about other people. More importantly, in erotica the body is the way characters express themselves. Most of the time you’re going to need to describe them.

When I say “bodies,” I’m including faces, incidentally.

Which brings me to a good point. In non-erotic fiction, there are certain areas of the body that are considered appropriate to describe. These include faces, hair, maybe shoulders, hands, arms, and attributes like height and weight – not to mention clothes.

Describing anything else, in most fiction, is often considered rude, in one form or another. Sure, you can get away with it. But for many readers of mainstream fiction, it’s like using the F-word; you’d better have a reason for it. If you’re writing a mainstream mystery novel and a narrator describes the size of a woman’s cans, it’ll generally get labeled as sexist. But in erotica, it’s perfectly appropriate. Similarly, not going to find Neal Stephenson spending time on the size, shape and leftward sweep of a male character’s cock; if he did, he’d probably need a good reason, or readers would be left going, “Huh!?”

(Many readers are left going “Huh?” when mainstream authors include explicit sex or sexual description – but often, other readers will be all over it. Keep in mind that a little goes a long way.)

Anyway, in erotic fiction, you have carte blanche to describe all those sexual bodily attributes in tasty detail.

But as an erotic writer you shouldn’t just describe those sexual attributes. Describing just “the basics” about a sexualized character is a porno cliche. Read a few pieces at the Alt Sex Stories Text Repository (Google it – it’s highly NSFW) and get a crash course in bad writing (along with some very good pieces – but they’re rare.) One of the things you’ll see is a first paragraph that looks something like this:

“My name is Candi Summers, and I’m a college Freshman. I’m five feet, two inches tall, I weigh a hundred pounds, and I have long blonde hair, blue eyes, straight, white teeth, a tight, firm ass, and 38D breasts.”

Ow!! Ow!!!! For the record, women do not walk around thinking about their bra size all day. Similarly, hair color and eye color are not going to show up in a narrator’s description. But it’s not much better to deliver the information like this:

“Candi Summers was a 19-year-old college Freshman. Five feet, two inches tall, she weighed a hundred pounds and had long blonde hair, blue eyes, straight, white teeth, a tight, firm ass, and 38D breasts.”

It’s still information dump. The license to think about bodies, particularly sexual attributes, is one things; the license to describe nothing else about a character is something else. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it makes for cheesy fiction.

A more vivid picture is painted by lacing the description throughout the narrative, but if all you care to tell the reader about Candi is her height, weight, hair color, eye color, the tightness of her buns and the size of her knockers, you’re not describing much about her. She’s beyond being a flat character; she’s nothing but a target for your fantasies.

Which is fine, in some cases. Yahoo Chat? Sure. Alt Sex Stories? Yeah, that’s what people go there for. Certain erotica writers can pull clichéd descriptions off just fine, and still bring home a hot read. But commercial erotic fiction strays far closer to the realm of “real” fiction than it used to. Sometimes, it almost gets…gasp…serious. Even, dare I say it…literary! (No…I dare not say it. Scratch that, it just can’t be.)

However much of a sexual fantasy your fiction is supposed to be, people will hopefully spend a lot of time in your universe. If women are walking around with nothing but knockers, butts, possibly a nice pair of legs and a flat belly, plus floating hair and a pair of eyes hovering about four feet, eight inches off the ground, with all of it poured into a tube top, skintight cutoffs and four-inch wedge heels – well, then you’re really not doing your characters justice, visually.

Of course, descriptions of men in erotic fiction are always highly complex…not. Writers may lapse into descriptive clichés. The male characters may have raven hair, piercing eyes, strong jaws, and muscles up the wazoo. Their bodies may be totally predictable, based on the expected sexual attributes of the alpha male. And rather than being poured into tube tops or tight skirts, male characters may be placed in blue jeans, cowboy boots and shirts that suspiciously disappear when it’s time to pose for the book cover.

Which is fine, in some cases. But as with female characters, male characters in erotica deserve the same visual richness that they get in truly vivid fiction when the book’s primary action is outside the bedroom (or dungeon, back seat, strip club, motorhome, psychiatric hospital, mud-wrestling pit, conjugal trailer, etc…)

Writing and reading erotica is a license to think about bodies; that’s awesome. And needless to say, to some extent bodies are going to be idealized in your erotic fiction. But the more creative, unpredictable and viscerally visual your descriptions of characters bodies are, the more readers will remember what they did with them, and how hot it was.

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 Posted by thomasroche at 10:15 pm

The Line Between Dark Erotica and Erotic Horror

 Thomas Roche  4 Responses »
Dec 082011
 
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With my next column, I’ll be continuing my series on the use of the senses in erotica. But for the time being, I want to talk about something dear to my heart — the line between erotic horror and dark erotica — or, to put a broader spin on the latter, science fiction, fantasy and horror (SF/F/H) erotica.

I consider “dark erotica” to be fiction where the “dark” element exists in service of the erotic element, and “SF/F/H erotica” to be a broader  category where the unusual or unreal element is not necessarily dark or scary — just paranormal. “Erotic horror,” on the other hand, puts the erotic element in the service of fear — in a sense, just the opposite.

Writing one or the other is a matter of personal taste, attitude, talent and strengths. In this week’s column on science fiction, fantasy and horror writing  over at The Night Bazaar, I talk about the aversion I once felt to writing action scenes. In writing fantasy and horror, I thought of myself as someone who invented complicated paranormal universes, not slam-dunk punch-in-the-face action. (I’m not sure why I thought that…it seems absurd in retrospect).

Here’s something I wrote at The Night Bazaar:

[T]he more I write, the less my strengths matter and the more my weaknesses do. That’s because writing a lot of fiction puts me face-to-face with every possible roadblock in my creative process, and every roadblock is a potential “debunking” of my strengths. It doesn’t matter how great I can write X type of scene, if Y type of scene keeps me from ever finishing my novel. As a result, all that my strengths do is allow me to get past the weaknesses, or manage them effectively. That’s great news, yeah, but if I take the time to celebrate my strengths, it only slows me down.

[Link.]

I think that’s important in considering what makes something dark erotica or erotic horror — as opposed to just horror with erotic elements.

Personally, I have a much easier time writing erotica than writing SF/F/H; it’s much less of a struggle to find what I want to say. All of my SF/F/H has a message; the message varies from work to work, but I have to know it before I can figure out which of my strengths apply to that particular story or novel.

With erotica, on the other hand I already know the message: sex is hot. There may be implications to that — especially in a BDSM or D/s piece — and there may be man complex subthemes to erotica. But ultimately it’s about the characters feeling pleasure, as concretely as a pulp action story would be about the characters having adventures.

That makes the composition a hell of a lot simpler, because I can skip the complex soul-searching that comes when I write about fear of the unknown, about the collapse of society, about the apocalypse, without the anchoring theme of “basically we’re going to enjoy this.” All those things tangle up my emotions when I’m writing non-erotic SF/F/H. Erotic action is a kind of storytelling solace to me, because it’s so straightforward.

So what do I have to say about explicitly and intentionally erotic science fiction, fantasy, and horror? I’m talking about works where the erotic elements have a clear intent: to turn the reader on — while, at the same time, the science fiction, fantasy or horror elements  are fully realized. This is the Holy Grail for many readers I know, who love kinky fiction but also read a lot of SF and fantasy.

One of the most common places the crossover of paranormal elements and erotica can be seen in the erotic marketplace is with vampire fiction — where vampirism is in many ways a stand-in for power exchange or for a surrender to the carnal, bestial elements of one’s nature, or to the unknown or to risk and danger. A similar connection can be seen in erotic fiction about werewolves, and (far less commonly) about ghosts, without the bestial element but with a more strongly developed sense of risk.

To me, what makes something SF/F/H erotica or dark erotica, as opposed to simply science fiction, fantasy or horror with sexual elements, is that that the fantastic or paranormal element has to be deeply connected to the erotic element.

Here’s an example of fantastic or paranormal erotica. In my story The Spiritualist (which I wrote as N.T. Morley), the main character Dr. Carny Keye is obsessed with exploring “union” with the denizens of the afterlife — not to put too fine a point on it, she wants to fuck ghosts. That’s not just because it’s a turn-on, but because it represents something beyond the world of the living, and sex is the method she uses to get there. It’s not quite horror; rather, the horror elements (ghosts) are used in the service of the turn-on, but within the story, the sex is used as a way of establishing connection with the ghosts. It’s a daisy chain. Most of the story is erotic action, but the “reason” for the sex is identical to, or maybe a mirror-image of, the “reason” for the ghosts. The ultimate message may not be simply “sex is hot,” but at the very least it’s “sex is a force for positive transformation.” Whatever other messages a reader takes away from “The Spiritualist,” this positivity is what makes it dark erotica in my mind, rather than erotic horror.

But because of the element of danger or jeopardy that exists in most science fiction or fantasy, and definitely in most horror, it’s a fine line between erotica and not-erotica. Therefore, even my description of dark erotica as being something where the erotic element is integral to the fantastic element doesn’t quite hold true — because that’s true, I believe, of good erotic horror as well.

Here’s another example. This one is of a story that, to my mind, is not erotica, despite having many sensual elements that are integral to the horror.

My zombie story “The Sound of Weeping” (this one written under my own name) is about internalized homophobia. In it, the zombies represent the homosexual cravings that the main character feels. He wants to be “eaten alive,” and through some (deliberately ambiguous) force of nature, his suppressed desire overcomes the barrier between life and death — resulting in (you guessed it!) a zombie attack. There are numerous sensual elements in the story, but it’s not “erotica.” Why? Because the intention is not to turn you on. That isn’t to say it won’t, but only in service of making another point. The ultimate message is not “sex is hot,” and it’s not “sex is a positive force for transformation.” It’s “sex is dangerous,” and maybe to make it more complicated: “Denying sexual desire creates explosive and hazardous emotional brokenness.” The story is about the main character’s internalized homophobia not being conquered, but indulged until it destroys him, and others around him. The theme is explored in the context of external homophobia in the story’s sequel, “Veggie Mountain,” which I don’t believe anybody could credibly call “erotica,” even though it also deals with sexuality. It’s unquestionably horror.

You might say my view is carried to the extreme in my novel The Panama Laugh, where the action inside a San Francisco porn studio is described in almost oblique terms, because the commercial sex itself is largely irrelevant to the main action of the story, even though the porn studio (which is also the home of a Wikileaks-style social activist network) is a central element. The novel is laced with throwaway lines that allude to the freakish and titillating elements within the porn studio, but there’s no narrative reason to linger on them. Whereas “Veggie Mountain” could maybe be called “erotic horror,” I don’t think anyone in their right mind would go so far as to apply that label to The Panama Laugh, however central to the action its fictitious porn company is.

Have I really established where the line gets drawn? Not by a longshot. The way I see it, the “supergenres” of SF/F/H and erotica overlap, in much the same way that the genres of SF, fantasy, and horror overlap, or the genres of crime and horror overlap, or the genres of BDSM erotica and D/s erotica overlap. Therefore, of course the subgenres of dark erotica and erotic horror overlap. Oftentimes the elements are integral to each other, and oftentimes teasing them out from each other is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

To my way of thinking, that’s when the works get really interesting, because they challenge our perceptions. Whether the central message is “sex is hot” or “sex is dangerous,” or something far more complicated, there are endless shades of grey in between every perception of sexuality. That’s what makes writing every flavor of erotic fiction — from sex-positive erotica to erotic horror — such a pleasure for me.

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 Posted by thomasroche at 6:00 am

Sound and Voice in Fiction and Erotica

 Thomas Roche, Write Sex  No Responses »
Oct 132011
 
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First things first: As I talk about describing sound in fiction, my erotic crime-noir story “Hell on Wheels” is about to be broadcast as an audio program on the BBC. It should be live on the website after it’s on the radio, so if you’re interested, check my personal blog thomasroche.com and my new blog about hardboiled, crime, noir and detective fiction, boiledhard.com, for an updated link once the program is available on the BBC.

Also, my alter ego NTMorley.com has a new blog live at ntmorley.com, with a visual bibliography and plenty of links to my work at Renaissance Ebooks. And in celebration of Halloween, I’ve just published The Spiritualist, a tale of bondage and ravishment by ghosts that has never been published in its full form, available for Kindle, as well as the obscurely-published bondage-ravishment novella A Night Without A Moon and my steampunk story Hysterical Friction, which is under my Thomas S. Roche “pseudonym.”

Also, did I mention I have a new horror novel out? The Panama Laugh is the first ultraviolent crime-noir pulp fiction zombie apocalypse about terrorism, hollow government, privatization of the public sector and LOLZ. I believe it’s also the first zombie apocalypse set partially in a BDSM porn studio…and if it’s not the first one to feature blimp combat, it oughta be. Find out more about The Panama Laugh here, or discover the viral nightmare at PanamaLaugh.com, Zombileaks.com and Z-Listed.com.

Sound and Voice in Fiction and Erotica

This post is part of my series on how to use descriptions that appeal to the five (or six) senses in erotic fiction. Today, I’m talking sound. Describing sound with words is always a challenge for me, but it can be one of the great pleasures of writing about music, which is one of my first loves. So I take the use of sound very seriously when it comes to erotica.

I’ve written several hundred music reviews over the years — but almost all of them more than 10 years ago. I’m a little rusty on the description of sounds…especially since, when it comes to erotica, I’ve always had a hell of a time incorporating “hearing words.” In fact, I struggle with this on an almost daily basis, because I like writing erotica from a very sensual perspective, and sounds always throw me for a loop.

Once upon a time, I wrote — at the insistence of my then-employer — an article about vaginal farts. I was quite sure that this was not a big enough topic to warrant an article, and in any event at the time I had no real interest in writing such an article. While I certainly acknowledge that such expulsions might cause unnecessary embarrassment for someone experiencing them, the whole topic seemed to me to warrant a mention in an article about embarrassing sexual situations or something — not an article of its own. But I was a beginning writer, so I wrote it. The best title I could come up with, given my utter lack of enthusiasm for the topic, was “The Sound of Love.”

Vaginal farts are not the sound of love.

So what is the sound of love — at least in erotic fiction? The sounds of sex are not really well-defined in most peoples’ minds. During real-life sex there are all sorts of sounds, from squeaking beds to slapping fuzzies to squishy sounds that are a little weird to think about. I remember being handed an urban legend as a kid that on one of the classic ’70s KISS albums, you can hear kind of a rhythmic squoosh that was supposedly “the lead singer” having sex with a woman. I thought such a claim was bullshit then, well before I’d ever had sex. (I’ve never been able to find a reference to it, so I can only assume that some dumb fourth-grader made it up.)

The sound of love — or, more accurately, the sound of sex — seems pretty obvious to me; it’s a lover’s voice. But describing a lover’s voice gets monotonous pretty damn fast. Especially in a BDSM or D/s context — where verbal orders and commands can intermingle with physical activity and with moans, groans, and sussurations — I’m often left with too few sensually pleasing words to describe someone’s voice, whether they’re uttering words or just yowling sounds to let the reader know that yes, in fact, the top’s hand did just successfully connect with the bottom’s bum, and ow! it hurts. (Without saying “Ow! It hurts!” which no one ever really says, or they get gagged.)

To my way of thinking, when you’re evoking the empire of the senses, sensual sound-words need to get used with abandon — and smoothly so. Prose that would be considered purple in other genres is standard in erotica, because the whole point is to conjure a kind of sesnsuality.

But when it comes to voices, there are far too few evocative words to use in an erotic context. “Said” just doesn’t work, and volume-related words like “whisper” and “shout” are for specific application. If a top starts whispering into a bottom’s ear, ther’es no reason to keep saying “whisper” for the rest of the scene…so you’re left with “said,” which implies a full-volume kinda speech, or leaving the words out entirely. There are many writers who will hand you their opinion about leaving out the “said” words. (Writers can be snooty as hell and will tell you they know what they’re doing — we don’t. Ever. EVER. Especially when we tell you we know what we’re doing. Rules are bullshit; in fiction writing, all that matter are observations.) Other writers will go on and on about “said bookisms” — “said” replacements that are unnecessarily descriptive or evocative, used to amp up the purple prose and overheated stylistic elements. Said bookisms are most commonly used in juvenile fiction to make the writing more vivid for easily-distracted tykes — and also to avoid using “said.” The technique also migrates into other genre fiction, often to the dismay of writing workshop participants. Most writing teachers despise “said bookisms,” and I don’t blame them, but I also don’t feel wedded to their prejudice. I need a level of purple prose. I’m writing erotica. It’s supposed to be overheated!

In erotica, I think those “said” words are important, and it’s better to have a bothersome “said bookism” than nothing at all. The reason is that I’ve had far too many alpha readers tell me “I lost track of who was speaking.” The same thing happens in every genre, but the modulation of voice — in volume and style — is less critical when your characters are throwing punches or bisecting zombies with chainsaws than when they’re spanking the hell out of each other and tweaking nipples. Then, whether someone whispers, whimpers, purrs, moans or growls is absolutely critical to WTF you as a writer are trying to communicate.

But the English language just doesn’t have the words to describe how a lover’s voice will vary from line to line in a dynamic situation like a spanking, swatting, consensual subdual, Friday-night baby-oil wrestling match or forced-femme strip poker match. In the real world, a lover’s voice should ideally communicate some combination of menace, craving, affection, anger, pleasure, threat, chiding, gentle prodding and a million other things. But in fiction, voice simply can’t be described with all those variations…not easily, at least (which is probably why they pay me the big bucks).

In most other genres, a good policy is to keep it simple, because going on and on about the sound of a character’s voice and the modulation of their words is seen as “telegraphing,” or dictating what the reader is supposed to feel. But a certain amount of telegraphing is almost required in erotica, because the direct involvement of all five senses is right there in the game plan. And it’s with sound that everything falls apart for me.

Voices are tough, whether we’re talking moans or dialogue. A submissive or bottom character can be described as “whimpering,” “moaning,” “whining,” or even “bleating” or “chirping,” those latter words being ones probably no self-respecting erotic writer would use (except me)….but all of these have limited utility. When it comes to a dominant partner, the choices are limited. Female Dommes can “purr,” maybe “hiss,” maybe “bark” or “growl” or “snarl,” and male tops can do a few of those things too, with a few said bookisms on top of those that belong in a detective novel. But overall, the problem becomes one of repetition, and it has to be solved individually for each story, scene or novel.

When it comes right down to it, I’m pretty happy with the English language. But the sound of the human voice is one place where it often feels like I’m left wishing I had another language to draw on.

Of course, if you’re an audio artist or audio book publisher, you avoid some of the problem by introducing actual sound into it. But I remain, at heart, a wordsmith, and sound is one of those areas where I wish I had more words.

How do you deal with the challenges of describing voice in your work? I’m always looking for new ideas, and I’m curious if other writers have this problem. Sound off in the comments!

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 Posted by thomasroche at 2:03 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Erotica In Good Taste

 Thomas Roche, Write Sex  No Responses »
Aug 182011
 
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When people write of erotic fiction and bad taste, they usually aim their poison pens at purveyors of writing who prove themselves from page one-and-a-half to be foul-mouthed and boorish savages whose idea of a seductive setup is a pizza boy asking, “Did one of you cheerleaders order extra sausage?”

But that’s not the topic today. This article is the second in my six-part series (you do the math, Bruce Willis) on the senses in erotic writing. Last time around I talked about the delights of the schnozz. Today it’s the mouth that concerns me — I’m writing, literally, about taste.

For a genre where so many book blurbs offer “gustatory delights,” “mouth-watering offerings,” and crap that’s “lip-smacking good,” supposedly, one would think we eroticists would have far more common with food writers than, in fact, we do. The connection between food and sex is nowhere more evident than in the way that erotic books are marketed, far more than in their content. While erotic stories about food are a solid aesthetic sub-genre, it’s also true that even erotic stories apparently unconnected to food per se require some kind of vivid description of taste to truly bring the reader in to the moment — during oral sex, for instance, or even a kiss, or a romantic meal at a zillionaire’s mansion before the orgy starts, or in the moments of burn following a shared Scotch consumed before balling fervently in a dive bar bathroom.

Erotic stories rarely get the vivid descriptions of taste that would do them justice. That doesn’t make them bad stories at all — erotic tales have a lot of fish to fry, in sensual terms, and not knowing what the character’s fourth margarita tastes like probably isn’t going to inhibit the reader’s appreciation if the point is to get the characters into bed together. But at some point in most erotic stories more than a very few thousand words, someone is tasting something where most of us have only a vague idea about what it tastes like — a body part, body fluid, leather boot. It may not get described at all, which is fine for most stories, or writers may use some stock phrase that doesn’t really tell the reader anything. Taste is a tool in the writer’s tool kit that is not always critical — but provides endless creative possibilities once you really start thinking about it.

The description of sensory pleasures in general is one of the hallmarks of vivid writing — and in erotica, the sensual details can set you apart from garden-variety Alt Sex Stories fare (which I do not mean to badmouth, mind you) and writing that is truly evocative. Most evocative descriptions of sexual encounters contain some reference to taste, and for most of us, taste is a key ingredient in real-life sensuality. Food and sex are inextricably connected, and taste and sex still more so.

Yet if you google “taste in erotica,” you get some hits that are at best distantly connected to the topic at hand, like a Nyotamori restaurant in Denver called “A Taste of Erotica,” Nyotamori being the practice of eating sushi off a naked female (or, presumably, a naked male, though I’ve never heard of that). There are any number of books that promise (and, in some cases, deliver) the connection between the sensuality of taste, in the literal sense, and the sensuality of, you know, sensuality, in the euphemistic sense.

Many very good erotic stories engage the senses at the kind of level that’s expected from the very best food writing. Sex writers can learn a lot from reading very good food writers — and surely the reverse is also true. Many anthologies have sought to mine the connection between food and sex, and not just for their marketing copy.

In fact, I contributed to one of them recently, the anthology Torn, edited by Alison Tyler, in which I waxed philosophic for some lengthy pages about the musky taste of the Cherokee Purple strain of heirloom, from the point of view of a character who doesn’t like tomatoes.

Now, my reason for making the character not like tomatoes was twofold. First, it created tension between the two characters, since the other one really liked tomatoes, and in fact grew them in great quantities. Thus, the experience of taste became a dominant/submissive exchange between them. But my second reason was that, by not liking tomatoes, the viewpoint character was forced to experience them with a certain lack of expectations. Tasted in an erotic context, tomatoes proved way sexy, and the endless variations of different varieties at different points of ripeness proved fertile ground for what I found to be a deeply sensual experience (writing about it, that is). Since I don’t usually write about food much, this was particularly cool; like the main character, I was experiencing something for the first time. Or, if not for the first, at least without the jadedness that comes from having done things the same way a million times.

What’s more, I like tomatoes a lot. But I also turn out to be mildly allergic to certain heirloom varieties.

Therefore, tomatoes carry a certain charge of danger,  a certain taboo appeal…just like the other tastes one might encounter in erotica.

The best thing about writing erotica is that as one does it one also gets, ideally, to learn about writing everything else. Every sensual detail brought into a story helps the reader connect with the characters and the fictional world you’ve created.

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 Posted by thomasroche at 4:21 pm  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Smell, Don’t Tell: Olfactory Details in Erotica

 Thomas Roche, Write Sex  No Responses »
Jul 012011
 
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From an original image by Ignacio Icke. Caption improvised by Bubba.

As I started to write this, a hippie chick sitting near me saw me pull out my ear buds and asked me if I’d heard “what I just told that other man…about the perfumes?”

There’s just no good answer to that question.

When I miserably sighed out the only real answer I could give — the honest one, since I’d been listening to Skinny Puppy and couldn’t hear shit the first time she ran through it — I was treated to about a five-minute lecture on the small business she apparently just started, importing body oils from a group of Sufi producers in Tangier, Morocco. “The Sufis believe that they brought scent to the Earth…and, now, whether that’s true, I don’t know, and I don’t really care, since I’m not a Sufi.” She gave me three of her flyers, “For you and your friends,” packed with velo-wrapped samples that look disturbingly like enormous ketosis strips. Since I doubt my new friend would be amused if I hauled that shit out and peed on them, the samples are currently stinking up my keyboard, while I try to write blog posts.

This, of course, is a bizarrely Sufi-esque string of events for the Universe to hurl my way. After all, I’d already decided that I would title my blog post “Smell, Don’t Tell,” because it rhymes. And that’s what The Cosmos whacked me with, as if to say “Oh, yeah, fucker? Smell THIS!” Right now, incidentally I’m more inclined to re-title it “The Smell from Hell,” because while I’m as happy as the next guy to huff a little of the Breath of Life, the overpowering scent of African black musk is a  little intense when one’s trying to operate a human brain on nothing more than a recoil starter primed by six liters of coffee.

Anyway, so that intense smell that I’m huffing right now? It makes me dizzy, and makes me think, “Whirling dervishes, harem girls, the Call to Prayer, teenage hippy chicks shimmy-shaking on my dorm room bed in the lyrical years before my friends and acquaintances all seem to get multiple chemical sensitivity.” Back in those days, stinking up a room was the Goddess-given right of every college student, and it was done with great prejudice: with body oils, perfumes, cigarettes, incense, pizza lifted from the Dining Commons, copious gurgling bongloads from hell, day-old burritos, discarded nitrous canisters, Jack Daniels, and Boone’s Apple Wine — plus a few scents far less pleasing. It was positively boner-inducing, though admittedly I was in my teens and early twenties, so what wasn’t?

One of the traps I think many erotica writers fall into is forgetting to describe certain sensual details of the scene. However, the opposite crime is also possible. Many writers in all genres can put too much sensual detail for my taste — or, far worse, just pick those sensual details out of a hat and describe them in hackneyed ways that have been done to death. When someone walks into their parents’ house and smells the comforting scent of Mom’s cooking, GAAHAHAHAHHAHA! I’ve heard it a thousand times. The scent is there to communicate information, supposedly, but it’s not real, because it’s been grabbed from the fiction writer’s paint-by-numbers set, not re-experienced and re-imagined the way sensual details, and particularly olfactory ones, should. But you don’t have to create the perfect sensory description for a scene to be augmented by olfactory details — in fact, your quarry just has to think he or she knows what the thing you’ve described smells like, which can be based on nothing more than your description. All you have to work with is words, so words get to stand for every sense you could possibly engage…accurately or inaccurately, and I’m not so sure it really matters.

In my opinion, nowhere is that more important than in erotica. Nor is there a more powerful tool in the erotic writer’s toolbox than olfactory details, freshly imagined (or…ripely, if you’re into that) and rendered in original terms. Smell is a powerful subconscious motivator when it comes to sexual activity, and if you can get across the scent of something that causes a sexual response — not so much in your reader, but in your protagonist — then you’ve got a live wire right into your victim’s backbrain.

Did I say “victim?” I meant, of course “reader.”

There’s a danger more subtle than just hacking out the same predictable phrases to describe the sent of a campfire, sea breeze, boudoir, French whore, weightlifting stud or stinky back alley, however. It’s adding details that shouldn’t be there.

In my opinion, scents in very tightly-written plot-driven fiction should be there to communicate information, rather than just provide window dressing. Humans do our thinking with our bulbous cortexes a lot — some of us more than others. If sensual details (of ANY sense — but smell is particularly important here) don’t communicate information related to plot, character or setting, then they’re just there to be there. In that case, to my way of thinking, virtually any sensual detail can potentially be one of Chekov’s many unfired pistols — it’s there, taking up space, for no good reason.

Maybe the author just decided to be a Smell Commando this week, describing how the scene smells because “it’s important to the millieu.” It might be, and it might not be, but the reader shouldn’t wonder. The description of a scent should either be so compelling that it creates a concrete response in the prey (er…”reader”) or it should be a piece of story information in addition to helping transport one into the scene.

The tendency to describe sense-experiences rather than information-experiences was one of the things that alienated me from poetry, actually, back when I used to be very interested in it. I was unsettled by the form’s tendency to focus on experiential details of sensual significance only insofar as they had sensual significance, rather than insofar as they communicate information. It made me feel like as a writer and a reader, I was wasting my time. Not all readers are as alienated by excess sense information as I am, so take it with a grain of salt. And I’ve also heard many prose writers who say they learned a lot of valuable descriptive techniques by studying poetry.

But as a bona-fide Brainiac, I grab information from the sensual world and stuff it into this mammoth computer I call a brain. Or, more specifically, a frontal lobe — and no, I don’t stuff it in the lobe you’re probably thinking of, perv. Yes, indeed, the “lobe” you might be considering is indeed wired pretty strongly to my other frontal lobe, about forty inches north. Yours may be too, whether your equipment includes a “lobe” or…whatever.

But humming deep in the chasms of your brain is a whole universe of non-verbal arousal cues that can be communicated through fiction over and above what a smell can communicate informationally. That’s because smells can do all three things. They can a) communicate information, b) draw a reader into a scene, and c) have no specific plot significance in and of themselves, but hold a significance within the machinations of the plot itself, in that they draw a parallel between an early scene and a late scene.

For instance…check it: This guy — I’ll call him “Bubba” — walks into an apartment and smells African black musk. That tells you that the protagonist knows what African black musk smells like. Bubba probably knows what African black musk smells like for a reason. That gives you an opportunity to hint at why Bubba knows, or leave it unstated. The place probably also smells like African black musk for a reason.  Ditto.

You can describe the smell itself, or not, depending on how evocative the term is, and how commonly known the smell is. Maybe the reader knows what African black musk smells like. Maybe not. I sure as hell didn’t until about fifteen minutes ago. But the term itself holds an automatic sensual significance for me, and not just because I’m huffing it right now. The very name is evocative. “African black musk.” Hello, beautiful. I think I know what African black musk smells like, even if I don’t. (Though, to be fair, I do. So will everyone who gets within 40 feet of me for the next 72 hours.) Terms might be less evocative or more evocative, but to my mind the evocation that the term and your description provide are far more important than whatever the stuff smells like.

So here’s what that does for the person reading about the guy who just walked into the stinky-musk apartment:

Information is communicated: Bubba knows what African black musk smells like. For some reason. The apartment smells like African black musk. For some reason. Bubba’s first love was an African musk ox! And the woman who lives the apartment, where Bubba is, say, delivering a Hot Tomato Pizza? Maybe she’s secretly an African musk ox, too! (Bubba’s pizza’s deep dish, incidentally with lots of anchovies…were-oxes love anchovies. Incidentally, it smells great, but we’ll cover that particular aroma in some other column, maybe.)

2) The reader is drawn into the scene: Whether or not the reader knows what the stuff smells like, just having the ol’ sniffer engaged may get a nosehook on ‘em, if you know what I mean. Plus, when Oxana says “Gee, Mr. Pizzaman, I don’t have any money to pay for my pizza,” it’s already been established that she’s having an anti-rational, pro-sensualist effect on Bubba, so when the funk music starts, the sex isn’t just, like, random.

3) …and, lastly, you’re provided with a fully loaded and primed Chekovian Blunderbuss…later, after his fervent tryst with the beautiful and mysterious “Oxana,” Bubba can stand there in her living room spinning with joy while holding his Hot Tomato Pizza red uniform shirt think “Gee, I wonder why this girl I’m falling for smells like African musk!?”

Then voila! It hits him! Full moon’s out, see, and out of the bedroom bursts this giant musk ox, see? And it spots Bubba spinning for joy and waving his red Hot Tomato Pizza uniform shirt, and…

What…you were expecting Gift of the Magi?

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 Posted by thomasroche at 4:29 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Starting Erotic Stories: Two Things That Work, and Two Things That Don’t

 Thomas Roche, Write Sex  3 Responses »
May 122011
 
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When I need to write erotica, it’s usually because I have promised someone a story or book. I often draw a blank, and have to “jump start” myself with a concept, theme, or image. Therefore, I do a lot of thinking about how strong stories start.

When I say strong stories, I don’t mean stories you will think are strong — you, the reader. I mean stories I will think are strong — I, the writer.  I need to generate a narrative critical mass to keep myself going through the first few thousand words of story — and by then, I’ll know one way or another if there’s a coherent narrative there, or something dull enough that I’ll abandon it.

I have literally dozens — possibly hundreds — of uncompleted novels on my hard drive; some of them are 200 words long. I’ve probably begun thousands, if not tens of thousands, of stories I’ve never finished. I’ve had lots of experience in what works for me, and what doesn’t. The problem is, what works is different every time, so I constantly have to fine-tune the process.

There’s nothing “wrong” with starting a story and not finishing it. But it becomes increasingly dangerous when you depend on writing to generate your income. False starts — on everything from short stories to novels to scenes-in-novels to conversations within scenes to individual character descriptions  — are built into the writing process. But they don’t just spend time; they spend ideas. If I blow an opener and waste a story idea, that idea might feel depleted when I go back to them. Since I write for a living, every false start is a potential financial liability.

So when it comes to writing erotica specifically, these are the kinds of “jumps” that I often find can work for me in opening a story that I’ll want to continue.

What Works?

The first thing that almost always works for me is a visual description of a woman taking action in a non-sexual context that’s eroticized. Generally, this means she’s arriving somewhere. I usually frame this within the context of her clothing. I do this because I’m clearly Ed Wood reincarnated, and women’s clothes obsess me. In all seriousness, I do this because clothing provides clues as to what is about to happen, and describing a woman’s clothes could obsess me from now until doomsday.

The sluttier she is dressed, the better. If someone nudged her into dressing that way, better still, because then I’ve got a guaranteed conflict to begin with. Boyfriend talked her into it by promising you something dirty? W00t. Desperately need $200 and agreed to be a lingerie model at the car show on the very last day before she enters the convent? Ba-da-bing.

This all assumes, of course, that the female in question actually wanted to dress that way to begin with, but someone kind of eased her into it with the promise of some reward. This is not some cryptic anti-feminist message, though it certainly may have its problematic aspects. It’s the way my brain generates drama. I’m not saying it’s good drama…but it is drama. Basically.

On the other hand, If she just dressed that way because, you know, she’s “adventurous,” that’s fine too. The point, for me, is in describing the drape of her skirt, and exactly how precariously short it is, and how little room there is between that phenomenally short black skirt and the top of her black patent leather go-go boots, because clearly, I missed my calling and should have been a creepy clerk at Hot Topic.

The second thing that usually works for me is a description of someone’s facial expression. This starter very often does not stay at the beginning of the story, because I often find that there are stronger ways to start stories, from a reader perspective. But from a writer perspective, describing facial expressions is very hard for me — and I find that I like it. It allows me to describe something expressive, without having to commit to a specific set of interactions.

Describing facial expressions out of context creates many questions. Every character has expressions that are peculiar to them; as a writer, by picking a “way” someone looks, and then describing it, I create a static physical image that I don’t know the context of. Then I have to invent that context, and voila! I’m off and running. This often works.

Sometimes posture is integrated into the description; someone may be leaning forward and frowning, or leaning back and smiling, or turning his head and looking enigmatic, or pouting and brushing her hair. But the face is where it happens for me, in the theater of my mind — especially the eyes.

What Doesn’t?

There are two things, on the other hand, almost never work for me when starting a story. There are probably far more, but these are the two I’ve really noticed.

Unfortunately, I’ve found these things out by doing them over and over again. I often do them anyway, because apparently they’re central to the way my mind works. Half the time when I abandon a start after half a page, I discover I reflexively started it with one of the two things that doesn’t work.

The first thing that usually  doesn’t work for me is a line of dialogue. For some reason, dialogue is excruciating to me. I hate it. I don’t like reading it, generally, and I really hate writing it. I think my dialogue sucks. I don’t particularly like talking to people in the real world, so why would I want my characters to talk to each other? Unfortunately, dialogue is an absolute deal-breaker in fiction. You’ve got to have it, or your story just won’t proceed.

Because it’s a method of jumping into a scene, I often fall prey to the temptation to start a scene with a line of dialogue. It’s almost always a disaster. If you’ve read an erotic story by me that starts this way, chances are that I added the dialogue later — or cut out an opening paragraph. Either that, or you’ve hacked my hard drive and you’re reading my unfinished crap.

The second thing that almost never works is a summary of events. That might get me further than a line of dialogue, but it usually won’t get me very far. “The night they first had sex was totally awesome” doesn’t ask any questions for me as a writer.

When I put stuff like that down on the page, I find myself shrugging. “So? Why say any more? You already said it.” Even if that summary is only backstory (“Though they started out with a strong mutual attraction, they had been having mediocre sex at best since he moved in to her place”), it lays out too many of the answers to questions I haven’t even asked yet. It’s not that it doesn’t give my mind room to work; it doesn’t make my mind work just to complete a scene that’s already in front of me.

That’s why I gravitate toward the concrete descriptions of physical realities that have social cues underlying them (clothes, expressions, posture).

Don’t think for a second I’m telling you that if you avoid these types of openers you will write more effective fiction. I think all these things work great as openers for stories. I’ll even go back and add either summaries or dialogue at the start of a story, once it’s written. I think both can be strong ways to start stories.

But in terms of getting the draft down on the (virtual) page, those kinds of openings don’t work for me as a writer — and the more I stick to the things that open my brain up to finishing a picture that’s already there, the more I let my subconscious do my work for me.

So…feel free to leave your views in the comments. What works for you, as a writer, to begin stories that you’ll want to keep going?Do you find yourself opening stories, predictably or reliably, with a certain kind of description, scene or interaction? And if so, how reliably does it work? Are there things that don’t work?

Share your ideas as you wish, and maybe we can each pick up some new ones.

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 Posted by thomasroche at 2:44 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

Disaster Preparedness for Writers

 Thomas Roche, Write Sex  2 Responses »
Mar 242011
 
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When I started this gig at Write Sex, the idea was to have me write about “taboo” topics in erotica or erotic romance. You know: sex with the dead, screaming banshees, and hotty-hot vampires. As the column has progressed, I seem to usually end up writing about the mechanics of creating fiction, because as I’ve written more and more fiction over the months I’ve been doing this, I find the mechanics become all-important. Therefore, my writings here often contain pretty straightforward writing-technique observations, though they maybe laced throughout with inexplicable glimpses of my own unique mental mise-en-scene (Goth chicks! Humanities grad students! High-end hotels!).

It must have dawned on the editor and proprietor Sascha by now that I have no real intention of telling you — or perhaps I just have no capability to tell you — how to write an exquisite vampire blood-orgy romance sex scene. Sascha has, just the same, kindly refrained from docking my pay. That’s because Sascha understands what all successful writers must sooner or later understand. Your muse is not a bitch. But neither is she easy. She will gut you like a pig if you don’t listen to her. But if you meep politely now and then and blurt lots of “Yes, Ma’am” and “May I freshen your drink, Your Majesty,” there’s a small chance you’ll walk out of this business — instead, I mean, of crawling.

That’s why built into my Write Sex column was a certain breadth of scope — and without it, I’d be sunk. I wouldn’t have written this column, or the last column, or the one before that.

Because living a writing life is all about disaster preparedness. And so, after all these months, I return to the taboo — perhaps the greatest taboo of all: when shit goes wrong. Disaster preparedness is something you’ll need if you’re going to have a writing career, just as if you’re going to run a country or a city or a nuclear plant in a tsunami zone, you should probably have a spare garden hose to cool down your spent fuel rods, and you might want to consider putting your diesel tanks underground.

In writing, as in life, disasters happen. The most common writing disaster is sitting down to write and finding nothing in your brain. Almost as common is getting shit down on virtual paper — called “the computer” by these newfangled tech types — and finding it’s an absolute mess. A third kind of writing disaster is sending something out to your very best friend, your first reader, your agent, your editor or your boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband — and getting an “Um…huh. Okay…” in response. Or an “it sucks.” Or the most disastrous feedback of all: “I read the first page and it really seemed good, but I haven’t had time to get back to it. Maybe next week? I’ve been so busy cleaning out my fridge and LIKE-ing photos of puppies on Facebook…”

Christ! How it hurts to hear that shit! To be dismissed! Forgotten! That feeling will ream you if you let it. It will damage your spirit beyond redemption; it’ll leave your soul a smoking ruin. It’ll melt you down and send molten uranium tunneling to China. It’ll flood your Gulf with oil.

But it hurts still more to hear nothing.

By which I mean not just to hear nothing from editors, agents, first-readers, and the like. Sure, that hurts. But for me, it hurts most on the days when I hear nothing from myself. It happens all the time. It’s when my brain just goes dead, and words don’t come, and I not only don’t give a fuck if the hero and heroine ever get together — I don’t care if they lived in the first place. On days like that, my characters could drown in a levee failure or be wiped off the map by a tsunami or lose their fishing business in an oil spill, and I’d leave the computer empty and spent with nothing to show for six hours of agony, and I’d prop my feet up and watch Serenity for the umpteen-thousandth time — and tell myself, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Please don’t think for a moment that I mean to make light of the fucked up crap that happens to people — whether through no fault of their own, or at least, to my mind, through no fault of the poor people, and no fault of the rich people except being so unwilling to pay taxes that cutting the budget for earthquake and volcano monitoring in somebody else’s state seems like a really good idea. In using this metaphor, I mean to minimize nobody’s suffering — real suffering, not this indulgent crap that we writers do. I don’t wish to imply that my writer’s block even begins to compare to slurping down radioactive iodine with your cornflakes, let alone taking 40 Sieverts of radiation on the chin.

On the contrary; on many of my days, writing an escapist zombie melodrama seems like a reeking load of bullshit considering how bad things are going in the world. Not having any ideas for my next warmed-over stroke fest is hardly the equivalent of having multiple cities flattened by earthquakes. I’m not suggesting that it is. Every day I’m grateful that I’ve the luxury of sitting my ass in a hard wooden chair and daydreaming about fairytales and moonbeams and whips and chains and werewolves. Every day I’m bloody grateful that a meteor hasn’t hit me — yet. Or an earthquake, a levee failure, a Mack truck, a catastrophic core meltdown…whatever. Even being able to blog about this shit is a gift from chance, or whoever. Just speaking for myself, I find that even on my worst days, my being alive to suffer so horribly is actually, God help me, appreciated.

But what I am suggesting is that when you find that creative empty, or end up with a mess of a not-quite-a-novel on your hard drive, or get yet another “It’s not for us” or “couldn’t the heroine be a juggler instead of a unicycle-acrobat?” from a publisher, it’s preparation that will save you. On those days, however bad it feels, even if it feels like the apocalypse — and oh, for fuck’s sake, some days I know it does — feeling bad about it doesn’t cool an emotional meltdown or get food or medicine to your characters who need it.

When emotional disaster strikes, you can say you never thought it could happen to you — despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. In no way, shape or form am I one of those pricks who’ll say in that case you have “only yourself to blame.” Creative emptiness feels like a tragedy, so it is a tragedy. Getting self-righteous about someone else’s pain is as reprehensible as mixing up “looting” and “finding supplies.”

But the first principle of disaster preparedness is admitting “it can happen to me.” If you’re riding high on creative success, or just pumped from drinking too much coffee, you can rest assured you’ll hit the skids at some point. If you’re the creative and spiritual equivalent of “high on life” at the moment keep in mind that life may have a special nightmare in store for you.  And if you’re one of those snooty hyped-up San Francisco weirdos nobody invites to their parties who has three first aid certificates (dog, cat, and human) and knows exactly what the liquefaction will be at the base of the Bay Bridge pylons, when disaster strikes you’ll know what to do.

You’ll be the one giving CPR to werewolves hit by runaway MacGuffins.

And that’s your chance to make a difference.

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 Posted by thomasroche at 1:59 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Life Ain’t Easy For a Boy Named Bonaparte-Luis Henderschott

 Thomas Roche, Write Sex  3 Responses »
Feb 032011
 
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I’ve written so much at this point that I can’t be counted on to come up with names for a story all on my own. If I picked the first name that came into my head each time, every character would be named “Ben Tyler” or “Jake Davis” or “Jessica Miller” or something.

To pick my character names, I need piles of baby name books; I need Google Translate; I need actuarial tables.

All of this may be to my detriment. Making up names is easier than writing, so maybe this is just my way of procrastinating, like blogging or resorting all my paperbacks by the second letter of the title. And it certainly can take as much time as I let it — often more. For me, character naming can take on a life of its own.

The result of all this procrastination is that I’ve been told that I have a facility for coming up with colorful names. To be sure, my exceptionally bizarre character names like Irma Precht, Spunky DeShanski and Douglas “Woppo” Chamberlain come to mind when I choose to pat myself on the back for my writing talents — but just as many readers find my more esoteric character names annoying. I’ve been told things like, “I just couldn’t pay attention to the story because I was wondering why anyone would name their kid Arwycke.”

But coming up with completely bizarre character names is one of the few pleasures left to me in my old age, so at this point I can’t stop any more than I could stop breathing.

Still, it’s far from natural. When a story’s really pumping along, the last thing I want to do is stop and come up with a character name — or even the name of a company, hotel, or small town. That’s why my early works were laced with characters named things like “Jake Martin” and “Susan Green,” and occurred either in nameless big cities with streets called “Center Street,” “West Street” and “South Street,” or in towns called things like “Walkerton” and “Smithville.”

It’s only after I got to be more of a seasoned writer, and discovered baby name books, Excel and the data banks of the U.S. Census that I started really going ape shit when it comes to character names.

Many writers believe that the character and place names shouldn’t distract from the story. I basically agree, but for me, in some ways character and place names ARE the story. I love life at least partially because of its randomness. At least once a week in my reading, I encounter someone’s name that makes me go, “WTF? A Persian guy named McMurphy?” or something of the sort. Every time you learn someone’s name, you learn something about them. Names are evocative and illusory. They tell a story in and of themselves.

But many writers feel that the story names tell should be a non-story so that the story-story can stand out more strongly. To them, calling a character “Horse Badorties” would be ludicrous. A character named “Kilgore Trout” would be merely distracting.

I can’t say I disagree with them — and bizarre character names are more effective in satiric or humorous works, certainly. But I find those same writers who oppose unusual character naming conventions on the grounds that such names call attention to themselves aren’t always standing on the most solid of ground. They’re often the ones whose characters are named “Veronica Traynor,” “Bowden Blackheath,” and “Treat Scarborough.”

Seriously — this is supposed to be an erotica and romance writer’s blog, so I can’t let this one drop. Having had, for most of my reading life, little interest in romance novels — but respecting them wholeheartedly as an art form — I recognize that characters named things like “Devlin Raffterty” are expected in the genre as surely as characters named things like “Jack McCarthy” are expected in the international-thriller genre, and crime novels feature characters named things like “Burke.”

I would never expect a romance novel not to have main characters with names that stir my quest for adventure and, of course, love. But too often the names of romance novel characters go way overboard, without the satiric intent that drives a name like Kilgore Trout. I don’t know if it’s just my perception, but it seems like the names of romance novel heroes and heroines — and here I include paranormal fiction — have been getting ever more bizarre and outrageous since genre fiction started its migration to ebooks.

I’m not saying don’t name your broad-chested erotic romance novel hero “Dionysus Rapture” — just be aware of what you’re doing.

To be certain, there’s no reason to agonize over names if you don’t want to. There are plenty of people named “Jim Parks” out there, so it’s plenty realistic, if your characters are American and have essentially European names (which may or may not mean they’re of European descent) to name your characters something that won’t stick out in the reader’s mind.

But, speaking for myself, if I just picked the first name that came to mind I would call everybody some variation of something like “Tess Williams,” “Brock Proctor,” or “Lou Sinclair.” They would all sound like standard-issue dime-novel characters. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t inspire me.

Personally, I’d rather haul out the baby name book and pore over it for a few hours looking for just the right name.

Hell, it’s easier than actually getting down to writing — am I right or am I right?

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 Posted by thomasroche at 1:49 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

Placeholders, Question Marks and Stuff in Brackets

 Thomas Roche, Write Sex  1 Response »
Dec 092010
 
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If you’ve done much fiction writing, it’s probably happened to you. You’re cooking along on a story or a novel, describing things as they happen. Then all of a sudden…you hit a brick wall. It’s not that you don’t know where your story goes in story terms — it’s that you don’t know how to describe what needs to happen next. I’m not talking about plot or story structure; I’m talking about scene-building and sensual details.

Let me give you an example. I recently wrote a novel that required me to know what it looked like, felt like and smelled like in about 40 different locations — on boats of one size or another, different areas of different ships, on the high seas off the east coast of South America vs. the west coast of Africa — etc. etc. etc.

The sensual details of a narrator’s experience are, to me, what are both most important and most pleasurable in the process of writing — especially writing long-form fiction like novels.

For me to enjoy writing a scene about being in the hold of a Bengali container ship, I need to have a sense of what it’s like there. My viewpoint character’s very tangible reality needs to become my reality. And yet this asshole insisted on doing crap I’d never done and going places I’d never been.

What a prick!! You believe the brass ones on this joker?

Sure, I can go back and find the memoirs of a Bengali sailor, if they exist; I can find an article about what it’s like to be on a ship; blah blah blah. I can do all of those things — but if I do them in the middle of my writing day, then the fiction doesn’t get written. Especially when I’m on a deadline, I simply can’t do all the research that is suggested by a plot that’s boiling over. That’s a sign that the plot is going swimmingly. Unfortunately, it’s also a huge pain in my ass.

This is one of the things I find most challenging about writing long-form fiction. If I’m doing it right, I run up against stuff I don’t know how to do. Some things are easy. Interpersonal stuff? Easy as pie, Bubba. I’m pretty good at imagining what it would be like for a middle-class, educated goth chick to confront her mother about her upbringing and say “You never loved me!” blah blah blah. I know what a shitty dive bar in Fresno smells like.

But as for what it feels like to jump out of a Coast Guard helicopter into storm waters off Santa Barbara, or crawl through a cave half a mile underground? I haven’t the foggiest.

People who have never written ten words of fiction, people who are seasoned fiction-writing professionals, and everyone in between, will tell you that the way to deal with this problem is to “Make it up.” That seems as obvious to them as they feel it should to me. Makes sense, right?

But “make it up,” to a fiction writer, has infinite permutations to it. The entire job description consists of “make it up,” so telling me to “make it up” is like telling a surgeon to “operate.” If you feel qualified to tell me that I should “make it up,” then you write the New York Times best-seller. Go ahead…I’m waiting.

“Make it up” is the hardest thing in the world for me when i don’t have a natural reference point for an experience. For me, with my style of composition, one detail depends on the detail before it. What kind of entrance a Bengali container ship has from the main deck to the deck below determines what it feels like to be there, to go through the entrance, to find a bunch of zombies puking green muck on you and howling, “Brains!!”

It’s awfully hard to keep a narrative flow going when you have big fat chunks of nothing in your writing. The details are not just critical in creating a finished piece of prose. To me, they’re critical in writing the next sentence. In order to get a flow going, I need to know not just whether my narrator’s boots make a clunking sound on the deck of the container ship, but what kind of clunking sound they make. I have to practically be able to hear it, and to smell the wind off the ocean as well as the dead bodies floating in the bay.

Thankfully, I’ve never smelled a San Francisco Bay choked with dead bodies — and I sure as hell hope I never do. There’s a lot of imagining and some not-imagining (aka, “research”) in figuring out just what it would smell like. If I haven’t done that before I sit down to write, I run into the potential problem of not knowing what to put down on the (virtual) page.

Of course, you can always write the “bare bones” of the action and leave the details to future rewrites, right? Easy! Easy as pie!

Yeah, I tried that.

The result? Sparkling prose. Stirring literature. Pathos! Excitement! Drama! Question marks! Stuff in brackets!

I’d end up typing whole paragraphs that looked something like this:

We ran across the ??steel?? deck and found the ??hatch?? and took the ??spiral stairs?? to ??Deck 4??, where we knew we’d find a ??med kit?? we could scavenge for ??thiopentone?? [They find zombies hiding somewhere in the nooks and crannies of whatever a bengali container ship has on its second deck [[how are decks designated on container ships again?]]]. Then the engines began to ??throb??…

Isn’t that thrilling and exciting prose? Personally, I’m on the edge of my seat. When can I expect my Pulitzer again? Actually, I think I’d prefer to win the Nebula first — then the Pulitzer. Can you just send it to my agent’s office? Thanks.

Sure, that’s not what the publisher or the reader is going to see, but that’s hardly the point. The point is, it’s no goddamn fun to write.

Maybe you’ve encountered this problem in your own writing. It could be virtually any situation; it’s the thing that brings your narrative to a grinding halt, because you’re not sure how to describe what happens next.

The only way to get through it is to get through it. The best technique I found is to make everything up — to the point of making up more details than are necessary. I superimpose other experiences that I have had — or feel like I might have had — on top of the ones I haven’t.

For me, the thing that works better rather than writing paragraphs packed with placeholders and question  marks is writing fiction packed with sensual details that are complete and utter bullshit. I know a Bengali container ship doesn’t smell like the cargo hold of a C-5, but I’ve been in the cargo hold of a C-5 and I’ve never been in a Bengali container ship.

The lesson, for me, is that going back and taking out inaccurate details is a hell of a lot easier than adding ones in over question marks and crap in brackets.

For me, whether in fiction, fantasy or reality, the sensual facts of an experience are the things I retain — sights, smells, sounds, tastes, feelings.

Yes, I do — in most cases — want these to be accurate in my final draft.

But when it comes to a first draft, those details don’t need to be accurate. They just need to be compelling.

The conclusion? “Use question marks, brackets and placeholders at your peril.” Here endeth the lesson.

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 Posted by thomasroche at 4:32 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

Novels That Write Themselves

 Thomas Roche  8 Responses »
Oct 212010
 
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With NaNoWriMo coming up, it’s worth addressing the central conceit of the NaNoWriMo concept, which is — if you’ll allow me to take a few liberties that may piss off the punters — that you should just write, no matter what, without pausing — and without an outline. That’s the way to get a novel out of you.

I agree and I don’t. Personally, I like novels that write themselves. But not every novel wants to write itself.

Outlines are a critical part of the novel-writing process for most successful novelists. Their importance simply cannot be overstated. Writers who pump out book after book of quality prose about spunky ballerinas finding romance and homicide detectives hunting serial killers and winemakers solving crimes about cheese — those people almost all write with outlines, and tight ones, too. If it’s your first novel or your hundredth, you should do whatever works for you, but personally I wouldn’t trade the crazed madness of writing a novel without an outline for all the tea in Buckingham Palace.

That’s when the novel seems to write itself. It’s awesome. Writing a novel without an outline is the bomb.

Writers are very much split on whether doing so is a good idea or the most dangerous kind of antisocial lunacy. I tend to fall into the latter camp; writing a novel without an outline is definitely antisocial lunacy and should be avoided if you value your sanity, your interpersonal relationships, your job, the tendons of your forearms — and, most of all, your time.

But you’re not me, and therefore there are no significant consequences to my advocating that you do stupid shit.

Writing a novel without an outline is unquestionably dangerous — you could end up with a mess. The truth is, you’ll probably end up with a mess. If you make a habit of this, you may end up like me — the proud possessor of a hard drive packed with few dozen 20,000-word innovatively-cross-genre turds that steam so bad sometimes you gotta open the windows. But the experience of writing a big narrative with total abandon is something that I simply can’t give up. The problem is, that kind of muse doesn’t necessary come when you call her. She’s much like a cat in that regard. Nine times out of ten she knows you’re looking, and you can bite her.

What outlines can do for a novelist is force you to break your narrative into manageable chunks. When I write novels (or feature-length screenplays) to a tight outline, I lose the experience of sitting there tear-assing through six scenes in a sitting with no idea what’s coming next, which is a hell of a feeling. But like I said. I get that feeling a lot, then realize I have no idea what’s coming next. For this reason, I have many, many more half-novels than novels. Most novelists do.

But I also have many more outlines than novels. Hell, I have more outlines than first chapters! It’s easier for me to write an outline than it is to write a first chapter, and you know who enjoys reading them? Uh…no one. Not even me.

The point is, you can tear through an outline and think you have the framework for a novel. But from a reader perspective, there is no framework for a novel. The framework is the novel.

There’s no one answer as to whether you should outline, except to say that if it works for you, everyone else’s opinion is irrelevant. But it’s worth mentioning that most of the really accomplished genre novelists I know — I mean the kind of people who put out a book a year or more, and have been doing it repeatedly for a while — outline like fiends. Their outlines or “treatments” are incredibly detailed. Why, just this past week, science fiction legend Norman Spinrad, by way of crowdsourcing his novel queries, freely published a 113-page treatment of his next novel. James Ellroy of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia fame writes novel outlines hundreds of pages long, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro once told me she outlines novels so thoroughly that she never has to rewrite (and, in my experience, her novels read tight).

If you’ve never written a novel, there’s a chance when it comes, it’ll just happen. You won’t need an outline because the thing will be winking at you from your computer screen, and you will have just typed END. Sure, everyone you know may think you’ve vanished off the face of the earth, and there may be an eviction notice on the door, and you may be about to get your power shut off because you haven’t paid the bill in twelve weeks. You may need a payment plan with the power company, but you still won’t need an outline. If this is how it goes down, mazel tov.

This sort of first-novel experience occurred with me on two separate occasions. That’s right; I received the lightning strike of having not one but two first novels just kind of explode out of me, in different decades, because they were in thoroughly unrelated genres. It’s an awesome feeling, a little bit like being high. High on life! High on life and six shots of bourbon. And the cocaine exports of Peru and Colombia put together. And these funny pink pills some weird guy in an overcoat sold you for $3 and a bus transfer over on 16th and Mission…

If that sounds like fun, great. If that sounds sustainable over the course of a professional career, you’re either more näive than I am, or you have way bigger brass ones.

If you’ve never written a novel and you’re trying to, or if you’ve written lots of them and you’re trying to write the next one, it won’t do you any good to bellyache about the novel that won’t write itself.

Sometimes you gotta make them write themselves. And then? An outline can be your best friend.

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 Posted by thomasroche at 5:19 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,
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