Taboo | Write Sex

Disaster Preparedness for Writers

Mar 242011

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.

The Last Taboo: Second-Person Narration

Thomas Roche 7 Responses »

Mar 182010

By Thomas S. Roche, www.thomasroche.com

I was originally brought on board here at Write Sex to be the “taboo guy,” sort of the William S. Burroughs of sex-positive erotica-writing instruction, the Luis Buñuel of the twenty-page blowjob scene or, in my fondest imaginings, the Lou Reed of the 1,500-word spanking vignette.

But for better or for worse, nowadays I’m not as much of a freak as I occasionally play on webcam. I’ve lately been obsessing more over appositives than ass-fisting, more about emdashes than emetophilia. Therefore, in this month’s column you won’t be reading about how to make your vampires sparkly but still spooky. I’m about to talk about a real literary taboo: second-person narration.

In case you’re not clear on what I mean by second-person narration, think “You unzip my dress” as opposed to first person, “John unzipped my dress,” or “I unzipped Mary’s dress” as opposed to the third person “John unzipped Mary’s dress” (or for that matter, maybe Mary unzipped her own goddamn dress — why does John have all the agency here?)

Got it? The “you” character may be the main character (most commonly) or, occasionally, a peripheral character in the action, an observer. This technique has been used intermittently in literary fiction. Commercial fiction, on the other hand, has historically been rather hostile to the technique — though the technique occasionally does show up on the best-seller lists.

With erotica, second-person narration has become much more common than it was ten years ago; similarly, it’s also much more common in erotica writing than it is in any form of commercial genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime fiction, or romance — though it does show up, occasionally, in all of those. To digress briefly, my view is that it works well in erotica, and is more common in the genre, because of a major change of culture. In the 1990s and 2000s, literary erotica has become less something people buy in sleaze shops and read by flashlight, and more something people use as a guide for developing their own sexual lifestyles, fantasies and behaviors — and sometimes even those of their sexual partners. But whether that’s right or wrong is a biiiiiiig long conversation I don’t have time for at the moment — so, hold that thought for some future date.

Second-person narration also works better in short stories than in novel-length works — in my opinion, because of the need for — or “habit of” if you prefer — writers to provide concrete character change throughout the length of a novel in order to make the thing feel like a satisfying feature-length whole. Short stories, on the other hand, are snapshots in time, and there not always the need to have backstory about “you,” as the main character, the way there is for a novel. As such, some of us very much like to put “you” in the story.

As one of the second-person technique’s most enthusiastic practitioners, I have to admit that — not to overstate it too much — you could be taking your creative and commercial life in your hands using this technique. A lot of readers find it alienating — and I mean a lot. The reasons for this I can’t really say; I hear it’s distracting; I hear it’s pretentious; I hear it reads like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure Books. Chris Baty, in his book No Plot? No Problem, the handbook of NANOWRIMO, even goes so far as to hold forth rabidly against second-person narration, essentially forbidding its use. I hope to someday meet Chris, so I can punch him hard in the mouth for that.

Regardless of whether you, or my many detractors, or Chris Baty or Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham think “pretentious” literary techniques blow chunks, it should be said that second-person narration has shown up magnificently in some important literary works written in English and other languages. Whether you like them individually or not, there’s no denying that, say, Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Jay McInnery’s Bright Lights, Big City, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Tom Robbins’s Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, and the works of Julio Cortazar, John Barth, and Jorge Luis Borges — just to name a few — are works of note, “pretentious” or not.

I recently experienced one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read: Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates; far from being a hot ravishment fantasy, this novella is the most hard-boiled thing you’ll ever read; I found it much like having Oates smack me in the face with a lead pipe for 140 pages. But the “love story” of the title hinges precisely on the periodic use of the second person; for me, that technique is devastating. It brings an immediacy to that story that left me with nightmares and a bizarre feeling of melancholy hope. For all that the novel is brutal and violent, it is also at times bizarrely and disturbingly sensual.

Joyce Carol Oates notwithstanding, that is what attracts me to the second-person narration. To me, there’s a sensuality, an intimacy, that comes from describing another person’s experience. When we are reading or writing fiction, just where our consciousness “exists” at that moment is a matter of some mystical speculation for me. Why, then, would putting myself explicitly in the reader’s head prove more sensuous and immediate than putting myself in the head and body of an “I” character who is clearly not me?

Fuck if I know. But I know that every variation I try gives me a new chance to experience the fact of fiction anew.

Sure, if you’re trying to produce a commercial product that people will read book after book, second-person narration — or any unusual literary technique — may be a liability. If you want to be safe, you’re probably better off sticking with first-person or third-person narration. Readers are familiar with those, and you’re unlikely to raise any eyebrows.

But if as a writer you’re trying to “stand out” in terms of technique, stylistically unusual factors in your work — second person narration just being one very minor possibility — are your playthings.

And, perhaps more importantly, every different technique can give you a whole new perspective on fiction writing.

Writing is a learning process; to learn, you experiment.

And then…you unzip your dress.