Note to brane

You are not allowed to hate the book until edit phase. Then you can loathe it all you like and poke and dismember it and all that stuff. But first it has to exist.

Also, if you suck it up and get to, say, 20 000 words, you can write some nice Faustus/Mephistopholes porn.

Well. Not NICE, necessarily. But you can write some.

Now get your lazy ass synapses back to work, or no naked Meffy for you!

Love,

Marna.

"I know, but what are they DOING?"

Word count:

10 040.

Go me! Go angevin2!

Go PEASANTS!

Specifically, go burn the damn Savoy, willya?

Guest Post: Lois McMaster Bujold *is awash with fangirly glee*

So, as many of you know (as you know, Bob), I'm on Lois McMaster Bujold's mailing list.

The topic of writing sex came up in the context of a discussion of her most recent novel The Sharing Knife --


of which, btw, the first three chapters are available for free here, and you should go read them, because this my friends is a DAMN GOOD BOOK and you would probably like it.


Lois did, however, ask me to note that none of the sex she is discussing below is in the first three chapters.

And I asked her if I could post extracts from her comments, or a link to the archive, here, by way of illuminating the essay about sex writing and genre conventions wrt erotica that I'm going to inflict on you all as soon as I get it cleaned up, and instead, because Lois is Just That Cool, she sent me this version and told me to go ahead and post it here.

So here it is. You can comment to her; she'll be reading. I can't tell you whether she'll be answering copiously, sparingly, or not at all, because she's got a book on the cook, but she'll be here.

Anonymous posting is on, but screened, unless she asks me to de-screen anonymous. Please use an initial or something, at least, when you comment, so we can tell which anoymous you are; it makes the continuity better. Open, passionate, honest communication is encouraged; nastiness to other posters or making fun of other people's turn-ons will, as usual around here, get you slapped so hard your ancesters four generations back will feel it.

Writing Sex.

Lois McMaster Bujold, copyright 12/12/06


A recent on-line conversation put into high relief for me an interesting writing problem: how to write about sexual issues for the broadest possible audience, without either boring the desensitized, or dropping the sensitive overboard. I now think it’s a head-space issue, and it might be enlightening to detail my own travels through those changing zones.

I have seen, and been part of, exchanges of vast mutual incomprehension between the sexually shy or reticent and the sexually active (physically or only mentally); one of the more peculiar of which is that both parties can think the other must be lying about their experience. “Real people (like the kind I know or think I know) aren’t like that, are they? Not possible!”

My own pubescent fantasizing, once I learned enough to have some, was mostly focused on fictional characters to whom I was emotionally attached; it gradually came to seem some sort of violation to me to so use real ones. (RPS, Real Person Slash, still squicks me deeply; I can’t help processing it as a species of slander, so that’s where I draw my personal boundary-of-taste.)

I also draw a personal line between unreal porn -- written or drawn -- and the vid version, which must necessarily involve real people, and tow a boatload of more complex issues. (This medium still squicks me, too, but perhaps in my tiny sample I just haven’t seen the better sort.) Comedy visual porn gets a pass, oddly enough, perhaps through being sufficiently unreal or unthreatening as to get past my filters, but neither do I find it erotic. I will therefore mostly be talking about the imaginary, written kind.

Soon after my marriage, when I was initially trying to figure all this stuff out, I had my husband take me into one of Those Stores, which, despite being a bookstore, was a bit uncomfortable, although he also reported that the few other customers there that morning found my presence made them uncomfortable, too. (I didn’t notice. I focus.) We picked out a couple of books, I took them home and read them, and found them profoundly anti-erotic. They made sex look, to my eyes, ugly and stupid. (I didn’t know, then, about this men’s commercial stuff being written to a reading comprehension level well below my own.) If an interest in sex was to render one ugly and stupid, I would take a pass, thanks. If this was porn, I wanted nothing to do with it, end of survey. The people who read this stuff must either be aliens, or crazy. (In long retrospect, I realize that if my poor ex had harbored any secret hopes for the consequences of this expedition, they must have been quite sadly dashed.)

So the problem of Taking It Personally (and not in a good way) is one I share or have shared, and I quite understand it.

(It may have been an accident of the sampling. I mean, I like dogs, but not in that way, and the trope where the guy fires a gun into the woman’s private parts made me feel strangely unwelcome, for some reason. See Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax” for another writer apparently processing that one. I didn’t make it past that scene in his novella. Once was more than enough for one lifetime.)

Meanwhile, I’d also discovered the romance genre, but this was the late 60’s, early 70’s, and all the books I encountered ended with the proposal, or at most a fade to black. Not at all like the modern, much more useful sex-ed versions. No connection here between romance and real grotty sex. Or even between mind and body. Not helpful.

So anyway, sometime in the early 80’s a female friend passed along some slash fanfic ‘zines, which I read with rising eyebrows. Till around 6 AM, iirc. And the light dawned in more ways than one. This was the sort of riveted interest those other books were apparently supposed to have been having on their intended audiences (which did not include me.) But at least I was now able to extrapolate. And porn in general, now assimilated at a remove, became a much less threatening topic to me. (Well, OK, still not the guns and other misogynistic hostility.) I also, eventually, figured out fetish and how it works, so a lot of other stuff which is Not My Turn-On became at least comprehensible, and not simply insane-looking.

As a side note, I am now wondering if all sexual turn-on (eroticism, the stuff that makes your pupils widen despite yourself, as distinguished from romance -- they are indeed two different things) isn’t a species of fetish, merely that the most common and approved is that of having a fetish about healthy members of the opposite sex of reproductive age. But it all works the same way using the same circuits down in the crocodile-brain. Still thinking about that one. If you eliminated all persons who harbored at least some sort of fetish or focus-of-interest, would there be anyone left?

In my much-later reading, at least two SF books lost me as a reader permanently by repellent sex scenes, one toward the end of a book, another in the very first scene. I’ve never read anything by either of those two writers again. So a misstep handling this stuff can indeed be fatal to, if not a writer’s career, a certain portion of their readership.

Part of the problem was that the scenes in question actually were repellent, but part of the problem was in me as a (then) non-desensitized reader. They leaped out at me. Certain subjects -- sex for many readers, violence for a few, other elements for others -- are received more acutely by the psyche. It then becomes like the problem of balance for a sound engineer, calibrating various frequencies to the hearing of the audience. I posit that in order for a sex scene to “read” level with the surrounding text (in material not intended to be erotic), to a large audience that may contain a lot of non-desensitized readers, content may have to actually be stopped down, muted, or even fade to black.

"One man's meat is another man's poison" is never so true than in literary sex scenes; or, to drop the irresistible double entendre and broaden the scope, one person's turn-on is another person's turn-off. Woe the writer who mistakes his/her own fetishes for human sexuality generally, for example. Specifics that may be working well for the writer may well have an unintended opposite effect on a sensitive reader, or just one who has wildly varying tastes.

The Sharing Knife was from the get-go intended to be a romance where the characters’ various sexual problems were quite central to the plot, so fade-to-black was not an option for certain key scenes. It proved to be mainly a challenge of tone rather than subject matter. The goal was romantic rather than erotic, explicit but not graphic. Leaving out the short words, letting the tab-a-slot-b details fall between the lines, and avoiding gigglesome euphemisms all seemed to contribute. Hence also the use of well-placed strategic vagueness, invisible ellipses as it were. (Although those deliberate lacunae may have been what caused the scene to read "not smoothly" to one apparently desensitized reader. S/he may well have been picking up on or stumbling over the places where specifics ought to have been but were deliberately left out.)

At one point I was considering writing that scene as all-dialog, for some of the above reasons. Except that, after a while, people usually stop talking. And Fawn getting a handle on these major elements of her life was a hugely important event in her character development; trying to find answers to her original welter of questions and going to the wrong source for the withheld specifics was what got her into trouble, in all senses, in the first place. And the effects on Dag mattered, too. So.

Reader-response has still been wildly varied, as a quick perusal of TSK’s Amazon reviews will prove. (Which is actually the usual state for reader-response, I have to admit.) Genre conventions are something of a code term for reader expectations; half the negative reviews on TSK were from folks saying, "But this wasn't the book I was expecting!" Simultaneously, the readers demand freshness and originality in each new book from a writer. This turns out to not be quite the case, for some who only seem to want certain very narrow kinds of freshness and originality. No coloring outside the lines, to be sure, and they are very nonplussed when the writer turns the paper over and draws another picture altogether.

Ta, L.

ETA: My related post is here -- MRN.
ETA2: matociquala has one here, too.

Kissed you in France and I've kissed you in Spain/And I've kissed you in places I'd better not name

Note: I keep editing this as things occur to me.

So this is my sort of other side of the coin comment to Lois, because I found her comments on writing sex in non-erotic fiction clarified a lot of my thoughts about writing sex in erotic fiction, and about erotic fiction in general. This stuff suddenly seems to make more sense when you can work with contrasts...

See, I've spent a lot of (in the end, useful) time grappling with the issue of genre-appropriate eroticism in what I write. For a long time, the notion of "toning it down" really collided with my worldview, probably because I was processing it as "(explicit, erotically portrayed) sex doesn't belong in serious fiction."

Which I... don't buy. And few things will get me as irked as the idea that sex in serious fiction is okay if it's unerotic or disastrous or horribly dysfunctional, but erotic sex is by definition 'gratuitous'.

But it doesn't belong in every piece of fiction, either, and there has to be some way to decide. And having tried and discarded the rules I thought I was seeing in use elsewhere, I have spent a lot of time trying to find a set that were helpful to me.

ETA: oh, good, I was useful after all; matociquala has also posted on writing sex, ETA2 twice, now -- and apparently it's my fault for thinking at her. I'll cop to that. *g*

So today it occurred to me that if I gave the whole thing a quarter turn I get "sex, like every other story element, must contend with genre conventions." And genre conventions, as Lois noted, are a way of saying "reader expectations". You don't necessarily have to MEET your reader's expectations, but you do have to address them.

Ok, I can work with that.

Shortly thereafter it occurred to me, apropos of another bit of discussion, that erotic fiction isn't, by a very useful definition Lois put out there awhile back (don't know if it started with her, but she's where I got it) -- a genre is a group of works in close conversation -- or argumentation -- with one another -- exactly a genre. Yet.


ETA note by Lois: Yep, "A genre is any group of works in close conversation with one another" was my own, original line, and I'm quite pleased with it myself; if I'd been the writer of _Cold Comfort Farm_, I'd have given it three asterisks. (Stella Gibbons, iirc, highly recommended as the antidote for anyone who has overdosed on Thomas Hardy. Which is pretty much anyone who has read Thomas Hardy... but I digress.) Note I say any group of works, not just books, because painting has genres too. As does just about any other art or craft or hobby.

But Marna, you say. Erotica has been around forever! How can it be not a genre?

Well, yes. But each piece of it mostly floats around on its own, in isolation. The work is there, but the conversation is not. Or it is, in a sort of slow, muffled, crippled way.

I think that's changing, slowly.

There are conversations going on there, but it's kind of a bunch of semi-closed shops, and it's not a huge or really cohesive scene. Certainly not as compared to SF/F.

Some of that is probably about the particularity of erotic tastes, but then the SF/F community has all its specialised tastes too, and yet we sort of rub along and find common conversational ground.

Most of it, I suspect, is still about sex as dirty, sex as special case, sex as gratuitous content, etc etc etc. Or just that porn is purely functional, and as long as it more or less gets you there it need not have any 'wasted' beauty or grace to it. Which are reader expectations to be dealt with as well as possible, but they needn't necessarily stop us from reviewing, critiquing, discussing... from taking erotica seriously as a genre and talking about things like genre and subgenre conventions and how we want to work with and against them.

Considering erotica as a genre with genre conventions (which Lois also notes are basically a collective understanding of reader expectations, which I find a useful and true remark) allows for all sort of levels of erotica, including serious and deliberately plotful erotica, It also gives an interesting and I think a useful angle on many of the often heard personal objections to, say, slash:

It's absolutely true that most of the time friends are just friends, to take a recent example.

That doesn't mean that slash devalues platonic friendship. It means that slash is by and large romance, erotic romance, or straight up (sorry, ObBeing12 moment. The world is full of double entendres, and writing erotica teaches one to notice and use them so that they support and don't crossgrain your purposes. This, sadly, has the side effect of making some part of one's brain forever twelve ) erotica, and in erotic fiction, strong emotions tend to move towards the horizontal expression.

If you're reading a spy thriller, you may know very well that most real change in international politics comes about as a result of long, boring, complex actions and negotiations in which nobody at all gets stabbed in the back by their former partner, but you know that that probably isn't the plot you're facing.

And that's not a comment on one's personal reality. Genre conventions are to one's taste, or not, but they're not really a comment on reality.

ETA svilleficrecs prompted me to come up with a list of reader expectations for erotic work, and this is what I have so far. It occurs to me that the rest of this piece makes more sense if I add them here:

In an erotic story, the reader expects:

Attractive characters, conventionally or otherwise, but treated by the narration as appealing.

Mutually enjoyable sexual contact.

Generally positive emotions towards one another.

That the sex is recogniseably related to the characters and to the overarching plot, even if the sexless part of the plot is four lines either side.

That they will get to see not just the mechanics of the sex but a genuine look into the erotic response of the characters.

You can subvert any one of those in any story, you can maybe subvert two, but if you subvert all of them you have a story which may be good but isn't erotica, and if you just ignore them you have a mess, which if it turns anyone on will be because they have a truly bulletproof kink that will operate in any conditions.

Here endeth the establishing remarks, and beginneth another round of Things Marna Thinks She Has Found Out About Writing Good Hot Sex For Erotica, with some remarks on tricks for the erotic story that wishes to find readers who are not already signed up to the kind of stimulus you have on offer this week.

1) Stylish, tight, good writing.

I value good writing in any genre, but in erotica I think it's an especially touchy issue; the effects of jarring the reader are more severe, for one thing, and the narrative voice has to establish itself as one you don't mind having around at a delicate moment. Even the much-decried Purple Prose has its place, or at least its younger and more modest sibling Lush Prose does. The human mind thinks in blood and roses when it comes to sexual pleasure, and you don't want to chill your reader with a good dose of clinicalism at the wrong time.

2) You don't get everybody.

Erotica has the same constraints as any other genre writing: you start out by assuming you have a certain percentage of people who actively want what you're peddling (this is one reason -- the other one being that slash and everything else are in the eye of the beholder -- why you can write a good, effective slash story, for example, about two characters where there is little or no homoerotic tension to most eyes and get readers. People who want slash want slash, and they'll do a lot to get it.) and then another percentage who wouldn't have it if it came with a pony, and you aim at group A.

Err. Not a pony in the story. In that part of the story. At least, that's not my readership. I hope, or they're probably fairly peeved at me by now, even if I do invoke fauna a lot for plot.

3) I'll note, as that just reminded me, that in plotful erotica there are all sorts of story elements you have to handle very very carefully that often don't really occur to the mind until you're in edit. Like, say, goats. The fauna and the rest of the set dressing must be deployed with great caution, lest you send your reader where nobody wants them to go. :)

4) On specifics/explicitness:

At the moment, I'm finding it very useful to think of this along genre lines at the moment, though I'll probably broaden out again when I'm done chewing this bit of meat.

So I'm mapping this to 'subgenre', as in the differences between, say, the difference between cozy country-house mysteries, police proceedurals, the detective-centric mystery novel of character, and the overtly literary mystery that wants to state a broader theme.

Sometimes you describe the blood spatter minutely. Sometimes you just say there's a body.

5) The case where you are a member of your own target audience requires careful handling. As does the case where you are not.

The best way I have yet encountered to deal with the whole writers-kinks versus narrative-requirements issue is to write your first draft long and detailed and exactly to your own taste and then edit the living heck out of it, if possible at a time when you're in an utterly unerotic mood. While eating oatmeal is good, I find ...

If you don't do the first, you risk never really getting any strong emotional resonance in the scene at all, not to mention you end up with amazing and amusing continuity errors from skimping your blocking.

If you don't do the second, well. The term for unexpurgated outpourings of one's own personal kinks is 'steamy love letter', and their natural audience is one person, already disposed to be tolerant. And even they can go horribly wrong...

6) Degree of detail does not equal hotness level, or even smuttiness level.

"All the details left in" is its own specialised subgenre, and even that doesn't _really_ leave them all in, it merely takes pains to add enough for versimilitude.

I mean, a certain consistency and tolerance for repetition is generally valued in the real life act, but it sort of kills the narrative. "And the rest of the night he was on 'er and off 'er" gets the point across nicely.

The trick to broadening the appeal of smut, if you care to do so, is, I find, strategic vaguenesses about mechanical detail coupled with a very tight narrative focus on the erotic and emotional responses of the parties involved. If you can entice your reader into the character's head, via methods that don't directly touch on sexual hot buttons, you can lead them for the space of the scene to want what the character so urgently wants, even if you stray a bit from what the reader would normally consider a good time.

There are limits to this, but you can get a pretty good run out of it.

Also, you can get away with a lot of telling detail in the more generally appealing bits, and there are always generally appealing bits, even in the most specialised erotica: like, just about nobody hates the smooching, and the smooching is usually pretty early on. If you can grab 'em and drag 'em in erotically with the smooching they'll probably stick for the ride. (I don't seem able to get away from the double entendres, do I?)

You can even get away with only writing the smoochies, pouring in enough detail to attain a suitable heat for making creme brulee, and then fade to black and people will hardly notice and tell you you are smutty as heck, when actually it's their dirty little minds, bless them, doing all the real heavy work. This is total stunt-writing, and sort of fun, in moderation. :)

And bits of telling detail in the non-erotic bits are also good. I think I once bought myself a whole pile of reader identification by deploying the phrase "and his knees, not to put too fine a point on it, were killing him." 'Cause most people can identify with THAT one; more even that can be gotten with smooching.


And there I run dry for a bit...

Addendum: Dealing With Erotic Cliches.

"Avoid them" doesn't totally work. Our main erotic and romantic goals as humans and as readers tend to be satisfaction, not wild originality; lots of human erotic behaviour is cliched for good reasons.

There are, however, things you can do to make them more palatable to the experienced reader: most of them add up to subversion, but not all.

For instance, you can have aware characters. (I'm sorry to fall back on my own work for examples, but the usual reason applies): I once wrote a character with a tall, beautiful blonde falling passionately into his arms. And made him notice that this was, you know, One Of Those Moments.

Also, playing with the tension between cliche and departure from cliche is good: said blonde was drunk. And needed a shave. And the falling was semi-literal, i.e. whups! tumbled over ... so, not VERY like a play, then.

And all that meant I could go cheerfully ahead with the basic Hot Damn! Hot Blond! In my lap! reaction of the character. Who is one of those guys who is aware enough to be amused by this sort of thing, but he really isn't gonna pass this up.

Or you can just deal with them straight on when they come up, and make sure that they're passing moments in your scene. This works best with those cliches ther's a reason for; actually, the first time you kiss someone you've wanted for a long time generally IS bloody explosive. If it isn't, you probably end up rethinking the sex thing right there.

And the bit right after the sex generally IS bloody awkward. Go ahead and let it be awkward; exert your originality on making them deal with it interestingly.


OK, that's all I got for now.

I think slowly but I get there: another way to make your erotica work better is to make your erotic detail do double duty: if you can manage to also make it forward the plot, the reader for whom it does not hit an erotic tender spot will still more readily accept it and is less likely to be tossed out of the scene, because it then "fades down" instead of sticking out like a sore thumb. So tie it to character or plot where you can; makes the erotica stronger, makes the plot stronger, means you can pack more detail in with less risk. Because you just never know what's going to hit a person's buttons, as I was reminded tonight when I passed a tall, thin blond man wearing a stripey scarf and didn't figure out for four blocks just exactly why that had hit me like a brick. You know, nobody could predict that. When we say we're writing to a certain group's kinks, we're really only talking about the large print. The small print ... is luck. I'm trying to think of a good example of this except the really kind of squicky one in Elements, because that's a special case where ambivalence was desired. Body movements or lines that can either be sexy or just tell you something about the character or what they are thinking. Environmental description, ditto. This may be best done via infilling on edit: oh yeah, I need her to smile like THIS later, when she lies, and to only do that when she's lying, and I can work it into the sex scene, cause she's lying there and also if you don't know that yet it's got a certain hot to it. Things like that.