A brief interlude for non-fiction, or, I need a metabreak

[marnanightingale]

A few things I think I know about love and sex and the writing thereof:

1) Love does not conquer all. In exactly the same way that chocolate cake does not remove stubborn stains from white tshirts -- if that's what you're trying to use love for, you may wish to read the manual again.

1a) Love can INSPIRE you to conquer quite a lot, but that's different. And not necessarily good.

1b) Love does not constitute permission to conquer. There are words for people who refer to their love affairs as conquests, and most of them are at least slightly unpleasant.

2) Actually, first times are frequently FABULOUS. Reason being, by the time you finally make up your mind that you actually are going to have sex with this person and get somewhere where you can make it happen, your brain's done most of the work already.

2a) It's the Hundred-and-First time when either you've learned to use your hands for something other than leverage or you have a problem.

3) Love actually does change everything.

3a) BEING loved, not necessarily; you can be greatly loved and totally unaffected by it. Or even unaware of it. But LOVING? Oh yeah.

3b) I said change, not improve. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes just plain different. Hell, sometimes it'll make you dead or insane.

3c) It's alchemy, not Wild Magic. Lead can become gold, Gold can become plutonium. Shit isn't going to turn into sugar, nor steel into sponge-cake. What comes out of the fire will resemble what went in.

4) Loyalty, honesty, and fidelity are desperately important in love. They also mean different things to different people. Very different things, some mutually contradictory. For some people fidelity means never being alone with another member of the opposite/same sex (if your beloved is bisexual, may I timidly suggest that this is not a good way to go unless you want them to go stir-crazy? ETA: I phrased this ambiguously. Go Here for the slightly long-winded clarification). For others, loyalty means calling when you get back from the Dangerous Secret Mission and honesty means not mentioning what -- or who -- you got up to until you're at home and they've had a chance to count all your fingers and toes.

4a) Loving someone and having a powerful and deep will to do them good doesn't actually guarantee that you know what will be good for them.

4b) These things alone can keep you in plots rich with conflict and turmoil until your keyboard screams and your fingers bleed, with never a spurious argument in the lot.

5) It's not that real sex isn't much more awkward and messy than fictional sex. It's that you don't generally much notice or care at the time, so really, there's no real reason for your characters to either.

5b) It is a truth universally acknowledged that people think about their grocery lists during bad sex. It is less widely known that this sort of thing happens during good sex too. People multitask. Knowing these things can be useful for a writer.

Comments

[gryphons-lair.livejournal.com]

ROTFLMAO at 5b.

[guede-mazaka.livejournal.com]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that people think about their grocery lists during bad sex. It is less widely known that this sort of thing happens during good sex too. People multitask. Knowing these things can be useful for a writer

*sporfle*

Not at the truth, but at the juxtaposition. So whenever I get around to having two-person whoopie, it's perfectly okay to work on my plots while messing around?

:P

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Not only is it okay, it is more or less inevitable.

[guede-mazaka.livejournal.com]

I suddenly have this image of me diving off the bed to scribble down an idea on my Post-its. Ai-yah...

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

the invisible boyfriend and i got the germ of an idea for a set design while in bed and did just that, once

[cleverthylacine]

But it's still bad if you're thinking "I could do better with a Hitachi and a Snape fic" on the first go, yes?

Talking of serial commas...

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Yep. that's bad. Thinking about Hitatchi/Snape fic is more of a grey area...

Re: Talking of serial commas...

[cleverthylacine]

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee yes!

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

the opposite/same sex

If you want to avoid slashes (come on, you know what I mean), I recently ran across the apt phrase "the apposite sex".

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

I like that!

[the-dala.livejournal.com]

::nods:: I will save, and learn.

[hawk-eye.livejournal.com]

(if your beloved is bisexual, may I timidly suggest that this is not a good way to go unless you want them to go stir-crazy?)

Assuming you're saying what I think you're saying (I'm only on my second coffee of the day and may not be thinking straight - so to speak), I'm not sure I agree with this.

I'm Bi, but I'm also utterly committed to my female partner. To me, the matter of bisexual fidelity is no different from that of straight or gay fidelity. I've always felt that you commit to the person, no the gender, if that makes sense.

But hey - great list!

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I *think* (although I could be wrong) that commodorified was saying that people have different ideas of what is involved in "fidelity", and that some people's ideas of fidelity might be as restrictive as "my partner should never be alone with a member of his/her preferred sex, other than me". This would be difficult enough if one's partner were monosexual, but well-nigh impossible if one's partner were bisexual.

I really don't think there was any implication that someone who is bisexual couldn't be monogamous.

Again, though, I could easily be wrong, and I don't claim to speak for commodorified.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Again, though, I could easily be wrong, and I don't claim to speak for [info]commodorified.

In this case, you're hired, because that is exactly what I meant. :-)

[hawk-eye.livejournal.com]

Hawkeye - bringing people together since 18-ought-three!

[hawk-eye.livejournal.com]

But even what you're saying still implies there is a difference in... self control, I guess, between bi people and other preferences.

I'm not trying to make an argument, or anything, but it's a topic that's kinda close to my heart :)

Certainly, people do have very different ideas of commitment - one person's fidelity can easily be another person's nightmare, but I think it's a universal issue, not one more prevalent in one sexual preference or another.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

OK, one of us needs more coffee.

Possibly me.

Also, remember that I am bi also?

No, what I am saying is this:

I know people who either through religious scruples or personal choice interpret marital chastity/fidelity as "do not be alone with a member of the sex you are attracted to unless it is me." Perfectly sane, happy people with good marriages.

Now, if you are a straight woman, this means that you can still be alone with other women.

If you are a queer woman, this means you can be alone with men.

Etc.

Restrictive. But perfectly doable.

If you are a bi woman OR man, this means you will potentially never for the rest of your life have a private conversation or intimate friendship with any person who is not your spouse, a child, or a close family member, ever again.

And I do not recommend that. That is all.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

(and do not be alarmed; I am familiar with the exact bigoted bullshit of which you speak and it makes me drink boiling water and piss icecubes too -- so there is absolutely no danger of getting into an argument here.)

*invokes the friendly moose*

[hawk-eye.livejournal.com]

*lightbulb!*

Aha! I get it now! My apologies for being one of those annoying bi folk who ignore every sentence but the bloody important one! And for some reason I was reading 'alone' and somehow managing to interpret it as 'alone in bed' for some reason.

Which probably is very telling...

:)

And, incidentally, I had guessed you were bi, but was not certain of the fact of it.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

No problem, and *hee* and queer as a snake in sneakers, yes...

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

My stockings are rocked by your wisdom. *applauds and makes notes*

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

1b) Love does not constitute permission to conquer. There are words for people who refer to their love affairs as conquests, and most of them are at least slightly unpleasant.

The most positive of them being "General Romeo Vorkosigan, the one-man strike force"???

[allyra.livejournal.com]

I bow to your extraordinary wisdom. Again.

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

3c. Wise and beautiful.

[imyril.livejournal.com]

I've found my fiction tending towards the sexual like a freight train with on ice recently... after your pearls, I have no fear.

Although the poor buggers familiar with the characters may well do if they read the unedited version of what's going on in my main character's head.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

I agree with utterly every item on your list. Wonderful.

The whole love conquering all bollocks, too true.

And, oh god, loving someone changing yourself? And your life? And causing you to change your country? And your job? More than once? And the way you relate to other people in general? And feel about the world? Lord.

I like the analogy with alchemy - the form of what one has may/will probably change, but the substance remains pretty much the same.

Totally with the fidelity, in whatever sense one defines it. "Knowing what's best" for someone is never a possibility - knowing what might be better is, but you can't ever make that happen for them. Even if it kills you to admit that.

And, hah, the lateral mind-movements during good sex... I think one's brain ferments and it all bubbles over into wierd places. Oh, and I hate it when writers self-consciously emphasise the awkwardness of first-time sex - thank you for highlighting that one.

[thynk2much.livejournal.com]

5) It's not that real sex isn't much more awkward and messy than fictional sex. It's that you don't generally much notice or care at the time, so really, there's no real reason for your characters to either.

So true... and to follow on from that, I think that the point where the awkwardness and messiness become something that one is extremely conscious of? that's the point where one perhaps should be asking oneself, "do I actually still love this person?" Because the place where the emotional problems in the relationship show up first (if most subtly) is, yep, the bedroom.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that people think about their grocery lists during bad sex. It is less widely known that this sort of thing happens during good sex too. People multitask.

I think multitasking - not as ability to multitask, but as the degree to which one does it by default - is one of those things about human nature that falls on a normal distribution curve, with some few people who do it a lot and some few hardly at all and most in the middle, but which is sufficiently not talked about that it's easy for any given person to think their own experience works as a default.

Speaking as an obligate multi-tasker who regards first person singular as a convenient narrative fiction for keeping one's grammar straight, I suspect I am getting the thing of it being easier to notice ranges like this when one is an outlier than when one is closer to the normative.

[galadhir.livejournal.com]

Love 3c! So true :) As is the rest of it, of course.