Waiting for the muse to strike

I just read a post by Elizabeth Black at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association. It's titled: 'Don't wait for your muse to strike; you'll wait for ever.' It's a topic I'd already been pondering after a period when I managed to get thousands of words done despite being run off my feet with other work and family commitments. 

Elizabeth points out that you can't wait for inspiration

to strike, or you'll never write anything. She advises setting yourself goals, treating writing like a vocation, establishing a routine and creating a support network of people who take your writing seriously.

I've read other advice about the importance of routines and of having a workspace conducive to creativity. I find setting up a routine hard when no day in my life is the same due to strange working hours, family duties and having to make the most of good weather to get down to the allotment. (Stop laughing. I mean generally. I know we haven't had any good weather of late.)

But Elizabeth is quite right. You can't wait around for ideal conditions and expect that they will suddenly make you uber creative where before there was nothing. I remember when I first started journalism training, a fellow student mentioned that they were waiting for inspiration and our tutor took great delight in laughing at her expense. (Humiliation being one of the main methods of training journalists.) Deadlines don't wait for inspiration, and even though your work as a fiction writer might not involve news editors swearing at you at 8am, you still have to get the words on the page.

I got thousands of words written in January when I had a weekend away. I wasn't actually meant to be alone; my partner and I having suffered a minor blip. But the fact that I went alone turned it into a kind of writer's retreat. It was a snowy weekend, which meant I didn't want to drive anywhere once I'd arrived. The cottage was a fourteenth-century building in the countryside with a wood burner (and not much other heating). It was ideal for writing. I'd get up, write for a while until I got hungry, cook breakfast then head out for a walk, during which time I'd mull over ideas (as well as imagining that the animal prints in the snow looked just like I'd imagine a panther's prints to look). Then I'd get back and write some more, with a beer, until I got hungry again. After that I'd spend several hours coaxing the woodburner to stay alight so I didn't freeze to death and get eaten by the resident mouse.

I probably wrote a similar number of words earlier this week. I've had a big editing job to do. I've volunteered to do extra shifts at work. I have the usual family stuff. I've booked to run a five-mile race on Sunday which I really needed to train for. I decided, in my wisdom, to write stories for about six calls for submissions with April 1st deadlines. Which is apt, because I must be a fool.

The point is, that I had a sudden burst of creativity in which I managed to write in a notebook on my knee at work, I mulled stories in my head as I commuted, I typed up late at night when I should have been asleep, I wrote in the twenty minutes I had between the school run and gym class, I wrote in bed, at the dining table and on the couch. I'd probably been storing up inspiration from a million and one little observations and experiences and suddenly there was room for no more.

What's my message here? You can't wait for these periods of creativity. If you're going to be a writer you have to write regardless of whether conditions are ideal. But if you're going to be a writer, you'd better be ready for the muse to strike when conditions are far from ideal as well as in those times when you find yourself alone in an isolated cottage. And yes, that is the cottage pictured above. It's in Shropshire, England, it sleeps two and you can book it at the Landmark Trust. 

Once Upon a Time...

Once upon a time, all an author had to do was start a story at the beginning and keep writing until they reached the end. And sometimes that is still the way to do it, especially if you happen to be producing an eroticised version of a traditional fairytale. However, some bright spark started spouting Latin and going on about stories starting in the middle of the action: ‘in media res’. It was, in fact, some Roman dude called Horace talking about Homer’s The Iliad in the first century BC. Thank you Wikipedia. So not some fancy pants technique made up by twentieth-century movie directors to confuse us, although the writer Kurt Vonnegut took it a step further by saying: “Start as close to the end as possible.”

So where are you going to start your story? Let’s take our couple who are about to get up to some kinky shenanigans at the allotment:

Once upon a time there was a boy called Nick and a girl called Leanne and they grew up and moved in together and got an allotment. And one day, Nick was making a chicken coop, while Leanne planted broad beans. Little did Nick know that Leanne was also planning to lock him in the chicken coop and drop nettles on him. But he wouldn’t have minded, because Nick is sexually submissive and a masochist.

Are you asleep yet?

So how about this:

Before his brain told him to stop, Nick’s hips started to thrust. The nettles’ tiny hairs punctured his skin, injecting their poison. He pressed his butt down hard to immobilise it, whimpering around the glossy Red Windsor dessert apple he was holding in his teeth as he did so. His jaw ached as he tried to avoid biting through the fruit.

‘Push it into your mouth as far as you can then bite down,’ Leanne had said. ‘Keep it there while you jerk off for me. If you bite through it, I won’t give you permission to come.’

Starting off like this allows us to take in some facts without them being spelt out in such a prosaic way. Nick is lying in some nettles and is holding an apple in his mouth while he wanks. Leanne has ordered him to do this, so we know about the power dynamic and the kinkiness. But we’re still going to have to provide backstory at some point about exactly where they are and what they’re doing.

There are different ways of doing this. The simplest is to give a paragraph or so of the action, then put in a break mark, a row of asterisks or whatever the style is, then go back to the beginning. If the initial image is striking enough for the reader to hold in mind while they go back to the start, I think this can work, but it also risks looking lazy. The alternative is to drip feed in the backstory a bit at a time. And this risks being confusing if you’re not clear about the frequent shifts between current action and what’s gone before.

Which leads on to the subject of whether you’re writing in the present or past tense to begin with. As with third-person narrative, I think past tense tends to be the default when you begin writing. But again, the alternative can provide more immediacy and pace, particularly for erotica. With the past tense, even though the reader doesn’t know what is going to happen before they actually read the words, they know subconsciously that this fiction they’re currently pretending to be true is over and done with: ‘His jaw ached as he tried to avoid biting through the fruit.’ Will he bite through it and be denied permission to come? With the sentence in the past tense, the reader’s expectation is that he will avoid it. The fictional narrator knows this already and has given no clue otherwise. Here's the alternative: ‘His jaw aches as he tries to avoid biting through the fruit.’ The narrator is still in the middle of the action and so, therefore, is the reader. The future is a lot less certain. Anything could happen.

Writing in the present tense make it easier to put the backstory in too without having to use the word ‘had’ a million and one times: ‘Nick lies down in the coop. He made it for the Plymouth Rock pullets they’d ordered.’ Otherwise you end up with: ‘Nick lay down in the coop. He had made it for the Plymouth Rock pullets they’d ordered.’

As for the second person future tense – only you know how that one will turn out. Incidentally, though, Alison Tyler currently has a call for submissions out for stories in the second person (not future tense!), deadline April 15. Details at her blog.

Who's telling this damn story?

I've been thinking about the decisions every writer makes for every story about narrative voice and tenses. Sometimes you have a brilliant idea for an opening scene. You rush to the laptop to get it down in all its glory. Then you kind of peter out and all you've got is a mood piece. And you realise that in your rush to start writing, you made a number of unconscious decisions about who’s telling the story and in what tense. Often, what’s needed to get the story flowing again, is to realise what those decisions were and ask yourself whether they were the right ones.

Let’s say you’re going to write a story about... er... kinky shenanigans in a chicken coop. As you do. So you put your fingers on the keyboard and this comes out:

Nick put the last screw through the hinge of the chicken coop and stood back to admire his work. It was a pine A-frame ark with a cosy perching area opening onto a meshed run. Perfect for the four Plymouth Rock point-of-lay pullets they’d be picking up next week.

‘What do you think?’ he called over to Leanne.

She straightened from weeding the French beans. ‘Looking good,’ she said. ‘But you’d better test it out. See how comfy they’re going to be in the run.’

Nick clocked the change in dynamic between them. Leanne had a wicked smile on her face and a handful of nettles in her gloved hand. His cock tingled.

If you take a step back, you can examine the decisions you made without even realising: The story is going to be in the third person, but from Nick’s point of view. It is in the past tense. It starts at a point at which the sexual element between the two characters is just coming into play. This means some backstory is required right away about what the hell’s going on with the chicken coop. So let’s look at some of the possibilities.

I think a lot of us probably start out as writers with the third person being our default setting. It allows us to describe the main character in a way they wouldn’t do for themselves: ‘Nick’s hair was dark and in need of a cut; it stuck to the back of his neck where working in the sun had made him sweat.’ You couldn’t just translate that into first person: ‘My hair was dark and in need of a cut; it stuck to the back of my neck where working in the sun had made me sweat.’ It doesn’t work. No one goes around describing their own hair colour or their level of perspiration. 

To convey the same kind of information and mood in the first person, you’d have to say something like this: ‘I wished I’d been for the haircut I knew I needed. Working in the sun had made the long bits at the back of my neck stick to me.’ And it may just end up sounding better.

What’s the difference? You get less objective description in the first person. If you want to describe Nick’s hair colour, you’re going to need a narrator that isn’t him. But you get more emotional depth in the first person. I’m coming round to the idea that my default setting for erotica is the first person, although it’s not always appropriate. It leaves more space for the reader to identify with the protagonist precisely because that person is not describing their own appearance in detail. And it gets you right into the person’s thoughts and physical responses without having some mysterious mind-reading narrator hovering over the action. I mean, how does my narrator know that this is what Nick is thinking and what his cock is doing?

Nick clocked the change in dynamic between them. Leanne had a wicked smile on her face and a handful of nettles in her gloved hand. His cock tingled.

It’s much more immediate and, I guess the word I’m looking for here is sexy, to have Nick tell it himself:

I clocked the change in dynamic between us. Leanne had a wicked smile on her face and a handful of nettles in her gloved hand. My cock tingled.

What we’re getting here is the direct effect of Leanne’s smile on Nick’s body without any guesswork. And as a reader, you’re right there in the action, living it through Nick.

Sometimes, you can wring more depth and meaning out of the action simply by swapping who is actually telling the story. The more obvious option when writing about D/s relationships is to write from the submissive’s point of view because they’re the ones who’ll be experiencing a range of emotional and physical responses. I think it’s harder to write with as much depth and emotion from the dominant viewpoint. But if you crack it, it can be pretty darned hot because the dominant player actually has to be closely attuned to all the things going on in the submissive’s mind and body. We could have Leanne being the first-person narrator:

I watched Nick put the last screw through the hinge of the chicken coop and stand back to admire his work. His hair was sticking to the back of his neck from working in the sun.

‘What do you think?’ he called over to me.

‘Looking good. But you’d better test it out. See how comfy they’re going to be in the run.’

His lips parted slightly as he clocked the change of dynamic between us. He glanced at the handful of nettles in my gloved hand. I smiled.

It’s not about the dominant controlling the sub’s response, but anticipating from experience what that response is likely to be, watching it happen and throwing something new or unexpected into the mix. Like a handful of nettles.

I’ll be writing another post about how you choose what tense to use, at what point of the action the story starts and the issues with weaving in back story. In the meantime, my story about chicken coops and nettles is over at the Every Night Erotica site.

Positively kinky

After getting my knickers in a twist over ethics, I thought about sharing the sort of things I really like to write about to balance the debate about the areas I worry about. There is, of course, room for all sorts and I'm for freedom of expression, as a general rule, rather than censorship. As my grandmother likes to say, 'It'd be a dull world if we all liked the same thing.' But I do like to think about the worlds I'm creating with my words and the effects they might have.

There's one area I do like to explore, and that's kink as part of healthy, positive relationships. That might mean anything from people's tentative first steps to seasoned BDSMers. but it's always in an atmosphere of acceptance and openness.

Some of the comments I read in The Guardian's debate on porn, mentioned in my previous post, talked about the repression of desires. One actually put the words 'healthy' and 'repression' together. Now, I suppose if what you desire is to go out and kill people, it might be necessary to repress that (although I imagine therapy would have more long-term success!). But it doesn't take a degree in psychology to know that when otherwise reasonably civilised human beings repress a desire, it's going to manifest itself regardless in possibly unwelcome ways. Personally, I think people should be able to explore and express their sexual selves within loving relationships.

What this means is that my characters probably already know they're kinky, even if some of them may be at an early stage where they haven't fully admitted it to themselves or put it into so many words. I'm reminded of Sophie Morgan's Diary of a Submissive, in which she recalls her youthful fascination with Maid Marian, who would be forever getting captured by the baddies and in need of rescue. (Game of cops and robbers anyone?) I'm not going to write about people who have to be shown/taught that they're submissive (by the domineering asshole I mentioned in my last post) when they keep expressing reservations. A couple of recent blockbusters come to mind.

What all this also means is writing about people who've had time to build up trust in their relationship. Physical safety is an obvious issue, but it's also an emotional issue in knowing that someone accepts you as you are and wants to understand. So while I can see the attraction of a casual fling (in a literary sense!) and the fantasy of unpredictability, I mostly prefer to write about people who are committed to their partner(s). In fact, I think as a writer I'm getting soppier. This is odd, since I'd rather sit in a bath of cold baked beans than watch a romantic movie. Unless it's Dirty Dancing. 

I've started to explore what's going on in people's brains more than what they've got in their toy boxes. Charlotte Stein's style springs to mind here. She manages to explore power dynamics without so much as a mention of handcuffs. Well, not often anyway. No props, just people and their crazy, complicated mind-body connections. And it's so damn hot. 

Ethical Debate is Just Thrilling

I've been thinking lately about the ethics of the eroticised thriller as a subgenre of erotica. I read one book in which a male agent was made to unwillingly submit to a variety of BDSM practices as part of a double bluff. The storyline was presented such that if the agent was let in on the secret, he may have blown the mission. One reviewer wrote: 'Abuse and assault sold as BDSM' and 'If you call it BDSM, then write real BDSM. Don't package non-consensual torture as BDSM.' 

I know I'm getting heavy here, talking ethics 'n stuff. I've been spending too much time reading discussions on The Guardian website about the EU debate on banning porn. Some food for thought here: 'Porn for all, not a ban is better for women' and here: 'Who speaks for women who work in the adult industry?' Some of the comments are amusing in an entirely immature way. They get onto strap-ons, sperm whales and insulting each other's mothers.

I've seen various plot devices which allow all manner of things to be done to people that they might not have expressly asked for: enchantments, drugs, vampire magic, complicated psychology, different societal norms. The good stuff is a million miles from the stories in which people with low self-esteem have to be 'persuaded' that really they're naturally submissive - despite this never having occurred to them before - by some domineering asshole. So I don't think you can draw up rules about this. It's about intelligent writing. It's about awareness of the issues. And it's about how your work makes you feel about yourself as a writer. 

I was going to get into discussion of where you draw the line, why erotica is different from other genres in which nasty things happen to nice people, why you can get away with more in fantasy or pseudo-history, why it seems like men sometimes get it rougher and how sexist that is. But then I thought, to hell with that, I'll just post some sexy pictures from movies and TV of men in oh-so-terribly perilous situations. It's the movies people, it ain't real. And Velvet Tripp has already covered issues of consent in BDSM writing at the Deliciously Deviant blog.

I do apologise for my inability to sort out the layout of this blog template! It's not exactly user friendly.







Pictured, from top: Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem in Skyfall, Ryan Reynolds in Blade: Trinity, Richard Armitage in Strike Back, Joaquin Phoenix and Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Jensen Ackles and, er, Paris Hilton in Supernatural.

Virtual cake

I've been out visiting again, sharing some virtual cake with the lovely Kay Jaybee.

I've shared some thoughts as a relative newbie to writing erotica on the things I've learnt since I first had a story accepted by Xcite Books last summer. The list starts with 'Be Nice'!

Click here to read more...

I'm Out Visiting

I'm over at the fabulous Lucy Felthouse's place today, talking about why maps are so sexy that I wrote my story for Smut Alfresco all about them:

My story, The Explorer Challenge, is all about the British Ordnance Survey map, which may not sound a particularly likely subject for erotica. But I'm a map geek and proud of it. In fact, I've just ventured into my loft to count the maps in my collection and I have 62...

Click here to read more...