Here, publicly, is my response to Joan Defers ‘On “Dark Erotica” post. I posted it here because I’m so fed up to the teeth with the emergent relationship between readers and writers, I just couldn’t keep silent any longer. Please note that my comment was not a refutation of Joan’s post. It was simply a commentary on the issues she brought up in hers, which I feel are important and very germane to the changing definition of ‘erotica’ as a genre and the radical shift in reader-expectation.
What I find truly depressing is the unvarnished reality: readers now expect to consume books the way they walk into McDonalds and order a Big Mac. It better taste the way they expect it to taste. Better have the same ingredients. Better look the way it did before. After all, they’ve bought their PRODUCT and the customer is always right.
Reading is no longer about having an adventure or being shocked, or surprised, or challenged, or stumbling across something unexpected. If it doesn’t conform to the tropes they have been led to expect from whatever sub-sub-sub genre marketing they’ve had it sold to them as, they feel ripped off.
This expectation makes erotica writers into literary sex workers. It makes them factory staff, churning out formulaic trope after formulaic trope. Change the names, the colour of hair, the professions of the characters, and run the same trick again. God forbid a reader should end up with something unexpected on their kindles.
May you get what you deserve. And may you drown in the predictable banality of it all.
Readers have a right to expect skilled writing. If they buy a sci-fi novel, they have a right to expect it to be about the ‘not yet possible’ and if they buy a fantasy novel, they have a right to expect the ‘impossible’ (I’m taking my definition from the fabulous Kij Johnson). If they buy detective fiction, they have a right to expect that there will be some form of a mystery that requires unravelling. If they buy erotica, they have a right to expect sexual desire as an integral part of the plot or character development. Not necessarily what YOU SEXUALLY DESIRE.
But that’s where it ends. I am not a whore. It’s not my JOB to get you off for money. I write, I’m not a sex worker. Not a porn producer. I don’t perform literary cunnilingus for cash. If I did, I can assure you, you couldn’t afford me. Because it sure as fuck wouldn’t be on sale for $0.99 or $3.50 at Amazon. If you don’t like it weird, rough and edgy, don’t fucking read any of my books. And don’t EVER FUCKING WHINE that I don’t give you happy endings.You’re barking up the wrong genre. For that, you either need to visit a Bangkok massage parlour or a romance novel.
I’m not going to allow the present fashion for treating cultural product as a fast food meal or a pair of factory sneakers ruin my love of reading or writing literature and if that means I only have five fucking readers in the world… I don’t care. I fell in love with reading because it offered me the unknown, the dangerous, the frightening, the wondrous. Not a fucking Big Mac. I began to write to participate in that dialogue, not in frigging someone for money.
A writer, writing professionally, needs to write to meet the editorial guidelines that have been set for him/her. (Or, concievably, to adapt something already written to meet those guidelines.) In your case you are setting your own editorial guidelines – and therefore I gratefully say, “More power to you!”
I’m happy to be one of your five readers.
That may have been the case in the days when fiction publishers HAD editorial guidelines. But now, for the most part, they just have profit targets. And no, it’s not the same thing. Romance and erotic romance have VERY CLEAR tropes. A reader, picking up a book published under that genre, has a right to expect love and an HEA. But what has happened is that readers have come to believe that they can burden ANY FUCKING BOOK THEY GET THEIR HANDS ON with those expectations. And they’re being accommodated because publishers just want the money. And my genre is dying under the sludge of this banal, profit driven vomit.
This is where I begin to wonder if this “open relationship” between readers and writers is fruitful or deterimental. As much as writers say they will write the book of their heart and stick to their guns, once you enter the world of publishing and expect to make money from your words, that focus changes. Posts like this subconsciously push us into writing what appeals to readers so we aren’t ridiculed in this fashion by the Big Mac connisseurs of the genre. Because let’s face it, I’m an artist. I’m sensitive about my shit. This is what 50 shades has done to the genre. I fear it will go the same way as Paranormal where it was so hot and popular but quickly fell off because every book that came out was full of the same tropes/characters/settings.
Wooooohooo!
I’ve been trying to formulate this for a while. Especially after reading a review that gave my story two stars for having ‘weird, loser characters’. I didn’t respond, but I really wanted to say: If you don’t like weird losers, steer clear of my work. Go and find some dashing alpha males somewhere, I think there are plenty to go around already.
As for editorial guidelines : You don’t aim to meet them, but you acknowledge their presence, in my opinion, and then try to forget about them.
God… I LOVE weird, loser characters. I love reading about characters who are strangers to me. It’s like doubling your sphere of acquaintance without leaving your living room.
Hmmm. Perhaps that’s why no one wants that in fiction anymore. They already get it via the internet.
I’m with RG and you on this one. Give me the weird ones, the slightly unlikable ones, and the weird. I have yet to read an alpha male type that interested me.
Hear, fucking hear.
Cringe worthy moments in writing:
1) A writer polling her readers about her next “alpha male” character’s hair length. Rather than McDonald’s, this is Burger King “Have it your way” writing. Check the boxes and we’ll slap a customized skin over this generic product. Essentially, the reader is hovering over the writer’s shoulder and dictating the contents of the story, which explains something about the level of writing those readers accept. It’s often only marginally better than if they had written it themselves. Are we stenographers or writers?
Several years ago, I was a judge for a writing contest and was given ten paranormal erotic romances to read. In eight of them, the woman broke up or divorced then bought a huge house in a secluded area on a whim (usually a Victorian). In seven of those, the house came pre-furnished with a huge four poster bed in the master bedroom (which was inexplicably on the ground floor rather than upstairs). In six of those, the curtains on the bed were red velvet. In five of the stories, there was a thunderstorm that blew open the French doors in the bedroom. In all five of them, the heroine was compelled to walk through those French doors out into the storm where the wind whipped her filmy white nightgown around her, and she happened to run into her reclusive alpha male (werewolf/vampire/Byronic hero) neighbor. I’m not saying those writers were working off a checklist, but…
2) vote whoring. Writers begging people to go vote on their book to win a contest. In the land of “What I’d like to believe,” the writer with the most fans writes the best books. Alas, this is demonstrably not true. So frustratingly, maddeningly not true. Sure, People’s Choice awards are authentic recognition of the least offensive, most zeitgeist, mayo on white bread work out there, but the author who wins those things is not by a long shot the most gifted storyteller. Those awards should be more honest and say they’re a measure of a writer’s social networking skills, not the literary quality of the book.
And yet, I believe there are readers out there who want to read something unique and challenging. I’m one of them. So are you. I’d be content to write for such a small readership.
What most bothers me is the anger that is sometimes directed at writers because the reader PAID MONEY for the book (i.e. the product) and is therefore entitled to make any kind of venomous attack on the author. It’s a curious idea, that transactional/entitlement thing.
The logical end point of all this sub-sub genre labelling and reader expectation is maybe that we all become writers. Which is fine by me, as usually once people try writing for themselves they suddenly become much nicer about other practitioners. In fact, I suppose it’s the breaking down of the old author/reader hierarchy. Good in principle, atlhough the process seems to be a bit messy, and I’m not sure where the monetary aspect comes in anymore.
Well, if someone expects a tailor-made wank fantasy from you at 0.99, then quite honestly, they don’t know the real cost of a decent ‘paid’ orgasm these days.
Oh, it doesn’t have to be paid for to have readers feeling a sense of entitlement. Ask any number of authors who write for free sites like ASSTR or Storiesonline. Many of them are bad… but some are very very good, and some of the comments they receive are simply *vicious*.
I don’t write erotica, I write “rather original” sci-fi/fantasy. My latest book is called Ethereal Girls, which is superhero novel, and i got trolled because it stars four very atypical teenage girls(ones super-muscular and one is a snake-girl). I got called creepy and pervert and my work got trolled hard, even ended up being made fun of my a rather popular web-comic artist.
Strangely enough, the trolling had actually helped me sell books, but a little unnearving, because it shows that readers really do judge book by their cover. If teenage superheroines aren’t tall, thin and pretty with a nice rack, BAD, BAD BAD!
In addition, I’m a 30-year old man, and I got called a creepy and a pervert by both men and women. There’s very little that’s sexualized, in fact I went out my way not sexualize anything(which is in line with the point of the book), but because of who I am, its automatically has to be fetishistic and sexual.
And don’t ever get me started on the people who pegged it as YA, only to read it and find out it isn’t YA…
I had an editor tell me that some of the stuff I’d included in a MS was weird and I shouldn’t put it in future books.
I no longer work with him.
Great post.
Ash
So very well put…and precisely the reason I write for myself and not for money. I’m not willing to be at the mercy of my readers. Writers should write what they damn well want to write, and readers can pick and choose. Don’t like it? Don’t read it. But then, we seem to live in a world where people increasingly feel a sense of entitlement…a sense that they can demand anything and have it handed to them. It’s especially detrimental to culture – especially the arts.
*I* bought your latest book, Beautiful Losers, the same day it came out. I am terribly sorry that my dislike for puppy/pony play in ONE BOOK set you off. Or, at least, I would have been sorry, until you tried to make some sort example of me.
Hey Joan, I wasn’t so much reacting to your personal feelings about dislike for content in a single book as to what I see as a dramatically changing relationship between readers and what they read. I didn’t find your post offensive. It simply acted as a catalyst.
The Vow
(A short by TFP)
“Okay, okay! We will go to MacDonalds’, it’s cheep, quick, and easy. Besides we haven’t been there in a long time.”
Cheers emits from the backseat.
As he gets out of the car he pauses momentarily for a glance at the golden arches.
“I know, I know.” He mutters under his breath, watching the children scramble joyfully to the playground.
(30 minutes later driving down I-35)
“Why did I do that? That was MacShit! Never again!”
-The end
Thanks RG!
Thank you for the uncomfortable, the unusual, the different. I love reading your work because it is not only beautifully and well written but because the worlds you create take me out of my comfort zone and also show me more about myself. I also love that you write for yourself, thank you for doing so and sharing as well.
I think that giving readers something they don’t expect or that makes them uncomfortable is sometimes too much for them to handle. At first. It’s uncomfortable to leave your comfort zone but sometime later maybe you’ll look back and realize that being uncomfortable was the best thing to ever happen to you.
Example time! I wrote this short erotic work about cuckolding and sent it to my boyfriend to get his approval (never a good idea). The reaction that he had was devastating. He was livid and he absolutely hated it! He said it was like he was there and I was cheating on him right in front of him. He held it against me for days because my writing was ‘so vivid’ and couldn’t even make eye contact with me, all over less than 7,500 words!
I came to find out later that he reread the story not once but fifteen times and that, after a while, it started to turn him on a lot. When I confronted him about this he admitted it and said that yes, he actually really liked it but he knew that he shouldn’t. He also said that the fact that I COULD make him so angry meant that I had to be a really good writer.
He is now my biggest supporter and that is his favorite work of mine to date.
Moral of the story: even if someone doesn’t like your work at first (and even HATES it and HATES you for writing it), fear not because maybe sometime later it’ll become their favorite work.
I’m not sure that a significant other’s reaction to the penning of a sexually adventurous story is exactly indicative of general reader reaction.
You are right, though, of course. Some readers simply don’t want to be surprised, or challenged or any discomfort at all. They want formulaic pablum. And there are, it seems, a lot of them. And there are more than enough writers in the erotica genre willing to supply them the pap they want.
This is typical of the sort of response to books that sell well; ‘if it sells a million it must be pap’. The struggling writer sitting in poverty safe in the knowledge that they haven’t sold out.
People read for various reasons; for education, for instruction, to challenge their thinking and also just for the pure pleasure of sitting on a beach with a ‘formula book’ – John Grisham et al – and escaping. That doesn’t make the sunbather a thick moron with no imagination as the commentators to this post would indicate.
JK Rowling said that Harry Potter had set her free to write what she wanted, no advances, no editorial restraint, and her book, ‘The casual vacancy’ got slammed. Not, I feel, beacuse it was a bad book, but because it was a successful author that wrote it.
The unkowns on this page no doubt contributed to that torrent of barely concealed jelousy.
Well, Harry, as someone not sitting in any kind of poverty, who has most definitely ‘sold out’ in earlier incarnations and other forms of arts, I can honestly say you’re dead wrong. There’s a torrent of outstanding pieces of fiction that have sold over a million copies, more or less constrained within the conventions of their genre. There’s incredible, fresh art to be made within the constraints of a genre – there are still brilliant haikus being written (constraining themselves to a genre so precise that the theme and the number of syllables used is proscribed). They are not pap because they confine themselves to the rules of their genre. Pap is just badly written, uninventive, unoriginal repetition.
There is nothing badly written about “The Casual Vacancy”. I can’t honestly say that it’s my favourite book published last year, but it’s a very good, creditable novel.
The criticism of massed produced shoddy fiction for money is always met with the counter-accusation of concealed jealousy. But anyone who knows me at all well knows one thing: I would not be E.L. James for anything in the world. Because the one thing an author can never escape, no matter how brilliant their later works turn out to be, is the stench of a really badly written book.
You miss my point completely. Perhaps because you’re one of those people who thinks that market forces only move in one direction: that demand drives the market. But this is an oversimplification of a complex interaction. Over time, the market ‘trains’ tastes. Consumerism is not aimed at giving the consumer what they want, but training the consumers taste to what is being produced and sold.
People are losing the ability to cope with nuanced, problematic, complex stories – in literature, in TV, in film. Another superhero film, another remake, another narrative full of simplistic, moralistic blacks and whites…. easy to consume, easy to digest, easy to shit out. They’re easily and reliably produced, and a breeze to market, because they’re just like the last one.
If this doesn’t worry you, that’s fine. But don’t mistake my concern for the utter dumbing down of my culture for jealousy. That is one stupid, simplistic narrative meme I’m afraid I’m not going to allow you to consume without a fight.
Give em hell RG,
I will happily be one of your 5 readers as long as you continue to write the deep, dark, surprising erotic tomes which make those of us who want more than just a fuck, a boner, something to jerk off to out of their reading. I have been your fan for years and the style of your writing is what keeps me here. Fuck the whiners whose mundane, never experience a new stimulus, dried-up, spoiled and boring existence will not let them live a fantasy.
I love ya babe,
Waterguy
Well, I’ll not add to the torrents of eloquent outpouring that already support your excellent post and understandable vitriol,
I’ll simply say, 6 readers.
Regards,
I.
Dear RG – my comment regarding poverty struck writers was a cliché in response to the comments on this post. Your individual circumstances are not my concern, although I presume, judging by your moniker, that you are provided for and therefore not forced to write for a living, but for the pleasure of it. You can therefore, like JK Rowlings, write whatever you please, whenever you please.
There is this theme that runs through your article and the commentators posts to your article along the lines that if people read books that don’t meet certain literary expectations – big Mac books to use the phraseology – then they are dumb, mindless readbots who can not comprehend anything more cerebral that the book equivalent of an Arne movie.
It is this that irritates me; that ‘Catch 22’ is a good book and such and such else is a bad book. Who, exactly, decides this? It is personal taste. I once read a Jilly Cooper novel – I claim mitigating circumstances for this – and I will never read another one, but many people read her books and clamor for the next. Who determines if her books are “Pap”?
I fully understand and agree with your point about market forces, I work in an industry that shapes peoples ides of what they will want in five years time and as you say the reason that people’s perception of what they want is guided is that if they always wanted the same old thing then there would be nothing new to sell to them.
Market forces do drive supply and demand and they always have done. If Shakespeare’s plays were not economically successful – market driven – neither you nor I would have ever heard of him – now he is revered. I disagree that ‘art’ is being ‘dumbed down’ (excluding US television) now more that previously. There has always been a variety of entertainment, and books – fiction – are entertainment. As more people become literate the greater the number of titles will become and inevitable the higher percentage will be less intricate novels. It is a fact that a greater number of individuals like to read more simple material. To use newspapers as an example, more people read the Sun and Mirror than the Times, Telegraph or Guardian. There will always be a market for the 50 shades of whatever just as there will always be a market for the more intricate novel. Who decides to read which book is the choice of the individual and their mood at the time, but to arrogantly demean books that don’t meet your particular specification is nothing short of the worst kind of literary snobbery and I for one would rather have people reading something rather that not reading at all.