You know I’m a modernist. I believe that creative product is forged out of effort, self-evisceration and the work that has gone before in equal measures. Something Hazel Dooney wrote on her blog has triggered a desire to rant.
I’m tired of meeting people who suddenly ‘decide’ to be writers, artists, photographers or musicians and expect to produce brilliance the very first time they put digit to keyboard or fingertip to shutter. I’m heartily fed up with people who decide they’re going to write erotica without learning the structure and grammar of their own language. I’m sick of people who think there’s some trick, some short-cut.
I think the fault lies in many places but at its core is a post-modernist belief that creation is not only easy but automatic. The media portrays artists as genetically blessed with instant capacity to create good work. Schools, in an effort to encourage creativity in students, are loath to criticize anything that students do for fear of ‘stifling’ that creativity.
I get a lot of email from people who truly believe that writing down a blow by blow account of their last sexual exploit or the fantasy they had last night is tantamount to having penned erotic fiction. They send it to me and want me to tell them it’s good. That’s all. They want stroking.
Well, fuck. You want stroking? Get someone to give you a hand job.
Writing takes years.
First, it takes reading. You have to read a LOT. You have to read things that are difficult to read, the value of which may not be immediately obvious to you. You have to read not just for amusement or entertainment but to learn how to use language to communicate slippery ideas that can’t be expressed in single words.
Secondly, you can’t assume you know your tool – the language you were born speaking. There are different levels of language usage. The one you use to order a pizza with is not the same one you use to write with. If you were born after 1980, there’s a fair chance that you know very little about the linguistic structure of your own language. Just because you know what a chisel is doesn’t mean you can use one to sculpt. Language is the same. You need to know your tool very well.
Thirdly, you have to write. And write. And write. And you have to expect that in everything you produce in the first year or so, there will be very little of any literary value. You’re going to have to re-write things over and over and you’re not going to enjoy it.
Oh, you thought this was enjoyable? A pleasant pastime? Think again. You don’t write well until you get to the place where you force yourself to squirm under an uncompromising demand for your own honesty.
It’s not a nice place. It’s a place of autopsy. In erotica, you had better own the most intimately humiliating parts of your own sexual self. This isn’t autobiography; it’s auto-evisceration. Writing is not about gratifying your own ego or literary exhibitionism. It’s about bruising yourself against the wall that separates your consciousness from that of your reader. And the lines of communication are never, ever going to be complete. You’re going to lose your nails and rip your fingers to shreds digging at the brick and mortar that are the cultural, perceptual and existential barriers that separate you from the person reading your work. If you can’t do it, or won’t do it, or are too damn lazy to go the distance, find another hobby.
There’s no walk-through, no cheat in this game. It’s not a game. It’s a life.
~ end rant ~
“…you have to expect that in everything you produce in the first year or so, there will be very little of any literary value.”
My watercolor teacher in college told her first year students, “The first thousand don’t count”. Thank you for your rant!
I unashamedly write erotica as a “hobby”, but I am not disillusioned to think I am any “good” at it. Especially when surrounded by so many talented writers. I also would never call myself a “writer”. Thank you for a very well said rant. 🙂
Thank you so much for writing this. I’ve often felt this way, and now I can rant vicariously through you.
RG. excellent rant, and I so agree with your point about knowing the language.
Knowledge of your Mother tongue and some Latin and Greek, a good thesaurus and several good dictionaries, plus wide and deep reading are basic tools of the trade.
I despair at what passes for English teaching these days. 🙁
How did we manage before spell check?
Warm hugs, 😀
Paul.
“I think the fault lies in many places but at its core is a post-modernist belief that creation is not only easy but automatic.” I’m a bit of a postmodernist in comparison. I enjoy a bit of found art and a clever recontextualization. Yet imho, the highest of these works is wrought by somone who has first mastered the craft & skill to render a bowl of fruit with agonizong accuracy. It was hard to pick a line to quote. I so enjoy your brain. “It’s not a nice place. It’s a place of autopsy” caused me physical pain. Brava 🙂
*Throws the quill to the floor & crumples the sheet, opens a Budweiser & turns on wrestling…
mwuahahaha. Pass the popcorn
Yes. That.
“You don’t write well until you get to the place where you force yourself to squirm under an uncompromising demand for your own honesty.”
Those are times when I recoil from myself, when I have to promise myself that I will bury whatever I just wrote. Even if it means lying to myself. Just so I can keep going.
Well, I think that this recoil is what’s honest and it’s the thing you can share with a reader that will be what connects truly and honestly. And that’s really the most one can every hope from writing.
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Quite right, RG. I always think I’m a good writer of erotica. And then I read your stuff, and realise I have no clue whatsoever! (grrr)
Well, you can imagine, I feel the same about other writers I read. But we all have our own voices. All that matters is that we pursue them genuinely and with passion, and discipline. And god knows, I could use more of that myself.
I type damn good.
Thanks for putting this up. Really hits the nail on the head.
Very interesting. Maybe I would have a better understanding if I were sure of your definition of a writer. In my own little narcissistic world, I write, but do not consider myself a writer. Actually, I view it as purging, rather than writing, which would put it in the category of vile output, no?
As for ‘auto-evisceration'(which, by the way, I absolutely love that description), my use of a public forum for which to display what I retch out is more akin to self-inflicted medieval exposure. Do I enjoy having someone read my words. Sure. However, readership is not my purpose. For me, writing releases the haunting in my head and soul, leaving room for the next demon to take it’s place.
Excellent rant!
Ah RG, I think you already well know how much I adore you. I have been stewing about this very subject and will be posting about it later today.
RG — This is a very cool post that raises a number of big issues for me. First, I’m not sure the Modernist/PoMo distinction applies the way y’all have been wanting to use it. I don’t think Post Modernist writing is any lest crafted or worked-on (James Dickey used to say he “worked on” his poems until he got the worked-on look out of them) or reliant on structure than what you’re calling Modernist. I don’t know a more faithful close reader than Derrida. But I may have misunderstood you here.
Second — and I know you know this — I think all writing begins with somebody, perhaps a dilettante at first, who suddenly wants to write. Saul Bellow says the writer wakes up one morning and “anoints himself” [sic]. That can’t be the problem, although it sure feels like it if you ever teach a college-writing course on short stories. I think your post is about respecting the words and the craft, and totally agree with what you and the comments say here. In the US, where the working street vocabulary is just over six hundred words (this, in the largest language ever on the planet), you get people starting out with a very lame sense of the language and its possibilities.
I’ve been trying to write erotica for a while: slow and unprolific. My problem is that I run laps with the same shit: the horizon of what provokes sexual arousal is limited: to throw back to an older post of yours, I guess I keep coming up with images and scenes for men. In this way, I guess I write something like the teen fantasies that keep coming back in the college writing courses. I’m a big fan of your work because you always come up with that voice that’s anguished and the psyche that’s torn in two by the knowledge that what it wants is not what’s good for it.
Thanks for this post, and for the blog. I remain a big fan.
P50