writing about fucking without it sucking
Last night I attended a reading called Return of the Booty Call emceed by Kevin Sampsell. It was Portland at its weirdest in a hipster joint where rap music thumped and blared out speakers the size of washing machines. When it was time for the actual reading, Kevin, standing before the crowd sporting unzipped jeans, welcomed all present with the query: Are you ready for some sucking and fucking?
There were lots of stories about sucking and fucking. And fucking and sucking. Sometimes just fucking or sucking. The readers performed and/or read scenes with a variety of sex acts, encounters, anecdotes. In between the readers there were giveaways and booty grind contests and groins rubbing up against the mic.
I guess you had to be there.
Fucking and sucking aside, writing sex is hard (no pun intended). What's most hard about it is delineated aptly by Elizabeth Benedict in her book, The Joy of Writing Sex, where she posits, "When we sit down to write a sex scene, our circuits can jam, our self-consciousness surge, and we might as well be beginning students of English as a second language."
For me, though, it's less about the self-consciousness of untoward content, and more the fear that I'll write something boring or cliché. I mean, in a culture packed with sex, literally with sex dripping off billboards, magazines, television and packaging, is there any new territory here? In workshop, we call the output of well-worn language recycling received text. Received text requires no penetration (no pun intended). This sort of language just slides into a groove, a zeitgeist, a trope with easy familiarity, and satisfies the audience without spectacle. It's like eating a Whopper. You think: Whopper, and your taste buds have already filled in the flame broiled flavoring, the texture of soft bun, wet lettuce and cooked beef patty. No surprise, no disappointment.
I don't want my novel to serve up Whoppers. Especially not in the bedroom. Take Frances and Arthur, my quirky characters, for example. I've been wrestling them into bed for nearly a month. The problem is that it still reads flat. Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce flat. I'm trying to particularize drawing from a limited imagination. And why is this? Simply, because I haven't been sure enough on how Frances feels about her erstwhile husband to make this sex scene lift off the bun (bad pun intended). If, as Benedict would have me do, Frances must enter this scene from an emotionally dangerous place, I have to go back and establish why, exactly, going to bed with Arthur puts her in peril. I've wanted to make this case within this particular chapter (125 pages into the book), and I keep coming up short. When I workshopped this chapter last week, the feedback was all about that—show more ambivalence, more reluctance, more difficulty in the surrender. Bump up the emotion by lingering on a couple of observations I'd blown through quickly while the act was taking place. And by act I mean fucking.
This morning though, something clicked. I realized that the scene was set up to take advantage of something I'd glossed over in the first part of the book, which had to do with a parallel relationship between Ursula and Brandt, two other characters. I went back to the earlier chapter and made that scene more of a reveal to my main character, Frances. By revisiting that earlier scene within the Frances-and-Arthur-having-sex scene I got closer to nailing the heartbreak.
As far as the Return of the Booty Call, I liked it well enough. What's not to like about a hot summer night of scintillating prose? Especially when there's whiskey involved. At the end of the day though, I have a confession to make. I think it's sort of like the act itself. I like writing sex myself more than hearing sex read aloud.
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eavesdrop of the day
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notes from vacation