julesjones | pushing envelopes (Reply)

sarahf has an interesting post over at Dear Author today. She's discussing the oneupmanship in sex acts in erotic romance, the trend to ever more exotic acts as a way of creating a charge by pushing boundaries and breaking taboos. And she's talking about something that is going to cause a problem for any author who thinks about their craft -- how do you make it feel organic to the story, rather than something tossed in as titillation?

I've been breaking boundaries ever since I started writing for a pro publisher, usually with material that wouldn't cause a batted eyelid in fanfic circles -- at least not the fanfic circles I moved in. I wrote my first DAP scene around eight or nine years ago, after seeing a very interesting video clip posted to Usenet as advertising by a now defunct "streaming video" porn site. But I wrote it with my writing partner, as a co-authored piece in a series she'd already been writing for some while, because the idea I had fitted with *her* take on the characters rather better than it did with my usual line. And it was something that was clearly a natural development in the storyline she was already writing. Doing it that way let me scratch that itch to write such a scene, while making it feel right for the characters.

This is the way it works for me -- I can write very short scenes as pure stroke fiction, but for longer stuff I really need to know how and why the characters ended up in that situation. It needs to be something that feels right to *me*, something that these characters would do. Sometimes that's where the long story comes from -- I had an idea for a sex scene, and the story grew around it. A very specific example would be the story that eventually ended up as Mindscan. That started life because in my mind I suddenly saw two characters in a leather bar, and I needed to know how they got there and what happened next. You can see exactly what I saw, because it's exactly the scene the Loose Id webmistress chose[*] (completely unprompted) for the catalogue sample. [* not work-safe text at the end of that link.]

So if it's in a long piece, you can be pretty sure it's there because I think it's doing something for the story besides provide this chapter's bit of sexual titillation for the reader. The question is -- is that obvious anywhere outside my own mind? Have I put in enough connections to make it obvious to other people what's going on? Is it serving the function I intended in the story?

There's another scene in Mindscan which was the subject of one of Loose Id's first "you need to tone that down" editorial directions. It broke one of their almost-absolute Thou Shalt Nots, which was why I hadn't formally submitted the manuscript to them. But my editor had seen the piece, and wanted it anyway. Toning that scene down is one of the hardest pieces of editing 300 words I've ever done, precisely because it *was* integral to the development of the emotional storyline. The owners, and my editor, recognised that; which is why I was asked to tone it down rather than simply cut it, and why I was given a lot of help in finding a way to make it acceptable without reducing its emotional impact.

And I'm sure there'll be at least one or two readers out there who think that I wrote it purely to push up the kink factor.

There are always at least one or two readers who will hate it, whatever *it* is. As some of my sf writer friends like to remind people, 20% of the readers will hate the book no matter how good the book is, because it just doesn't click for them. It's when it's a lot more than 20% that you have something to worry about. That applies to this specific problem just as much as it does to the general. So given what I write, one of the things that I get writer "will they like it?" paranoia about is "will they think this scene is here only because I'm deliberately trying to push boundaries for the sake of it?"

Not sure I can ever solve that one. Good beta-readers help, but the trouble with good beta-readers is that after a while they know you too well, and they see what they expect you to have put on the page instead of what's actually there. And I tend to write things that push at boundaries, because I find boundary-pushing situations interesting to write about...