July 06, 2001
CW2k1: Independence Day (week 3)

[Clarion West 2k1 week 3, continued...]

One of my fellow Clarionites, Sean, has commented that he likes to check my site to see what he was doing the day before. I am just now catching up on my entries on Friday, July 6th. So, Sean will soon know what he's been doing since Tuesday. I hope finding out all at once doesn't make his brain explode. :)

Wednesday. The building where our classes are held was closed for the holiday, so we had our class on the 4th of July in a conference room in our dormitory building. It was another picture perfect day in Seattle, and I sat opposite the windows which gave me a view of downtown against a backdrop of the Olympics and a clear blue sky. At one point, a Budweiser blimp sailed by.

Nalo kicked off the day with a brief lecture on writing sex scenes in fiction. Why write them? They can be particularly useful in character development, insofar as they represent a moment of extreme exposure (vulnerability was the word she used) and emotion that can reveal a great deal about the characters to the reader. They can also provide action that advances the story in a very particular way. However, sex is not generally a part of the speculative fiction genre. Thus, the writer is advised to tread with special attention.

I won't repeat her entire lecture here (yes, I took lengthy notes :), but fellow writers may wish to be aware of a couple of books that came up during the conversation: The Big Book of Filth details cross-cultural and historical word usage, and then there's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue which was written over a century ago and is also a good reference for ways to, uh, refer to various acts and body parts.

Other reference books mentioned included: The Joy of Writing Sex, How to Read and Write Dirty Stories, and Biological Exuberance. In some cases, these texts are simply good writing manuals that happen to focus on this particular kind of scene.

Of course, there's more to writing sex scenes than word choice, but language is important. As is choreography. Sensual imagery. And, most importantly, the writer needs to keep in mind what he/she wants to elicit in the reader with the scene. Titillation? Horror? Amusement? Arousal? Repulsion? Knowing where you want to go will lend more weight to the scene, which must ultimately contribute to moving the story forward.

Writers must also keep in mind that their own sexual mores may not be the same as their characters.

Nalo gave us a writing exercise: try writing a paragraph that's a sexy description of something you wouldn't normally find as sexy. A light switch? A rioting crowd? Drowning? Getting a piercing? She then read us an example, in which there was a very sensual description of an ice floe.

[temporal shift: one of the stories we critiqued for Friday included such a scene, and it was excellently done. The sexy presentation was of a white dwarf star. It worked.]

Nalo noted something that I recall coming up in a number of conversations over the years: the two biggest drivers of technological advancement are porn and war, a sentiment with which I tend to agree. (I will stipulate that there is a third fundamental driver of technological advancement, and that is religion. Gutenberg's press advanced printing forever on the basis of mass producing two texts: the Bible and a pornographic novel. I think the novel in question was Moll Flanders, but that might be wrong and I'm too lazy to look it up right now.)

After the lecture and the critiques, we discussed the issue of how many stories we should be critiquing each week (and whether folks should be submitting more than one story per week). This is a point of legitimate debate, as several of us favor a write-and-critique-until-you-puke approach (after all, we're only here for six weeks), while others prefer a more measured, mamby pamby approach (something about being fair). I am saddened to report that the group consensus represented a perfect compromise that satisfies all, and we are agreed to limit the submissions each week to 19, which allows two people to shoot for an extra submission each week (assuming that everyone else still writes one story for the week).

[temporal shift again: this topic will come up again on Friday....]

That afternoon, there was much critiquing and, in my case, much writing to do. One of my fellow Clarionites, Sean (who has given me permission to use his name, which I will now do shamelessly), assembled a wonderful dinner of chili and picnic-style sides (potato salad, macaroni salad, watermelon) in honor of the holiday, and there had also been a concert effort to make sure we had other traditional adult beverages on hand to celebrate the holiday. Once it got dark outside, we congregated in the south room of our penthouse floor to watch the fireworks over Puget Sound and the southern reaches of the greater Seattle area. We were unable to get access to the roof to see the fireworks, but we still had a good time.

I then stayed up until 5am working on "Derivative". The story centers on the broadcast of the Ms. Solar System Pageant, in which the contestants compete to the death until only one survives to be crowned. The story needs an awful lot of work, but the basics are there. The story weighed in at a scrawny 1900 words.

My fellow Clarionites thanked me for giving them something short to read. :-P

Posted by on July 06, 2001 06:24 PM in the following Department(s): Clarion West Journal

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