Serious

By Lisabet Sarai

My brother and I stroll along Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester, whipped by the chill April wind. My decision to live overseas and his aversion to travel don't leave us many chances to talk face to face. Every visit becomes a massive attempt at catching up.

“You're such a great writer,” he comments. I glow at the praise, coming from someone so massively creative. He makes his living as a songwriter and musician, leaving me in something like awe.

“So I don't know why you don't write a serious book, instead of this—this erotic stuff.” He doesn't say it, but I hear “porn” in his tone of voice. My spirits crash land, though it's hardly news that he feels this way. I really want him to be proud of me and my accomplishments in the world of publishing. Instead, he fundamentally disapproves of my work. The graphic sexuality embarrasses and disturbs him. (“I don't want to get turned on when I read,” he told me once.) Despite all my explanations about power exchange, trust and consent, he still believes that M/f dominance and submission is sexist and abusive. In addition, I strongly suspect he views any sort of genre fiction as something less than worthy. We are obliquely related to a very famous literary author whose long shadow falls over all our artistic endeavors.

“My books are serious,” I protest. “Sex and desire are serious topics. We can't understand the human condition without exploring our sexuality.” I don't know why I bother arguing, though. I'm not going to change his mind. And after all, he's hardly alone in harboring these opinions. Scads of people would label what I write “trash”. Some of them would go further, calling my novels “obscene filth”, even “the work of Satan”.

I shouldn't listen. But it's tough to avoid being influenced by negative evaluations, especially when they come from people close to you. My sister is more polite and less extreme than my brother. Still, she's only read one or two of my books (which didn't include BDSM), and shows no interest in reading more.

They're both intelligent, thoughtful people. If they view my work as “not serious”, maybe they're right.

I didn't choose my genre, though. It chose me. Despite my illustrious relative (by marriage), I never imagined myself making a career out of being an author. (Lucky thing...) Still, I've been writing all my life. Nobody showed me how, or particularly encouraged me, yet I created poems and stories from the time I was six or seven. Writing seemed a natural extension of reading, which was an activity in which I indulged at every opportunity. Stories to read, stories to write: one catalyzed the other.

Meanwhile, as I matured, love and desire became my mirror for understanding life. My early sexual and romantic experiences, especially my first (and thus far only) BDSM relationship, profoundly affected my view of the world, my philosophy, my spirituality and my sense of self. I was writing about desire, love and sex long before I ever considered publishing my tales.

My husband is less judgmental than my siblings. He enjoys erotica, though he has no tolerance for kink or for homoerotic content. Still, every now and then, he suggests I should switch to a more mainstream genre. “Why not write a mystery?”, he asks. “Or a science fiction novel?” I love both these genres, when done well, but I know already that if I turned my hand to either, I wouldn't be able to avoid adding at least some sexual content.

What about so called “literary fiction”? That's what my brother means by “serious”, I'm quite sure. I'd love to have the talent and vision of Barbara Kingsolver, or Sarah Waters, or Haruki Murakami, but I have no illusions. I don't think I have the necessary depth. Mostly I just like to tell stories. Most of my stories have at least a passing concern with sex and desire.

So I guess that means I'm not “serious”, but I'm not sure I want to be either. I just finished reading Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas. The main character Meg has a contract to write a literary novel. Over the past three years, she has written, and then deleted, about 500,000 words. Every time she has a new idea, she builds it into the book. When she picks up the manuscript again, though, she finds she has lost all confidence in her original inspiration, and deletes it all.

Meanwhile, she supports herself writing science fiction books so successful that they've been optioned for a TV show, as well as a wildly popular young adult adventure series that has turned into a franchise. Every year she runs training workshops for other authors who want to ghost-write “Zeb Ross” books.

Because she can't seem to finish her “serious” novel, however, Meg considers herself a failure as an author.

I write books that make my sister blush and my brother squirm, books that Amazon bans, books that mean I have to hide my true identity and can't share my publishing accomplishments with many people. I'd love to get some recognition, but I'm not willing to twist my creativity into unnatural directions. I'm willing to sacrifice possible fame and fortune—or at least the respect of my family—for artistic integrity. If that's not serious, I don't know what is.

I'm a Book Snob (or What I'm Not Reading)

by Giselle Renarde

A book snob is not a popular thing to be when you write genre fiction.

In fact, there are a lot of things you're not supposed to admit when you're a genre fiction writer. I write erotica but I don't read it. (Don't tell people stuff like that!) I've never read a romance novel. (Don't!) A lot of genre fiction, even the bestselling stuff, is surprisingly poorly written. (Don't say it!)

At the start of my career, I used to wonder why established authors would say inflammatory things. Didn't they care about their reputations?

Ten years into my writing life, I kinda get it. You get tired of saying all the right things. It's boring.

So here I am, saying all the wrong things.

I love literary fiction. I just finished All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews and it knocked my socks off. Her writing style is is so unique, and the way she approaches difficult subject matter is spellbinding. This book is written with divinely humorous compassion, but the writing isn't lofty. It's not even particularly pretty. But this is a book that had me laughing and crying simultaneously. I am so in awe of Miriam Toews. I am so in awe of her work.

My girlfriend bought me another book while I was reading All My Puny Sorrows.

We were at my local library, looking at the shelf of books they were selling off, and she spotted a thriller she'd read and enjoyed. It was a #1 bestselling book by a #1 bestselling author. So she bought it for me, and we were both excited to share something. We really don't read the same books. She likes Nora Roberts, Stephen King. I'm into Canadian litfic. We both like autobiographies, but she goes for celebrities and I go for random queer people.

I started the thriller Sweet had enjoyed so much, and from the first page it sparked my editor brain.

That's never a good sign.

I had trouble paying attention to the story because I was too focused on awkward sentence structure and crappy word choices. It reminded me of the first revision I submitted on my first ebook. My editor (bless her heart--my book was certainly a challenge!) told me I needed to vary my sentence structure. There was too much. "She did this. She did that. She did some other thing." So I tried to mix it up like "Doing this, she did that" and what a disaster!

I could feel my editor cursing me under her breath as she wrote, "Pushing down her skirt, she pulled up her top? How can she be pulling up her top and pushing down her skirt simultaneously?" 

That's how I felt reading this bestselling thriller. I couldn't look beyond the messy language use to focus on the story.

There were things I appreciated about it. Chapters were short, which made me feel like a fast reader (which I'm not), and each chapter ended in some moment of "Gasp! What's going to happen next?" I always wanted to know right away, so I'd flip the page and read the start of the next chapter, then get swamped down by my editor brain evaluating the language.

I gave up after 54 pages. Maybe I'll go back, but probably not.  It reminded me of the kind of action/adventury crime show I might put on TV and half watch and half enjoy, but when I sit down to read words, the words themselves matter. The order of those words matters.

Now, I don't want anyone thinking I'm saying thrillers are universally BAD or that my taste in fiction is superior to anyone else's. Everybody's got different tastes. And that's great because it leaves room for authors to find a niche. There is a reader for every writer.

I read literary fiction because I like it. It appeals to me. There are terrible litfic books, just like there are terrible books in every genre. Did I ever blog about The Postmistress? Because that book was awful (not that I finished it). But lots of people liked it, so there you go: tastes differ.

So are there good books and bad books? Or are there just books we like and books we don't like?

Contrary

By Lisabet Sarai

Market? Do I have a market?

I suppose I must. I mean, not all the rows on my monthly royalty statements are zero. However, I suspect that the people who buy my work don’t fit easily into any category, because my writing doesn’t either. They don’t constitute a Market with a capital M. I’m not particularly popular with Erotic Romance Readers, or Suspense Readers, or BDSM Readers, or Science Fiction Readers, or Steampunk Readers, though I’ve written in all those genres. Actually about the only identifiable group who seems to consistently like my work is the community of other erotic authors.

Definitely not what you’d call a large market, though I’ll admit it’s one I respect and for which I’m grateful...

The funny thing is, to a very large extent, I understand what’s popular in the different genres where I dabble. I believe that I could write exactly what the market wants, if I set my mind to it. Another lusty virgin seduced by a dark, seductive, haunted dominant? I cut my literary teeth on that trope, in my very first novel, fifteen years ago. (Okay, Kate wasn’t exactly a virgin, but she was a total newbie as far as BDSM was concerned.) Been there, done that. Although tales of power exchange push my personal buttons more than almost any scenario, the world now has more than enough books with that basic plot. I have little desire to write another.

In fact, I’ll admit that when it comes to my writing, I have a contrary streak a mile wide. I love to experiment with different genres. When I do, my first thoughts involve ways that I can give the genre an original twist. For example, I wrote a feline shape shifter romance in which the hero was originally an ordinary cat. I wrote another shape shifter romance about Quetzlcoatl the feathered serpent. I’m working on a story now where the bossy billionaire is a woman and the virgin is a guy (a nerdy professor who is borderline Asperger’s). I’ve already discussed here at the Grip the BDSM romance I’m contemplating, in which the hero is quadriplegic.

In my multi-genre opus Rajasthani Moon, I challenged myself to include the classic elements of as many genres as I could. I ended up with a steampunk/ BDSM/ multicultural/ menage/ werewolf/ Rubenesque/ Bollywood tale that I personally think is pretty brilliant (or at least, a huge amount of fun), but which readers have mostly shunned.

These narrative choices do not endear me to the capital M erotic romance market. What about pure erotica, though? There are millions of readers looking for stroke fiction and thousands of authors publishing it. I can write fuck-and-suck stories with the best of them (with correct grammar, spelling and punctuation, too!) Perhaps that should be my target market.

Alas, sex for the sake of sex bores me, almost as much as love for the sake of the happy ending. If I were desperate for money, I’d probably try my hand at hard-core porn, and I suspect I’d be at least moderately successful, but writing as I do mostly for the pleasure of the experience, I want more than just the mechanics. I’ve received reviews from folks who bought my erotica collections, complaining that the stories weren’t sufficiently graphic. Yes, I know. They had characters. Conflict. Plot.

On the other hand, I find myself struggling to tone down the raw sex in my romance. I make my editors squeamish. Then there’s the problem that my characters always want to have sex with the wrong people, instead of staying focused on their soul mates.

I could write popular erotic romance or utterly filthy smut if I forced myself to do it. I’m quite certain. Despite my contrariness, I’m actually good at taking direction. (I am a sub, after all.) The commissioned stories I’ve written for Custom Erotica Source have been highly praised. Clients have sent comments thanking me for bringing their (for me, sometimes odd or even distasteful) fantasies to life, exactly as they imagined.

I understand how fiction works and how language can manipulate emotion. I feel as though I have decent control over the tools of my craft – better than the majority of published authors today. I’m confident I could bring those tools to bear in order to construct, if not a best seller, at least a series of books that would sell much better than what I write now.

The bottom line, though: I don’t want to do that. Unlike some of you here at the Grip, I’m not trying to make my living at this. I can write what I feel like writing – even if only a few people share my tastes. My true market consists of the relatively rare individuals who care about originality in fiction and who appreciate the way a story is told as much as the story itself.

I know you're out there somewhere.

Legitimizing Erotica

Erotica is written to be sexually arousing. If a story is not sexually arousing, then it cannot be erotica. Right? But sexual arousal is in the eye of the beholder-- in this case, the reader. Regardless of what gets the author off, if the reader is left without a sexual reaction to the material, it isn't erotica.

And yet, there are many stories and books published that contain sexual scenes and are not classified as erotica by the publisher-- or by the author, in many cases. Are those stories and books erotica if they have not been labeled as such? Well, of course-- if the reader thinks so. And the publishers (and authors) seem to go to great lengths to make sure readers will not think certain stories and books are erotica.

I've noticed an interesting trend in literary fiction, both in novels and short fiction. Stories that are published by highbrow literary publishers often contain some extremely raunchy sex. I can't be the only reader who finds some of those sex scenes arousing, yet the stories and books aren't labeled erotica. Why not? Publishers choose labels and market the books accordingly--but what role do the authors play in keeping that erotica label off their stories?

Two writers can write essentially the same story and it will be labeled differently. Two writers can write a similar stories about, say, a woman who enjoys rough sex and seeks out sex partners on a kinky adult website. Both writers can describe the sex in graphic detail, along with how much she enjoys it physically and emotionally. The stories can be identical right down to the concluding scene-- and that one scene will make the difference between whether the story is considered "erotica" or "literary fiction."

What would the difference be? Do you know? Here it is: If author A closes the story with the woman sprawled in bed, sexually satiated and musing over how grateful she is her vanilla ex-husband left his laptop behind when he moved out, the story will be labeled erotica. If author B ends the story with the woman being beaten to death by the psychotic anonymous lover she chose from the website, the story will be labeled literary fiction.

In erotica, women enjoy the sex. In literary fiction, women enjoy the sex-- and are punished for it.

Does that seem too simplistic? Maybe it is, but I've noticed the lovely hardcover books that are labeled "Hot New Literary Voices" (or whatever they're called) in Barnes & Noble often have explicit sex scenes and women who suffer for enjoying that sex. Sometimes the men suffer, too, but most often it is the women who are punished for being unapologetic sexual creatures.

Not every piece of erotica is filled with sexually satisfied people and happy endings. But sexually explicit literary fiction often has a layer of subtle (or not-so-subtle) misogyny that is not found in erotica. And I wonder if inflicting emotional and physical trauma on a character who enjoys sex somehow legitimizes a piece of fiction and elevates it to the realm of literary fiction. If that is the case-- what does it mean?

Author A can defend her story as literary fiction until she's blue in the face, but at the end of the day people are going to say she wrote a piece of smut because her protagonist acted like a slut. Author B never has to defend her sexually explicit story because her slut gets what she deserves in the eyes of a sexually repressed culture. Both stories are erotic, but only one is erotica.

Asking if something is erotica is a loaded question because it assumes a general acceptance of erotica as a genre. And it's not. I've gone back and forth on the subject, trying to figure out what it would take to legitimize erotica. And by legitimize it, I mean to get it out there on the front shelves of Barnes & Noble with the other lovely hardcover books, to have it reviewed in Publisher's Weekly and featured in the New York Times. With degrees in English and Humanities, I've read enough literature to see a pattern in literary fiction that suggests sex is, was and will always be bad. As an erotica writer, I've heard enough snickers and snide comments to know that the perception of erotica is that it's easy to write, meant only to get you off and is not to be taken seriously as literature. It's disheartening.

Answering the question, "But is it erotica?" is on par with "But is it art?" And the answer is as simple--and as complicated-- as: it is if you think it is.