By Lisabet Sarai
I’ve been publishing
erotic fiction for nineteen years now. During that time, I’ve
learned two important, somewhat contradictory lessons:
1. My words are not
sacred.
2. Editors can be wrong.
When I first began
publishing, I tended to think of my stories as artistic creations
which would lose their integrity if they were altered. This attitude
probably carried over from my poetry. I’d always viewed poems as
snapshots of experience and perception. All my poems were written in
a single sitting, often in less than an hour, to capture some sudden
insight or intense emotion. I never revised them. Editing them
afterward would distort the truth they embodied, the essence of the
moment in which they were created. Or so I believed.
Hence I resisted my early
editors, who wanted to change various aspects of my work. Only
grudgingly did I remove the golden shower from the first, Black Lace
edition of Raw Silk. I felt that the scene exemplified the D/s
dynamic between Kate and Gregory. (It also pushed my personal
buttons.) My editor replied, not unreasonably, that a man with an
erection could not have managed this. Out it went (though the editor
did allow the characters to fantasize about such activities in the
indefinite future).
When my pure romance
publisher got hold of Raw
Silk, even the fantasy reference had to go. Indeed, as an
author of erotica I had a lot of difficulty adjusting to the rules of
erotic romance, at least as promulgated by this publisher. In their
defense, they subjected everything they published to multiple rounds
of editing, for both content and format. The overall results were
definitely improved over my original manuscripts. Over the years that
I worked with them, I received some excellent advice from some of my
editors. Others, though, I fought with tooth and nail.
I’ve come to realize
that authors need to balance their personal visions of their work
with the informed suggestions (or dictates) of their editors. Editors
often can see structural and language issues in a story to which the
writer is blind. Editors also may have a clearer picture of the
target market, so features in a story that conflict with the
expectations of that market are more obvious to them than to the
author.
That being said, I
bristled when my editor insisted I replace my (many) semi-colons with
em dashes. It took me a while to understand that this was a question
of fashion, not correctness. Then there was the editor who wanted to
strike every use of “that” to introduce a dependent clause.
Every single one. Okay, I was willing to admit I might have overused
the construction, but sometimes the rhythm of a sentence required
that extra beat. I was selective in my obedience to her dictates.
The editor who believed
that any verb phrase that included a form of “to be” was passive,
however, I simply ignored. I also rejected changes that put entire
paragraphs of flashbacks into the past perfect tense, even though
strictly speaking that would be “correct”. Instead, I’d change
the first few verbs, then revert to simple past. Otherwise, the text
sounded stilted and awkward.
Content-related edits are
tougher. Recently I had a story accepted to an anthology of fetish
erotica. My tale, in a flashback, shows the birth of the
protagonist’s fetish, when he was in high school. The scene
includes arousal and masturbation, but no intercourse. The anthology
editor insisted that we had to take out any suggestion of underage
sex, even solo sex.
I fumed. Finally I gave
in, deciding it didn’t make much difference in the story.
Probably the most
difficult editing experience I’ve had was my erotic romance The
Ingredients of Bliss. My initial
manuscripts are normally pretty clean. Rarely did I need more than
one round of content edits. In this case, we did four. My editor
forced – well, strongly urged – me to excise or rewrite entire
scenes.
One problem was that I’d
let my imagination take over, and written a novel that was more
erotica than erotic romance. My heroine Emily already had romantic
attachments to two men, but I found her lusting after the tough
female police detective Toni and even the sexy but dangerous villain
– a French gangster named Jean the Shark.
The plot required her to
seduce the Shark in order to find the drugs he’d stolen from the
mob who’d kidnapped her lovers. In my early drafts, Emily enjoyed
that process far too much to please my editor! I had to sit on my
instincts, suppress my fantasies, and make Emily repelled by him,
rather than attracted. I found that tough to do.
The seduction ends in an
attempted rape, as the sedative Emily has slipped in Jean’s food to
neutralize him fails to take effect. The editor really took a red pen
to that scene! Okay, I’ll admit it was pretty raw and violent
initially. The toned-down version still gets the idea across. And
yes, as effective as the original scene was (in my personal opinion),
maybe it didn’t belong in a book billed as erotic romance. Still,
it hurt to cut those paragraphs, because I’d felt them so intensely
in writing them.
I did draw the line,
though, at sanitizing the language. Jean uses some strong
epithets when he discovers Emily’s double-dealing, including some
racial slurs. I refused to remove these terms. I viewed them as
essential details helping to define Jean’s character.
The editing process for
this novel was exhausting and demoralizing. I actually considered
pulling the submission and publishing it elsewhere. Unfortunately,
the book was designed for a particular series of this publisher. Plus
it was a sequel to a novella written in the same series, so I would
have had to figure out how to reclaim the rights to that book as
well.
Did I choose my battles
wisely, fighting about the important issues, surrendering gracefully
in areas where the changes seemed less damaging? I’ll never know.
I’m fairly happy with the way the book turned out (though I still
fantasize about an affair between Emily and Antoinette), but it has
never sold well. Sometimes I wonder whether readers can sense the
tension that went into its production. Can they see the blood
staining the pages where my editor and I fought?
Still, my publisher got
the last word (though only on their site, not on Amazon).
Sigh.
These days, I’ve
switched almost entirely to self-publishing. Guess I’m avoiding the
battles, rather than choosing them, but it’s a lot less stressful.
