Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, is accurately subtitled “Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” I picked it up as a writing guide, and found it far more interesting as a window into Anne’s life and her own approach to writing. That said, much of the advice is quite good… read more »
The synchronicity of two things this past week involving sexual conservatism made me smile. First, an author wrote me and reminded me that my sexual history is not the mainstream. Second, a woman I know attended a ‘sex toy party’ (one of those sales parties where women sell adult products to other women in someone’s home) and discovered that she was one of the more ‘liberal’ attendees.
Now I know that I’ve got more experience than most people. After all, I deliberately set out to get experience in tantra and bdsm. I accumulated several shelves of books on sexuality and that’s after purging a shelf or two about a decade ago when I last moved. I also spend way too much time exploring the internet, and it’s usually on sexually related topics. Hell, I write porn. My wife jokingly calls me a dirty old man.
So I wasn’t surprised to be politely reminded that most people tend to get into vanilla sexual relationships and those relationships are where the majority of their sexual life occurs. I, after all, have been happily married and monogamous for several years now and therefore ‘retired’ from a lot of the active exploration.
But I was surprised to be reminded how much more adventurous I’ve been than average. Most of that hearing about the sex toy party. The sales lady said that every woman should own five vibrators, and listed the five types (phallic, bullet, wand, butterfly, waterproof). I smiled when I heard this, recognizing a marketing spiel in work. If five is “ideal”, how many of the women she’s selling to will break down and buy at least one?
For that’s what the surprise was. I had long ago hit the point where I assumed that every woman owned a couple of vibrators. At a minimum, I figured every woman had one that she really liked. But the party reminded me–not so. Most of the women attending were about to make their first purchase.
And when I step back, I have to go “duh.” I’m sure, in the national or global average, a substantial number of women, if not the majority, don’t own a sex toy of any type. Quick googling confirms that–only 46% of women admitted to owning a vibrator in one survey. Another says 25%. A third says half. None of those numbers are close to the “every woman” figure I’d had in my head.
This was confirmed because one of the women expressed concerns about her husband feeling threatened by a vibrator. That just made me raise my eyebrows. I thought we’d culturally moved past the belief that a man wasn’t truly manly if his wife got off by other means. My personal belief is closer to: “hell, enjoy your vibrator! Use it a lot! Can I watch? How about if I drive?”
In fact, as a single man, I owned, gawd, six vibrators. Not for my use, but ones I’d accumulated for use with various lovers and playmates over the years and ended up keeping (though on more than one occasion, a breakup meant I lost my sex toys).
Which, I guess, it part of why I was surprised. It’s too easy to take myself as an example of ‘normal’ without realizing how non-conservative I really am.
I just haven’t had a lot of good uninterrupted time to concentrate this week. At least not on writing. That’s not all bad–much of where my time has been going has been to important tasks. But it does make the actuall writing pretty fractured.
I didn’t even try to tackle Love’s Labor Found, so it’s still at 1640 words. I did work on One Eyed Dick, adding 541 words to it. Which were out of order. Fundamentally I just skipped the sex scene and wrote the end of the story.
Now, it’s not like the remaining sex scene is extraneous. There’s two major plot points I have to convey in it, besides showing what a stud One-Eyed Dick is. He’s gotta leave three very experienced women satisfied without ever loosing his erection. Gonna be fun to write when I get to it. 
But such a scene really has to have the first draft done in a single take. Good sex scenes are ones, in my opinion, that are written on a roll and revised later. Not done a paragraph at a time, painfully and haltingly. So here, like I’ve done before, I wrote around it.
Maybe I’ll have time later this weekend. I wouldn’t be surprised if I don’t. But I’m one sex scene away from having the Crappy First Draft complete.
Write what you know, right?
Ah, if only it was so easy. On the one hand, there are things that many authors want to write about, that they just don’t know. Research helps, but only goes so far. My personal example is from Two Minute Penalties. I had to write a blowjob scene from the POV of the person giving the blowjob, when I’ve never given one myself. Fortunately, I was able to get some advice from women who had, and get a scene that I think worked out okay.
On the other hand, I can’t write memoir style stories either. For starters, there’s the risk of libel if someone doesn’t particularly like how I depicted them. For second, do I really want to tell some of these stories to people who know me?
For, while Big Ed Magusson is a pseudonym, there are a number of people who know I write and know both names. My wife. A few friends. A couple of past lovers. Not many but enough to make me think: do I really want them reading a true story about my past?
Because that’s one of the advantages of fiction. No one’s going to say: “You actually did that? What a pervert!” After all, it’s just fiction, right?
Which means that I’m left stealing from my real life, dressing it up and changing it around. That tends to work, but it’s amusing to see the results. In general, I try to keep the emotional tenor true to real life, while letting the characters take on a life of their own. For example, “Dave” from the Holiday Series is based on a real life friend whose wife asked him for a divorce right before Thanksgiving. His next girlfriend was a vivacious redhead, and that formed the beginning of the story. Of course, by now, the characters look and act nothing like their inspirations, having evolved and moved in their own directions.
Overall, I think it’s working. But it does make these musings tougher to write. Part of me wants to say, “yeah, here’s the full story behind the story,” but that would just defeat the point of writing fiction in the first place.
I wonder how many other authors struggle with the same balance?
Big Ed's Place