I discovered buried treasure today.
There's
a box in our storage closet labeled “L's Writing”. I hadn't
examined it in quite a while. I knew it held my old journals, my
poetry notebooks, various term papers, theses and other academic
artifacts. I couldn't recall, though, how much I'd kept of my very
early schoolwork and writing. After all, my life journey has taken me
through five decades and halfway around the world since I was in
junior high school. Maybe I'd jettisoned some of my childish output –
or maybe it had disintegrated, the paper drying out and crumbling
away after half a century.
In
particular, I was looking for a set of science reports I remembered
from eighth grade. Each week the teacher would perform a
demonstration and ask us a set of questions. In our reports, we were
supposed to diagram of the experiment, then answer the questions and
draw conclusions. I liked to draw and I liked my teacher. So instead
of simple scientific figures, I created a series of cartoons, some of
them harboring private jokes. I had great fun concocting those
reports. I'm sure it took me far longer than if I'd merely followed
the instructions, but I didn't care. I was happy putting in the
effort, expressing myself. It was homework but it was also a kind of
play.
Imagine
my delight when I found a tattered manila envelope crammed with
documents going back to elementary school – some as fragile as I'd
feared, but many in decent condition. My book reports and my
compositions from French class . My high school honors thesis about
the Great Chain of Being in Tolkein's Middle Earth. My plays about
the Beatles, about the jealous gods of Olympus, about the 1964
presidential election. My ghost and science fiction stories. And,
just as I'd hoped, the full set (as far as I can tell) of said
science reports.
You
might ask what all this has to do with writing erotica.
I've
been pondering the way we present our writing process as work. We
discuss conflict and pacing, the theory of the short story, the
exterior and interior elements of character, techniques for evoking
sensory experience in our scenes, strategies for self-editing. We
wrestle with revisions. We “kill our darlings”. We train
ourselves to view everything we write with a critical eye.
I
don't mean to minimize the importance of self-analysis or craft.
However, I sometimes worry that we're too analytical, too focused,
too left-brained, about our writing. Or maybe I should say “I” as
opposed to “we”. I'm so concerned with markets and word count,
sentence structure and word repetition, that I forget why I started
doing this in the first place. I've lost my sense of play.
Nobody
taught me how to write creatively. I've been doing for as long as I
remember, and from the very first, I did it for fun. I played with
words, and back when I was a kid, I played with images too, as can be
seen from my eighth grade efforts. (I was always a better wordsmith
than visual artist, though.) I was, in psychological jargon,
intrinsically motivated, writing, drawing, painting and rhyming
simply because I enjoyed the process.
And
that's what's often missing now. The product is what counts, from the
perspective of readers and publishers. They're waiting for my next
book. I try to ignore the pressure, but I'm never entirely
successful. The limited time I have available for writing adds to the
sense of stress. I only have this day, these few hours – what if I
can't get the words out?
Art
cannot be compelled. You have to simply open yourself and let it
flow. I know there's a theory that all great artists must suffer. I
don't know if I buy that, but in any case, I'm not aspiring to
greatness. No, I just want to enjoy my writing the way I did when I
was younger. I want to play.
I
managed this, to some extent, with my portmanteau novel Rajasthani Moon. I undertook this project solely for my own amusement, as a
challenge to myself: how many sub-genres could I combine in a single
book? In a sense, I was thumbing my nose at the erotic romance
establishment, which so loves to slice and dice, categorize and
label, every story. So I let my imagination run free, and I didn't
censor myself to please my publisher. I even included some F/F
interaction, generally considered to be the marketing kiss-of-death
in traditional erotic romance. If it turned me on, I put it in and
damn the markets.
When
the book was done, I knew it was no work of enduring literary
significance – but it's lively, entertaining, and pretty hot. Most
important, I had a fabulous time writing it.
I
want to do that again.
I'm
willing to put in the effort it takes to write well – but not
without the payoff of having fun. Not anymore.
