SEX SCENES & A REFRESHINGLY COUNTER-HEMINGWAY SPIN ON ADVERBS: TIN HOUSE NOTEBOOK 2007

NOTE: As Nora reminisces about writing workshops last summer, the Wordstock Festival offers tons this weekend -- including a reading and a workshop by Steve Almond. 2GQ writer/editor/bookmakers Nora, Tif, and Clare will be at the PLAZM booth at the festival, booth #1130, Sat & Sun (PLAZM distributes 2GQ and our new book, A Compendium of Miniatures -- signed copies will be available). Also check out Tif, Jon Raymond, & Lidia Yuknavitch reading at 5 pm Sunday at the McMenamins Stage.

Ah, the halcyon days of summer when you can enjoy riding your bike with your face into the wind, two consecutive hours without rain and the Tin House lecture series, which never fails to amaze me with its stellar lineup despite the fact that it only costs fifteen bucks each.  What some of these folks would cost to see at the Schnitz I don’t like to think about.  I believe Steve Almond was in the fifty-dollar range last time he read there.  And there I was, front and center in the Reed College amphitheatre, listening to him crack wise about writing sex scenes. ... (Keep reading for Nora's report on the series.)

This all seems a bit taunting now as the cinnabar and ginger-apple trees are burning themselves down for autumn, but I’m still using some of the stuff I heard there.  Like Stephen Elliot’s line from his talk on using personal experience in fiction: “We [writers] can hide in fiction, but you can’t expect [the reader] to believe it, though they don’t care as much as you might think they would.”  Elliot, known for heavily fetish-influenced fiction that traces the knots in some fairly dysfunctional love stories as seen in his 2006 collection My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, was also a teen addict and sexworker, so the provenance of his writing territories seems fairly clear.  Nonetheless, Elliot made the point that it’s somewhat irrelevant if the protagonist really is a stand-in for the author because if it seems so, people will think the author is present.  “In all writing, all characters are stand-ins for the writer, the writer’s experience.”  Does this matter?  Only depending on what you want to get out of reading fiction. 

Novels where the author does seem to be present in the protagonist tend to be rawer, closer to the marrow of a particular experience and our current societal environment.  Drawing on cultural moments like New Journalism and realism, author-protagonist novels have been much more influential in this—post-Eggers—century, as opposed to novels in which the author’s persona is not apparent, which tend to lend themselves better to escape from the current environment, to shining a light into different perspectives, a sense of history.  Interestingly, Elliot proposed that the author-protagonist novel is easiest to do if not a memoir.  In memoir, “the character which is meant to be the author is usually not the author.”  Perhaps the mask of the protagonist somehow allows a greater honesty, a drawing on the writer’s most powerful memories to seek out the truth of a situation, though “you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.  Recitation of facts is, obviously, not enough.  Reading Bukowski, for example, "was never because we cared about him.  We were reading him for the reason we read anything, for ourselves.”  Fictionalizing what you know so well is what we do in real life anyway, Elliot quipped.  “Your girlfriend’s having an affair, why not that guy?”

Similarly, good sex-writing is never about the clinical facts of sex either, according to Almond, but about advancing the story.  As elaborated upon from his excerpt distributed among us in handout form, “How to Write Sex Scenes: The 12-Step Program,” the reason to write a sex scene is “to learn more about your characters”.  We had a good exercise actually wherein we all wrote the worst sex scene we were capable of and read them out loud.  Well, several of us read them out loud, as that was all you needed to hear for Almond’s point to become highlighted in jumbo-sized neon hot pink marker.  Endlessly heaving bosoms, Frankenstein bolts, and sperm puppets do not get to the shame lying deep in the heart of sex which is “the quickest and surest path to the truth.”  Really, a good sex scene is about the love story, a tool in the writer’s toolbox to show the state of the relationship. So, how to accomplish this?  A key question to ask is whether the character is pushed up against his or her desires, which obviously is a revelatory experience for the character to be having and is organic to the story.  “Sex is emotionally dangerous.  Especially when there’s a lot of hope going into the interaction.” 

Your typical writing class would say the best way to be honest is through visceral physical details that show us the truth of what’s happening in the story, that make the story happen to us, the readers. However, what about telling?  In her winningly named seminar “Show and Tell,” Aimee Bender poked a few holes in the notion, perhaps most markedly championed by Ernest Hemingway, that even adjectives and adverbs are too much editorializing, that all we need is the action, Jackson.    According to Bender, bad telling, so to speak, is telling the reader how to feel or think about what is happening; it’s overstating things the readers want to see for themselves and have their own reactions to.  Good telling, on the other hand, suddenly closes the distance between the story and the reader.  Rather than the reader being left to wander around in the scene of the story, the narrator is suddenly grabbing the reader by the collar and making a statement, which can be an incredibly powerful moment.  As with most pendulums, this is best done sparingly, with a balance between scene and summary, showing and telling.  Bender made a good point that writing is an act of communication, not just self-expression, and sometimes the writer has to take a step back to best convey the truth of the story.

As always, the Tin House lectures left me with a great deal of craft points to think about; I have to say, it may be the best fifteen bucks I spend all year. --Nora Robertson