Then there are the surprises. Things I don't remember writing, or things that if not for my handwriting, I would assume a friend wrote instead. Then there are the pieces I recognise all too well, the obligatory poetry, and every single teenage desire for someone to notice me written down in terrible YA prose. A style I couldn't write in because I'd never even read any. You can't write YA romance when the closest thing you've read to the genre is Catcher in the Rye, but for some reason, this doesn't preclude the need to write it.
All of the pieces in this genre break down once it's time for the heroine to actually interact with the hero, after he's noticed her and inexplicably sat down next to her and mentioned all his favourite things which are hers too. Not *my* favourite things, no, because this character with brown hair and eye colour that can't make up its mind what to be and bitten finger nails in jeans and sneakers can't possibly be me, because her name is Sarah, and she likes different books. But there was always the point where Brendan or Peter or Etienne or Christian or Michael (Christian was always a compromise, I hated it in theory, but as a name borrowed from Moulin Rouge and a series of French phonemes rather than a religion, I was willing to forgive it), or whoever he was, the boy with the laughing eyes and dark hair would touch her hand and catch her eye and Sarah would escape to the bathroom. Invariably, these were all abandoned with Sarah and I in the bathroom trying to sort out what had just happened, and what on earth we were meant to do next because neither of us knew. In real life, I never made it as far as needing to escape to the bathroom, so I was already out of my depth.
All of the pieces in this genre break down once it's time for the heroine to actually interact with the hero, after he's noticed her and inexplicably sat down next to her and mentioned all his favourite things which are hers too. Not *my* favourite things, no, because this character with brown hair and eye colour that can't make up its mind what to be and bitten finger nails in jeans and sneakers can't possibly be me, because her name is Sarah, and she likes different books. But there was always the point where Brendan or Peter or Etienne or Christian or Michael (Christian was always a compromise, I hated it in theory, but as a name borrowed from Moulin Rouge and a series of French phonemes rather than a religion, I was willing to forgive it), or whoever he was, the boy with the laughing eyes and dark hair would touch her hand and catch her eye and Sarah would escape to the bathroom. Invariably, these were all abandoned with Sarah and I in the bathroom trying to sort out what had just happened, and what on earth we were meant to do next because neither of us knew. In real life, I never made it as far as needing to escape to the bathroom, so I was already out of my depth.
All of my writing is incredibly harmless. Apart from being embarrassing now, due to inexperience in either life or writing, there's really nothing that I couldn't show to anybody off the street or people interested in my juvenilia.
Except, going through my Google drive today, I found a piece I wrote last year. I've read erotic literature for 20 years, but it wasn't until last year that I ever tried to write any. I made a throwaway account for a Reddit sub. I can no longer get in to it because past me intelligently created a password that I didn't use for anything else, with the logic that once future me forgot the password, I wouldn't need the account anymore. Past me knows how future me thinks.
The sub was for sharing logins and scenarios for an anonymous chat app that people tend to use exclusively for sexting and video chat. I wouldn't do video chat, and after discovering that Redditors in my age bracket are on Reddit to cheat on their wives, I lost interest. However, before that happened, I got a message from an Australian, the beginning of a scenario. It wasn't poorly written, though it wasn't terribly original, but it was intriguing enough for me to choose to finish it.
The revisions on the doc indicate it took me four hours to write just under a thousand words. And it's not well written. It's got most of the problems that erotica has, you borrow from the four or five ways to describe various things and jam them all together between the specific transitions you want with just enough innuendo to force the reader to make a couple of leaps and there it is. But I don't believe I wrote it. I know that I did, because I'm the only one in the doc, and I can see that I picked up on a couple of the guy's specific preferences and included them even though they don't appeal to me at all, which is how I do- write to your audience. But it is surprisingly effective.
This surprises me because I struggle with my own fantasies. They either fall in to the experiences I've had, which I don't want to revisit, or I get lost somewhere in the middle, lose track of what I'm doing and unless I go in search of something written by someone else, start balancing my checkbook, or something. I wonder why this held my attention. Is it because I had four hours and a topic? Is it because I opened it expecting an itinerary for a vacation I never took and surprised myself with the subject? I'm not sure. But, since this is nearly the same kind of thing that I was unleashing on guys in chat rooms last year, I see why they liked it.
Now that I'm remembering, after reading, the Australian really wanted to get together online at the same time. Due to the time difference, this didn't happen, but it also didn't happen due to my fear of being called upon to perform to that level in real time. Also because of the number of things that he was interested in that I wasn't.
This kind of writing is something I should probably get back in to (not here, I'll spare you all that particular discomfort), because it does a lot of positive things for me when everything goes right. The difficulty is that, like so many other things in my life, it requires confidence, practice, and finding someone who's any good to do it with.
The sub was for sharing logins and scenarios for an anonymous chat app that people tend to use exclusively for sexting and video chat. I wouldn't do video chat, and after discovering that Redditors in my age bracket are on Reddit to cheat on their wives, I lost interest. However, before that happened, I got a message from an Australian, the beginning of a scenario. It wasn't poorly written, though it wasn't terribly original, but it was intriguing enough for me to choose to finish it.
The revisions on the doc indicate it took me four hours to write just under a thousand words. And it's not well written. It's got most of the problems that erotica has, you borrow from the four or five ways to describe various things and jam them all together between the specific transitions you want with just enough innuendo to force the reader to make a couple of leaps and there it is. But I don't believe I wrote it. I know that I did, because I'm the only one in the doc, and I can see that I picked up on a couple of the guy's specific preferences and included them even though they don't appeal to me at all, which is how I do- write to your audience. But it is surprisingly effective.
This surprises me because I struggle with my own fantasies. They either fall in to the experiences I've had, which I don't want to revisit, or I get lost somewhere in the middle, lose track of what I'm doing and unless I go in search of something written by someone else, start balancing my checkbook, or something. I wonder why this held my attention. Is it because I had four hours and a topic? Is it because I opened it expecting an itinerary for a vacation I never took and surprised myself with the subject? I'm not sure. But, since this is nearly the same kind of thing that I was unleashing on guys in chat rooms last year, I see why they liked it.
Now that I'm remembering, after reading, the Australian really wanted to get together online at the same time. Due to the time difference, this didn't happen, but it also didn't happen due to my fear of being called upon to perform to that level in real time. Also because of the number of things that he was interested in that I wasn't.
This kind of writing is something I should probably get back in to (not here, I'll spare you all that particular discomfort), because it does a lot of positive things for me when everything goes right. The difficulty is that, like so many other things in my life, it requires confidence, practice, and finding someone who's any good to do it with.
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