I started the week talking about my short story class, and some of the challenges that come with providing feedback to our peers. The worst of it was talking about a sex scene buried in one of the many stories we’ve read so far.

And, mostly, it was a whole lot of worrying over nothing. We’re in this class to speak openly and honestly. We’re in this class to share our best thoughts and solicit judgment. It doesn’t make any sense to worry we might get some.

But I drew a surprising epiphany out of all that introspection. Arguing with nobody, trying to justify to myself my claim that “I don’t like reading sex scenes,” I came to a pretty startling realization about myself. Not just that, it was a realization about American culture, and a double-standard that many have found baffling for a very long time.

Reading Sex

For what it’s worth, I really don’t read sex scenes very often. I stumbled across a library book about shape-shifting druids back when I was in middle school that featured some. I felt a forbidden, rebellious thrill as the first scene unfolded.

At that age, I lacked the context and vocabulary to really understand what was going on (and being part of a book about shape-shifting druids, it wasn’t exactly your standard fare anyway). The stuff I did comprehend just felt awkward and unpleasant. Even after it was over, I couldn’t look the characters in the face anymore. That was probably the first book I consciously chose not to finish.

And after that…y’know, I don’t think I encountered one sex scene in a novel until my Category Fiction class last fall. For that class we did a review of all the most popular genres, and that included a pair of romance novels. One of them was pretty good apart from the sex scenes. The other one was no good at all.

Oh! I forgot one. Courtney’s got a sex scene in her fantasy epic. That was the only part of the book I didn’t like. And she’s almost got a sex scene in Colors. Again: least favorite part of the story.

Liking Sex

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike sex. Ahem. I don’t want to get too personal here, because I’m broadcasting this to the world. You come here to read writing advice. You come here to keep up on my writing projects. Maybe you come here to hear amusing little anecdotes about my children or my childhood.

So I won’t dwell on this topic. But I feel like I should at least mention it for context. I’m a fan of sex. I like that it happens. If some of my favorite characters in literature get to have great sex…awesome! Good for them! They deserve, after everything they’ve been through.

But, personally, I rarely want to read it.

And that’s where we get to the double-standard. On the flip side of the coin, I hate violence. I really don’t want that to happen to anyone I care about, literary characters included. Yet I read about that all the time. I seek out books where it happens to them.

That’s kind of a weird conundrum. And it’s not just mine; it’s a big (and much-criticized) part of American culture. It’s built into our decency laws and laid out in startling clarity in our movie ratings system. As a culture, we’re totally comfortable watching brutal violence, but we shrink away from a little personal contact between consenting adults.

I think I know why. And I think understanding it is valuable writing advice.

Hurting the Ones We Love

Story violence represents an application of force. When we participate in stories, we understand that. It can be force a villain is applying against a hero, or it can be force the hero is applying against his enemies. In either case, it represents the weight of the story. He’s either losing (which generally represents 90% of a given story), or he’s winning.

But even when he’s losing, we understand that this is part of the process of winning. The violence being done to him will be answered. We don’t like to see sympathetic people suffering, but we understand that it happens, and we love seeing a good person who has suffered overcome it. If we have to see some of the suffering to appreciate that, we’re willing to.

Maybe that’s enough to explain why we tolerate violence in our stories–maybe–but why are we so terrified of the physical act of love?

Sharing Perspective

The heart of the problem isn’t the “awfulness” of the scene. It’s not a matter of what we, as a culture, prefer to happen. It’s a matter of what we’re comfortable sympathizing with. Of what we’re comfortable participating in.

I think that’s the key to it. And maybe I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been involved in so many discussions about character- versus plot-driven stories recently. But it’s not about what’s happening, it’s about how what’s happening impacts the character. And, more than that, it’s about how we connect to that impact on the character.

In character-driven stories, writers and readers both work hard to get readers inside the protagonist’s head. We work hard to create that connection, to experience the world our characters are experiencing. It’s always a delicate negotiation, but writers who can do that tend to become extremely popular (and, sometimes, even wealthy).

That’s the big challenge with first-person perspectives. It’s the big challenge with men writing female protagonists (or vice versa). It’s the challenge with writing narrators who have mental disorders or an extremely foreign cultural background or even just strange tastes.

Getting Intimate

Now, many readers read with the specific goal of accessing that different perspective. But that’s some very deliberate word choice. It’s not to “see” or “glimpse” the character’s perspective: readers read to access the character. To engage. To internalize, if only for a moment.

The more unique a character’s perspective–the more it differs from a readers–the harder it becomes for that reader to effectively connect with the character. The more personal a protagonist’s responses, the harder it becomes for readers to access them. And if they differ from the reader’s own responses, the more personal the responses are, the more uncomfortable it becomes to internalize them.

And nowhere are we more personal than in our response to sex. I think a close second might be the grief response at losing a loved one–and you’ll notice how much I complained about that in the stories we read last week, too.

Ultimately, it’s not a question of awfulness, it’s a question of intimacy. Culturally, we’re not comfortable sharing that intimacy with strangers. We can recognize violence together, and we can strive side-by-side for a victory over it, but there are some thing we just don’t really want to know about our neighbors.

Of course, like so many things, it’s a matter of personal choice. Different people have different comfort levels when it comes to intimacy, and I’d hypothesize that you can see that expressed in their opinions concerning sex scenes in their stories.

For my part…I like to keep a little distance. Now you know something about me. Hopefully now you know something new about audience analysis, too. At the very least, I’m happy to finally have a little clarity on the old sex/violence conundrum.

I’m taking a short story class out at OU this fall. It’s the one I mentioned in the English department, where the professor claimed fantasy and science fiction stories don’t feature complex, compelling characters.

Bah. That still makes me angry. I’m going to get myself in trouble in that class if I’m not careful.

Still, setting that issue aside, it’s already been an incredibly valuable class. We started off the first week by reading and reviewing three published short stories. That gave us a chance to practice providing feedback and developing discussion through the class’s internet forum, and it gave the professor an opportunity to tell us what kind of discussion he found productive and what kind he didn’t.

And while we were reading and discussing those short stories, half the class was also hard at work writing short stories of their own. By the start of the second week of class, those stories were posted on the website, and we were all required to read, review, and discuss them.

It’s interesting seeing what people get up to when there aren’t dragons and laser guns cluttering up the scenery. For the most part, they get up to precisely the same things. The death scenes just aren’t as exciting.

But there are certainly death scenes! Mainstream fiction is grim. In that first week:

• We saw an innocent family (including women and young children) ruthlessly and senselessly gunned down by escaped convicts.
• We saw a bunch of miserable WWII-era workers at an explosives factory in Britain watch the new guy show up and die of a heart attack.
• And we saw a teenage veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder come back from Afghanistan or Iraq, watch his destitute mother get evicted, and make his own plans to senselessly murder his family (including women and young children).

And…well, we all took our cues from that. In week two:

• We saw a grown man watch helplessly as his father killed himself with unhealthy habits.
• We saw a young woman sabotage her life and a pretty happy-seeming relationship with reckless spending and alcoholism, and then she tried to solve her problems by robbing her father and grandmother.
• And we saw a girl with a traumatic past and trust issues open herself up to a new relationship with a seemingly perfect man…and find him to be a neglectful drunk with no regard for her at all.

Now we’re at the end of our third week, and the second half of the class has submitted their short stories (and I’m included in that set). And I have to say, we’re keeping the tradition alive.

But I want to talk briefly about something we saw in that last story from week two. The girl’s perfect new man is healthy and handsome and self-confident and rich. He’s also chaste. That works out perfectly for the reticent protagonist. (A little too perfectly, really.) Then, two-thirds of the way through the story, just as we’re easing into the climax….

Well, they get together and ease into a climax. It’s explicit. It’s not dirty. The whole point of the scene is how healthy and natural it is for the two of them, so the author took pains to paint it that way. But that didn’t stop her painting it in high resolution.

I don’t read a lot of sex scenes. I know blinked in surprise when I realized that was where the narrative was headed. I’m pretty sure I squirmed in my seat, and tried hard not to think about the fact that I know the person who wrote it. I got past it, fell back into the conflict of the story, and went on editing.

When we’d all gotten around to reading it, we carried on the mandatory discussion on our class forum. We spent most of a week talking about it before anyone even mentioned the sex scene. At last, on the last day of open discussion, one of my classmates (another dude) piped up:

I’ll risk sounding like the pervert of the class, but I’m going to go ahead and admit it.  The sex scene was the most convincing piece of narration in the entire story for me and because of that, it was one of my favorite moments.

I had to admire his courage for coming out and saying that. More importantly, I had to agree with his points. The purpose of this discussion is to provide criticism and feedback so we can all get better at writing (which is something I happen to believe in), and he was spot on. In terms of storytelling, the sex scene was the best writing in the whole piece.

So I went ahead and chimed in, too:

Yeah, I have to agree with that last point. I really don’t enjoy reading sex scenes, but that was probably my favorite scene in the story for all the reasons you listed.

Nobody else replied at all. (The author’s not allowed to.) So that was the end of the conversation. I wish it hadn’t been. I wanted to hear what everyone else thought. But, also, I worried how people would respond to my own comment. Lacking a spoken response, I was just left guessing.

And, of course, I made up some horrible guesses. I imagined everyone judging me. I read and reread my own comment, trying to think how it would be interpreted. And the bit that bothered me most was there in the middle, “I really don’t enjoy reading sex scenes.” In this semester packed with the dreadful miserableness of the human condition, I complained about the sex scene.

I laughed when it struck me: The first commenter worried he’d sound like a pervert for his post. I only replied to agree with him, and ended up worried I’d sound like a prude.

On Tuesday I wrote a little story about getting my mouth washed out with soap for singing some dirty words. I like that story. It characterizes me pretty clearly in a short scene or two.

It also shows the inefficacy of corporal punishment (at least of the soap-based variety), because I’ve grown up to be quite the foul-mouthed little beggar.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m from Brooklyn. But I can sling around all Bart Simpson’s favorite swear words without so much as blushing. Still, I’m careful to watch my language around Mom (and around my older sister, for that matter…), so maybe the soap bit worked after all.

Making Genuine Characters

Most of you don’t care where exactly I draw the line on obscenities, but I bring it up here because it has much to do with the writing process. I got my undergraduate writing degree from a private Christian university, and I’d say the threat of getting your mouth washed out with soap for saying “damn” was every bit as real there as it was on my mama’s farm.

But at the same time, my Creative Writing professor was reminding us–admonishing us, even–to make genuine characters. She reminded us that genuine characters aren’t us, and their behavior doesn’t reflect (directly) on the morality of the writer.

To tell a good story, you sometimes have to let your characters swear, even if you don’t swear. You sometimes have to let your characters sleep around, even if you don’t sleep around. If you only write what you know, your stories are going to get pretty boring after the first or second.

So she encouraged us to loosen up. Though my professor never used the phrase, a popular way of expressing the sentiment is, “Write like your parents are dead.”

Ellie Kemper (most recently famous as the receptionist on The Office), did an excellent parody on that advice over at McSweeney’s:

FROM
Autumn Days Are Fleeting

There was a slight nip in the air, and I pulled my anorak closer. The leaves were beginning to turn. Orange, brown, bright yellow. Autumn, I thought. I inhaled deeply, imagining the crisp air filling my lungs. Oh, God. I miss Mom. Why did you take her from me, God? Why did she have to die? She is gone.

FROM
Seven Days, Five of Them Working

I agreed with Cynthia. I did. Four hours would never be enough time to prepare the presentation. There was too much data. There were too many bar graphs. It wasn’t our fault. We were told the meeting would be on Thursday; it got bumped back to Wednesday. Oh, God. Wednesday. My dad’s favorite day. What was it that he used to call it again? Oh, yeah: Hump Day. I miss Dad so much.

I definitely recommend reading the whole bit. It’s hilarious. (And thanks to Heather for sharing it with me.)

Holding Back

Despite my professor’s encouragement, it took me a while to come to terms with that advice. And it wasn’t primarily out of fear of people judging me. Honestly, the circles I run in, I’m already considered the bad boy for saying things like “damn” and “ass.”

No, the problem was that I wanted readers to like my characters. I wanted everyone to like my characters. And since I’ve got firsthand knowledge how some people respond to obscenities, I always shied away from putting those words in my characters’ mouths.

I remember a time when I was writing (and blogging) Sleeping Kings. I got to a point where about 90% of the characters involved in the story were military guys. One of the most active characters (after my protagonist) was a helicopter pilot named Henson.

He’s watching the United States and life-as-we-know-it fall apart before his eyes. He’s engaged in guerilla warfare with American citizens (to be clear, they’re the ones doing the engaging). He’s following a Marine grunt on a suicide mission to save civilization. He comes up over a hill and sees that, rather than a ragtag resistance, the terrorists have a full-blown army waiting for him. With tanks.

In my head, Henson shouted something foul. On the page, I wrote:

Henson cursed.

I frowned at it, added an inadequate adverb (“strongly,” or “viciously,” or something of the sort), and I went on. I spent the rest of the day feeling uneasy.

A month later I finished the book and went back through rereading it. Everything was playing out in my head in vivid detail. I got to that scene, and read those words, and I just groaned.

It was wrong. It would have been one thing if I were writing a book for kids, or maybe aimed at the Christian Fiction market. (Maybe.) But this was a thriller. These were military guys. I had bloodied corpses left and right. And that description just didn’t do the story justice.

I left it, though. That was the first time I really understood what my professor had been talking about, my first real opportunity to go against my own squeamishness and let a character be genuine. I didn’t have the courage to follow through.

Goodall’s Bullshit

I’ve grown quite a bit sense then. My characters loosened up considerably, mainly because I came to understand that it was the authenticity of my characters that made people like them. By holding them back, I wasn’t making them easier to like, I was just washing them out.

Sure, some readers will hate a character who curses, but I really oughtn’t to be courting those readers in the first place. Not with a military thriller, anyway!

The next time I really had to encounter the issue came about a year later when I first started in on Gods Tomorrow. Katie Pratt (as most of you should know) shows up late for her first day at a new job with the FBI Ghost Targets team, and right off the bat she runs into the head of the department, her new boss.

And he’s a big character. Physically imposing, boisterous, no-nonsense, and totally un-self-conscious. He also has a habit of calling people out on their bullshit. Literally. In dialogue.

That’s not a word I’m super fond of. I don’t like the aesthetic of it. But, man, Goodall loved it. If I’d let him, he would’ve been dropping it in every other sentence. I toned that down–not to sanitize the character, but just for the sake of effective communication–but he still managed to litter my book with bullshits.

And I let him do it. It went a long way to characterize him, too. Since I published it, both of my parents have read it. It’s been given as gifts to rather conservative extended family. I think there’s a copy in one of the Central Arkansas Christian Academy libraries. Every time I heard about someone new (in that crowd) getting a copy, I widened my eyes a little and thought, “Hmm. Hope they don’t mind.”

Then my grandma picked up a copy. That was about a year ago. She tells me she keeps trying to read it, but she just can’t make it through. She blames the sci-fi, but I find myself wondering.

Still, I wouldn’t do it any other way. The most valuable thing you can do for your storytelling is learn to make genuine characters. If you don’t want cursing in your stories, you don’t have to write about the kind of characters who curse (but, y’know, stay away from the military and the Burroughs).

But eventually you’ll get good enough that your characters start to take on lives of their own. When that happens, you’ve got to let speak, no matter what your mother might think.

1.

I’m starting this week with a story set in our living room sometime last week. It was getting late at the end of a very long, very busy day, and Trish and I were on the two couches in our living room, working on our computers, while Annabelle entertained herself.

She wasn’t quite ready for her bedtime yet, and I guess she wanted more attention than she was getting, because she jumped in front of the TV (clearly the focal point of our living room) and shouted, “Hey!”

Trish looked up. A moment later I tore my eyes from my monitor, too. When she was finally satisfied all eyes were on her, Annabelle said, “I have a new song.”

Trish smiled. I said, “Sing it.”

It went something like this:

Once there was a girl
And her name was Annabelle.
She was a princess.
She was very pretty.
I love her.

I often set aside some time to waste worrying how good a job we’re doing raising our kids. Then one of them goes and does something like that, and I realize we’re doing just fine.

2.

I guess I’m in a reminiscing mode these days, because Annabelle’s impromptu song put me in mind of a story from my childhood. Once again, it comes from around the age of ten, when we lived on the great sprawling expanse of my parents’ hobby farm.

Once again, it was inspired by some bit of nonsense I’d seen on some children’s show. Somewhere I’d picked up the line, “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!”

So I was thinking pirates. At the bottom of our wooded hillside was a shady, swampy little grotto that felt very pirate to me. So on some happy, sunny Saturday I was camped out in the depth of the grotto, tromping around like I owned the place and singing at the top of my lungs.

Problem was, that was all I knew of the song. So, like Annabelle, I just started making stuff up. I made a story of it. I’d never really spent any time on pirates before, though, so I had surprisingly little to go on. I knew they used swords and boats. I knew they hung around water. That was about it.

But I spun a tale anyway. I followed the age-old advice (before I’d even heard it) and decided to write what I knew. And when it came to water, my favorite pastime was building dams. I’ve talked about that elsewhere, but whether it was on a camping trip or just in the stream across our pasture, I loved the process of hauling stones and building dams to create deep, slow pools.

So in my improvisational epic, my brave pirates were building a great dam. They would raid. They would pillage. They would buckle swashes. But they did it all in the name of gathering the materials needed to build their dam.

I was really in the heart of it, just belting out my chorus, when my older sister came skipping around the corner. She stopped for a moment, listening. Then her eyes got wide, her mouth made a big O, and she screamed, “You’re in trouble! You’re in trouble!” And she took the steep slope up to our house at a full sprint.

I ran up after her, trying to figure out what was wrong, but I couldn’t catch her. I got into the house to find her tattling to Mom, all breathless and offended. She jabbed a finger at me, and said, “It’s true! I heard him. He was saying it over and over again. Damn. Damn. Damn.”

I blanched, just to hear the words out of my sister’s mouth. Then Mom turned on me in a blazing fury. I tried to explain, but it sounded awfully hollow. “No, no, I was singing about pirates damming a river.” I’m not sure she even heard the distinction in spelling I was trying to explain.

But Mom did not want to raise a family of filthy potty-mouths. She marched me straight to the bathroom and, in a show of truly old-school parenting, she washed my mouth out with soap.  I cried and yelled and insisted it was all unfair, but she went right through with her punishment, and when she was done, she said she hoped I’d learned my lesson.

I went to my bedroom and slammed the door. My day had gone a long way downhill from dancing in a shady grotto singing away an afternoon.

I spent a lot of time brooding on the injustice of it all. There was no way I could explain. Even as I a child, I could see the futility. The truth was too thin. It would just sound like an excuse. I raged…but I had no real recourse.

At dinner, Mom related the incident to Dad, so he could nod gravely and give me a stern look and insist I never use such uncouth language. He pantomimed wide-eyed horror when Mom said she’d had to wash my mouth out with soap, trying to drive the point home, and mused, “That must have been awful.”

I huffed. Then I sat up straight, met his eyes, and said, “No. It wasn’t so bad.” I turned my level gaze to Mom and smiled with all the bitter irony a ten-year-old can muster. “It just tasted clean.”

A couple hours later the event was forgotten. Mom was herding us all through our nightly rituals, and she chased me into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and when she reached for the toothpaste I hit her with that same level look again and said, “No thanks, Mom. I’ll just use the soap.”

And with all the dignity of any languishing political prisoner, I lathered up my toothbrush with the same soap she’d used to punish me, and washed my own mouth out. I did it again the next morning, and every day for most of a week.

That’s me, ladies and gentlemen: ten years old, and already a nuanced master of passive political protest. Or maybe just a huge smart-ass. Either way, I won.