Editors are Murderers

By Russ Gregory

 

There’s a sort of push-pull, dance-to-the-death between writers and editors that rarely breaks out in actual physical violence but none-the-less leaves emotional scars. I’m not referring to disagreements over the placement of a comma or the appropriate use of passive voice. I’m talking about flat out murder… the killing of darlings.

 

As my editor Greg Herren explains it…

 

As painful as it is, sometimes a writer will write an extremely beautiful sentence–it just sings and is clever and wonderful and—just doesn’t really fit in the narrative. In fact, it jars the reader out of what they are reading. I call it ‘author intrusion’–”see how beautifully I can write?” 

There’s nothing wrong with using language beautifully, or creating lovely images with words. But it has to fit with the sentences and paragraphs before and after, otherwise it interrupts the flow–and you don’t want that.

 

Oh but Greg you are so wrong – that’s exactly what I want. I want my readers to be jarred out of their complacency by the sheer elegance and beauty of my words. I want them to see my oh-so-heavy hand as I craft another glorious phrase and take flight on another visual bunny trail, with my sentences painting pictures in their minds even when if their focus is pulled away from the story.

I want them to say, “Wow, that’s cool… who is this guy? I wish I could write like that. I’m going to print this saying on a T-shirt. I’m going to tattoo this phrase on my buttocks. I’m going chisel this slogan on my headstone. I’m going to run naked through the streets screaming these words …”

OK, maybe not that run through the streets thing, but you catch my drift. I want to be the one that brings universal truth to light in a series of witty, elegant and thought provoking expressions.

Or at least part of me wants to be that guy. The other part wants a readable and well-designed story.

Still, when I spend three weeks writing and re-writing the same sentence – struggling over word choice and placement and syntax and rhythm, turning over options for hours and hours until late one night, I wake from a fitful sleep and bound from my bed shedding sheets like the skin of a serpent, tripping over my backpack and nearly impaling my face on a bedside lamp, just so I can make it to my computer before the perfect slogan escapes my sleep-addled brain, and then I smile and do a little happy dance and pat myself on the back because the words are too beautiful, and the world is too beautiful, and I’m too beautiful, to hold in all that beauty – it’s a little difficult to see it deleted from the manuscript on the first editing pass.

This probably explains why writers drink heavily.

When I send off a manuscript and get back the edited copy, the first thing I do, after pouring myself a stiff drink of course, is hunt out my darlings. I hold my breath until I locate the sweeties and if they’re gone, after pouring myself another drink, I pout, and curse, and stomp around the room threatening to call my publisher, or my agent, or my mother (because no one wants to hear from my mother). After another drink, I realize that maybe the world will not end at this affront to the literary cannon and, after another drink, I don’t seem to care as much because now I’m passed-out on the sofa, or yelling “Ralph” into the thunder-mug, or trying to pick up the mailman. (“Hey big boy, you sure look good in blue…”)

That’s how I handle it; other authors may have different methods.

The thing is, it hurts. It hurts like a good whack in the testicles or giving birth to a bigheaded baby.

I want my darlings left alone. The thought of them disappearing into the universal editorial maw is agonizing. My pretty words obliterated, after all that fretting and lost sleep, and, well, dancing. Seriously, I’d rather donate a kidney to a to a gun lobbyist.

Once I struggled over a single word for nearly a month and a half. I just couldn’t get it right. One early option was ‘surreal’, but that didn’t sing to me. Later, it morphed into ‘cubist’, but again not quite the right sentiment. I finally landed on ‘Picassoesque’. Even writing it now gives me goose bumps. Lovely sound isn’t it? It was lovely in context too. I fell for that word. I sang songs to that word. If I could, I would have dated that word all through high school and taken it to the senior prom.

So you can imagine my horror when the manuscript came back sans my darling ‘Picassoesque’. I sunk into a funk so deep even copious amounts of self-flagellation couldn’t pull me out of my doldrums. I was devastated.

Now some of you may be asking yourself what’s all the fuss over one little word. But ponder this if you will. What if Edward Bulwer-Lytton had written, “The pen is mightier than the butter-knife”, or John Donne had coined the phrase, “No ham is a island.” or Dorothy had muttered, ‘There’s no place like Akron” – see, one little word does make a difference.

So for all the killer editors out there, and you know who you are, this rant is for you. Authors can be spiteful and petty and as a class we are not above peeing on the petunias. So please tread lightly when you murder our darlings (or someone might just make a late night run through your garden.)

I Know It When I See It

by Greg Herren

I was on a mystery writer’s panel once at a literary festival, and the panel was asked, how do you create a character? Where do you start?

            The other panelists—all accomplished, successful, award-winning mystery authors—gave really good answers; things I’d heard before, advice I’d been given before, and I nodded as each of my fellow panelists explained their process of character creation.

And then it was my turn.

I looked out into the audience—it was an older audience, all dressed very well, and they were extremely conservative looking, if you know what I mean—and cleared my throat. “I decide what kind of sex life they have—you know, what they do in the bedroom and how they feel about sex, because that directly influences every other aspect of who they are as people. If someone is incredibly sexually repressed, that shows up not only in their interactions with other people but also in how they dress, how they view the world, and it shapes who they are more so than any other part of their personality.”

I was shocked to see people in the audience nodding, and the moderator, a mystery writer whose work I respect, said, “You’re absolutely right, but I would have never in a million years thought of that.”

Sometimes, being a pornographer comes in handy.

My first fiction publication was, actually, an erotic short story—and so was my second.

I had never once, in all of my dreams of becoming a published author, ever considered writing erotica—and in all honesty, writing that first story was incredibly difficult for me. I kept getting embarrassed as I wrote, and would have to stop. It was a constant struggle for me until I finished the damned thing. I don’t know how many times I told myself I just can’t do this and almost stopped. Yet I persevered—the story was for an erotica anthology called Men for All Seasons, and when I finally managed to finish writing it, I also submitted it to Men magazine. The anthology editor bought it—and the very next day the editor of Men emailed me and offered to buy the story. Flush with excitement at another possible sale, I responded, I’ve already sold the story elsewhere; but I have another I can rewrite and send you on Monday, if that’s okay? (It was a Friday afternoon.) He responded with an affirmative, and I spent the weekend writing my second erotica story.

Late Monday afternoon he bought the story.

And that’s how I became a pornographer.

Sometimes I write pornography and sometimes I write erotica; unlike Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said about obscenity and pornography, “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it,” I actually can define pornography—and there is a significant difference between pornography and erotica, at least in the world of fiction.

To me, pornography is writing about sex itself; the characters really don’t matter, the setting doesn’t matter, and there really is no story. Two men (or two women) meet, are attracted to each other, have some blistering hot sex, and then go their merry ways. We don’t know anything more about them than we did when we first met them.

Erotica, on the other hand, is about the characters; and needs to actually tell a story. Erotic fiction, to me, has to meet the standards of fiction—there has to be a change of some sort in the main character by the end of the story; the sex itself needs to be revelatory to the character in some way. (When I teach workshops, I say “If you can change the sex scene in your story to nothing more than and then they fucked, and the story still works, then it’s erotica.”)

An example of this differential is my story “The Porn King and I,” originally published in 2002. In this story, my main character (who is nameless) goes into the Tower Video store on Decatur Street in the French Quarter and sees a poster of a lazingly hot gay porn star. He rents the video and takes it home to watch. As he is watching, there are three sex scenes unfolding: the one in the video itself, the one in his head where he is imagining himself having sex with the porn star, and his own actual masturbation. The only thing we learn about him is that he has a thing for the porn star and lives in the Quarter. He doesn’t change from beginning to end, and if you remove the sex scenes from the story, there is no story.

Conversely, my story “The Sound of a Soul Crying” is erotica because I can change the sex scene to and then they fucked and the story still works. The story is about an empath, who is awakened in the middle of the night by another man’s emotional pain. And as the story unfolds, we learn that the empath himself is lonely; his gift has rendered him unable to connect with another man. Yet he continues to feel, and sense, the other man’s pain—until they actually do have sex with each other, but in their minds. They aren’t together. The sex heals the other man, and they encounter each other in person in a French Quarter club. They’re drawn to each other, having seen the other in what they thought were dreams, and so they begin the process of getting to know each other. That story was erotica; the sex was important but incidental to the story itself.

There are exceptions, of course—I’ve read some erotica that was nothing but lush, smoking hot sex from the very first word to the last. And of course there are similarities between the two forms; the line between porn and erotica is frequently blurred, and really, that line is subjective—everyone defines it their own way.

I guess I know it when I write it.

What Are Your Priorities?

by Greg Herren

I don’t know how many times people have said the following to me, but if I  w as given a quarter each and every time, I’d be living on an island sipping a cocktail right now: “I would write if I only had the time.”

Ah, time. I personally am frequently amused by the excuses I will think up not to sit in front of the computer and do my work. “I can’t write with dirty dishes in the sink. I can’t write when I have all this laundry to do. I can’t write with the house a mess. I can’t write when I have all these errands to run. I can’t write because I am just fried from everything I did today. I can’t write with Hezbollah bombing Israel. I can’t write while George Bush is in the White House.”

Pretty much any excuse will work, really. That’s the beauty of writing; we do it usually in the privacy of our home where no one is watching, no one is standing over our shoulder with whip in hand forcing us to do it. And if we don’t have the pressure of a deadline looming—and sometimes even then—all bets are off. (In fact, right now I am trying to think of a reason—any reason— not to write this column.)

But in order to publish, you have to write. Even if its crap. Even if it’s something that no one else will ever see. (Trust me, I have written a lot of stuff that no one will ever see. Ever. Under any circumstance.) Even when you don’t want to do it, you have to sit your ass down at the computer and open a new document and do the goddamned work.

If you want to be a writer, you have to look at it as a job. Whether it’s a part time job or a full time job, if you want to make it, if you want to get published, you need to view it that way. There are so many times you really have to force yourself to do it. Skip Desperate Housewives or whatever the big hit TV show of the moment is and turn on your computer and just do it. How many hours a week do you waste in front of your television set? Cancel two of your TV nights and spend the evening writing instead. There are any number of things you can probably give up to write.

The question is, do you want to?

How badly do you want to be published?

If you don’t want it bad enough to give something up in order to make it happen, then it’s very likely that you won’t. I wanted to be a writer for many years, but was too busy thinking up excuses not to take it seriously rather than coming up with reasons to write. And finally, one day I decided, “this is never going to happen unless I change the way I look at it.”

It stopped being a fantasy and became a reality.

Within a year I published my first story.

Take your writing seriously, and take yourself seriously as a writer.

It’s amazing what a difference that can make.

Writing Outside the Ring

Accomplished Bold Strokes Books author and editor Greg Herren shows me some moves. Some literary. Some not.

Every Experience You Have is Potential Material

by Greg Herren

Many years ago, I picked up a single author collection of erotic writings by a very respected name in the field. I’d read some of his work over the years and been favorably impressed by it, and was very happy to be able to read more of it in one sitting. One lazy Sunday afternoon, I sat down with it on my couch and started reading the introduction.

In a matter of a few paragraphs, I was so deeply offended I stopped reading—and have never picked up the book again.

You see, this author opined that in order to write about hot sex, you had to have hot sex with hot men. Otherwise, you could never, under any circumstance, be a good writer of erotica. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. If you were not fucking hot men, you could never write about it.

Bullshit.

I now realize that this was nothing more than another way of stating that incredibly tired truism of write what you know, which every writing instructor and every book on ‘how to write’ tries to shovel down the throats of writers. I’ve always had a problem with this; obviously, Kathleen Winsor had not been a courtesan at the court of Charles II before she wrote Forever Amber; Isaac Asimov had never been to outer space, and I doubt very seriously Agatha Christie ever solved a murder. Ergo, how could such writing advice be valid? It also does not take into consideration that some of my absolute favorite writers of gay male erotica are women.

This advice was something I hated and thought would never truly apply to my own writing. It discounted imagination and creativity; two of the most important tools of any writer.

Yet, older and wiser as I am, I’ve had to rethink my stance on this bit of writerly wisdom. The vast majority of my published work is about gay life in New Orleans; something I know very well. A lot of my erotica is built around the eroticism of wrestling; something else I know quite well. Obviously, I had unconsciously been following that advice in my own career and with my own work. Yet there are also stories I’ve written which required a bit more imagination: I am not an empath, nor do I know one, yet I wrote the story The Sound of a Soul Crying. I am not a merman, but I wrote The Sea Where It’s Shallow. I’ve never had a pool boy, but I wrote a story about fucking one. So, where does write what you know stop and imagination begin?

I believe that life experience does come in handy when you are a writer. When I write in the first person, generally what I do is simply take myself and put myself into the character’s mind. My character Scotty Bradley (Bourbon Street Blues, Jackson Square Jazz, and Mardi Gras Mambo) couldn’t be more different than I am; he’s much more in tune to other people’s feelings, he’s kinder, sweeter, and overall, just a better person than I am. However, when I created Scotty, I had a definite idea in mind of what kind of character I wanted to write about, and the best way for me to define him, to get inside of his head, was to imagine myself to be him; and the rest of it came together from there. What kind of family would I have had to have in order for me to grow up into this person? What kind of experiences? And thus, he was born.

When I write about sex, I do draw from my own experience. What did this feel like? Did I enjoy the sensation? Where was I in my head as I experienced this?

So, yes, all these years I’d been writing what I know. Yet this advice needs a caveat; one they never give you in class or in those ‘how-to” tomes. Experience is where you start; and then you let your creativity and imagination take over.  As I said, I’ve never been a merman nor have I ever fucked one, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t write about one.

Besides, coming to the realization that everything in life is fair game and possible material makes the shitty stuff easier to deal with. Just shrug and think, “ah, this would make a good story.” Someone’s an asshole? That’s a possible character in another story or in a novel. Emotional or physical pain? Again, you can funnel that into a character to make them breathe and come to life.

Write what you know is just a place to start; not a place to finish.

Follow the Guidelines, Stupid

 

By Greg Herren

When you are applying for a new job or interviewing for a promotion, you put your best face on. You dress in your nicest and most professional clothes, right? You don’t go in wearing a paint spattered T-shirt and ratty old jeans.  You want to give the impression of competence, professionalism, experience, and maturity. You emphasize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. You are trying to convince them you, and only you, are the best choice for the position.

So, why don’t writers do the same thing when submitting a manuscript?

In a job interview, you are trying to sell yourself. When you submit a manuscript (be it a short story, an article, a proposal, or a full length book), you are doing the same thing. It is in your best interest to at least give the impression you are a competent professional—even if you have never published anything in your life. Yet, in all the years I’ve been editing—magazines, anthologies, and now a line of fiction books—I am constantly amazed at the sad lack of professionalism some writers exhibit in submitting their work. Why on earth would you want to give the editor reviewing your work the impression that you are going to be difficult to work with?

            Editors are often maligned, and sometimes rightfully so. As a writer, I often forget what it’s like to be an editor and have been known to malign a few on occasion—usually after a few drinks. But editing is very hard work, and every time I put on my editor’s cap I groan and think, “Why the fuck did I agree to do this again?” As I start digging through the submissions pile, the temptation to take a razor blade to my wrists is always there. (Don’t get me wrong. Editing can be very rewarding. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of discovering a new writer with a lot of talent who has never published before.) And I will sit there and read every single submission, no matter how bad the grammar, how one-dimensional the characters, how implausible the story, or how trite the dialogue—on one condition. I will read every single submission from beginning to end—if they followed the guidelines.

            Editors don’t set up submission guidelines just for the hell of it. They set up guidelines because it makes their job easier. As I mentioned before, editing is hard work and very time-consuming. I can’t speak for other editors, of course, but I know that I try to be as efficient with my time as I can—and so I set up guidelines to make my job as simple as possible. So, it really irritates me when someone feels that they don’t need to follow my guidelines. I don’t think it means they’re a bad person, or a bad writer, but it tells me they are amateurs. And I have neither the time, nor the inclination, to work with amateurs. At the very least, it tells me the writer did not bother to read my guidelines; at worst, s/he felt the guidelines did not apply to him/her.

So, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to explain my guidelines.

I do not accept electronic submissions for anything because early in my career as an editor, I did and got a virus that ate my hard drive. I was without a computer for two weeks, and then had to reconstruct all the work that hadn’t been backed up.

I want the manuscripts in Times or Courier font because my eyes are failing, and those particular fonts are easiest for me to read—and likewise, anything smaller than a 12 point font is too hard on my eyes. I spend most of my days—seven days a week, 52 weeks a year—either reading manuscripts or working on my computer for at least eight hours a day, sometimes more. So, I won’t read something that isn’t in a font style and size that is easy on my eyes.

I don’t want the submissions to be bound in any way other than, at most, a paper clip. This is because I want to be able to look at the pages side by side at times; if it’s bound in a folder or stapled, I have to take it apart…and sometimes, no matter how careful you are in removing the staple, the page will jam a copy machine…which is an enormous pain in the ass at Kinko’s.

And since I don’t like the submissions to be bound, it is imperative that the author’s name and the name of the story be in the upper left hand corner of every page, and the pages be numbered—in case they get separated. My cat loves to knock stuff off my desk—and there is nothing more frustrating (and time consuming) then putting pages back in order that aren’t numbered.

So, whenever you are submitting work, read the guidelines, and follow them. It’ll show the editor you are a professional—and every little leg up will help get you one step closer to making the sale. Remember, editors have guidelines for a reason, and you should respect those reasons—even if you think they are stupid. Bite the bullet and just do it.

You’ll make the editor very happy…and don’t you want the editor in a happy frame of mind when they are reviewing your work?

But Is It Still a Story?

by Greg Herren

The notion that erotic writing (henceforth referred to as ‘porn’ so I can cut back on my keystrokes) is a lower form of literature—if not the lowest—is probably one of the most insulting of the condescending notions born in university writing departments and perpetuated by the martini-swilling snobs who frequent literary parties in Manhattan. I have, over the course of my six years as an unashamed pornographer, been told, with the utmost seriousness by other writers—whose publishing credits might run to a short story sold to a small quarterly literary journal with a circulation of about seventy five Gay Lit professors nationwide—that writing porn has forever tainted me in the eyes of ‘serious’ writers and critics; that any future real writing I might do would never be taken seriously. (Note to the last person to say this to me: I’m still waiting to hear about your multi-million dollar deal for that Pulitzer Prize winning novel you were writing five years ago.)

I suppose what leads serious writers to say things like this is fragility of self-confidence; I must put your work down and consider myself to be superior to you because I truly don’t believe my own work is any good. It used to bother me a little; now I just shrug and think, “get therapy. Quickly.” This notion that I should be somehow ashamed that I’ve written, edited and published porn is ludicrous to me—and says a lot more about those who think that than I would really care to know.

In truth, I consider porn to be the most powerful form of writing being published today.

A pretty bold statement, don’t you think? But it’s true. Porn is the only form of writing that can provoke a physiological response in its reader. Well done porn will not only get its male reader erect, but should get him so horny he needs to do something about it—jack off.  That’s the goal of every porn story, and what should be in your mind when you sit down and start writing: everyone who reads this story is going to get so turned on their cock will drip and their balls will ache.

            And it’s not as easy as those crème de la crème snobs think it is.

When I wrote my first porn story, I have to admit, it turned me on and it also embarrassed me. I’d been writing my entire life—and had never once written a graphic sex scene. Usually, in short stories or novels-in-progress, if I ever got to a point where characters were going to fuck, the violins swelled; the waves began crashing against the beach; and the lacy curtain came down. Cut, fade to black. But now, I was writing a story that specifically had to include a graphic sex scene. I had to think about choreography; who was going to fuck whom; where and how; what were the smells and tastes; what was going through the heads of the characters while they were fucking. So, I sat at the keyboard and called up in my memory my favorite sexual experiences. The anthology I was submitting the story to was sports-themed; so I decided to make it about wrestling.

And when I was finished writing it, I was happy with it.

It told a story.

One of the biggest mistakes rookies make when writing porn is they forget it’s a porn story. I’m not certain if this happens because they are so focused on getting a hot sex scene down on paper, or if it comes from that self-same mentality that ‘porn is not a valid form of fiction’—but that is the surest road to not getting published. You have to believe in what you are writing, and you have to take it seriously. If you don’t, it comes through loud and clear on the page. Sure, there is a formula to porn—two men are attracted to each other, they fuck, and either stay together or go their own way. But the formula is merely a skeleton, and it’s up to the porn writer to put some flesh on those bones. But just because there’s a formula to it doesn’t mean you can’t make art out of it.

In my story “The Sound of a Soul Crying,” the main character is an empath. He has a power he doesn’t understand, but he feels other people’s pain—and his power is so strong that he can sometimes even visit the people in their dreams. In this story, the person is another gay man who is suffering; and he feels an overpowering attraction to him. They do have sex at a point in the story; but neither is sure that it’s real—and the story comes to an end with the two men actually meeting in a bar.

My goal in writing the story was to tell that story, as well as to write a really hot, lusty sex scene that would get the reader hard. I believe that the more connected the reader feels to the characters, the more involved he is in their story and their lives, the hotter the sex will seem to them. Just like in life, it is possible to have a hot one night stand with a guy you will never see again—but the hottest sex is generally with someone whose body you know; whose personality makes you comfortable to be around; and whose buttons you know how to push. Sure, you can write a story where the characters have names and descriptions, have some hot sex, and then go their separate ways; but while that story might give the reader physical satisfaction, it will not give emotional.

When I teach workshops on writing porn, I say, “Take the sex out of your story, and read it again. Just delete the scene out; and type in ‘Then they fucked’ and read the story again. Ask yourself, is it still a story?”

            If the answer is no, your story still needs work.