Writing those tricky scenes

Warning - Risqué content. If you're offended by sexual content please skip to another blog post.

Okay, if you still reading be prepared to chuckle - at least that's what I did when I read this post "On the subject of penises ..." 

As a writer, some scenes are just harder (oo er) too write than others. Here one authors talks about his trouble getting a love scene on the page, in a way that doesn't throw the reader out the the story by having them laugh at an inappropriate moment. The source of his difficulty - describing an erect penis.

Here are some snippets that reveal his dilemma ... 

"There are some literary subjects that have become total clichés and
attempting to describe an erect penis is one.


"I am writing a sex scene and my hero is now crossing the room while
fully erect.  So, basically, his stiff dick is bobbing like a demented
conductors baton as he crosses the room ... however, one cannot simply
write, 'He crossed the room, his stiff dick bobbing like ... ' and so
forth.  Well, one could if one was writing that sort of scene (and one
was half plastered).


"To write anything referring to his 'turgid manhood' is also somewhat
tacky.  Hell, just the term 'manhood' to describe the penis strikes me
as idiotic.  A dick is no more one's 'manhood' than a hymen is one's
'maidenhood.'  'He strutted across the bedroom, his hard manhood
pointing the way' sounds somewhat he owns a badly named seeing-eye dog.
'Sit, Hard Manhood ... good boy.'


"Just describing the state of erection is tough.  It is a simple matter
of erectile flesh and hydraulics, but damnably difficult to put into
terms romantic.  'His penis, reacting to his viewing her naked flesh,
achieved satisfactory erection, proving good vascular response and
socio/psychological adjustment."  Oh, yeah ... baby, baby.


"And then there is the matter of size, shape, color and texture.  Well,
he's the hero ... I suppose it should be heroic, but somewhat shy of
practical joke size.  Shape, now, there's another difficulty ... as well
as color and texture.  Hell, let's face it ... a dick is a fairly funny
looking, if not downright ugly, piece of equipment.  Veins, bumps,
ridges and all that; a color that never matches the sheets, much less
the surrounding flesh (or any flesh, for that matter); an overall look
of a plum precariously balanced on a badly whittled rod.  Let's not even
mention it and simply stick to the concept of a literary description of
my hero approaching the heroine.


"Okay, he's naked and fully aroused ... does he stride?  Stalk?  Strut?
Strikes me as a situation that calls for something more than 'walk,' but
something less than 'bound.'  I could have the silly sod moonwalk across
the floor, but the resulting mental image ... damn, too late!  Oh, well
.. another round of therapy.  And what does the erect penis actually do
while he crosses the floor?  Does it bounce against his belly, producing
it's own applause?  Does it wave about in some sort of vague response to
his stride?  Would it be feasible if I simply had him hang a towel from
the damn thing and skip the entire description?


"And what about the heroine?  She is languidly reclining on the bed ...
and doing her level best to not bust a gut laughing, I suspect.  Should
she stare?  Gasp?  Giggle?  Ogle?  Chant 'boingy, boingy, boingy' as he
approaches or whistle the 'Elephant Walk' in time to the swaying?  This
is suppose to be a moment of strong passion and deep emotions ... but a
bouncing, throbbing, column of manhood slowly moonwalking forward ...
damn, gotta stop that image ... strutting towards her cannot be what
every woman dreams of in her fevered imagination.  I want this scene to
be equally stirring to both men and women, but fear that this is
impossible."

 Some of the comments are pretty good too, including this one from the poster himself...

"Okay, this is the first time -- the very first time -- that I have found
my quirky sense of humor turned against me.  Last night, I shut my computer
down, put the birds to bed, moved all the various cat people into the back
of the house (so the birds could actually sleep) and took a warm shower.
Dian, as usual, had already showered and I noticed she had used a little
Maja (an incredible perfume, I really recommend it to anyone who can find
it).  Hot diggity, I knew what that meant and so did Squeeker.  By the time
I left the bathroom, Squeeker was happily leading the way like a oddly
placed periscope on the sub of my body.  I opened the bedroom door and Dian
was simply laying back on the bed, smiling.  I grinned back and started
across the room.

"And she started chanting 'Boingy, boingy, boingy' and broke up laughing."
Sailor Jim drains his drink and requests a second.  "Now, I have as good a
sense of humor as the next guy, even if the next guy happens to be Groucho
Marx, himself, but ... well, let's just say that it was a deflating moment
and leave the curtain drawn on the rest of the evening."

SJ

(He takes a deep swallow of his second drink and mumbles, "Nor did it help
matters when she commented, through her tears of laughter, that she finally
understood the phrase 'hoisted on his own petard!' ")
I struggle writing the more intimate moments myself, but I don't think I'm ever going to be able to start without thinking about this post :)

  

(full post in link at top).

You have something to explain but how do you tell the reader/viewer?

Well, it looks like you start with the words"

You just don't get it do you?

Then you explain ... Check out this montage:

 

Love, Death & other essentials.

Just to show love can happen anywhere...

"When beloved director Spike Jonze, he of Being John Malkovic and Where The Wild Things Are fame, met handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan, he fell in love with her intricate embroidery and asked for an embroidered cover of Catcher in the Rye to put on his wall. Le-Tan agreed, but asked for a film in return. The result was Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side) — an absolutely beautiful stop-motion animation for book-lovers.

Set inside iconic Parisian bookstore, the film tells the story of the skeleton from the cover of Macbeth, voiced by Jonze himself, who falls in love with Mina Harker on the cover of Dracula. He sets out to meet her, but loses his head to a French version of The Big Clock on the way, trips and falls into Faulkner’s Sartoris, and is then swallowed by Moby-Dick. Harker, voiced by French singer Soko, springs to his rescue, punching the legendary whale in the face with a mischievous smirk. The happily-ever-after ending comes only after an appropriately dark and grim twist."

No embedding possible but here's the link: To Die by your Side.

I totally enjoyed this short :)

25 ways to F*** with your characters

25 ways to F*** with your characters (or building conflict one cruelty at a time).

As storyteller, you are god. And to be frank, if you want the story to be interesting, you’re not a particularly nice god. After all if life is nothing but a pretty, sunny day in the park, without even a hint of rain clouds in the distance - well, that's just not very exciting to read is it? With that in mind I rather liked this list:

1. Your Proxy: The Antagonist

Gods have avatars, mortal or semi-mortal beings that exist on earth to embody the deity’s agenda. Avatars — be it Krishna, Jesus, or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man — are the quite literal hand of god within the material plane. And so it is that the antagonist is the avatar of the storyteller, at least in terms of fucking with the other characters. A well-written and fully-realized antagonist is your proxy in the storyworld who steps in and is the hand holding the garden trowel that continues to get shoved up the protagonist’s most indelicate orifice. The antagonist stands actively in the way of the protagonist’s deeds and desires.

2. The Mightiest Burden

The audience and the character must know the stakes on the table — “If you don’t win this poker game, your grandmother will lose her beloved pet orangutan, Orange Julius.” But as the storyteller, you can constantly adjust those stakes, turning up the heat, the fumes, the volume until the character’s carrying an Atlas-like burden on his shoulders. The world’s fate suddenly rests in his hands. Character fails at his task and he loses his wife, his family, and all the nuclear missiles in the world will suddenly launch. In unrelated news: Orange Julius is the best name for an orangutan ever. Go ahead. Prove me wrong. Show your work.

3. Never Tell Me The Odds

Impossible odds are a powerful way to fuck with a character. “It’s you versus that whole army of sentient spam-bots, dude. And they’ve got your girlfriend.” It certifies that the task at hand is an epic one, and is the dividing line between hero and zero. Confirming heroism means beating those odds. Confirming mortality means falling to them. Note that a character doesn’t always have to beat the odds. Failure is an option.

4. Torn Between Two Horses

Drop the character smack dab between two diametrically opposed choices. A character is torn between a love for her country and a love for her family. She’s torn between her obsessive devotion to science and her religious upbringing. She’s torn between saving the life of Orange Julius the genetically-modified super-orangutan or giving all the world’s children infinite ice cream. Okay, maybe not that last one. Point is, tie your character to two (or more!) difficult choices, and let those horses run like motherfuckers.

5. Life On The QT, The Down-Low, The No-No-Nuh-Uh

Give the character an untenable secret life: a forbidden romance, a taboo, a transgression. Confirm that the revelation of this secret life will destroy her. “As soon as they find out you’re really an android, Mary, I can no longer protect you.” The character must constantly protect her secret life, must constantly work against revelation. And you as storyteller will constantly threaten that, won’t you? Because you’re evil.

6. Deny Success With Speedbumps, Roadblocks, Snarling Tigers

This one? So easy. Whenever your character reaches for That Thing He Wants (a girl, a cookie, world peace, a leprechaun’s little hat), slap his face. Throw a tiger in his path. Chop off his hand. Thwart his every grope for the brass ring. That said, don’t let your story become torture porn. A character needs smaller iterative successes to match the longer, larger failures. “I didn’t get the leprechaun’s hat, but I got one of his little shoes. We can use it to track him.”

7. Go Down The “Do Not Want” Checklist

You frequently hear that a character is defined in part by what he wants, but you will find it useful to take the opposite tack, too. Take your character. Dangle that poor fucker by the ears. Give him a good look-over and pick, mmm, say, five things he does not want. Outcomes he fears. He doesn’t want his wife to leave him. He doesn’t want to die young. He doesn’t want to have his penis stolen by wizards. Now, your job, as Evil Mastermind Storyteller is to constantly put the character in danger of these outcomes coming true.

8. A Victory That Tastes Of Wormwood

An old classic: “We finally got the leprechaun’s hat! Ha ha, now we’ve the little basta — OH MY GOD THE HAT IS FILLED WITH BEES.” Die Hard has exquisite false victories. John McClane succeeds in calling the authorities and ultimately ends up causing a bigger shitstorm as a result.

9. Storyteller As Robber Fly

Everybody has something they love. Identify those things. Then take one away. Or more than one! “Sorry, dear character, in the fire you lost your house, your husband, and your mystical manrikigusari given to you by your immortal sensei.” You have a choice, here, of paths, a divergence of “lost now” and “lost forever.” Lost now intimates the story can continue, and in fact, the reclamation of lost things is a story unto itself. Lost forever moves the conflict inward, where a character must learn to deal with that loss.

10. Tickle Them With A Ticking Clock

If you ever wish to squeeze my heart and cause my blood pressure to build so that my brain is smothered by swollen arteries, give me a ticking clock time limit in a video game. Freaks me out. Do that to your character. Throw him, his goals, his story, between the turning gears of a ticking clock. “You have one week to save Orange Julius from the leprechaun cult. After that? He becomes one of them.”

11. Beat The Donkey Piss Out Of Them

Again we call upon John McClane, who ends up basically sticking a gun to his back in his own blood at the end of Die Hard. A simple way of dicking with your character is to hurt them. Again. And again.

12. Shot Through The Heart, And You’re To Blame

That being said, a broken jaw, shattered foot, or stapled labia has nothing on the betrayal by a loved one. Maybe it comes down to a simple, “I’m leaving you in this, the moment you need me most,” or maybe it’s, “For your own good, I’ve alerted the police. They’re on their way. I’m so sorry. Now hand me the orangutan.” However it shakes out, the treachery of a loved one is a deeply twisting knife.

13. Shattering Lives With Your Story Hammer

Think about all the pieces of the puzzle that add up to a picture of “you.” Now, do the same for your character. Imagine all those identifiers: lover, father, friend, sheriff, amateur chef, jazz fiend, leprechaun hunter. Now, break the puzzle apart. Throw away most of the pieces. Calamity and cataclysm rob the character of his fundamental identifiers. Force him to question who he even is anymore. What impels him forward? How does he rebuild? What is rebuilt?

14. Shatter Their Preconceived Notions

A deeper, more internal version of the last: take what the character thinks she knows — maybe about her family, her government, her childhood — and throw that paradigm out on its buttbone. The character’s comprehension of events and elements has been all wrong. And not in a good way. The character must respond. Must act. Can’t just go on living like everything’s the same.

15. Motherfucking Love Triangle

The love triangle. Never a more hackneyed, overwrought device — but, just the same, a device that works like a charm if invoked with skill and nuance. Becky loves Rodrigo and has since they were young. But Orange Julius vies for her attention and Rodrigo is off fighting the Spam-Bots in the Twitter War of 2015. And Orange Julius is one sexy orangutan. Who does she choose? Swoon! You needn’t stop at three participants. What about a love rhombus, aka the “lovetangle?” Point is, this is a more specific version of forcing the character into a difficult choice. Do it right and the audience will be right there with you, wearing their shirts, TEAM RODRIGO or TEAM SEXY ORANGUTAN. Gang wars in the streets.

See the rest of Chuck's list here.

Cool photos

Last 2 posts have been kinda text heavy, so how about something non brain straining, something where you can just sit back and go "oooo".  Yeah, that's what I feel like too.

Friends to lovers trope

As a romance reader (watcher) one of my favorite tropes has to be that of friend to lover. Mr Knightly & Emma, Harry & Sally, Chandler & Monica...

For me, the relationships are always deeper because the people involved know so much more about each other. It also seems as if the relationships have a better chance of weathering the tests of time - after all their friendship has lasted through its own tests.  They are not just learning surface things about each other (they know those things already) they are learning to look below the surface. Finally, it seems more like love, and less like infatuation.

Being that it's one of my favorites, when I found this post & article I thought I'd share bits of them, maybe they can add some more reasons to like this trope :)


Beyond the book: Friend to lover trope by Taryn Kincade.

MR KNIGHTLEY

Emma! You want our friendship to remain the same as it has always been, but I cannot desire that.

EMMA

But why? I know I make mistakes, but had you been here the last few days you would have seen how I have tried to change! Please tell me I am your friend.

MR KNIGHTLEY

I do not wish to call you my friend, because I hoped to call you something infinitely more dear.

The trope is as tried and true as the characters are to each other (at least until some annoying third wheel attempts to come between them and threaten a relationship as old and comfortable as a faded sweatshirt). They know they have each other's backs.  ... 

The conceit is particularly delicious for us, the reader or movie-goer, because we know something the hero and heroine don't:   that while they are confiding in each other as friends,   either bemoaning their lack of a sex life or dishing the deets of their relationship with someone else (someone obviously, hideously wrong) - they are absolutely, positively, awesomely right together.   We are rooting for them both. ...

One of the things that's so tantalizing and intriguing for us, the reader or viewer, about the "friends to lovers" premise is watching the way old friends go about discovering each other anew, in a more highly-charged way.   We, of course, feel a little smug and superior because we knew it all along! Don't you think that's true? We delight in watching our hero and heroine fall back on the comfortable and familiar, the things they were in "like" with all the time- even as that same crooked smile is suddenly worthy of   notice and sets them ablaze. ...

And from the comments:
"I love the friends to lovers thing, it’s about people seeing each other properly for the first tiem – out of the box they have consigned them too. I think that’s why I like boss and secretary type books too. It’s that sudden twist in a familiar relationship that changes everything."

"I think one aspect of why I like this trope so much is because the two friends already have a high degree of trust between them. So often in romance (and romantic suspense, which I really, really like) a fair bit of the novel has to show the building of trust. With friends-to-lovers the trust is there, and it presents a different challenge — not to betray the trust, but to add hope and (romantic) love and take the relationship somewhere new."

Friends who become lovers - The Telegraph
The reality is that when friends become lovers the shift in their emotions is usually gradual. In fact, it's so subtle they don't even notice it's happening until the moment a kindly hug becomes loaded with intention. Mo Kurimbokus, a relationship counsellor, says, 'Think of it like foreplay. All the time you're being friends, you're learning about each other. Subconsciously you're deciding whether you can take it further, from a friendship on to a more emotional and sexual level.'  ...

[from a real life example] Sophie and Simon have now been married seven years and have just had their first child, Maggie Mae. 'We are incredibly close,' says Sophie. 'I truly believe that because we were friends first our relationship has always functioned on a much deeper level, which is actually quite rare among couples. It's difficult for me to define why it switched focus that day of the wedding, but, looking back, I think Simon was starting to get under my skin. I'd go on dates with other men and find myself thinking about him, and once I joked that we should get together. I suppose I was testing the water to judge his reaction. Deep down I knew he already liked me when I made my move. We were sitting on the bed in his parents' spare room when he kissed me for the first time. If I'm honest it felt so familiar, and it wasn't a fire-in-the-stomach thing, but it made me very happy. All day I couldn't stop thinking what an amazing person this quiet man had become.'

If there's one thing the experts seem to agree on it's the healthy survival rates of many friend-to-lover relationships. Ray Pahl says, 'Friendship is often the basis for a deeper kind of love, one that tends to be more long-term.' While Kurimbokus adds, 'When you're friends first, there are so many qualities you're ticking off along the way. If it all adds up, then you've got a real fighting chance.'

Book Reviews

As a writer I have a love/hate relationship with book reviews. If they love it, I love the review; if they don't... Of course, I'm not only a writer, I'm also a reader. As a reader, reviews can open my eyes to new books & new authors. This review opened my eyes in a most unexpected way...


Unsettling Echoes Of Josef K., March 2, 2010

By 

Hamilton Richardson (London, UK) - 

This review is from: Mr. Messy (Mr. Men and Little Miss) (Paperback)

If '1984' or 'The Trial' had been a children's book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in this work, but he also goes beyond them.

We meet Mr Messy - a man whose entire day-to-day existence is the undiluted expression of his individuality. His very untidiness is a metaphor for his blissful and unselfconscious disregard for the Social Order. Yes, there are times when he himself is a victim of this individuality - as when he trips over a brush he has left on his garden path - but he goes through life with a smile on his face.

That is, until a chance meeting with Mr Neat and Mr Tidy - the archetypal men in suits. They set about a merciless programme of social engineering and indoctrination that we are left in no doubt is in flagrant violation of his free will. 'But I like being messy' he protests as they anonymize both his home and his person with their relentless cleaning activity, a symbolism thinly veiled.

This process is so thorough that by the end of it he is unrecognizable - a homogenized pink blob, no longer truly himself (that vibrant Pollock-like scribble of before). He smiles the smile of a brainwashed automaton, blandly accepting what he has been given no agency to question or refuse. It is in this very smile that the sheer horror of what we have seen to occur is at its most acute.

Somewhere behind this blank expression though is a latent anger - a trace of self-knowledge as to what he once was - in the barbed observation he makes to Neat and Tidy that they have even deprived him of his name.

The book ends with a dry reminder from Hargreaves that just as with the secret police in some totalitarian regime, our own small expressions of uniqueness and volition may also result in a visit from these sinister suited agents.