Publish and Be Damned » Point of View

Point of View: The Beatles Made Me Do It – Dirtyboy

Dirtyboy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:53:20 +0000

I’ve always had a definite preference for first person narrative when reading erotica. I often find the style irritating in mainstream fiction, but when reading smut I feel far more drawn into the story when the narrator is a part of the events. It feels somehow more voyeuristic to me, enhancing my arousal: as though I’m right there next to the narrator as she (I only ever read erotica written by women) describes her adventures. I want to be right there next to her, want to at least imagine that she might have experienced the sex that she’s describing so delightfully.

This preference guided my voice when I began to write my own erotica. I’ve never felt the need to write the kind of confessional sex that is available to read on many blogs, but I did feel that if I was going to be writing fiction, then it would be more exciting to the reader if I (as the narrator) was within the stories. I hoped that they, too, would experience that feeling of being a part of events, of being right next to me there on the bed (or wherever I happen to be). It’s certainly seemed to have worked in the Sophie stories, in which I play the narrator and am very much at the centre of the sex in the stories. My readers have expressed to me time and time again that they wish they were Sophie, which is precisely the reaction I’d hoped for. That immediate audience identification with the characters, feeling a part of the sex taking place.

With my other erotica I take that a step further, writing much of it in second person (basically using “I” and “you”). This can go horribly wrong when attempted without care, but if you can get the balance right and resist being the voice of god, describing simply your own feelings and reactions (and not those of your reader) then I’ve found that it can result in some particularly powerful smut. At it’s best, the reader is right there in the story with you, experiencing it directly, and also experiencing the writer vicariously. At its most basic, I fuck the reader as the reader fucks me. I’ve been writing this way for some years now, and it does seem to be very popular with my readers.

I got the idea for thiis technique from an article I read some years ago about the Beatles. The theory suggested in the article was that because the band used second person in their songs (Love Me Do, Please Please Me, I Wanna Hold Your Hand etc) it brought their fans much closer to them, and made it feel as though the band were singing directly to them, expressing desire for them in person – hence the screaming hordes of young girls at their concerts. I felt there was some mileage in this with erotica, and it’s a really fun way to write.

Take care though – the minute you begin to assume emotional reactions from your readers, or even the most basic physical reactions, you risk the reader disagreeing with you, and the story fails immediately. Be careful out there, the waters can be choppy!

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Point of View

Monocle — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:14:27 +0000

I like this particular topic, from a selfish perspective, since point of view is one of those things I’ve most consciously experimented with in my writing. Long before I cared about craft or other aspects of writing and style, I was interested in different viewing geometries of the protagonist or narrator POV of a story. I’ve written in first, second, and third person, and from male and female points of view, and it’s hard to say if any one is a favorite or preferred. Second person is probably the least, since there are, for me, only a few occasions where I feel the writing really requires it. Most of my full-blown stories are, I believe, third person limited, ‘over the shoulder’ of the protagonist, in most cases female.

A great deal of my erotica writing stems from wanting to truly experience the scene from the eyes of the protagonist, so a lot of my stories and vignettes are written in first person. All of the flash pieces in Nightmares and Visions, for example, are written first person for that reason – the immediacy and intimacy of the action, and the mystery/horror and off-balance nature of the situations all work better, I think with that perspective. The stories in the Lens collections out so far are an almost even mix of first and third person. One of my conceits, which I was somewhat nervous about early on, was that most of my first person writing was from the female POV. Being male, I worried then that it was goddamned presumptuous to write that way, and now only think it’s gosh darned presumptuous, because I’ve been told I’m good at it.

More recently, I’ve been writing more first person male perspectives, which could be saying I’m coming closer to writing pieces of myself, if we wanted to get all psychological about it. But that’s what POV is for me, in some ways, more than a writing device; it’s an avenue inward, to explore different parts of myself. Writing erotica has been, until recently, largely a turned-inward thing for me. The emergence into a more conscious, literary perspective about writing is still relatively new. A lot of writers who I admire and learn from are storytellers – they’ll describe themselves that way, and you’ll see it in their body of work. I can tell stories, sometimes reasonably well, but reflexively I’m a sensualist; I like the physicality, emotion, and immediacy of the erotic scene, and the perspective of the actors in that scene is a huge part of that. I think storytelling is adaptable, but lends itself to third person and first person POV more strongly. Short vignettes and flash fiction, I find, are the places where first person – and second – are most likely to shine, and to be appropriate.

I recently experimented on a few older stories I had written in first person, converting them to third. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t . Both Fog and The Cliff (both in Through a Tinted Lens) had multiple perspectives in their writing. POV shifted in Fog from first to third a couple times as I wrote it, which suggests I wasn’t certain about the feel of the story at first, but I concluded in the end I liked the first person better – again from the sensualist perspective. The Cliff actually started off in third person, but I found my perspective shifting to first early in the story. Sometimes I think the characters want to narrate the story their own way.

As much as the first/second/third/limited/omnipotent perspectives, I think gender, and by extension sexuality (het/hom/bi/tg) are equally important aspects of point of view in erotica. I’ve explored that space some – certainly the male and female hetero aspects, and female bi/hom aspects. I have not written male bi/hom, mostly because it doesn’t turn me on, and I haven’t felt experimental enough to do it for its own sake. That’s not to say, however that I haven’t found writing in those points of view that I like.

No matter what perspectives you choose, though, there are a million ways to fuck with it. In my story titled “POV” (in Through an Ethereal Lens) I do that literally and intentionally, with a science fictional virtual reality toy – camera/glasses that give the narrator the visual perspective of her sex-partner. In some of the Nightmares, perspective is changed – turned inward or outward on the characters by limiting sight with blindfolds, or other sensory tricks. These are all POV games that put the writer and reader in different places, and I know that there are still endless aspects and combinations to explore.

-Monocle

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The Air Up There — Third Person POV

Eve McFadden — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:51 +0000

I instinctively write in the third person; it never occurs to me to do otherwise.

Okay, once. I wrote a story, I think for a class in college, in first person where I conflated the events of my junior and senior prom into one story. That was [deleted] years ago, and I’ve never done it since.

When I write, third person is what comes naturally, and I rarely thought about why. Having given it some thought, I’ve come to the conclusions that a) I like the control and b) I’m an information junkie (that is to say, nosy).

They relate, in that I like to know what all my characters are doing and thinking and by writing in the third person, I can figure that out and (I hope) get it across to the reader. This is also the POV I prefer to read, although I have read many good first-person pieces.

I think this first hit home with a story I read (Home for the Holidays, by Wendy Stone) which was written in first person. In the story, two best friends — each harboring feelings for the other — decide to pretend to be a couple. As I read the story, as much as I enjoyed it, I kept wondering what the man was feeling and thinking. The narrator did describe the man’s action, and dialogue and expressions, but it wasn’t quite enough.

An English professor in college once told my class that if you didn’t like the story you’d read, then write the story you want. In this case, I did. I wrote a “best friends” story called Pretending, and wrote it in the third person. It could stand improvement, I’m sure. I’m not sure how “accurate” my male character is, although I don’t think he’s implausible. Still, it was a good experiment in writing my own story and in making my own characters.

I find third person a challenge, as it forces me to consider motives for all of my characters, male or female, good or bad. There is also the experience of trying to portray a character who is not me, although I’m sure there’s a little bit of me in nearly every character in my stories. To figure out why a person acts as they do, and then get that out in dialogue and description is something that might be difficult but I think is necessary as a writer, otherwise you will end up with the same characters, perhaps with different hairstyles or eye color.

To me, the drawback of third person is the flip side of the reasons I like it; that same control and nosiness make me feel like a voyeur with my characters. This makes writing sex scenes a little difficult, for example. However, I find it easier to write about other people having sex as I go along. The idea of writing in first person is intimidating; there’s a fear, perhaps irrational, that people will attribute the desires/fears/thoughts/wants of the narrator to me, even if they are the opposite of my thoughts. To write a sex scene in first person seems impossible and I haven’t tried it. Perhaps one day I will.

For now, I guess I’ll continue to be a voyeur.

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He Said / She Said

Louis Friend — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:53:54 +0000

For years I only wrote in first person personal. Everything I penned was a confession of my sins. On occasion I’d try to distance myself from my writing a bit and utilize the third person; still writing about myself but masking it with an outside observer’s point of view.

I wish I could remember what finally pushed me out of this comfortable zone. It might have been the works of David Goodis, a terrific pulp author from Philadelphia. Goodis slides easily from third person to second to first when his characters are in times of distress; the second person taking on the voice of a character’s conscience, pushing and needling the hapless protagonist. Or, perhaps it was advice from a writing manual. Regardless, I finally broke out of the first person personal prison and stretched my mind; trying to cast my eyes into the head of another person, even if that person was just a character in one of my torrid tales.

My first “break out” in that regard most assuredly had to be the story “The Houseguest” in which I took a tale that I had been writing and rewriting for years and gave it new life by changing the point of view from one character to another. I don’t know if this switch was successful but it was the first time I ever made it to any kind of ending point of the story.

Being a fan of Kurosawa’s Rashomon I’ve long been fascinated by the way two (or more) people can perceive the same event through the veil of their experiences. I’ve always wanted to play out a scene in real life and then have the other party and me write out our experiences and put these two stories together, comparing and contrasting our perceptions. That has yet to happen but in the meantime I’ve done what I could with my own writing, playing with the notion of innacurate memories.

I couldn’t take any more. “Wait just a second,” I said, getting up. I had a feeling I knew what was coming and wanted to put a stop to it before Faith could open her mouth again. – Friday Night Plans: Louis

“Now wait just a darned minute,” Louis whined. He tried to get up and I shot him a look that put him right back in his seat. – Friday Night Plans: Faith

True, the differences are subtle but they’re there and they’re intentional. Others have been wildly different. I suppose it’s odd to care about such verrisimilitude when writing a smutty cuckolding story but it matters to me. I kept the stories of “Faith” and “Louis” separate. I’ve had fun with others where I’ve switched the point of view midway through and others where I vary the POV from one paragraph to the next (more or less) such as Cerebral Trainee Subject: Susan.

Varying the point of view can offer new shades of detail as well as providing an obvious point of empathy for a reader. Seeing the world through another’s eyes is what makes fiction such a wonderful journey.

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POV: Meat Puppets – Remittance Girl

Remittance Girl — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:47:03 +0000

I’m going to leave the relative merits of the different POVs up to someone else. Everyone has his or her favorite POV to write in, and often it will be the story that dictates what that is.

What I want to discuss is an almost chronic problem I see the work of people who are just starting out writing erotica. And sometimes – I’m sorry to have to say – I see it in the work of writers with a good deal of experience who should know better. I’m not sure there is a proper term for this problem, but I call it ‘meat puppeting’.

Let us be honest. Most of us write erotica because it is pleasurable to do it. It turns us on. And we write most often about the kind of kinks and fantasies that are of specific, personal interest to us. It’s rare to find a writer who, for instance, is an avid BDSM practitioner in real life, but never writes about it in their fiction.

But far too often, I’ve read characters who were solely created for the purpose of acting out the writer’s personal sexual fantasies. Now, this isn’t always a problem. If you’ve written a character who may believably share your fantasies, then it usually works very well in the story. The problem comes when, for instance, male writers put exceedingly male-centered fantasies into the heads of their female characters or vice-versa.

I recently angsted for days over feedback to a writer whose narrator and main female character kept having the most graphic fantasies about a man she fancied spurting his come all over her – not once, but five times in five pages. Not once in any of these fantasies does she imagine being touched, penetrated or tasted. Not once does she imagine how it feels on her skin. These are NOT typical female fantasies. These are the male fantasies of the author being channeled through his female character as if she were a literary blow-up doll. He WISHES women had these fantasies and he’s manufactured a character out of his wishes.

If this were a story about an uber-submissive female character who was seriously into orgasm / pleasure denial, I could see it, I guess. But it wasn’t. The relationship was, by most people’s standards, a vanilla one. Only a woman who specifically got off on the complete absence of any sexual stimulation, other than the visualized pleasure of her lover, would fantasize like this. The writer has made his female character his whore – his meat puppet.

Similarly, I get very annoyed to read about sexually vanilla male characters who want nothing more than to spend four hours performing cunnilingus on their lover. Of course, if he was into femdom and got off on being denied, that would be one thing, but too often in erotica writing this is not the case. The female writer has used a male character to act out her fantasies for her, and allowed him no volition or natural reactions of his own, because they didn’t feed her personal fantasy.

Now, many people are going to say, “Who cares? I like the idea of a male character who wants no more than to please me. It’s fantasy. This is erotica!”

My response is: nope, that’s porn. Porn doesn’t need to be concerned with the creation of three-dimensional characters who have a certain amount of autonomous agency. Porn characters ARE meat puppets, manufactured specifically to bend in all the right places so we can get them to sexually perform our fantasies for us.

If erotica is ever to take its place as a respected literary genre, we have to start seeing the erotic in reality and write our characters accordingly, with enough realism to begin to do what all good literature does: reflect our world back at us and offer us a deeper insight into it. And god knows, we are sorely lacking in much in the way of deep insights into our own eroticisms and sexualities.

Now, there is a really simple way to avoid the meat-puppeting problem. Just write a character who can believably have the fantasies you want to see played out. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, no. It isn’t easy at all, because it means being incredibly honest about your own fantasies and really owning them.

Writers who are most likely to meat-puppet their characters are the ones who are least comfortable in themselves with the fantasies they want to portray. And, crafting a character who resembles the writer enough to believably channel the fantasies through, still feels uncomfortable, because it is too close to the bone.

So, here’s my advice. Sometimes you need to work on yourself first, and make peace with your own sexual fantasies before you can write in fiction. No one ever said that good erotic writing would be comfortable or easy to do. Moreover, there is no writer who doesn’t, to some extent, commit this sin. But it is a question of degrees.

The first time I stopped meat-puppeting when I wrote a male character in a non-con story, I produced Click. I spent most of the writing time feeling acutely sick to my stomach. That’s when I realized, if I wanted write something non-con that only fed my fantasies and still contained realistic characters, I was going to have to write it from the female perspective in first or third person limited.

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