What I Learned by Writing an Erotic Novel
Three lessons about writing, sex, and spiritual practice
Last year I finished a novella titled Bodywork. It’s about sex, death and God. I’m pitching it to publishers right now.
The main character is Greg, a man who’s deeply interested in Buddhism and goes on long meditation retreats. One day, however, Greg realizes that he’s done with sitting meditation. Over time it’s become an isolating head trip that leaves him with little more than a sore butt.
So, Greg decides to explore bodywork — therapeutic massage — as a spiritual practice. He will mindfully observe physical sensations, just as in sitting meditation. But those sensations will arise from being touched in a loving way by another human being.
Greg gains a lot of insight from this practice — more than from sitting meditation. He also meets bodyworkers with controversial techniques, some that are deeply erotic.
The more risks that Greg takes in bodywork, the more he learns. And the more bodywork Greg does, the better a lover he becomes to his wife. But how does he tell her about all this?
Eventually Greg’s wife learns about his bodywork anyway. And from that point on, nothing about their marriage goes according to plan.
Finishing Bodywork took me ten rewrites over ten years. The project involved a steep learning curve and yielded lessons I’d never dreamed of learning.
First lesson: I had no idea how to write a novel. Even though I worked for decades as a freelance writer and editor, I’d never attempted fiction. The idea of making up stories seemed grandiose and impossible.
Finally I forgot all about writing the great American novel and took inspiration from The Art of Fiction, a book by John Gardner. The novelist’s job, he writes, is to create a “vivid and continuous dream” in the reader’s mind. Help readers to see, hear, and feel events that unfold in full sensory detail, in real time, on their mental movie screen.
Imagine that you’re shooting video of your characters. The only thing that you can capture is physical, visible action — what the characters do and say. That’s it. That’s what sustains the dream. Cut almost everything else.
Second lesson: Few things are more unsexy than writing about people having sex. (In Bodywork, by the way, this takes place only between husband and wife.)
Want to reduce your libido? Try writing a sex scene.
My first attempts were cringe-worthy. But I persisted and finally realized something: Good erotic writing is just good writing, period. It is lean, built on nouns and verbs. The more adjectives and adverbs I loaded into my prose, the more bloated and boring it got — especially the sex scenes.
Third lesson: Titillating writing — the literary equivalent of porn — and erotic writing are different.
Titillation is an end in itself and totally predictable. From the moment that the first bodice gets ripped, you know exactly how the story is going to end.
In contrast, good erotic writing is unpredictable. My goal with Bodywork was to surprise readers at every turn in the story, and to do it in a credible way.
Erotic writing is also a means to other ends — revealing character and propelling a story. The purpose of erotic writing is not to get people hard or wet. It’s to reveal how sex relates to the human search for love and meaning and making peace with mortality.
There was another lesson as well: Yes, sex really can be a spiritual path.
That’s the subject of my next post.
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