writing and seduction

"Have you written anything for me lately?"

Well, no.  Nothing at all.

So. What's the problem?  And actually, I want to solve here a larger problem.  The problem of bad writing altogether, especially that of undergrads.  And maybe a few grad students as well.  Or.  To be honest.  Maybe a lot of grad students.  

And then I'll solve the teaching problem too.  But not till the end of the post. Or next post, if I don't get around to it.  But I think I will.

No.  I haven't written anything for you lately.  I've been too busy sleeping with you. Camping with you.  Doing the being-together thing with you.  I haven't written a goddamned word.  Cooking. Doing the laundry.  Emptying the trash.  Muzzling the barky dog. Unmuzzling the quiet dog. Setting up the new computer to start writing.  Clearing off the desk.  Picking up the dogs shit.  Working out, for god's sake!

Anything, anything at all but writing.  

Which spells for me a stage of life that might be called 'post-seduction.'

It's that easy (still early enough) part of a relationship in which just picking up someone else's dog's shit is still kinda a kick enough to be fun.  And done out of love and reciprocity (I pick up your dog shit, you pick up mine), and has not descended into resentment, or even worse—rage. Horrors. Don't get me wrong: it doesn't ever need to go that way.  I think I like this stage of post-seduction. I like the mutuality of it.  The minutiae of it.  It's pretty easy.  But I'm not sure it's quite enough.

Because writing is a powerful seduction.

I don't mean the kind of writing written explicitly in order to make a million bucks or two.  I don't mean strategic writing. The porn of how he gets laid every X number of pages because you think that sells. That's not seduction. That's ambition. And I'm not talking about ambition.

The Story of O didn't make those big bucks because it was trying to seduce a large well-paying audience. Anne Desclos (Pauline Réage) had only an audience of one in mind.  Everyone else has been just eavesdropping on a very private conversation.

And that's why it works.

The best writing has a sense of urgency as well as a very clear sense of audience.

Desclos knew what she was doing.  As did Genet, when he sat in prison pleasuring himself with words. The stuff just pours out (the words, I mean—though with Genet, that would be both), because there's no way to dam the flow.  Compelling writing is like that.  And it doesn't have to reach everybody.  It just has to reach that one person.  The eavesdroppers come along for the ride. They're a freebie, if you will.

Undergrads primarily write out of obligation.  Coercion.

"How many pages do you want?" they ask in dismay.

They're not all like OMG, can you believe it, I GET to write something... I am so jazzed...  

Think about it, students (if I may address you as such, just for a moment, one last time). When school is finally over, it is very likely that no one will ever give you the opportunity to take the time and just pour out your words ever again.  For some of you, it's very likely you'll never ever write again. At least, that's what you've told me.

And you've forgotten, it seems, that someone has to read this crap you've flung at us as pages filled.  Student papers have to be read (unlike that porn, the NYT, or any other written word).  Someone has to read them.  And that someone used to be me.  But no, no more.  With luck, I will never read another student paper ever again.  

So. I'm gonna say this straight out (and with all due respect)—and I hope it helps.  And maybe I should have said it in class. But no, you'd have taken it all wrong—

The best papers are a seduction.

They're written with words put together with that one specific 'audience' in mind.  Beautiful combinations of words. Just for me, for you, whomever. A topic filled with three parts desire for every part called eloquent.  Seduction trumps eloquence any day.

It doesn't matter what the topic is.  

Write about-the-economy-stupid. Write about Romney. Saddam (curious unconscious transition there). Write about whether to fund (or weaponize) Syrian rebels. Or how to get your name on a crater of Mars. Write about daffodils in the very early springtime.  Drought mid-summer. What you had for breakfast this morning (and why we should care).  Write about the gods. It's never ever about the subject anyway.

But if you're writing for that goddamned grade (or to make you that fortune you think is there)—you've missed the mark.  You've got to be turned on by your own writing.

Seduce yourself, first and foremost, no matter the topic.

There's a flush, a blush in those students who fall in love with their own work.  Their cheeks blossom, their eyes twinkle.  They're not being strategic, they're being excited by the material at hand.

I haven't written for you lately.

I've been too busy doing anything but writing. 

Because my own writings were missives to death, love songs to the dead and dying. Remembrances, lest I forget. Tales to my children, lest they never have the opportunity to remember. Stories that will be forever gone if I don't write them down.  No one else can do it.

In the face of death and dying, I seduce myself with words.  Genet was ever my best teacher.

Ah, but here's the rub.  Let me not put this all upon the student who writes because he feels he's forced. Because the-system's telling him to jump through hoops, crank out those pages. Because he's stuck with an English class (or god-forbid, Anthropology) and he's an Engineering student. And shit, I have to in order to-get-outta-here. Goddamn it, when they resent their being in school, it drives me mad!

This goes for teachers, too, you know.

Teaching is seduction, too.

A prominent psychoanalyst told me that one time when I complained to him of such.

Not a seduction of the person, but of the material at hand.  If you as you lecture are in love with your topic, that is the best seduction of all.  (In truth, that's not quite what he said.  To an analyst, it's all about the person).  

Topic doesn't matter. Ancient Greek or Pleistocene dentition. The fall of the Ottoman Empire. Black holes. Who cares?  It's all seduction-worthy.

Blow on those embers and makes them glow.

I've been doing laundry, not writing. Cooking for you. And eating your own exotic meals.  Camping out, and hiking trails. Studying pig roasts and fishin' holes. Walking dogs and bagging dog shit together. I've been doing chop wood, carry water of late. Pouring out a simple kind of love and not seduction.

In other words, I started just to live again. And started leaving all those stories far behind.

School is starting in a week or two—and for the first time in my sentient life I won't be there to greet it.  For me, school is finally, finally over.

But life is not as much fun without a little seduction now and then.  Time to pick up that quill again, and try my rusty hand.  

drowning at the grotto (rethought)

I wanted the Grotto to look like a grotto: old, womb-like, a bit dank, prehistoric even. I expected it to be mildly tubercular. I pictured the San Francisco Grotto Writers' Collective in a dilapidated old Victorian sitting in a downtown alleyway in dire need of a paint job — but no, none of that. The Collective encompassed the entire 2nd floor of a steel and glass building at the corner of 2nd and Bryant, with an attempt at a row of plants in the entryway downstairs just inside the black iron gate out front. There were buzzers to get buzzed in, and once inside, a large cheerful 'Grotto' sign in script.

The second floor did seem to have a bit of the 'cave' feel. Inside, the writers' offices were, for the most part, as far from the downtown office mentality as possible. My favorites were the two closets that are rented out as writers' offices — caves indeed — and only $20/month. Picture a closet. A small closet. With a shelf as a desk, and a chair, and nothing else but yellow stickies all over the walls. Stickies so close, given the closet dimensions, that all you have to do is turn your head from side to side, and your whole storyboard is right there surrounding you. Now that's a writer's grotto!

What was I doing there? Took an all day Short Story Writing Workshop. My first (and likely last) writing workshop ever. We talked about all the normal things — writing prompts, narrators, characters, dialogue, exposition, plot, story, arc, setting, and even writer's block and marketing. There seemed to be a lot of rules to writing stories.

What did I learn? I learned that there was too much glass and steel for me and downtown vibe. I learned that I don't understand the rules of story writing. I learned that taking a workshop feels like a cooking class (or how I imagine one, anyway). It feels like cheating. Or (like everything else) like a good start for little anthropological study of writing groups.

I learned that I don't care whether dialogue subtly conveys the exposition, and that I don't care if a story arc follows the trajectory of a satisfying sexual encounter (even if that makes a story 'natural' or downright 'biological'), and I learned that I think it's sad to be motivated by the expectation of acceptance letters and the acceptance of rejection letters.

When it comes to writing, I think it's a lot more fun just to write a tale because it wants to be written. And to tell it the way it wants to be told.

I want a 'narrator' to be thoroughly untrustworthy if she feels like it, or out for himself, for his own pleasure if that's what he wants. My model here is Jean Genet in say, Our Lady of the Flowers. Where you know that he's writing in his prison cell and that they did let him write. And we're caught up in his story — and then suddenly he stops — and tells us that the piece he's just written and that we've just read has gotten him off. And because of his pleasure, he'll tell that bit again. He gets off again. And what do we get? As we read, we cannot escape our narrator's pleasure, our narrator's prison cell, our narrator's incarceration, confinement, and his ability to write himself an escape right out of his cell. We're not just in his story, we're escaping his cell with him.

I want 'characters' to go ahead and live their own lives without hope of 'redemption,' let alone resolution. I don't think they should have to try to satisfy a 'reader.' Again, Genet is a good model. His characters don't want to stay who they are. They dress up. They are impersonators of other characters trapped in the same story. There's The Maids, for example, which when performed, the maids are played by men playing women playing maids, playing their own mistress. And they're not going to get a nice, neat resolution. Genet doesn't give a shit if this troubles his reader. The reader who gets it, who gets off on it, is really the only reader he needs. And that reader is Genet himself. It was Sartre, after all, who got Genet his audience.

I don't think a story should have to care too much about clarity of 'setting.' Think Kafka or Durrenmatt. Or even Genet again (but I don't want to overdo it here with Genet). They're writing from inside some pretty terrible expressionist landscapes. We don't really need to see them; we can feel them. That's enough. And is there anything at all wrong with sticking in an extra alleyway between say, Bryant and Harrison streets? Must it be either fictional or geographical accuracy? Surely there's room for a little alleyway between? Somebody quick go tell JK Rowling that she can't squeeze Diagon Alley into the heart of London.

Then there's the 'arc,' that nice satisfying arc. I think of North African folk tales. No happily ever after or perfect little story arc there. No, our protagonist learns that life is tough, and just gets tougher and that she can or can't endure it. Or that the prince is the real villain. Or that the villain is really your uncle. Or that your uncle is about to be your father-in-law. Or that your father-in-law is really a sorcerer ... who takes the form of a prince... Or that there is no transformation, no reward, no escape, you're just trapped — get used to it. It's probably a good thing to know.

I learned that I can't just make stuff up. My own 'characters' all exist already, and at least somebody knows them. They've been walking through our consciousnesses for millennia. Avram and Sarai and Hager and the whole dysfunctional mischpaha, for example. And when I write them, they are already fully alive, fully formed, simply going where I send them on the page, getting themselves into trouble, just as they always have.

What I've learned is that I'll never be able to write fiction. I'll only ever be able to just tell a tale. Exactly as it happened.