Confronting The Blank Page

"A little learning is a dangerous thing."

Of course, Alexander Pope meant this to exhort people to deeper study of subjects. Like any wise piece of advice that has been abused into a cliche, I'm quoting this out of context.

I never had a moment of angst in confronting the blank page until I started this degree. That's the honest truth. A blank page was, until about a year and a half ago, the only truly irresistible proposition I'd ever met. It was the land of a thousand possibilities, the place with no limits, the coziest of beds and the widest of wide-open spaces.

Now, after eight units of this course, the blank page is possibly the most problematic part of my life.

How could knowing more about something have such a negative impact on me as a writer? Isn't the truth supposed to set me free? Isn't education supposed to broaden my horizons?

I don't regret taking this degree. I'm pretty sure this state of affairs isn't a permanent one. But right at the moment, I feel like the a piece of dialogue from 'The Fly' was written specifically for me. "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

The thing is, you can't really be afraid of something until you learn enough about it to know how dangerous it is. The more I've learned about writing, the more I see minefields in every part of the process. I'm interrogating myself in a ways I never even thought existed before.

Sometimes I feel like I need the processing power of a mainframe computer just to play out all the implications of each one of the writing choices I have. Tone, voice, POV, character, setting, plot, tense, subtext, where does the power reside, what are the feminist dynamics, how do the unseen and sticky tendrils of normative cultural values warp the story, and how do they tint the lenses of my readers, who have I under-represented, who have I over-represented, what are the class implications, what are the psychological underpinnings of the main character's motivations, etc. ad nauseum. Now, concatenate, repermutate and process again. Because each of these pieces affect every other piece on the board. Deep Blue where are you?

The weight of the responsibility to apply all the things I have learned to my writing has made the task seem unattemptable, insurmountable, absurd - actually - whatever I set out to write.

And, if all that didn't seem paralyzing enough - this tops the whole thing off with a cherry - I write erotica.

Erotica might seem, on the surface, to be one of the least rule-ridden genres, but it isn't. Like every other genre, it has its peculiar set of parameters that must be obeyed if you ever want your writing to see the light of day. Obvious though it may seem, I'll mention it. The First Commandment of writing erotica is: there must be sex.

I've often envied murder mystery writers. Agatha Christie got away with calling herself a mystery writer while killing off relatively few characters in any given story. Often she only had to kill of one.

In erotica, it isn't just that there must be sex, but that there must be quite a bit of it. And, if it is to be well-written erotica, the characters must seem like they drift into bouts of bonking under their own steam. You can't prod them into bed with your pen, at least not noticeably.

For the most part, erotica has escaped the scrutiny of literary critics (with the exception of de Sade, a few Victorian bits and pieces, and Anais Nin) because its has never been considered literature. Porn gets more critical attention because it is far more widely consumed. It makes no bones about what it is, and the genre conventions and values are widely understood.

In truth, most erotica is not 'literary'. It's often a sequence of sexual situations strung together with a very substandard plot line, as much character development as it takes to clarify what gender is on the table and a bit of setting, if it includes something you can use in foreplay.

It would be easy to wonder why I just don't change genres. Well, for a start, I've seldom written in any other. The times I have, sex is always there just floating beneath the surface and I have to stop myself from bringing it to the fore and incorporating it into the story. Secondly, good erotica IS literature. One of my favourite writers of modern erotica is Mike Kimera who writes exquisitely erotic and sharp, painful stories and, most of all, confronts his readers with the uncomfortable realities of their desires. Although he's won the RAUXA award, he'll probably never get a Booker Prize. His work is far, far too explicit and too uncomfortable at the same time.

We don't mind gritty reality, but it seems we aren't supposed to experience it while in a state of arousal.

Following Carolyn's go ahead, I've decided to complete my novel "The Waiting Room" about two travelers in Cambodia. It was initially written online under the glare of about 30 dedicated readers, and although the structure is in place and the characters are very solidified, the way it sits in the landscape of Cambodia, culturally and historically, needs a great deal of work.


Carolyn suggested I investigate the Chicago school. This is something completely new for me, so I'm excited.

"The Chicago Critics' investigation of major literary forms and effects was pursued by Wayne Booth in two important books: The Rhetoric of Fiction, a learned analysis of the novel form, and A Rhetoric of Irony, a provocative attempt to explain the ways in which authors communicate certain meanings by pretending to communicate others. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., continued and advanced the Chicago Critics' work on authorial intentions. His Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation are the most distinguished books on the subject."

Foundations Study Guide: Literary Theory
Stephen Cox

I'm going to have to see what else I can find online about this.

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