GrushaVashnadze
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2020
- Posts
- 220
Here are some thoughts I have had on the structuring of "smuterature" (my word for "porn that makes you think") - especially sex novels. I submit them in reference to my satirical dystopian futuristic romance novel Alison Goes to London. However, they are not by any means the last word on anything - and I would love to hear other writers' thoughts on the matter.
First - I love stroke stories. However, in a stroke story, issues of structure are rarely an issue, for such stories usually contain only one arc, and that arc is a sexual one. The challenge is the sexual encounter, the centrepiece is the fuck, the conclusion is brought about by said fuck. Any character development, any plot points, anything that “makes you think” coincides with the sex arc. There is nothing inferior about a story like this, and there are thousands of superb examples out there.
However, single-arc stories need not necessarily be short. They may be filled out, indeed extended to several chapters, by lots of “slow burn”, various secondary plot events, descriptions, dialogue, settings etc. Though beautifully and subtly written, they still basically have a single plot arc, which coincides with the sex. If I may be forgiven for paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, they are stroke stories, “though breathed through silver”.
Conversely, stories which appear long can consist of little more than a concatenation of short stroke stories. If each chapter contains a single sexual arc, and the series consists of a number of such chapters one after another, with a very simple scenario which links them all, then such stories are best described as a “series”, rather than novels. Again, there is nothing wrong with this.
Finally, there is the sex novel - which is my passion. I suggest that what makes a sex novel different from a slow-build stroke story, or a multi-episode “series”, is that it incorporates multiple overlapping developmental arcs. One or more of them may be sexual, but others may involve the development of characters, relationships, and a multiplicity of other plot points which expose aspects of meaning or subject matter. The overall structure of the whole novel need not be structured principally around the fucking; in contrast to a stroke story (long or short), sex and large-scale structure need not coincide. A novel can be structured, rather, around its main subject matter: What is it about? What is the author trying to say here? What journeys is he or she taking the characters on, and why? If the writer knows what he or she is trying to say, then the sex will fit in: it will show its true purpose as stylistic raw material for story-telling – for creating metaphor and gesture about the world we live in and the way we live in it. Some of the sex novels I most admire in this regard include: Jaymal’s The Tempting of Neely J, CurvyGalore’s The Tribulations of Tobias, and VioletVixen’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears. (The latter is not strictly speaking a novel, though, like many of that author's short stories, it has all the potential to become one.)
The ability of different character arcs to overlay each other also allows another wondrous set of things to happen in a novel (or any other long narrative, such as a piece of full-length theatre). Peter Shaffer, in his play Amadeus, allows the eponymous composer to explain it beautifully:
“That’s why opera is important… Because it’s realer than any play! A dramatic poet would have to put all those thoughts down one after another to represent this second of time. The composer can put them all down at once – and still make us hear each one of them… On and on, wider and wider – all sounds multiplying and rising together – and the together making a sound entirely new! … I bet you that’s how God hears the world. Millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us! That’s our job! That’s our job, we composers: to combine the inner minds of him and him and him, and her and her – the thoughts of chambermaids and Court Composers – and turn the audience into God.”
Opera and musical theatre throughout the ages do indeed provide numerous examples of how Shaffer’s insight can play itself out. But porn and smut have many of the same potentialities. Sex does not require dialogue; therefore, in sex novels, a multiplicity of arcs – some sexual, some not; some major, some trivial – can make simultaneous appearances, combining, bouncing off each other, illuminating each other and the overall subject matter of the work.
In this regard, my best structured work remains, I think, Alison Goes to London. My view is that it works well as a novel because, like some of the examples mentioned above, it incorporates and overlays several complementary character arcs. There is Alison herself, who begins the novel full of ambition, a born fucker bound for the top; her equilibrium is upset by Rob’s declaration of love, which sets in train a whole series of traumas which eventually lead to her loss of faith in the "Enlightenment" and her finding of happiness elsewhere. Then there is Claire, whose naïve contentment is shattered, not by her own doubts, but by the emotional instability of her best friend, whom she tries (unsuccessfully) to rescue by declaring her own love for her, before finally finding contentment in quiet reliable Bradley. There is Riley, the working-class ingénue, whose challenge lies in finding a way to pursue her ambition to become a “posh fucker”. There is Professor Emma Jane Cuntslicker of the Royal Academy of Fucking, whose arrogant confidence in the Enlightenment is shaken by the betrayal of her favourite protegeé Anna, and the stubbornness of Rob’s love for Alison, before finding a new nobility of purpose in the final chapter. There are Anna and Andy, up-and-coming pillars of the fucking establishment who, by falling in love with each other, lose their chance of success in the world, and find themselves forced to go into exile in order to be true to themselves and to each other. There are Eva and Chad, damaged individuals who mask their own unhappinesses through their own cruelty to others – until they find that self-same cruelty coming back to bite them, thus forcing them to reassess their values. And there is the villain, Hildegard Fotzenficker, a true believer like Cuntslicker, but who demonstrates all the pitfalls of ideological inflexibility and arrogance, which lead to her downfall.
The wonderful thing about writing a novel is the opportunity for all these characters’ arcs to overlay each other, so that they illuminate and challenge each other. Because each character is at a different stage on their journey, their stories can do battle, or complement each other, or comment on each other, in the same scene. I like to call this technique “concertato”, after the word used to describe the grand multi-layered Act One finales in nineteenth-century Italian opera.
One of my favourite scenes of this ilk is in Chapter 7, where Cuntslicker’s emotional nadir, her deepest ideological crisis, is overlaid with Anna’s love-epiphany. Another concertato scene I commend to you is from Chapter 9, where Alison is drowning in self-doubt, her eyes having been opened to the flaws of the Enlightenment by her friend Eva, whilst simultaneously watching the young schoolgirl Riley, whose journey of discovery has just begun.
All of these character or plot arcs, and multi-arc overlays, are non-coincident with the sexual arcs of the novel. In other words, the novel is not, in terms of structure or subject matter, built around fucking. There is lots of fucking, but because the novel is about the social and relationship issues outlined above, the sex is freed from the shackles of having to create the structure or subject matter of the story, and the story is freed from having to be built around the fucking. I have found this a great liberation as a writer, enabling me to create stories which aspire towards some of the structural genius of porn movies like The Opening of Misty Beethoven or Good Girls Bad Girls, or operas like La Boheme, or musicals like Les Miserables. Am I too ambitious? Probably. But on the way, it's fun...
Thoughts?
First - I love stroke stories. However, in a stroke story, issues of structure are rarely an issue, for such stories usually contain only one arc, and that arc is a sexual one. The challenge is the sexual encounter, the centrepiece is the fuck, the conclusion is brought about by said fuck. Any character development, any plot points, anything that “makes you think” coincides with the sex arc. There is nothing inferior about a story like this, and there are thousands of superb examples out there.
However, single-arc stories need not necessarily be short. They may be filled out, indeed extended to several chapters, by lots of “slow burn”, various secondary plot events, descriptions, dialogue, settings etc. Though beautifully and subtly written, they still basically have a single plot arc, which coincides with the sex. If I may be forgiven for paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, they are stroke stories, “though breathed through silver”.
Conversely, stories which appear long can consist of little more than a concatenation of short stroke stories. If each chapter contains a single sexual arc, and the series consists of a number of such chapters one after another, with a very simple scenario which links them all, then such stories are best described as a “series”, rather than novels. Again, there is nothing wrong with this.
Finally, there is the sex novel - which is my passion. I suggest that what makes a sex novel different from a slow-build stroke story, or a multi-episode “series”, is that it incorporates multiple overlapping developmental arcs. One or more of them may be sexual, but others may involve the development of characters, relationships, and a multiplicity of other plot points which expose aspects of meaning or subject matter. The overall structure of the whole novel need not be structured principally around the fucking; in contrast to a stroke story (long or short), sex and large-scale structure need not coincide. A novel can be structured, rather, around its main subject matter: What is it about? What is the author trying to say here? What journeys is he or she taking the characters on, and why? If the writer knows what he or she is trying to say, then the sex will fit in: it will show its true purpose as stylistic raw material for story-telling – for creating metaphor and gesture about the world we live in and the way we live in it. Some of the sex novels I most admire in this regard include: Jaymal’s The Tempting of Neely J, CurvyGalore’s The Tribulations of Tobias, and VioletVixen’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears. (The latter is not strictly speaking a novel, though, like many of that author's short stories, it has all the potential to become one.)
The ability of different character arcs to overlay each other also allows another wondrous set of things to happen in a novel (or any other long narrative, such as a piece of full-length theatre). Peter Shaffer, in his play Amadeus, allows the eponymous composer to explain it beautifully:
“That’s why opera is important… Because it’s realer than any play! A dramatic poet would have to put all those thoughts down one after another to represent this second of time. The composer can put them all down at once – and still make us hear each one of them… On and on, wider and wider – all sounds multiplying and rising together – and the together making a sound entirely new! … I bet you that’s how God hears the world. Millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us! That’s our job! That’s our job, we composers: to combine the inner minds of him and him and him, and her and her – the thoughts of chambermaids and Court Composers – and turn the audience into God.”
Opera and musical theatre throughout the ages do indeed provide numerous examples of how Shaffer’s insight can play itself out. But porn and smut have many of the same potentialities. Sex does not require dialogue; therefore, in sex novels, a multiplicity of arcs – some sexual, some not; some major, some trivial – can make simultaneous appearances, combining, bouncing off each other, illuminating each other and the overall subject matter of the work.
In this regard, my best structured work remains, I think, Alison Goes to London. My view is that it works well as a novel because, like some of the examples mentioned above, it incorporates and overlays several complementary character arcs. There is Alison herself, who begins the novel full of ambition, a born fucker bound for the top; her equilibrium is upset by Rob’s declaration of love, which sets in train a whole series of traumas which eventually lead to her loss of faith in the "Enlightenment" and her finding of happiness elsewhere. Then there is Claire, whose naïve contentment is shattered, not by her own doubts, but by the emotional instability of her best friend, whom she tries (unsuccessfully) to rescue by declaring her own love for her, before finally finding contentment in quiet reliable Bradley. There is Riley, the working-class ingénue, whose challenge lies in finding a way to pursue her ambition to become a “posh fucker”. There is Professor Emma Jane Cuntslicker of the Royal Academy of Fucking, whose arrogant confidence in the Enlightenment is shaken by the betrayal of her favourite protegeé Anna, and the stubbornness of Rob’s love for Alison, before finding a new nobility of purpose in the final chapter. There are Anna and Andy, up-and-coming pillars of the fucking establishment who, by falling in love with each other, lose their chance of success in the world, and find themselves forced to go into exile in order to be true to themselves and to each other. There are Eva and Chad, damaged individuals who mask their own unhappinesses through their own cruelty to others – until they find that self-same cruelty coming back to bite them, thus forcing them to reassess their values. And there is the villain, Hildegard Fotzenficker, a true believer like Cuntslicker, but who demonstrates all the pitfalls of ideological inflexibility and arrogance, which lead to her downfall.
The wonderful thing about writing a novel is the opportunity for all these characters’ arcs to overlay each other, so that they illuminate and challenge each other. Because each character is at a different stage on their journey, their stories can do battle, or complement each other, or comment on each other, in the same scene. I like to call this technique “concertato”, after the word used to describe the grand multi-layered Act One finales in nineteenth-century Italian opera.
One of my favourite scenes of this ilk is in Chapter 7, where Cuntslicker’s emotional nadir, her deepest ideological crisis, is overlaid with Anna’s love-epiphany. Another concertato scene I commend to you is from Chapter 9, where Alison is drowning in self-doubt, her eyes having been opened to the flaws of the Enlightenment by her friend Eva, whilst simultaneously watching the young schoolgirl Riley, whose journey of discovery has just begun.
All of these character or plot arcs, and multi-arc overlays, are non-coincident with the sexual arcs of the novel. In other words, the novel is not, in terms of structure or subject matter, built around fucking. There is lots of fucking, but because the novel is about the social and relationship issues outlined above, the sex is freed from the shackles of having to create the structure or subject matter of the story, and the story is freed from having to be built around the fucking. I have found this a great liberation as a writer, enabling me to create stories which aspire towards some of the structural genius of porn movies like The Opening of Misty Beethoven or Good Girls Bad Girls, or operas like La Boheme, or musicals like Les Miserables. Am I too ambitious? Probably. But on the way, it's fun...
Thoughts?
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