so why is it so difficult for me to write about sex? i want to be the writer who can take stories from her own life, disconnect for a bit, and create fiction based loosely on those experiences. maybe i need prompts? or something? is it that religious stigma that bars me from taking risks? a sort of cultural problem?
here's my issue: most of the best books have sex in them. scenes of sex between married people, torrid affairs, not so torrid and kind of humdrum affairs, homosexual sex, threesomes, all of that. and i can joke about it, i can talk about it, but something in me cramps up when i write about it. especially when i read books by south asian authors. there were so many instances when i read jhumpa lahiri's "the namesake" or "interpreter of maladies" when i had that cultural "a-ha" moment - when i recognized characters as someone i know in my life, or recognized a situation i had been through, or had known others to go through. same with monica ali, zadie smith, hanif kureishi, anita desai, arundhati roy, etc. but then the story hits a moment that seems unreal and gratuitous, because it doesn't fit the culture. it's something no one in their right minds would actually do. is that what makes the book better, or is that something that takes away from its essence? the trend of south asian storytellers (or, as said in hindi/urdu, the name i think fits best and is fittingly the title of an anthology of south asian fiction - "story-wallah") has only recently exploded onto the scene. it's fertile ground, but also young and yet exploring. i am in no way a prude (living in germany has had the opposite effect in fact), nor a conservative-minded prat, nor a narrow-minded pakistani-american muslim woman. but sex scenes in books about people like me make me squirm. maybe that's a challenge i should set myself up to. maybe i need to write one and get over it...
i have a gazillion ideas for stories in my head. one involves a "sliding doors" type theory - the life of one woman split in two realities. one reality is the life she leads as the child of pakistani immigrants, growing up in america, and the other is the same life if she had stayed and grown up in pakistan. how differently would she have been raised, what sort of twists and turns would her life take? my only doubt on this one is that i don't really know much about life in pakistan, or how that other reality would take shape.
second idea: a book of short stories. maybe.
third idea: write about what i know best - the conflicted life of someone who has wandered the world and no longer knows where she belongs, the ghost in limo between present and past, who she was and who she is now, involving all cultural elements of a women who feels very pakistani, very american, and very german, and how strange these elements make her feel. doubt: might be too close to home.
none of you have seen these posts yet, but the ass-kicking must commence. and so's to be clear, i get the weekends off, ok?
- z
3 comments:
Sex sells. and if you lose your mind enough to hire a Virgin for the sex scenes...my oh my...sex WONT sell. =)
-got it chim chimminee-
[read my shit phrase blog while your logged on this massacre site]
Write the greatest love/sex scene you can imagine. Then give it to someone to read. See how they react.
I write about stuff I'm not all the time. It's a great way to stretch the imagination and really see what character aspects you like and dislike.
If you're really nervous about it being cheesy/unrealistic/etc. then do some research. Plenty of books out there on the subject... :-) I could even point your toward the best.
Me, I'm terrified to write love/sex scenes for my own personal reasons...and when I finally did write one...it was weird and horrible...and the guy I gave it too to read was incredibly intrigued. I haven't done it since though... Shows you something about the human psyche though.
im voraus: sorry about the late response, brain and body, the whole shebang, have been detoxing.
idea number three, your Amerigermastani-Weltbuerger identity sounds great, but like you intimated you need to get a strong plot surrounding this, pure navel-staring is hard to pull off on literary levels :)
love the split us-pakistan idea, there's nothing wrong with research, authenticity can be found in different registers, emotional, theoretical, intuitive. granted, that's probably bit much research to be done for the Ides of March, but eh...
wish I knew where my real old Harpers are. there was an article in there (or Atlantic? damn, not sure now) about overrated literati, or rather: writers who got away with some pretty ridiculous shit just because they were literary and avant-garde-ish. I remember Delillo got a lot of hits. Big one: David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars...
ha! just googled it, here we go: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200107/myers .
but shoot: i'll try to send the whole thing to you if I can find my Atlantic subscriber info.
point being: Guterson's sex scene was just ridiculous.
so: assuming Guterson's had sex some time, we can conclude that sex scenes are not the easiest for many authors. and instead: sex scenes can take on meaning, significance, or at least just a context, from the rest of the novel. hell, sex often only makes sense in a context; otherwise it's often just silly. or porn.
which means: you have carte blanche to go crazy!
and it doesn't have to be only one person having sex. you can write characters with a complex sexual or gender identity. and seriously, you've got the www at your finger tips, you can include details authentically without having researched the spot.
example: the sex shop in Heidelberg. did you ever go in? I got to admit that I never did, though I was so damn curious. I mean, sex toys and porn are the same everywhere (I should know hehe j/k) and Beate Uhse's everywhere, but there was something enticingly nasty about the small dark sex shop in one of the tinier streets in neckarnaehe--you know, by the Irish restaurant. anywho, you could have a character with a Beate Uhse membership. the protagonist could bring down a Eastern European prostitution ring whose head owns the tiny sex shop--and he/she hooks up with the hot brilliant agent who helped her/him/it solve the case, they bring some goodies with from the shop as they go...
i'm losing track of the main purpose here, sorry, humoring old memories and scurrilous thoughts...
but seriously...let me ask it this way, have you got to a point where you have tried to write a sex scene in a story that's already well-formed in your head, where the characters are already physically and metaphorically fleshed-out?
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