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Teaching erotic writing
Jul. 19th, 2009 02:00 pmI'm doing something I've never done before this week: namely, teaching 2 live (as opposed to online or deceased) writing workshops in a row. The first one, "Inflagranti Delicto: Writing Good Sex Scenes" took place yesterday at The Loft Literary Center and the second one, "Some Like it Hot: Writing Erotica and Erotic Romance" is scheduled for next Friday at the Golden Crown Literary Society Conference in Orlando.
I ended up with 16 people in my class yesterday, including The Loft's director. I must admit, I was expecting a smaller turnout for a variety of reasons. These included the newness of the class,the fact that I hadn't taught there before, the existence of a similar class in the same session being taught by writers I was unfamiliar with and well, frankly, my perception that The Loft was not going to be all that friendly to the notion. The latter thought was based on a combination of my own prejudices and The Loft's overall rep. It's like the Guthrie Theater for writers in these parts: internationally known, heavy on established literary and various flavors of nonfiction authors and the place where all the cool kids hang out. Many of the cool kids in this case don't write, let alone admit to reading, genre fic. Sure big names like award-winning writers Ellen Hart and Louise Erdich and Wally Lamb get to play there, but not the small fry like me.
Let me just start by saying that I have been disabused of this notion. Part of this is due to the axiom about nothing succeeding like success. It's hard to get 16 people to sign up for a writing class right now, even a comparatively inexpensive afternoon workshop like this one was. It's usually even harder with a brand new class and a brand new instructor talking about, gasp, sex, and trying to teach writing about it in the upper Midwest. I might add that I knew the director was in the class beforehand (yay for Google) so I suspected I had to bring my A game or make one up in a hurry if I wanted to play in the big kid's playpen again. And you know, it turned out to be good, if exhausting, fun.
I talked a lot, great torrents of words if you consider that I'm generally used to talking for maybe a grand total of 10-40 minutes at a reading or a panel, rather than 3 hours and change. I was really, really glad that I'd put the time in beforehand to organize myself since free-associating and wisecracking are two things that I'm more inclined to do at cons. The outline got me through the material in a reasonably linear fashion (at least in my own head). I attempted to cover the following: examples of ways to write about sex (random sample of excerpts from the likes of Dorothy Allison, Chaz Brenchley, Pablo Neruda and others); distinctions between different kinds of writing about sex, from erotica to the occasional sex scenes; getting comfortable writing about sex; how you can use sex scenes for character development and plot arcs; building blocks of good sex scenes - description, setting, pace, pov, sexual tension, sensory experiences, etc.; common pitfalls - overuse of adjectives and adverbs, the dreaded exclamation marked, capitalized dialog, quaint euphemisms, cliches and so forth; plus a bit on submitting, finding markets and selling your work. Plus bringing books in for a show and tell and going over a resource list and a couple of in-class exercises. Okay, so perhaps I over-planned a tad bit for a 4 hour workshop.
The energy level stayed pretty high throughout, though it flagged toward the end and I clearly need a better workshop wrap-up. People asked me about a few things I'll have to look at incorporating (sexual vocabulary, for one thing) into future workshops. But overall, it seemed to go well and I had a decent time doing it. The director spoke with me afterward and asked me to submit more classes. Several people asked that I offer a longer version of this workshop in the next term or two. And I'll be back reading at The Loft in a couple of weeks.
I'm not yet sure how I feel about teaching writing in the long term. I think I'll be dissecting that for a bit. I don't have an MFA and apart from one 3 week residency with Samuel (Chip) Delany and a few workshops with various industry pros, I haven't taken a huge number of writing classes which means I don't come from the learning things in the classroom tradition. It's difficult to convey what is largely self-taught for you to other people who want to learn how you did it. Honestly, sometimes I have no idea. I did really like the challenge though and I suspect that doing this kind of thing will make me more conscious about my own writing, erotic and otherwise. In the meantime, one down, one to go.
I ended up with 16 people in my class yesterday, including The Loft's director. I must admit, I was expecting a smaller turnout for a variety of reasons. These included the newness of the class,the fact that I hadn't taught there before, the existence of a similar class in the same session being taught by writers I was unfamiliar with and well, frankly, my perception that The Loft was not going to be all that friendly to the notion. The latter thought was based on a combination of my own prejudices and The Loft's overall rep. It's like the Guthrie Theater for writers in these parts: internationally known, heavy on established literary and various flavors of nonfiction authors and the place where all the cool kids hang out. Many of the cool kids in this case don't write, let alone admit to reading, genre fic. Sure big names like award-winning writers Ellen Hart and Louise Erdich and Wally Lamb get to play there, but not the small fry like me.
Let me just start by saying that I have been disabused of this notion. Part of this is due to the axiom about nothing succeeding like success. It's hard to get 16 people to sign up for a writing class right now, even a comparatively inexpensive afternoon workshop like this one was. It's usually even harder with a brand new class and a brand new instructor talking about, gasp, sex, and trying to teach writing about it in the upper Midwest. I might add that I knew the director was in the class beforehand (yay for Google) so I suspected I had to bring my A game or make one up in a hurry if I wanted to play in the big kid's playpen again. And you know, it turned out to be good, if exhausting, fun.
I talked a lot, great torrents of words if you consider that I'm generally used to talking for maybe a grand total of 10-40 minutes at a reading or a panel, rather than 3 hours and change. I was really, really glad that I'd put the time in beforehand to organize myself since free-associating and wisecracking are two things that I'm more inclined to do at cons. The outline got me through the material in a reasonably linear fashion (at least in my own head). I attempted to cover the following: examples of ways to write about sex (random sample of excerpts from the likes of Dorothy Allison, Chaz Brenchley, Pablo Neruda and others); distinctions between different kinds of writing about sex, from erotica to the occasional sex scenes; getting comfortable writing about sex; how you can use sex scenes for character development and plot arcs; building blocks of good sex scenes - description, setting, pace, pov, sexual tension, sensory experiences, etc.; common pitfalls - overuse of adjectives and adverbs, the dreaded exclamation marked, capitalized dialog, quaint euphemisms, cliches and so forth; plus a bit on submitting, finding markets and selling your work. Plus bringing books in for a show and tell and going over a resource list and a couple of in-class exercises. Okay, so perhaps I over-planned a tad bit for a 4 hour workshop.
The energy level stayed pretty high throughout, though it flagged toward the end and I clearly need a better workshop wrap-up. People asked me about a few things I'll have to look at incorporating (sexual vocabulary, for one thing) into future workshops. But overall, it seemed to go well and I had a decent time doing it. The director spoke with me afterward and asked me to submit more classes. Several people asked that I offer a longer version of this workshop in the next term or two. And I'll be back reading at The Loft in a couple of weeks.
I'm not yet sure how I feel about teaching writing in the long term. I think I'll be dissecting that for a bit. I don't have an MFA and apart from one 3 week residency with Samuel (Chip) Delany and a few workshops with various industry pros, I haven't taken a huge number of writing classes which means I don't come from the learning things in the classroom tradition. It's difficult to convey what is largely self-taught for you to other people who want to learn how you did it. Honestly, sometimes I have no idea. I did really like the challenge though and I suspect that doing this kind of thing will make me more conscious about my own writing, erotic and otherwise. In the meantime, one down, one to go.