Friday 21 November 2014

Freeing the imagination

I read so many erotic novellas which end up being a bit samey. They happen in an American city. It could be any city. The characters live in apartments, they go to pizza parlours, they walk in the park, they drive Toyotas, they have sex.

Or the other kind of sameyness. The setting is the wilds of ... Canada, Wisconsin, somewhere with snow. The characters are werewolves. They run in the snow, they howl at the moon, they have sex.

Inevitably, genres create a lack of originality. It's possible to write quite a competent piece of erotica with no originality at all. But... couldn't we go a bit further? Isn't it time to free up the imagination?

And I must admit, I need to do it myself, as I've been feeling rather flat and uninspired recently. (Part of that has to do with finishing off a couple of books that have been on and off the boil a few times, and needed to be either finished or killed off. I think I've done a good job, but it's been a struggle.) So I've decided to spend a few days just "doodling" - thinking up ideas, allowing my fantasy free reign.

Here are a few ideas.
  • Take a 'straight' literary genre or book and try making it into erotica. SF? the Dickensian underworld? the court masque of the Jacobean court? Edgar Allan Poe's mysteries? ("Quoth the Raven: You're a whore." My heroine may have tart words to say about that.) Homeric epic? (Achilles and Patroclus...)
  •  Introduce some magic. What if... we could change our bodies and our gender at will? (Iain Banks's Culture people are able to do this. It has limitations.) What if... the world was like a hall of mirrors and reflected our every whim? What if...Gregor Samsa woke one morning and found himself turned into an enormous dildo? (Or as John Betjeman once fantasised: "I've always thought / I'd rather like / To be the saddle / On a bike.")
  • Introduce another theme into the erotica. Write about architecture and the urban environment, with some sex thrown in. Or write about Kropotkin and anarchism and the 1848 revolutions, with some sex thrown in. A lot of the thematic matter might hit the cutting-room floor, or you may end up with a 'straight' novel instead, but try it. Let it free up writing muscles that haven't been used for a while.
  • Take a statue you know and make it walk. I might take Charles I from his position at the top of Whitehall (but if his horse came along too, that might prove an embarassment). Or maybe one of the fatuous lions that guard the approaches to Westminster Bridge. Or maybe Nelson might fancy a St Patrick's Day wander around Soho; he'd get away with the uniform in some pubs I know.
  • Free yourself from the constraints of boy-meets-girl, or even girl-meets-two-boys. Allow yourself to go wandering and find small erotic encounters or fantasies to create a fragmented or polyphonic narrative. That might not sustain a full scale novel... then again it might. Who knows?

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