I dabbled in writing erotica for a few months, knowing full well that once my fiction class started I would have to set it aside temporarily and not necessarily get serious -good erotica is its own art- but get whatever the opposite of writing dirty stories is for me.
Guess how long that lasted?
I had this idea about painting on a person that rattled around in my head for more than a decade, and it just happened to fit in with the assignment and characters I was writing for class. Also, shoes are of course involved. The instructor noted that if I chose to develop the story, it could evolve either into erotica or literary fiction depending on what I did with it, and that the difference is that in literary fiction the characters have something at stake. What the characters had at stake, at this early point in the story, was unclear.
(Of course, a lot of erotica centers around infidelity, so technically, the characters have something at stake, but it is a tacit agreement between the writer and reader in erotica that the characters will not get caught, unless it is that kind of story, in which case, the same idea applies. All bets are off in literary fiction.)
I had not given much thought to what differentiated literary fiction with lots of sex from pure fantasy. I figured it was character development plain and simple and was taking more of an “I know it when I see it,” approach. Consequently, I have a handful of stories from the past six months that probably sit right at the edge between erotica and literary fiction.
So, this gives me a framework for moving forward with the story I started for class, but the concept of what is at stake as a defining characteristic of fiction relative to fantasy also has me looking a little deeper. It has been said that literary fiction is a culture’s conversation with itself about itself. Fantasy is fantasy, and exists purely for pleasure. In the epic that is a life, how do we determine the difference between the stories that we tell ourselves everyday in order to define ourselves, and the stories we tell ourselves purely for pleasure? It is easy in the extreme: we know that telling ourselves the story that, say, our job is important supports our identity and keeps the status quo humming along, and we know that imagining the barista at Starbucks straddling the counter and serving up a double tall handjob is a flight of fancy. If we lose the barista there is always another fantasy object. If we lose the job, there is so much more at stake – identity, world view, etc..
But, what happens when the lines get muddied between the stories that do the work of defining us and the stories that are simply passing pleasures? What happens when you can’t tell the difference?
What happens, I think, is that life gets interesting. Whether it is sex or food or cars or some other object of obsession, in this messy, smokey area of things that should be light and fancy but are tightly, dearly, deeply held there is tension, darkness, energy to be found. Wanting, compressed by time, forms a thick vein of coal at the center of a being. Everything is at stake with that much fuel sitting there; release it, life could blow up. If we’re brave, we throw in a match from time to time. If we’re a little less brave, we let some one else strike the match.
Regardless of how a person ignites, in fiction as in life, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are only as interesting as what is at stake if they turn out not to be true.
