fiction

The Sexy Between The Sentences

/ PaigeRandall / Leave a comment

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My characters have a lot of sex. Shouldn’t they though? But writing a sex scene isn’t as easy as you might think.  Doing is one thing. Telling is another thing entirely. How much detail is sensual, without crossing over into erotica.  Erotica is lovely, if that is the intended genre.  I think for me, for writing anyway, it is not. All too easily a character can be shamed into putting on nipple clamps and a butt plug to sell her poor author’s book. My female lead, Anna, and I have a deal, no S & M if she can be sexy without forcing me to write an instruction manual for virgins. Doing It For Dummies? You all do know what is below the naval and above the knees on a woman. I know you do. And as much as I love all of the words (I really do), are there any sexy words to describe the male anatomy? Directly? That is a real challenge.

Writing a sex scene is an exercise in pure meditation. You have to block out each and every family member, everyone you know now, knew way back when, or might meet in the future. You have to push out the Starbucks barista blending your coffee, the neighbor passing with a dog on a leash, the guy on the next bike at the gym. Oh God if the receptionist at work knew! Everyone get out of my head. And stay out!

It only works if you are head over heels in love with your characters. I am. The sexy is between the sentences for me. Bring your own memories into the experience and share it with us.

Let me beat around the bush a little.

Freeing The Pain 

/ PaigeRandall / 1 Comment

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With all of this thinking and all of this writing and all of this attempt at creation, a new section of my brain seems to have opened up. And that cleaving, that veritable exposing of my psyche, has hurt like a motherf**ker.

Years ago someone very close to me shared the following observation… you have three emotions, she said, happiness, anger and anger.  And that was working out just fine for me. Well little did I know that when I decided to climb into the fictional heads of my fictional characters, their fictional feelings would become very real to me.  Suddenly, sadness and loss, guilt and insecurity, vulnerability and indecision could only get to them through me. And that really really hurts (thank God for red wine). It is not unlike childbirth, but the outcome is very different. I felt a bit like Melisandre, without the fabulous red hair (G.O.T. reference, sorry), birthing, well, birthing something. In my writing workshop someone called it bleeding on the page.  That is exactly it.  And that bleeding is excruciatingly painful.

Fortunately my characters get laid a lot too, and so there is that.

 

The Movement of Inspiration

/ PaigeRandall / Leave a comment

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Inspiration is a funny thing. It is everywhere or no where at all. Angel Oak, the tree above (behind my name) is outside of Charleston, SC. It is awe inspiring. The tiny snail over this post crawled his way onto my pages, inspiring as well. Music, for me, is the surest form of inspiration. In the early drafts of Circling, before giving a crap about precision or technique, just trying to “see it,” I listened to music a lot while I wrote. On headphones and LOUD (my audiologist friend is going to make a killing off me in a few years). A guitar riff can shift the action of a whole scene. One line of a song can alter a character’s entire motivation. Music is easy.

But inspiration comes from other, less expected, places. Driving down a city street, I saw a cable repair man standing in a hole gesturing with both hands facing down, pressing repeatedly, up and down, up and down, with fingers spread wide. I have no idea what he was doing, but it was a beautiful movement. It was ballet. It stuck with me and made me think about the challenge of transferring gestures and expressions to the page. That repair man gave my characters more movement. They tend to get a little static since they are busy having deep thoughts and making snappy retorts.

I tried to give that movement words all day. I still don’t have it, but trying is a good exercise.