Fuck You, Pay Me #3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel
This is part 3 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy.
I’ve been working on what I refer to as my porn novel, and it’s been going pretty well. I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned so far. If the novel keeps moving forward, there will be more posts like this to come. By the way, my novel isn’t porn, or smut, or romance. It’s literary. I call it my porn novel for the sake of shorthand.
Do the math. There is nothing more daunting than writing a novel, so sometimes when I get overwhelmed, or stuck, or unsure, I quantify something that seems unquantifiable. You know, like a novel. So pretty early, I converted the project into numbers. The novel would be approximately 60,000 words long. It would consist of 12 chapters. Each chapter would be approximately 5,000 words long. Each chapter would consist of 10 sections. Each section would be approximately 500 words long. In this way, when I sit down to write, I’m writing another 500-word section of my novel, not attempting to write a novel that is 60,000-words long. Capiche?
Do it your way. Last year, I went to an estate sale at a Hollywood art gallery. Some of what was being sold was vintage adult movie posters. I bought a poster for a porn movie called “She Did It Her Way.” In case you can’t read between the lines, I did not feel while writing a memoir while under contract to a major publisher that I was doing it my way, so in a way the writing of this novel is an effort to go back to what I used to do, which is to write what I want to write how I want to write it, not write what I think someone else wants me to write because that is what I feel I am contractually obligated to do. This novel is all about doing it my way. The other way is bullshit.
Do weird shit. This novel is weird. I mean it’s written in English, but it certainly is very different. I don’t think it has any obvious comparisons in the world of novels, so I guess you could say it is quite original. Also, it has really weird stuff in it, like weird dreams, and a weird main character, and a weird kind of relentless focus on the life of a person in extreme detail to the point of being a little “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”-esque. Do you know how many new books are published every year? I don’t either. But a lot. Secret: Most of them are garbage. Garbage or not, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to be weird.
Don’t overthink it. One thing I’m having a fair amount of success with in regards to this novel is not overthinking it. In fact, I don’t even think about it that much when I’m not working on it. I bang out these 500-word sections in about an hour, and I try not to do more than one of them a day. I allowed myself to create a draft of the first chapter that was a little messy but not overly so, and I paid a lot of attention to not dwelling on it, not sitting at the computer for a long period of time, and not spending hours of my life wondering whether or not it’s any good. I mean, it’s about the porn industry. How bad could it be? Ha-ha.
Don’t over revise. When I was done drafting the first chapter, which, I don’t know was done over the course of maybe a couple of weeks or a month or something, who knows, I can’t remember anymore, but not super long, I set it aside for a little bit. Then I decided I would go back and revise the first chapter. Revising my memoir was a bit of a nightmare, for reasons you may or may not be able to intuit, and I wasn’t sure when I went to revise this first chapter of my porn novel if that would be a nightmare, too. Thankfully, it wasn’t. I identified the issues pretty quickly and resolved them relatively easily. There are some things that need to be figured out and tweaked that have to do with the overall unspooling of the book, but I don’t think it will be some massive reinvention of the text. The only part I struggled a bit with was the last section of the first chapter. I’m not sure why. I’ll figure it out later.
Don’t stop trying. Awhile back, I wrote this post about the story of my life as a writer, and I realized as I was writing it how impactful certain events had been. Not obvious life shit, but writer shit. Like the writing residency I did in upstate New York, and the fellowship I did at U.C. Berkeley, and the seminar I did in a Philip Johnson building in Manhattan. And as I was writing the post, I recalled very clearly that for every single one of those things I applied for I was very cognizant of the fact that I didn’t think I was going to get it. But then I did. So I thought, you know, I should apply for some writing residencies for my porn novel. And then I thought, Oh, no, they’ll never pick me because this novel is literary but it is also about porn, and sometimes porn makes people twitchy. Anyway, I applied to one and more to come. Because you gotta try.
Decide to be transparent. If you have any awareness of me and my writing, you’ll know that I’ve tried to write this porn novel many times before, although always in different ways. This way feels different. I debated whether or not to share how it’s going at all, seeing as maybe I’ll just fail at it again, like all those other times. But then I thought, Fuck it. Who cares. One great thing about blogging is no one ever reads blogs anyway. This will be me, writing for me, about me. It will stand as a record of the point where I was now, and maybe at some point in the not-so-distant future I’ll look back on this and think: You go, girl.
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