The Art of Writing: Know Yourself

This week, Blackwarren founder Vaughn R. Demont shares his thoughts on understanding not just your own writing process but who you are as a writer in a two-part series. The first half, Know Yourself, is below.

Process is a daunting term for a writer, but to be asked about it by an industry professional is often a sign that you've "made it". Requiring self-awareness, knowing your process is knowing not just what inspires you, but also knowing what triggers inspiration. All too often writers come into the craft believing they can only write after being visited by the muse, that on some idle Tuesday a random event will occur and suddenly the scales will fall from their eyes and a perfect story will emerge.

That is the difference between writers who see writing as a hobby, and those who see it as a career. To know your process is to know how the words come to you, and what you want to do with them, and how you want to lay them on the page.

"But Vaughn, could you provide an example? Like, what's your process?" Glad I imagined you asked.

“I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.”

– Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (p. 188)

To understand my process, I feel I need to understand that which influences and has influenced me. I’m a writer, working in the genre of urban fantasy, so it might seem odd that I would lead with a controversial comedian from the Sixties that I’d only heard of because I’d watched the Christian Slater film Pump Up the Volume. While I could easily carry his final line from his autobiography out on my shield and simply go with the point that a writer must keep himself open to receive inspiration and influence from all sources, the rest of his book influenced me as well.

I could use his various arrests for obscenity as a platform, about how in my own writing I’m hoping to rail against the “phonies” and “pretentiousness”. Sure, Lenny went out on stage to challenge the status quo, but he still went out there to get paid, do his job, and have a good time. When I first started taking writing classes in undergrad, I was put under the impression that what I was doing was a sacred and noble pursuit, that I was pulling the abstract from the ether and translating it into words that lesser mortals could understand. I was given works by towering masters of the craft who could or had changed the world with their words. This continued even into graduate school, where my head was crammed with works by authors I’d never heard of that I read dutifully, perhaps out of some vain hope that I’d emerge from the chrysalis of those hallowed pages ready to deliver my own Great American Novel.

Instead, in secret, like the kid hiding comic books in his biology text, I studied other sources in popular media and realized what I wanted to do with my writing: I wanted to tell a good story about characters that I liked, maybe sell it to a publisher and start to pay off my student loans. It’s hardly lofty, but I found myself, I love what I do, and I find influence in my waking hour. Every second.

“Write the shit you care about.”

– Elmore Leonard

Though Elmore Leonard had been recommended to me on a few occasions, I didn’t even start noticing his works until I saw Out of Sight and found out it was based on one of his books. I went out and rented Jackie Brown and Get Shorty and quickly went to the college library to read every Elmore book I could find.

I loved his research, all the little tidbits that were wedged in without feeling like they were wedged in, the constant reusing of characters from previous books and alluding to plotlines that were never quite resolved. I loved how Leonard had created a living breathing world that went on even when he wasn’t writing it.

But most of all I loved his dialogue. It was crisp and witty and sharp but most importantly it was real. I could hear the characters in my head saying the lines, and I knew that I could read the lines aloud and not roll my eyes at them thinking how corny it sounded. When I read Leonard’s dialogue, I knew that that was how I wanted my characters to sound: like regular people. I didn’t want a reader to suspend disbelief because my protagonist sounded wooden or was using a level of diction that wasn’t accessible.

His settings were believable as well, and not just because they were actual places. It’s all too easy to set your story in a real-world city and still have the skyline seem little more than set dressing. With Leonard’s stories, you never question why the story is set in Detroit or Los Angeles, or wherever because you can’t imagine the story occurring anywhere else. The settings were real because you could tell that no matter how dirty and dingy and crime-ridden these places were, they were described with the utmost love and care. It was from recognizing this that I expanded the writer’s maxim of “write what you know” to “write what you care about”.

“The Erotic is Not Only a Question of What We Do; It Is a Question of How Acutely and Fully We Feel in the Doing.”

– Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power” (p. 54-5)

I haven’t been the same writer since I first read Lorde’s essay several years ago. Considering that it deals primarily with reclaiming the erotic not only in writing but in life, you would think that my enlightenment would be an exaltation, that I would swear from that point forward that all my writing would only come from my passion, that every word I wrote would be a word I would mean.

Instead, when I said that my eyes were opened, I meant it. I became aware of the line drawn between the erotic and the pornographic. The pornographic, whether written, drawn, photographed, filmed, or imagined, is only intended for one purpose: getting off as well as possible. Instead of wanting to forsake the pornographic for the erotic, I became aware of how both are written.

When I’m not working on longer works of urban fantasy, I write erotic fiction to help pay the bills. This is divided into two camps: e-publishing, and private commissions. With the latter, I’m contacted usually through e-mail or messages on online forums by a patron who gives me a general idea of what he or she wants, the general word count, and the rate to be agreed on. It’s all very businesslike.

The commissioned works are often written over the course of three sessions, with fifteen hundred words on average written per session, with a carefully worded contract outlining the specifics of plot, which fetishes will be explored, and the specific points for “slow-downs”, where detail will be overloaded. Sound boring and sterile yet?

To be honest, I dread online writing sessions for commissions because let’s face it: it’s work. I’m not being creative at all; I’m just writing on average forty-five hundred words of descriptive filler with an over-focus on the explicitly fetishistic scenes. There’s no real plot, no real characters, just a pair or more of bodies that I’m flinging together for a penny a word. And yes, the client wouldn’t want it any other way. This is the pornographic as Lorde puts it: an empty and soulless construct that seeks to elicit only one sensation while denying all others.

But hey, it helps me make my rent, and I’m still happy and proud when I finish a project. If I’ve learned one thing about being a writer over the last couple of years, it would be that you have to be at first realistic. You have to accept that there is no type of writing that you are “above”. Writing is writing is writing, and you love the job (that’s right, I called it a job) or you don’t.

The writing I did for e-publishing is similar to the work I’ve done on the novel. I write short stories, novelettes, and novellas, all with erotic elements within them, but they aren’t all about sex. The Last Paladin’s first section is about ten thousand words and about half of it is sex, but writing it wasn’t an empty and soulless experience. I wasn’t just writing sex, I was writing the story of a character who was rediscovering his faith, who allowed a sense of wonder back into his world, and who began to reconcile with the loss of his mother. Instead of dreading writing sessions, I would wake up every morning eager to discover what I would write that day, what more would be revealed about the characters, how the mythology of my created world would expand, and when I went to bed that night, I would lie awake for at least an hour, my mind still swimming in the possibilities I hoped to explore the next day.

It was the difference between the pornographic and the erotic, the mechanical and the creative. One I was putting in my time, and the other, I was giving my time and wishing I could give more. And the difference comes across in the writing, I believe.

I believe that Lorde’s definition of “the erotic” is channeling the creative force that leaves you fulfilled instead of empty, a force you harness and celebrate without shame no matter where it might take you, whether it spirals in or out.

The second half of Vaughn’s essay, Know Your Process, will go live this Thursday, July 13th right here on Blackwarren’s blog!