the necessary

there's no sex in your violence

Fucking sex scenes and scenes about fucking. I’ve not personally wrestled with this for months or years really because nobody has time for getting that sort of jiggy in the first twenty-nine Jack Fell chapters down in yellow purgatory where most of the secondary characters are plenty busy with trying to not get their eyes eaten by a demon on the demon spectrum wielding a grapefruit spoon and quoting unfunny depression era comic strips in his or her weirdest betty boop plays Lady Macbeth voice.

Then recently dialed back to the sometimes Rachel series and the velvet and the early Jack and Zoe falling into yellow stories where there is a fair amount of odd and ominous sometimes hilarious fucking on the page, so here we are.

In general my nutshell with violence and sex is pretty simple. Less is way the hell more and the jump or cut away to aftermath especially with violence tends to be more effective and packs more weight, more gravity.

Meanwhile sex scenes are generally most useful for shining light on character flaws secrets and their weirdness obsessions trauma baggage childhood fears or whatever without pausing to give a ptsd versus cptsd seminar as that shit is a massive yawn and because it all bleeds through and becomes visible pretty quick when people get naked.

If it doesn’t, then either the sex scene sucks or is unnecessary or the characters are made of cardboard. But mainly as with horror it’s the anticipation of violence not the actual violence that is the gut punch you seek.

The anticipation of getting naked is where the juice is.

The soft porn graphic fifty shades play by play anatomical descriptions are not where the juice lives. Even if elegantly written that shit is tedious and never forget or always remember how embarrassing strange sweet funny frightening and revealing sex scenes in real life can be.

It’s also useful in the current era to keep in mind that none of this or all of it is impossible to talk about anymore without addressing or considering the gravity of whose pov is the sex scene happening under and who what how where in the demographic sensitivity spectrum is the author of said sex scene and how it might be received.

I don't give a remote fuck, personally.

Never even thought of it much back when all you had to go on was a name and mugshot and cryptic jacket bio. For instance I’ll take Anais Nin in my lifeboat all day and let Henry Miller fuck off sink or swim because Nin is the superior writer by light years. Never finished tropic of I’m in love with my sad dick cancer or capricorn because Miller was a bully and goddamn bore and there is no bro code when it comes to fiction or poetry.

Margurite Duras. If you have not read the lover please stop reading this and go read Duras if you want to see how it's done by a magician. The fact that Duras is a woman is meaningless to me in terms of skill and craft and literary mechanics and ought to be likewise unimportant to everyone but we don't live in that world.

Georges Bataille. If you have not read Story of the Eye or blue of noon, apologies but academically speaking fuck off you have no business in this conversation.

Bataille was a French man born in 1895 or thereabouts and if I had to guess was probably an insufferable asshole with unlikable opinions on whatever probably everything and who gives a fuck, all that matters is how good was the writing, and like Duras, Bataille is Michelangelo with sex scenes.

If you want modern go read Kathy Acker and Michelle Tea. Darcey Steinke. And go read whichever Denis or Dennis wrote Jesus' Son.

Johnson.

I am currently refusing to google or bing or duck duck go anything but would add that Cooper is no slouch neither but right now if reference or quote is not available in my head or on my shelves then I don't know whatever it is.

If you have not read a girl is a half formed thing by the Irish prose alchemist Einear McBride, stop what you’re doing and acquire that book as it will have you questioning just how bad do you want to be good at this shit.

Girl Trouble by Holly Goddard Jones.

Hemingway. I know he was a bastard who said and did some shitty things but if you want to talk about how to write sex and seduction and virtuoso dialogue and you haven't read the sun also rises you're in the wrong business.

I’d also say go read all of Bukowski again.

Then go read after dark my sweet and this world then the fireworks and the grifters by Jim Thompson

Read everything by Sylvia Plath and Albert Camus. Then read it again.

Pale Fire and Lolita and Bend Sinister.

Read as much Nabokov as you can. The man was a gangster and a genius, a goddamn sorcerer, and he could write circles around anybody alive today in multiple languages.

I promise I don't mean to be an asshole but if you're in your 20s and you have a voice and natural chops coming into power and focus but you're not actively devouring at least a hundred books a year by the masters and the genius minds who laid the cobblestones on the road behind you, well..

Exceptions and assholes and opinions yada yada good will hunting but you are wasting your time or fiction is just a hobby.

There is a reason surgeons and snipers are known to be unflinching unforgiving assholes. Likewise the writing of novels that readers get lost in and stories that come so alive the reader forgets he or she is reading is an art yes but also a brutally finely honed skill that takes years to master and if you are not deadly serious about it you will not make the cut and you will eventually come to hate the craft you fell in love with when you put down the outsiders or the catcher in the rye or are you there god it’s me margaret for the first time.

Trust that I will be adding to this one.

The title refers to a companion essay published in a London magazine back in 1999 the name of which I can’t remember but the original notion was from a lecture or sermon I gave at the Kerouac summer workshop after Judas came out that boiled down to this. If you put two or more characters or just one if he or she is fascinating and usefully unstable into any enclosed space be it bedroom basement restroom office or backseat of car or even just abandon them together under a naked sky, there will eventually be conflict.

If there is no conflict between them your characters are not even cardboard they are chalk outlines.

There is no such thing as story or drama without conflict.

And however which way you choose to take it apart to see what makes it bleed then shove story and drama together again, there is no conflict of interest that doesn’t blossom grow or mutate eventually into violence. The specifics of violence and the various off ramps into psychological verbal emotional sexual bloody nonphysical strains of violence are further broken down and given their due and I will drop that one here on rule 35 soon but perhaps not on 9.11 with half the americans howling for the blood of their neighbors.

peace.