Desire
I write a lot about desire; every erotica writer does. Desire, not the getting, but the yearning, is what separates erotica from porn, I think.
The beauty of desire is that it carves its reflection into the skin of a character. It animates them, but it can also be repressed, sublimated, substituted, mutated, rerouted. Like the different aspects of a single god, it can be plot, setting and character.
Many of my characters are based on people who think they know what they desire, get it, and find out that it was only a shadow of another, buried desire they were too vain, or inhibited, or insecure to know or admit they had.
Watching people, and you know I am an addicted watcher, I notice that very few of them are honest about what they want. For instance, most people don't really want money - they want what money will buy them: the admiration of others, freedom of choice, power. But they'll rarely admit it. Money is just so concrete and easy to understand.
In the same way, I've noticed that some people don't actually want the person they say they want. They want to be loved by that person, because their lover's regard will validate them. Or they want to be seen to be with that beautiful or rich or powerful individual, so they can be the envy of others.
I'm giving this a lot of thought as I progress through writing Beautiful Losers, because it is all about sublimated and misdirected desire. I don't offer a lot of answers in the story, because I don't have them myself. I only invite my readers to ponder the problem with me.
In the last couple of weeks, a surprising number of people have told me that I hide behind my fiction so as not to reveal myself. This has come from so many different quarters that I am sure they are quite right. So, in the spirit of honesty, I have to admit to having an almost pathological desire for knowledge. Not just book knowledge, although I like that too, but intimate knowledge - the knowing and the understanding, a desire to understand the meaning of what I see. That also includes an understanding of the experiences of my readers.
I have no idea if this is a surface desire that is hiding something else or not. I don't have the objectivity to be a good judge of that. But it probably is. In the end, it's almost always about feeding the ego.
I have always gotten the feeling that part of the reason so many people are unhappy in relationships, and perhaps in general, is because they think they want something that they don't - this applies to me as well. It's very hard though to know what one wants, in our professional, personal and sexual lives when we are raised and continually conditioned to adhere to certain values, which are labeled as 'good' and we are discouraged from wanting what is 'bad'. But it really about being dishonest with ourselves or is it about having the courage to really know what you want and try to go towards it - even when it is called 'bad'? I have been trying to be honest with myself about what it is that I want to avoid falling into the false happiness trap. And that includes discounting the expectations others have for you, especially when it comes to desire and sex. It is very difficult to try to follow your true desires, but also requires a lot of soul-searching and some aspects of guilt.
In terms of BL, my impression was that though Jean's desire to have Shira join the family was due to him wanting to hang on to Sebastian, that, perhaps surprisingly to all three characters, they've found something in each other that makes them a real family. They just work, even though it began more out of misdirected desire. But they are constantly testing their limits and boundaries and finding vulnerabilities and that there seems to be genuine feelings of affection involved. I could be totally off the mark, but that is how I am reading it.
I think desire is about wanting what you think you need but not always knowing what you really need. Whatever it is that will make you feel truly fulfilled. And let's be honest, it takes some serious self-examination to figure some of that shit out.
On hiding behind your fiction: I suppose I've always thought that you were careful not to reveal your self (emotionally, literally, etc.) for a variety of reasons, but because I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt I assumed it was all part and parcel of your desire to separate your identity from your online self.
now there's a run-on sentence for you :)
Guilt at your exhortations finally bestirs me to comment. Old story - long time reader, long and long and from Down Under and very cross about the list censorship business.
I wish I could do what you are apparently doing, (I don't quite agree)- I find it impossible not to pour myself - the moment's self - into my words.
From your body of internet work - maybe I don't know specifics but I feel the apprehension of notions and impressions of rg. I don't consider your anonymity as hiding self, or your work.
Doesn't a good writer infuse self in the words, somewhere, some how, or is it quite the opposite, or both?
Paeony
I think probably many writers hide behind what they write. But I don't think it's more so than what the average person does to hide who they are.
Writer's are more visible and reach a lot of people so I think people wonder about them as opposed to the average person you come across in daily life.
In your case, you write very thought provoking stories and it could be that people desire to know you personally from them. Who is it really writing these stories that affect me like this...sort of thing. So maybe they are just expressing that to you through a backdoor kind of way by offering that you are hiding in order to coax you out.
I also think, and you wrote this yourself, that writers need to be observers of people and the human condition in order to create compelling stories. In the process of being the watcher though, one needs to separate from oneself and get out of the way of the personal ego in that case. To not identify with. I think this also creates an aura of mystery or aloofness about an author that people pick up on.
Who knows really?
What you say about desire is totally true. I would go further and say that what many people desire really is desire itself. Feeling desire for something is kind of exciting. Once you get what you desire, there's nothing to strive for. All that energy is deflated. I think feeling desire for something is what keeps us striving and feeling alive and so maybe we perpetually desire things that we don't really want to keep that going.
Hi rg,
Apologies for the length of this comment but I couldn’t get this post out of my head today so please regard it as an exorcism on my part.
I am surprised and a little bemused at the idea you that you are hiding behind your writing.
It seems to me that you go to great lengths to make your writing process transparent and, to some extent, interactive.
Shouldn’t fiction writing always stand between the writer and the reader? If the writing does not stand without a knowledge by the reader of the writer then I believe the writer has failed.
For the writing to stand on its own, it must be more than a vehicle for the persona of the writer. The writing and the persona should only be congruent in autobiography – which may well be why I don’t read autobiography.
Perhaps the sense of hiding behind something is an artifact of the assumed nature of the blog discourse. My understanding is that your blog is not one of the help-me-share-my-existential-angst teenager-at-the-keyboard types. You use it to promote a discourse on what you write, how you write it and how readers react to it. After all, if the blog was really about you in the wider sense then it would not be under your pen name.
I liked your assertion that writing about desire is what distinguishes erotica from porn. It helped me to see the links between desire and identity. Others may define us by what we have but we tend to define ourselves by what we desire.
I’m certain that what people want and what they desire is not the same but I don’t think this is necessarily about dishonesty or cloudy self-perception. Desire is not just hunger. Desire requires imagination. It’s thought that the word originally meant "await what the stars will bring," from the phrase de sidere "from the stars,"
Desire is about longing for something to change. When we really, truly desire something we use our imagination to envision things they way we would long for them to be. Desire is essentially fictional.
Desire is not about the here and now. Desire doesn’t really have a present tense. When we acquire the object of our desire we can no long desire it. We may enjoy it, cherish it, take pride in it, but I think we can only desire what we don’t have. Perhaps this is why absence makes the heart grow fonder.
You refer to your desire as feeding your ego. I find Freud mostly unconvincing but his id, ego, superego is fun to play with. He originally phased it in German as “the It”, “the I/me” and “the over-me”.
Wants coming from “The It” are just hunger – sex, food, sex, shelter, sex, (OK, that might be a teenage male view but it’s how I imagine the IT. I think it never grows up).
Wants coming from the “The Over-me” are largely should’s (I should be better, I should be more powerful, I should be more careful) or shouldn’ts (I shouldn’t think of her that way, I shouldn’t touch myself like that, I shouldn’t read this)
I think that you are right and that desires are wants coming from “The I/me”. In that sense they are about identity. They are about becoming. Some psychologist see self (roughly the I/me) as a defense mechanism devised by a pattern sensitive organism with a reflexive capability in order to impose a sense of structure, sequence and perhaps purpose on the stimuli we receive and the responses we make. In this sense, our identity, our I/me is always inchoate and emergent. Desire is an instrument of that emergence and is itself therefore fundamentally inchoate. To put it another way, when desire moves from become to having become, it is no longer there. It is the emotional equivalent of potential energy in basic physics.
This brings us back to hiding behind your fiction. If your writing is about understand desire and feeding your ego then it is ALL about who you are trying to become. What could be more revealing than that?
That was the loveliest exorcism I ever witnessed.
You wrote "Desire is not just hunger. Desire requires imagination."
Ah, god that is so true.
I miss you more than you will ever know, Mike.
At the risk of getting yelled at or worse.
"intimate knowledge - the knowing and the understanding, a desire to understand the meaning of what I see"
I have no doubt that this is the person you like to be. Even so I often get the impression you don't see and understand people but fit them into your precast pattern of explanation.
You aren't going to get yelled at at all. You're probably be right.
However wanting to see, and actually seeing aren't the same thing. Remember, we're talking about what we want, not what we actually achieve.
But doesn't stereotyping imply that you don't want to?
Smitmar,
There are two situations in which I actively and consciously stereotype:
1. The stereotyped character is viewed from the POV of a character who would simplify the view of another.
2. As a literary device, i.e. in writing something like a noir story.
To say that I never stereotype anyone would be completely dishonest. We all do - we are all affected deeply by our cultural biases.
However, I don't do it on purpose unless I'm writing in one of the two modes I mentioned.
It is, though, very hard to address your complaint when you don't offer me an example of where you feel I've done that.
An example: You said, you have the desire to see and understand the experiences of your readers.
But everyone who's against your way of thinking is clearly a religious moralist of some sort.
Oh NOW I remember you!
And you're not talking about stereotyping in fiction are you? No, you're having a go at my personality again.
Get you off, does it? Get you HARD?
It must. Why else would you be back here? Now THAT is a very strange kink.
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