I’ve started this weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.
6/4/23
Show, Don’t Tell
WE’VE ALL HEARD the writing advice ‘show, don’t tell.’ But what the hell does it mean. I started writing to tell a story. Now you’re telling me I can’t tell it? WTF?
I’m one of a hundred thousand writers who can’t define exactly what that means, but I can give countless examples. I’ll start with, “She was so funny we laughed our asses off.” That was an actual line I wrote in LNDtH6 El Rancho del Corazón. And then I reread the chapter, as I always do. Groan! I’d spent an entire chapter telling about how funny Elaine was, but nowhere in the chapter was she actually funny.
This presented a real challenge. How do I write a funny twenty-three-year-old woman in 1991? I am an avid observer of people, and especially enjoy observing young women. I found what comediennes were enjoyed by my daughter and ex-wife. When I was writing the story in 2014-2015, many comediennes were making a name for themselves on Comedy Central and HBO. I watched them all. I noted their mannerisms. I noted their language. And I set about writing a comedy monologue for Elaine to give and Hannah to film. It wasn’t only the words that were to be used, it was the expressions, the camera angles, the intonation. I had to capture all that in a monologue that was actually funny.
After I wrote the monologue—and I thought it was pretty funny—I sent it to several trusted women and asked if they thought it was age appropriate and 23yo female appropriate. Even my ex-wife said I should consider writing comedy routines for comediennes. That was just the first. I had to maintain the conceit that Elaine was truly funny in her television show, Chick Chat. I ended up writing a dozen monologues for her.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had to deal with the issue, and certainly not the last. This is where research can only take you so far. Sometimes you have to become the character, at least in your head.
When I wrote Nathan Everett’s The Volunteer, I had to put myself in the head of a chronically homeless man. I began drinking wine—a little too much wine, but carefully rationed out because I couldn’t afford to over indulge. I went hunting for scraps of cardboard boxes and scrawled signs on them. I even considered standing on a street corner with a pile of book boxes and a sign that said, “Wrote a book. Please Help.”
I had to get inside the head and thoughts of the homeless man I was portraying in the book, and it nearly drove me crazy. I couldn’t just say, “And then he stood on a street corner panhandling.” What was going through his mind? What was his reality? How did he respond to the dollar dropped in his hat? And then, I needed to express it as G2 experienced it. I couldn’t just tell his story. I had to bring the reader inside that chaotic mind of this homeless man.
I’m pretty sure that all ten or twelve copies of the book that will ever sell, already have, though I’ve just released it on bookapy, ten years after it was first published. Once I was inside the mind of that man, I couldn’t write a happily ever after ending. I didn’t kill him off, but he ended the story much as he began it: alone and empty.
The Unitarian church I attended didn’t appreciate my telling them that their efforts to end homelessness were failing. They were doing good, but they weren’t ending homelessness, which was even on the rise in our county. What’s more, I told them there were people who would always be homeless. Some were even phobic when it came to houses. That’s a hard thing to consider when you just want to do the best for everyone and have defined ‘the best’ as being a roof overhead.
I never got closer to actually being homeless than having a sixteen-foot travel trailer pulled behind a pickup truck from campground to campground, wherever I found was cheapest.
One of the things I have discovered as I attempt to show and not just tell—notice I’ve put a modifier in now because you will always ‘tell’ part of the story—is that it prevents me from taking the easy route out. I can’t say, “Every time anyone brought up the joke, they laughed.” In reality, I have to know what the joke was, what the environment was in which it became a standard of humor for this group, and what the key word was that caused people in this group to start laughing. Then I could set it in improbable situations.
The three stood looking at their departed friend in the funeral home, tears running from their eyes. “Royal flush,” one said, just loudly enough for his friends to hear. Sam covered his laughter with a renewed bout of noisy weeping as Lil dug her fingernails into Jack’s arm on one side and into her own palm on the other. Someone in the back of the chapel whispered, “They really loved that guy.”
When I wrote Devon Layne’s “Model Student” series, I thought of a character who became so obsessed when he was painting that everything else ceased to exist. He had a playlist that he listened to as he painted the Mural and each song led him into another part of the painting. You had to feel what he was feeling in order to see what he was painting.
That is showing, not telling.
Next week, let’s get into some of the nitty gritty: Talk Dirty to Me, Baby.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
