2/4/24
What Difference Does It Make?
This is number forty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“YOU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL,” commiserated Gayle Lynds as we sat together at a writer’s conference back in 2008.
Lynds is the best selling author of spy thrillers, including Mosaic, The Last Spymaster, and Library of Gold. Great reads from a superb author. She was a collaborator on several Robert Ludlum books, Don Pendleton books, and others. She was kindly sharing some of her wisdom with me as I prepared my first intellectual thriller, The Gutenberg Rubric.
“In my last book, I inadvertently said the villain attached a silencer to his revolver,” Lynds said. “Oh, my! We got hundreds of letters telling me what an idiot I was and all the people at my publisher who didn’t know you can’t put a silencer on a revolver! You’d think I said the earth was flat. We all knew you couldn’t put a silencer on a revolver, but somehow, I missed it and all my editors missed it. We had to do a new release with the correction in it.”
Believe me, you don’t want to screw up anything with a firearm in it. People take it as a personal offense. I’ve done it a couple of times and now simply avoid any mention of a firearm of any kind in any of my stories.
“What difference does it make?” Indeed.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog discussing voice and character. What makes a woman different than a man? Do you have to describe every detail of appearance or action?
This week I received an email from OddManOut that listed two of the reasons he considers my erotica to be among the best on the internet. “One, you don’t tell me the bra size of the women in your story. Two, you never tell me that he puts his left hand on her right breast, or the like.” He says that level of over-specificity is like having to slow down for an unnecessary speed bump.
It doesn’t help, I suppose, that the writers who use that level of specificity often get it wrong. The hypothetical writer above has already indicated that he had a hand on the girl’s butt and one behind her head, so he was putting his other left hand on her breast. Oh, yeah?
When I wrote Border Crossings, originally released as a serial on SOL as Seven Wonders of the World, I used it as a stepping off point for recalling a whole bunch of stuff from my life. It was to be ‘the memoir of the avatar of the pseudonym of the alter ego of the author.’ I figured I could arrange things however I wished from there.
But the truth was that the women I wrote about were very much the women that I fantasized about as a man. They were adventurous, sexually liberated, looking for fun, and finding me attractive. And that included the women I wrote about on my trip around the world as well as the women I wrote about from my sixty-five years of life before that. They were very much the women I wanted to remember, not the women I actually remembered.
Border Crossings and the whole Wonders of My World series are available on Bookapy.com. Illustrated with photos from my trip!
So, the philosophical question arises: If what people want to read about is (like my fanciful memoir) the image they want to see, what difference does all this trying to capture voice and character make?
Even if they aren’t factual, readers do want realistic characters. And this is where authors find themselves walking a fine line. Or ignoring it altogether and wandering all over every place. It’s the plausibility aspect of the story. No one starts reading an outer space adventure assuming it is all real. They suspend their disbelief in the fiction as long as it seems plausible within the world that is being described.
A reader recently commented on Over Exposure,
I just take it for granted that they [your stories] exist in parallel universes that might closely mirror ours. So, to readers, if things seem slightly off…, that's why. Almost always, it’s something inconsequential to the story anyway.
But it still has to sound right. Which is why misrepresenting a firearm, for example, is such a red flag to so many people who are devoted to knowing firearms, and are highly defensive of their position of knowledge.
So, when I write a female character, she has to sound like the majority of my readers believe that woman will sound. It’s not a case of actually being the way a woman thinks or acts as it is a case of how the majority of readers (in my case, older men) want to believe they would think or act.
Much to my detriment, I’m not content to leave it at that. Not always, at least. I have this thing about being honest in my portrayals. I want the highly competent female lead in my upcoming work by Nathan Everett, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, to be a genuinely competent female who lives in a business world generally dominated by men. And that means she has to sound real to women, not just to men.
One of the ways I do that is to include several women of different ages as my alpha readers. These women are not afraid to call bullshit when they read something that doesn’t ring true to them. After I’ve rewritten the entire story to correct the errors they point out to me, then it goes through my typical editing cycle of three proofreaders and line editors. That’s more for technical stuff.
I can still guarantee that the story will be jumped on by one or more people for some inaccuracy or another. In this story, it will probably be in the process for land development. Or it could be in the progress of the railroad in the 1800s. Maybe it will be in how a Rubik’s Cube works! Of course, there is the ever popular “This is woke garbage,” meaning it doesn’t match that reader’s personal world view.
In general, developing characters who are genuine and who behave according their internal character may not make a difference to many readers, but it makes a difference to me. I wouldn’t feel I had done my best if it didn’t.
I’ve been asked if I would consider organizing the posts according to my own logic rather than simply by date, and then publishing them as a single book or story. I’m looking at the possibility of doing so after I’ve finished 52 posts (a year’s worth). Next week, I’ll talk about ‘Isms.’
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
