I tell stories. I like telling stories. I even tell a story to myself that I’m good at telling stories.
I have people say they like my stories, so I must be doing something right. And then they go on …
“I love reading your stories, Britni,” they say, with stars in their emojis, “but I suck at writing them.”
This is so not true. What they mean is that they have some sort of attachment within. “I’m a mother, a pilot, a statistician, not a novelist.” They can’t write stories because they don’t try.
Well, you can do all sorts of stuff that you once thought you couldn’t. It was hard to walk for the first time, stand up in class and give an answer, to drive a car, or bake a cake, or have sex.
Our first attempts sucked. Um, literally, sometimes.
But we got better, became more confident, maybe got to enjoy it a little. Or a lot.
Homo mendax
What sets us - Homo sapiens, thinking man - apart from animals is not the ability to think or reason. Crows can do this. Whales corralling fish with streams of bubble likewise.
What we have is an ability to tell stories and we - well, most of us - have this storyteller in our head since the time we began to use language. That's where infants get their imaginary friends from, the so-called chattering mind.
We have language and we have a part of our brain entirely NOT under our control that tells stories, comments, and reviews every aspect of our perceptions, inside and out.
It's not under our control because we can ask what our next thought is going to be and we have no idea. This stuff just bubbles up, it is random, it is fiction.
Some people believe their thoughts. Don Trump is the obvious example. He somehow believes that if a story emerges from within, it must be true; the facts must be flawed because he cannot be wrong.
But they are sometimes wrong. We walk through the trees and we see a snake. Our mind says, "A snake! Oh no, look out!"
But the snake isn't moving. It's a stick.
I was wrong
I used to think I couldn't write fiction. I'd suck at dialogue, I couldn't write characters different to myself etc. etc.
But I can do it now. I might not be a genius at it but there are things I write that I love, and sometimes other people do too.
I have a part of me that's always telling stories. And when I think on it, I'm always reading or hearing or seeing stories, and I know without thinking about it that some are good and some are bad. I know this - without studying over it - because inside me there is something that responds.
If I see a glorious sunset, a lofty mountain, a child smiling, a rose, I see beauty. I don’t have to ask myself. It just hits me, oh, that’s lovely!
I know what beauty is without thinking because I have beauty inside me as a touchstone, somewhere deeper than language.
And I know what makes a good story in much the same way. So, if stories affect me in some deep fashion and I can pick the good ones from the bad, then I can somehow find some way to let them out, even if it's no more than thinking up a story and then testing within myself to see if it works or not. Eventually, I might discard a hundred and find one I love.
Stories don't have to be true or rooted in whatever interior fund of truth we have. We can listen to an advertisement and know that it is fiction but still a bloody good story.
We have beauty within, we have grace, and majesty and love and …
There’s eight billion of our species - Homo mendax, storytelling man - on the planet so there must be a lot of sex going on.
We have a lot of thoughts and stories within, but we also have a lot of stories and thoughts about sex. Well, I do. I guess it’s fairly common because I’m not extraordinary in any other way.
It’s built in. It’s evolved. The people who weren’t interested in sex tended not to have descendants.
Certainly for men, that’s the truth. A man has to have enough interest to spark a physical act, otherwise offspring aren’t on the cards at all.
For we women, not so much. A woman can have a child without any desire or interest whatsoever. You know what I’m talking about.
But, law of averages, women who have more sex will have more descendants.
So, one way or another, we’re thinking about sex a fair bit on this planet, even if we don’t always say what’s on our minds.
Women tend to think about romance a lot. Romance novels are overwhelmingly aimed at a female audience and though they might contain some fairly hot scenes nowadays that’s not their main objective.
The female fantasy being satisfied isn’t necessarily about having great sex so much as it is about having a partner that cares for them as a person, as a soulmate, someone interested in them for more than their body.
Someone who will stick around and share the burden of raising a child, in other words.
And yet, men and women aren’t different species.
“That afternoon you and I made love and talked about our future, and our child. Later we were sitting on the balcony and he [a naval officer] passed below us without looking up. Just the sight of him stirred me deeply and I thought if he wanted me, I could not have resisted. I thought I was ready to give up you, the child, my whole future.” —Alice Harford to Bill, her husband (Excerpt From Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick)
Kubrick’s final film is about more than sex. Although marketed as an erotic thriller it defies easy classification. Still, in this one quote, we see female desire uncoupled from traditional expectations. What people say and what people think - especially in the areas of politics, religion, and sex - are often very widely separated.
I think that it is safe to say that if you want to write about sex, you will find an audience. Maybe the average guy in the street doesn’t want to read your masterful non-fiction opinion pieces about diets, or baseball, or investment, but they will very likely have an interest in a story that promises sex.
The sex doesn’t have to be explicit. Like Waiting for Godot, it can be the main character and yet never appear. The key aspect is the effect in the mind of the reader. They know what sex is like and they just need the details to be sketched out. They can fill in the blanks.
Or, of course, you can describe everything in sensual detail. Up to you. And your readership.
What are you waiting for? You can be telling stories. You can write erotica. Find a platform, find a pen name, test the water, respond to feedback.
Have a go, let me know, I’ll tell you what I think.
Britni
Informative