I have mentioned before my two unpublishable novels, and am happy to report that once my current health and cash flow issues are resolved I hope to epublish one of them. That assumes, of course, that I can figure out exactly what epublishing is.
What makes both novels unpublishable by industry standards, is a lack of emotional content or social significance. The four-dollar word would be gravitas. This is the sense I get from the many kind and personal rejection letters I have received from literary agents. Which brings up the question of just how one adds emotional impact to a story. Fortunately, I have heard the answer from not one but two successful authors: add a sex scene.
It surprised me to discover, when I was taking writing workshops, that even literary fiction has rules. One seems to be the necessity of a sex scene, usually about half-way through the novel. This is a good thing to know, and not something one would have learned from reading, say, classic literature. Twain and Dickens with their sexless writing must have surely been at a disadvantage, and it is a wonder anyone reads them at all now.
Armed with this knowledge, I determined to add a hot, steamy, emotionally-charged sex scene to one of my novels. But I couldn’t.
“Here’s the problem,” my former comedy-writing partner told me. “Nobody wants to read the sex scene you would write.”
And he is correct. I just don’t have the feel, let alone the interest, in writing a sex scene. I would end up using words like dangle and cantilever and the whole passage would read like assembly instructions for a leaf blower. A writer should know his limitations.
The main problem, though, is that I just don’t consider sex as important as our society does. In my time on this planet sex has moved from a forbidden delight to an open hobby to a social necessity. It is now apparently impolite for a women not to put out by the second or third date. And heaven forbid if a man were to decline such an offer.
Sex has gone beyond desire to a social requirement, like offering guests a drink when they come over for dinner. Actually, the only other social nicety I can think of is having sex reasonably quickly in a relationship.
I don’t want to come off sounding like a prude (even if I may be one). The point I want to make is that the sexual freedom our culture now champions should include the freedom to not have sex without feeling like apariah. Celibacy, even in the short-term, is now looked upon as abberent and even harmful. I caught part of a reality show a month or so ago that covered (gasp!) a couple of virgins who were getting married. The guests, when interviewed, expressed dismay, disbelief and outright concern about the viability of the relationship. It’s an odd turn of events that in a time when people who give up red meat, dairy products and processed sugar are lionized that people who forego sex are seen as damaged or misguided. There is no research or argument to back up this idea, unless you want to count Hugh Hefner—and I’m guessing anybody who ever took him seriously is feeling rather foolish now.
Sexual freedom, in fact, has led to sexual ignorance. In any adult drama or movie there is a common plot twist of a woman getting pregnant—to the surprise of both her and the man in question. It seems that in our age of free condoms and excellent birth control people have forgotten where babies come from. Sadly, people in real life don’t seem to be any smarter.
But such is the way of mankind that we just hop on the culture train without thinking about where it is going simply because everyone else has a ticket.
I have heard writers say that everything is about sex, but that fact is that sex itself is usually about something else: avoidance, fear, repressed anger, boredom. It is not a necessity.
So my modest proposal is this: consider, just for a moment and just for yourself, the possibility that sex may not be as important as culture leads you to believe. Not only is the idea potentially liberating but is certain to eliminate many potential personal and emotional catastrophes.
Well, it’s just one person’s observation. But getting back to literary fiction, I was once told by an excellent writer that everything is about sex. I don’t know if that writer was being totally serious, but the statement is clearly wrong. Much of the time, sex isn’t about sex; it’s about inferiority or denial or anger or triumph.
And, lately, it’s just about being polite.
