I went to see one of my favorite writers read from his latest novel at a quaint little bookstore in Seattle that is no longer with us. (sad) It was the second time I had seen him and when the Q & A section of the evening started, someone from the audience asked what nearly every writer gets asked again and again throughout their career: any advice you can give to aspiring writers? And I remember one portion of his answer: the story you start out to write isn't the one you actually end up writing.
That's true. Very true.
So sets the tale of how I wrote the first story I uploaded to Amazon Kindle and have since sold about 10 copies so far...
The idea had been in the back of my head for quite sometime...when I finished writing my novel 'Brothers' and sometime during the several years it took me to write 'Beautiful Men'. I wanted to write a story where sex was this unemotional entity that swirled around my characters until they discovered emotions that they thought they had lost and where sex had become something more than a pasttime or a career or an after-thought. The idea of writing about a porn star and a hustler who fall in love quickly came to mind. Only, I did not know much about the life of a male prostitute. Even though research would lead me to a peek into that world, I felt that it was mostly beyond my comprehension unless I actually got out on the streets and sold myself. Yet, the idea stayed with me. I was intrigued with it. I was so focused on writing the story that I had visuals of some scenes and could feel certain parts of my characters. However, I was stumped because I did not want to represent a false picture of something that I didn't know about. So, I put my notes away.
I had gotten the idea of 'Beautiful Men' from the title. One night, I had drove over to Century City to see the movie Beautiful Girls and wondered why most movie titles -whether it was about girls or not - focused on the images of Hollywood's version of a female. It was almost as if our society and culture needed to ignore the beauty of the male image in order to keep it's homoerotic nature hidden behind some translucent curtain or contained in the hidden bowels of fantasy. So, I decided to write a story with the title 'Beautiful Men,' only I had no plot of which to start this project from the heart. I made notes for a novel about an older man/younger man set up, but did not know much about that scenario. Later, my novel would focus on one man's journey through race and racism starting with the marriage of his black mother and white father and ending after his nervous breakdown during his encounters with a racially tense L.A. gay community.
As soon as I finished writing the first draft of 'Beautiful Men' I wanted to dive into editing it. But I knew that I had to separate myself from the project in order to move forward. I thought of writing a short story to keep myself occupied, but a short story would not do as that 76,000+ novel took me several years to write and it would not let go. I needed something else.
I looked through some notebooks I had and dug up. I came across the few notes I had made about the porn star/hustler love story. Still, I was not comfortable about writing the life of a prostitute and was not willing to go through the extreme measures I needed towards research. I did not think much about how to change the story until I was cleaning out some old boxes and came across an article I had read about porn addiction. The lightbulb went on and I had focus.
I knew a lot about pornography. I wrote a research paper on the subject, I came across my father's stash, I used to go to a couple of drive-ins back in high school and as I ran the movie club back in tech school back in Colorado, a lot of my fellow soldiers begged me to rent some porn so that we could sneak and watch it late at night. I worked in the industry from both the retail end and the production end. And I like porn. I knew about straight porn and gay porn and bisexual porn. My story would need a bit more research, but I did not find any harm in renting videos and watching them...just for research's sake, ya know.
I developed my characters through endless notes. I decided to write in both first person and third person. I made note cards of plot points and posted them on my corkboard for guidance. I wrote the first person sections in long hand and wrote the third person on my computer. I was somewhat obsessive in my endeavor for the story and the project would not let me rest. I made notes during my lunchbreak at work if I was not writing the next first person chapter. I raced home every night so that I could either transcribe what I had written that day or write the next third person chapter or review recent notes or replay a scene in my head. And, three weeks later, I had completed my story. Yeah, three weeks and 35,000 words later.
Initially, I thought the story would be dark in tone with a few scenes of not only explicit sexuality but of raw emotional frankness. I thought the story would follow a path believed to be dank with realism even though my two main characters would try to build a relationship where sex had become something new and beautiful. When I went back over the manuscript, I found a story that could be considered dark but had a light and airy atmosphere. In my original concept, the characters would work either during the night or in dark surroundings and would always be naked whenever they were together. My story, which I entitled 'Between Men', came out very different. I decided to call it a fable, as it had a strong adult theme with a fairy tale lightness to it. Even a straight buddy of mine thought it an easy read but unique.
When I decided to publish my work on Amazon Kindle, I thought that I would put out my work in the sequence they were written: 'Brothers', 'Beautiful Men' and 'Between Men'. However, the last book has come first. It is not my best piece, but that could be because I spent so much time editing the other two and this little personal gem just came out of me in no time that I think the story carries itself.
I sometimes wonder if I should have gone back and re-wrote the story and closed in on the darker tone I originally thought would envelop the story. However, I'm rather proud that I didn't. I am satisfied with the outcome and hope that a couple of readers will find some enjoyment out of the surreal world and the characters that inhabit it.
And now it is available on Amazon Kindle and I am rather proud of myself. I'm nervous and excited and all the things I guess a writer feels when he publishes something for the first time. It's rather crazy I think that the first piece of work I ever made any money was from writing a few porn scripts, and that my first piece of published material is a positive view of pornography as an interest instead of a damaging addiction.
You know what's also weird? This entry did not come out exactly the way I thought it would...http://www.amazon.com/Between-Men-ebook/dp/B004Y1N5KI/ref=pd_ybh_1?pf_rd_p=280800601&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_i=ybh&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0VDTQG6V912DPGJQK8G9
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