How to Write Difficult Sex Scenes by Kyle Phoenix

 

I’ve written lots of books, hundreds of short stories and teach about sex and sexuality so I have both a breadth of knowledge and have played with lots of ways to describe a sexual-romantic encounter. What I try to do now is describe the sex that a certain kind of character is having rather than a sex scene for the sake of a sex scene. In writing a sociopath/psychopath, the lead character Free in the book I’m finishing, titled Free—-I wanted to explore multiple sexualities. Whether in Free himself or his father or other men of color—-they’re all trying hetero, bi, homo, skolio, trans-sexuality on. It was also important for me to explore female heterosexuality and the idea of incest from Free’s mother, Maya.

While I could imagine and have seen/read and written about male to younger female/male nicest, I’d never explored mother to son incest. Then I considered family lore (the best place I find to excavate dysfunction) in an older cousin sleeping in my aunt’s bed until he was 13 and she kicked him out in favor of an older man, Carlos. In reality, that then triggered my cousin being thrown out of the house at 13, him joining gangs, juvenile delinquency and eventually in and out of prison for 30+ years. Not only had he sexually abused me as a child but he expressed to my mother confusion at his sexuality all his life. I thought that was fertile ground to churn and consider and re-create.

What kind of sexuality would that 13 year old have? Not sure if he were hetero or homosexual but sexualized by his mother Maya (my aunt Naomi)? Free (and my cousin) became a sexual predator though in my novel Free and his mother tangle through their relationship because his father, her ex-husband is a drug kingpin that has given Free territory and Maya gets a healthy stipend. They are both beholden to Dom and Maya is still deeply in love with her ex-husband, it revealed at the end exactly why they separated. IN many ways she’s using Free as a proxy for his father because they look so much alike.

That was my in to the erotic-sex scenes between the two.

It had to be fraught with tension, confusion, flashes of anger and disgust and then as he gets older, Free begins to use it, taunt his mother spitefully. At his wedding reception he helps her into her room because she’s drunk and lays atop her, touches her inappropriately because his father has been there, emotions are high, she’s in a swirl of desirous confusion. Another time Free relays to his wife how his mother bathed him for years throughout his teens, as a nurse, methodically. Then Free’s wife Lena catches them in a compromising position (during her wedding reception) and understands the enmity Maya holds towards her—-she’s jealous of her. Further Free is sexually assaulted as a teen by gang members tricked by what could’ve been his first adult love. He’s experimented with girls and boys before but hadn’t settled so it’s completely normal to him to include his male lover Alyosha to his marriage to his wife, to set them up s that she accepts being in a triad.

In designing Free’s sexuality it would be purposefully messy, he would have streaks of violence and debasement inflicted upon him and then him upon others. There would be BDSM, violence, rage, shibari (rope tying) and pornography filming and publishing online. It would also include drugs and money and crossing of boundaries as I included “Carlos” (from my aunt’s reality) to meeting Maya. I considered my aunt would’ve been trying to get an appropriate, successful adult male marriage—-he turned out to be abusive-0—so I worked with why he was abusive and his abuse of Free. But then I always wanted Free, in his psychopathy, to be an inch more dangerous than those who think they’re going to abuse him. I treat his psychopathy as the capacity to cross lines that even abusers are hesitant so his sexual practices are intense, vicious, exploitative.

The Writing Itself

In writing the scenes I focus on simple things—-it’s not about long drawn out scenes of torture—-it’s instead about shocking flashes. I purposefully found 144 things, debasing things psychologically that someone like Free would do—-then I narrowed it to 12 and created scenes from there. My intent isn’t to overwhelm the reader entirety with his depravity but to instead introduce it and then continue on with other scenes. Like a shark surfacing and then diving deep—-the idea that Free is doing these things to himself and others is always lurking under dozens of other scenes. In many ways with in the novel all of the characters have subterranean elements of their characters that surface and harm then dive deep again so that the reader can sort of “forget” and then be shocked again that oh, that’s right Maya has a wholly inappropriate way of engaging her son, Carlos, her ex-husband and then Carlos’s son, Worthington.

It’s about 150 pages into a 500 page novel that I got that last sentence out in scenes and I realized—-Wow, it’s really shocking/depraved BUT at the same time in the writing, the sexual contact, crossing of boundaries, real affairs/love, messy ones, are all sort of understandable.

That’s what I’m trying to find in those scenes—-strong enough characters that the reader (and to some degree me as the writer) can understand why Maya has crossed these lines—-as she starts to realize, in a hotel room with Worthington (they regularly meet years after her break up with Carlos, as she realizes Free started a secret relationship with Carlos) how her projecting incestuous drama plus her absent father—-so she has no template for what to judge a good, healthy man by—-hence a drug dealer and Carlos an ephebophilic (someone sexually attracted to teens). She has no mature “picker” of men, even as she’s in this affair with a man in his twenties, her son’s age.

I think it’s important when characters do distorted, criminal, egregious things that their thinking be both explained and examined. It simply can't be she’s with Carlos’s son because he’s handsome, we have to see that her failed marriage, lack of father, abusive relationship with Carlos and messy relationship with Free—-of course! she’d get involved with the handsome, willing Worthington.

Then to Free—-of course! he’d choose the self destructive Alyosha and Lena—-who’ve had severe trauma in their pasts. And of course they’d choose him form their warped upbringings.

It all has to make sense.

So when I write about the sex rooms/dungeons that Free takes his wife and boyfriend into, it makes sense to the character. I can then castaway a line or two about the sex but what I’m really trying to convey, incept into the reader’s mind is not the blow by blow graphic actions but the rationality of it. I don’t want it so horribly shocking that the reader turns away, I want it shocking, a flash and the reader to both understand and imagine more. The sex scenes I write are incomplete as they are often ancillary to the feelings and thoughts and situations folks are having during the sex. Which if we could read the minds of people during sex—-and perhaps what we’re trying to do in watching pornography—-is get a glimpse into the multi-layered thoughts that a person is having during sex.

When you can achieve that this character has sex this way and it makes sense for them, then you’ve written a good scene. That has to include not simply passion, naked bodies, penetration—-but sometimes clothing, bindings, the setting, their drama and trauma, their confusion and the other person’s obliviousness or joy at exploiting someone, the singular or mutual anxiety alongside the physical descriptions. I also find that incongruity, people being at different speeds and modalities is optimal in descriptions because that is often reality.

• Why Maya is having sex with Worthington is different from when they start to months later.
• How Free has sex with the first adult he’s attracted to and seduces is different than how he exploits and uses Carlos, who thinks because he’s older, he’s in control.
• How Free has sex with his wife and male lover separately and when together and why he wants a trio-marriage is different than the sex games he plays with his mother.

Those complexities are how one writes new, fresh erotic scenes. The idea of the why not simply the what and how.

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenixShow

Is it possible to be a successful writer without any mentor? by Kyle Phoenix

 

Initially, before considering how to answer this question—-I hadn’t considered this question to answer. So, what changed?

The Need For Mentorship

I joined several Facebook groups for writers, aspiring writers, newbies, self-published writers—-so there’s a mix of actual samples of writings, links to books for sale, and questions about writing.

Backing up from there, the online groups, I’ve had about 20 years of teaching experience, a large portion of that teaching writing classes, creative writing, etc.. And also years of publishing everything from newsletters to comic books to magazines to chapbooks to actual full length books. So I know my way around the Writing Block.

And what I found, dipping my mental toe into the online groups, was how woefully messy so many were. From grammar to syntax to idea to presentation—-and then audaciously publishing these messes—-with pride. Some of that has to do with not having an editor but some of that has to also do with not knowing how to edit one’s self, one’s work. I was reading a lot of bad work, no, no, no, a LOT of bad work.

And that’s when I started considering the breakdown on learning how to write fiction/non-fiction and then reflecting back onto how I learned. I think that’s a point important enough to make in answering this question—-reflecting on how learning occurs.

Not whether you sell a million copies of a book—-which really isn’t the mark of a good book—-just popular and marketed well and sold—-so all the Western/White tropes of star writers—-you don’t have to mention them, they are mentioned ad nauseum as sort of a cultural cult chant and as demarcations of limited writerly awareness.

It’s like the Top 10 of the Banal.

Making those writers, popular, seem even more banal because of the audience, the millions that rave about them. To that point, it means that I can’t access those writers, to judge for myself entirely, because of the cacophony from their audience. Their audience exists because of TV and movies and video games and that wave of mediocrity that’s been digitized.

But no one is talking about Art.

Writing as Art.

Not for popularity or to market it well or to make money but to do it well as a creative endeavor. That’s why I write. I write to get better at writing, to create better word sculptures and pictures and ideas, and to capture and re-reality.

So I’m deeply interested then and have been mentored by real Artists. Those who were Artists of Teaching and those who were Literary Artists.

I was just in a discussion at a teaching position and they, management, was sniffing around me to ostensibly move me into a position of more responsibility, title, etc.. Perhaps even more money. And I politely said No, thank you. I am content in my schedule, my title, my work, my responsibilities, even my pay—-I’m not interested in “more”.

But what I realized in listening to them pontificate on why their idea was worthy, was that not everyone wants a Mercedes. I could afford a Mercedes. I could drive one. I could park one. I could gas it up. I could also be responsible for it’s outrageous repair bills/issues (my mother had one—-the bills are outrageous.). I could also expand my stress/concern to its’ “safety” when I was not directly next to it or even while driving it. Not everyone wants a Mercedes.

Not everyone wants to be a popular, lauded, selling millions of books writer and all the associated social expenses and attention that comes with that.

Some people, want to do it, writing, to create good, thoughtful, provocative, interesting Art.

My Mentors

I’ve had 6–8 of them over the past 25 years. Focused on my learning, my writing, teaching me to become a better teacher, a better writer, and how to teach writing.

Denise Donnelly, in high school writing classes taught me about dramatic construction. She wasn’t interested in my multiple mammoth manuscripts—-a legal thriller—-she pressed me for diversity. To that end she funneled me to Ann Campbell and Dr. WH Hunter—they wrangled me into the Soap Opera Club—-where we filmed a 2 hour soap opera, which I’d authored in a weekend. I brought in a hundred page screenplay after Friday’s meeting, on Monday. That turned into 200 pages. And 2 hours of scenes and eventual editing through a partnership program at Long Island University.

Ms. Campbell, surprised at my prodigiousness then taught me about dramatic writing, dialogue, capturing and codeveloping characters; even directing scenes and editing.

Dr. Hunter, through his own life story, taught me that even if it was later, I could still go to college (I finally did—like him, at 21) and most importantly he exposed me to GOOD literature, serious literature by forcing me into his AP English class—-where he taught up Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon still my favorite of her works and favorite to teach) and Oedipus by Sophocles (structure, language, idea, story, etc..) He also made me get up at 6am to tutor at 7am down the block so I’d be on time for his 8am class. (I am not a morning person—-I was often up until 4am writing……..much as I do now.)

Debbie Freeman, same high school, she worked with me on multiple manuscripts—-including the legal thriller and a short story that became a novella and eventually a published novel, Hush (shameless plug—-it is available on Amazon.) Ms. Freeman wrote extensively in the margins, notes, questions, pressures, demands—-would such and such act this way, was this possible, did this make sense?—-I still have those original print outs, those original edits. She taught me consistency in plot, narrative, characters. I wrote thousands of pages longhand and then typed them up for her (because she explained that’s what writers did.) I was often cajoled/blackmailed by Dr. Hunter against my writing classes to pass my other classes, to stay in clubs, to stay working on chapbooks. It worked.

Eventually I made my way to college, at 21 and by 22, was sniffing around for writing classes. A friend of a friend told me that I “sounded like” Professor Carlene Hatcher Polite—-I looked up her classes, open only to Juniors and Seniors—-and one had to audition with a written piece. I showed up with a duffel bag (full of binders, my writing, to “prove” that I was a serious writer, even if I was still a Freshman.) She asked was I running away from home? lol

I read a piece, inside of two different manuscripts, and got in. Because of my personal writing rule—-especially when in a competition against 50 other students during an audition—-One must cut open a vein and bleed in one’s writing.—-later I would find the Hemingway quote of how one writes—-one cuts open a vein on paper and bleeds….he was right.

She made an exception, got a departmental exception, and I was in her class. Then a few months later she asked me to be the 2nd of only 1 other Teacher’s Assistants, she had in 27 years. I did it for 4 1/2 years. I managed Drop/Add, went through thousands of student assignments, bringing the best/strongest to Carlene. I would also cover/teach the class when she took a surprise day off—-some days I would walk in and Linda Bogdan, the Office Manager extraordinaire would tell me—-”You’re up! Carlene called and said you got this.”

I was officially, in SUNY history, the only undergraduate Teachers Assistant, who was also paid. Normally one had to be a graduate student to be a TA and paid. I took lots of writing and teaching and teaching writing notes and bought books she recommended. She took me out after classes to lunch, and talked to me about books, life, sex, love, being a writer.

Having spent almost a decade in Paris, where Carlene published her first, and only two works, where she was nominated for a Pulitzer. She read my work, appreciated some characters, talked to me about popularity and fame—-when they both came my way—-and formally introduced me to another Professor, her friend and former high school classmate, Raymond Federman.

Federman spoke in a thick French accent, in his sixties, promising that though he’d left France forty years ago, he assiduously practiced his accent. Federman was also the preeminent experimental writer—-in the world. His first mind-blowing lesson has reverberated through all of my writing for almost twenty years: “The margin, on the page, does not exist. It is a fictitious boundary.”

When he said that, when he politely, plucked aside the construction of the page itself——I remember feeling undone, the way one does when a whole new concept is casually announced—-about reality.

He taught me timing, voice, the page, no boundaries, experimentation, taking narrative, linguistic and ideational risks in my work.

Then he hired me as his TA as well—-and I worked for Carlene and Federman at the same time. And they were—-Dadaism would be too limited to express the kinds of teachers they were—-Avant Garde, challenging, sporadically absent, to throw me to teaching Junior/Senior level classes as a Freshman-Sophomore. Challenging me to write deeper, more, broader, wilder, and then recommending me to publishers signing off on my work, helping it get published across the country and empowering me to be a better writer.

Carlene and Federman, like Jedi Masters, both made me swear to abide by their teaching, to respect my Art, to not write pabulum——no bs romance novels, no swords and shit, no vampire crap, to not write for the dollar, for popularity, for fame—-to write as Art. To write as best as possible. To respect my hard-earned and developed talent.

I have.

I’ve been offered lots of things, including money to write bullshit—-but I attack each project, trying to find something, its’ golden nugget, a truth, a point, a new twist, a challenge for my worked talents.

Then there was Irving Feldman. I took two classes with him—-Poetry and then Prose fiction—-and we once got into a 90 minute argument, in front of the whole class, on whether my story was about Black Rage (from systemic oppression) or a Rage full father who happened to be Black. Twenty five classmates just got up and left, when we entered hour 2 of our debate. He, I nominate, as my Hard Jedi Master—-who lashed me hard in my own work, but privately, to other professors, Carlene and others, praised me endlessly at how hard I worked on the projects of others and on my own. He never quite complimented me to my face. lol But I knew he liked me, my work, was pushing me to develop it harder.

One of his exercises for our 3 semester projects was to write a story with no murders, no fantasy, no sci-fi, no guns, no ghosts—-just write a story. Often when I’m scrolling through the assault of writer’s in online Groups—-I wish they would just spend a year doing that—-just writing stories, about people, or animals. Or nature. Just a day in the wild life of a rabbit.

Then I made my way a decade or so later to Columbia University and Professor Stephen Brookfield—-who actually my godmother told me about. I thought she meant another professor who happened to be like the supervising professor over the teachers cohort I was in. I kept trying to smile and befriend Professor Not Him—-but then after a semester interruption, Brookfield arrived. And it was like watching Obi Wan Kenobi TEACH.

I bought 12 of his books and had him autograph them that first week and then took his classes a dozen more times over the years. When my mother was terminal and I was vacillating how to go help her down South, and at the same time maintain my teaching/student responsibilities at Columbia—-he helped me figure out how to take a sabbatical. He also advised me, on top of an Everest of mentorship about teaching, that it was time to start writing up all of my class notes, videos, workshops, etc.—and my first 4 books came out in 2013—-3 non-fiction, one the first collection of short stories. He confided that he’d taken a graduate school break when his parents were terminal, and sat by their bedside, aggressively writing. I did the same, produced another dozen or so books.

Donnelly. Freeman. Campbell. Hunter. Polite. Federman. Feldman. Brookfield…..so far.

Mentoring

I didn’t think about it while TAing for Polite and Federman. I didn’t think about what I was passively doing. I also, often standing in front of classes for weeks on end, didn’t think about how I was learning how to teach, become a teacher. I actually didn’t start teaching, directly professionally, for several years, almost a decade, after TAing. Education-teaching was sort of my stumbled into career choice after Finance and Law (Securities Litigation).

As a favor to a professional friend, I took a job as a liaison at a charter school and after a couple of years there, loved the children, even taught advanced test taking strategies to them, but didn’t want to be trapped in a room with them. Perhaps older? Adults? I was coincidentally attending a men’s group, a few blocks away weekly and the facilitator offered (as I was about to leave) that I teach a workshop or two. So I did. And then he left. So I took over facilitating the group and then the Youth Coordinator left and the charter school position ended—-and I was the new Youth Coordinator within a week of the liaison position ending.

Besides assembling a working, documented program—-I really had to think about what an LGBTSGL youth, under 27, would need. What did I need when younger? I scoured books and websites and other programs and assembled materials and workshops around work, school, finances, relationships, sex, etc.. I was also still teaching the general men’s group so there came a point where I was teaching about 150–200 folk a week.

What that also entailed was I became a sounding board for their feelings, thoughts, questions, job needs, a reference—-a mentor. That was harder because I was a Structured Mentor and more importantly, I was covering so many life areas—-I was a Jack of All Trades Mentor.

Some needed help in getting a basic job; others were college graduates in their first superstar position and needed help in how to manage and develop a department; some were homeless and turning tricks and needed blunt advice and guidelines for how to be a safe, professional sex worker; others needed relationship advice and validation in their sexuality.

I moved on from there, the clients the reason why I stayed so long at a deeply corrupt agency (they’re now defunct) and onto GMHC directly teaching computer certifications, wrapped within a vocational-mentoring program—-with a lot more resources. Working with, upon my insistence, adults from all genders, sexes, sexualities, races, etc.. Then moving on from there to Columbia, again teaching on vocational, GED/TASC and university levels, and taking on as many young adults as I could (one of my female students, dropped off her teenage sons—tired of them, got married and moved out, leaving them homeless) to mentor.

I had to learn how to professionally mentor, which I learned from all the research, takes about 3–5 years, to enact change in a person’s life.

One of my students—-I tried to create a highway of attachment through me to and through these various programs to progress and utilize the varying/greater resources so I’ve sometimes had students follow me from program to program to program to classes to university for years (trying to get that 3–5 year mentorship infused).

When Polite and Federman died, within months of one another——one student said to me that I was now the Mentor—-that I had graduated to the final step in Mastery—-becoming Obi Wan Kenobi, the Master Jedi.

I’ve come full circle.

To the point of a writer (teacher)/needing a mentor—-yes, you do.

Can you accomplish without one? Probably not in the way you think because most people, I learned this deeply in the GMHC program, rarely get objective, learned feedback on themselves, their work. That’s mainly what I did there—besides the computer trainings—-I listened to people’s lives and told them the truth, from my own experience and knowledge. Which is kind of what all my mentors did in a distillation for me.

But what I can tell you from those clients is that most of them smart, accomplished (even a VP from a bank came to class, needing coaching, mentorship in life/career) were sort of lost within themselves, their work, their careers and the thousands of clients I’ve had over almost two decades have gone on to varying successes. I would say I’m averaging, from keeping track of folk—-about 80% success rate.

But like my mentors, sometimes I was just buying them lunch or dinner (I once took a whole class out for breakfast when the computer system went down), pushing cash into their hands, a book, encouragement, texting them some link or information, a smile, a joke, a check in about how they were, remembering their pain/feelings when no one else did—-essentially loving them in a directed way.

Does one need loving from others to became a successful writer?

Yes.

And those who don’t get it—-honestly, and I often try to “pillow” speak to folk in groups or who present work to me without previous guidance (or worse an avoidance of guidance): your work shows it.

Most people don’t learn to handle the your work is shit criticism that all of my mentors smacked me down with. But they also had/then built me up, showed me new ways to do it, made better suggestions and insights, that by the time I got that slap down—-I was strong enough to take it.

Federman would stand in front of the room, waving my latest submission to the class of 20–30, and shake his head, and then say, in crumbling English-French: “This was good, this was good, this was good but this part?—- was bad, so bad. You have written yet another Great American Failure….but you’re getting closer to something else.”

And he was right.

Those Without Mentors

In college, some student writers I knew deeply personally, others peripherally (I was a little unaware of the mystique being the only undergraduate TA in the SUNY system conferred upon me then), other aspiring writers scurried around Polite, Federman, Feldman. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, in the handful of years I had with them. The students would often huddle at the local coffee house—-I went there once and found it depressing and self indulgently narcissistic, and instead went out to nice restaurants with professors, and did a reading at the Buffalo Yacht Club (they were my first paid engagement after I won an award—I was recommended by a close professor friend of Polite’s. $125!!! Shut the front door!). They avoided the very churn, the Mentors, that would have gotten them to the next level and instead remained in a squalor, wallow orgy with each other. Now, they’ve graduate to online groups. lol

There’s only one young lady from those days—-she really leaned into getting mentored by several other female professors—-she now teaches too—-but she’s published—-has made a good name for herself, gives back.

The others, several close friends and lovers, work at jobs (which is fine, gotta eat) but I watched them aspire and then frightened by dealing with a mentor-teacher—-dim, hide, run away, wither. They produced a lot of bullshit, failures with potential but it’s like a Rubicon you have to mettle your way though—-lots of things, becoming in life, I’ve noticed are like that.

Mentors are a level of that Rubicon.

To the group of folk who will name other writing, successful folk whom they believe didn't have mentors—-those people did/do—-editors, friends, fellow writers, teachers—-people they don’t directly mention and point out as I can with the above—-there are a few dozen more—like my godmother Anna, Polite's godmother, who mentored me spiritually for almost 15 years—I wrote the final draft of Hush in her dining room, helping to attend to her as she lay upstairs in her brownstone, blind, slowly dying. She’s the one who told me about Brookfield…yeah, connections upon connections upon one handing you off to another.

People mention this and that writer, as autodidactic, because it’s easier than doing the work.

• 2000 hours of writing is initially spent in a form of mimicry of the good, bad and bullshit stuff you’ve read, seen on TV, movies.
• Another 3000 hours is then spent developing your own Voice, finding your unique spin on ideas, characters, dialogue, explaining things in non-fiction, how you access the talent you’re growing, like a garden, within.

Talent is the byproduct of Work. There is no Divine, God given, lightning bolt mystical talent that comes from the fact that you’ve wiped your own ass for years.

That duffel bag that I dragged into Carlene’s class was 10,000 hours of writing by the time I was 22. A culmination of the mentors before pushing me, pressing me, allowing me, editing me, pouring into me so that I would be ready for the Olympics of Collège level Mentorship.

I didn’t even mention my grandmother, Dorothy, who read 5 books a week and when I was 10 slowly let me read her cabinet of books, which I inherited when she died, when I was 15. Domain work right there. I still push to get 5 books read a week.

• Another 5000 hours is spent in the work of writing AND mastering your domain on some level—-which is reading (for purposes of writing), twice as much as you write. I have a personal collection of about 5000 books—I have a storage room as I house hunt, NYC apartments never big enough. I’m sure I’ve had at least another 2000 books in my lifetime that are lost to the wind—-perhaps some decade I’ll try to collect them all, and then give the whole lot away.
• Then having explored the domain (Howard Gardner has written a great book on this about Freud, Picasso and others in Austria/Vienna at a particular time in the 19th century)—-you then have to be Mentored in that Domain by folk far ahead of you.

I’m closing in on 50,000 hours of combined writing/teaching—-it’s difficult to separate them now because they are symbiotic, hybrids of the other. (There are literally thousands of blogs from me online—-just writing exercise—-and that’s not counting the published short stories, articles, books—-hundreds more.)

And I will tell you, with a writing schedule outlined until 2025, with projects, numbering into the 300s for books, I see myself in only Phase 2 of perhaps 3–5 Phases of this Writing work. I have another 50 odd years to produce, I’m trying to get this load of work/ideas out of the way so that I can crack into Phase 3 and really figure out what I know, can imagine.

Long answer I know, but you’re a writer right? What the fuck else do you have to do but read about writing, learn and go apply it? Like you was out solving world peace and I took you away from that with my diatribe.

• The last 5000 hours of the ersatz 10,000 hour/Ericsson journey is spent simply doing it over and over and over and over. And over. And a few more times, and over, again. I’m better now, but I have just as many books, ideas, starts and fits, unpublished, as I have completed ideas published. I have a notebook close to 10 years old—-when I was trying to figure out how and what to blog about—-about 200 pages, 40–50 blogs, handwritten—-it’s green and beat up—-that I haven’t even typed up yet. lol

I rush out during Back to School sales and buy spiral notebooks by the hundreds! Yes, that and hundreds of pads are also in storage—-so that I can write stories, ideas, tales, essays, in them. I intermittently get a typist, an intern, a student, and give them them stuff to type or scan. Thousands of pages just waiting to be worked out or laughed at or act as the catapult or catalyst to more.

Hopefully I’ve mentored you a little here—-because when I read your stuff—-you mentor me a little—-another big mentoring influence is Peers (classmates, friends, lovers, wannabe writers) but what I learned from them positively and negatively, are different.

I have consumed my classmates/students work, diligently thought about it, marked up their pages, asked questions—-I know of the young lady who’s been successful because she contacted me years later—”Kyle—-longshot—-do you still have a copy of that piece I shared in class? I lost it.”

Of course I did.

I don’t necessarily look to steal ideas but I look at what I cannot do, what didn’t work, what did work, how I could try to get a character, idea, situation to that point—-and then negatively—-what not to do, where not to stumble, tropes, stereotypes, mundanity, banality.

But know this, even in writing, in achieving true Art, not vomited pabulum, no one gets there alone. You just haven’t been let behind the curtain by Masters to see/meet their Mentors/Master Teachers. And because you don’t know—-you don’t know what you don’t know.

But, those who have been mentored, can see your lack of knowing in your work.

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenixShow

Before you write a book, do you heavily outline and plan it or do you sort of wing it and figure it out as you go along? by Kyle Phoenix

 

The Spherical Stages of the construction of a novel.

No, heavily outlined work, is generally an amateur writing design. Which isn’t a bad thing but after 30+ years of writing thousands of stories, over a hundred books, a screenplay I directed into a 2 hour film and countless work related projects plus thousands of articles/ blogs, reviews—-I “turn on the faucet” is the best way to explain my automaticity.

Automaticity is essentially knowing a thing on such a fundamental level that you can simply “do it”. Like walking—-at one point we all had to learn how to walk—-we watched others, did balancing acts, used objects to achieve balance and then kept trying it—-eventually standing and then walking and finally running. This is also mental in reading or math or thinking about things you know how to do mentally that had to be taught. Pretty much everything but your automatic bodily functions were taught t you and engrained so deeply that you can do it withiest thinking consciously.

I can write, near anything, without having to think about it.

To planning a short story or novel—-what I do is I sort of encompass the entirety of the idea.

I wrote a book Tranny—-about a transsexual character. My thought bubble was from my counseling students as an LGBTSGL Coordinator and several of them playing with sexuality, sex and gender presentation. The majority were Black/Latino and instead of being males they found it easier to be female—-even when they weren’t attractive enough to be in drag/trans. But it was easier, they garnered more positive sexual attention from men (technically those men are called skoliosexuals) because they were trying to distance themselves from being Black/Latino males who were NOT heterosexual. And to some degree, most being raised in single sex households that were female led, they identified and were mentored more by women and saw the (sexual attraction) privilege women to over men, especially as people of color. I’ll further this point to the weight of race and non-heterosexuality being a laborious burden to young men, men, older men—-it’s a twofer hard punch to the psyche, to one’s life, especially here in America, and people, young people do things to mitigate the impacts.

In the course of conceiving the idea for the novel and teaching, I met lots of trans folk and even got to watch some evolve and some not. I got to see, deeply personally, the trans identity—-and even got certified in counseling trans folk. I had a clear picture of the identity and its’ origin/manifestation.

My razor edge on the bubble idea—-the push I wanted to engage——was that culture/sex/sexuality question because it was a fascinating posit/question/conundrum.

That’s the totality of my “outline” mentally.

Now, the first time I’ve seen this expanded upon deeply was by Anders Ericsson, the expert on mastery (he is the “creator” of the posit of 10,000 hours leading to mastery—-which was popularized by Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers) in his own book Peak. Anders talked about how he actually wrote the book with a partner (Robert Pool) and that they did what he would call something similar to mental models/representations.

For me, it would look like this for Tranny:

1. What is transsexuality vs. transgenderism vs. homosexuality? (Foundational concept)
2. A Black male decides to transition. (Central character)
3. How do they know or not know about their sexuality/how and are they “confused”? (Question/conflict)

then from experience/expertise mentally outline the physical template of the book—-I make decisions:

1. I’ll write it in the 1st person. Why? It’s more immediate, more personal.
2. It will be short—-under 300 pages, there has to be an immediacy and intimacy and an intensity, to the book itself.
3. Physically it will be slightly larger font size (I experimented with using a font that looked like handwriting but it wasn’t clear enough)—-however I knew that it was a book that the constant/huge-personal “I-ness” suggested was a faux journal.
4. I physically experimented with the Header/Footer for my template and even tried to incorporate images and color—-but the size and colors were too price prohibitive—-to create interior pages that looked like a journal.
5. Chapters-how many? Now I’m having all of these thoughts/plans/mental representations in a smoosh===not in such a lined order, so I knew I would do about 10 chapters. I knew that limitation in the Word document would force me to maintain within a certain amount of pages—-there was no space or time to drone on. In this constructed mental form, I then know where I’m going to enter the story and exit—-approximately. By that, I have my opening line and further ideas to Chapter 1 and segmenting the chapters to points in Nicky K’s life—good, bad, men, money, work, all the areas a human, particularly, a trans person, has to navigate.
6. I also started looking for pictures for the cover. I played with one that was a gawky physical body in a dress, no head—-then I found a stock photo of a big head. But what I was looking for was something——off. It’s one of the ways trans folk who are trying to “pass” for female, generally—-get spooked. There is something off about their presentation—-so the cover pic had to have an odd quality to it that could be projected into the space of this person is presenting as female now but that wasn’t their sex of birth. (As an interesting aside from talking to so many trans folk—-Black and Latino trans people are spooked more often by their cultural kin and therefore gravitate into spaces with more White people. It seems that White people, less accustomed to seeing people of color often exhibit a sort of race blindness—-I can attest to this—-White people learn to blur us out unless we’re in a context they're interested in—-the advantage for a trans person of color is that focusing on them, White people tend to see what is presented to them.. I’ve seen it happen in person with a White man and trans person of color—-he couldn’t quite place what he was seeing of the person and asked lots of questions, eventually even hitting on had he seen her in a magazine or along 12th Avenue (the notorious NYC prostitution stroll—-but certain areas are trans heavy.) Which ironically said a lot about him too.)

And then I consider tone (I can only compare this to how when you’re making something you decide if it will be a sweet BBQ sauce, spicy hot with cayenne, a dry rub, etc.). I’m considering the texture, the way it will be received by the way I get into it, the story, the character, the other characters. The sound, the tune of the voices, the narrative, which one of my writing Voices will I use, which style?—-I’ve developed a few. Hard, soft, sharp, smart, dumb?

1. I knew the title Tranny for this idea, one because in the city and my workshops, so many of my charges-students used the word. And then in clubs and so on and so forth—-but I also, well educated, know the divide in the world between street-slang lingua and formalized language. I know this also because I own Dick Gregory’s Nigger book and know that Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians was originally titled Ten Little Niggers. But in the writing I knew that trans is subversive and I’m not so much of trying to explain being trans—-more of elucidate this character Nicky K’s experience and the huge conflicting questions and external conflicts.
2. I heard the first line of the novel ten years prior to its’ publication, sitting in the room of a transsexual, with two of her trans friends—-her explaining having her testicles removed, illegally: “I paid $500 to have my balls cut off.” (Baby, what else is there to say to open a novel, to lead the blurb? I held that line like a diamond in the back of my mind for years it was so raw, so treasure laden to unearthing a character.)
3. Following it being in the 1st person and “I paid $500 to have my balls cut off.” —- I knew it had to be motherfucking raw. I’m talking Donald Goines, Zane, Iceberg Slim raw. Which meant Nicky K had to tell you, me, the reader, the writer, a harsh unvarnished truth even in their own self-delusions. I figured if it was going to be cut off, the balls to the wall, had to be unapologetic. I knew that it had be somewhere between X-rated to NC 17—-graphic, advanced, sexually provocative, which meant that I had to really think about how descriptive I would be—-what would be the line? Would there be any lines?
4. In that studio apartment room near Times Square, the trans person, Valencia, explained sitting in that apartment staring at the pilot light of the oven with a bottle of Vicodin, contemplating suicide after the illegal, back alley testicle removal. She was actively warning the other two trans folk with me that they lacked the mental fortitude and resilience that she possessed to have testicles removed illegally—-they were all doing illegal silicone injections and black market hormones—-they should follow the steps—-psychiatric care, psychologists therapy, medical/hospital surgeries by board certified doctors. To Valencia's underhanded credited, she presented with deep narcissitic, malignant, mentality, which perhaps lent to her resilience. The others were extreme narcissists but more from their identities over time than what seemed to be almost a birthed trait from Valencia. (Yes, she was extremely odd.) But her scenario framed the first chapter—-what if Nicky K were in this studio, on that bed, clutching the pills, crotch piled high with bloody bandages, looking at the pilot light of the oven—-reviewing the irrevocable decision, the life circumstances, that had gotten her/him to this point?
5. I knew I wanted the final chapter to be experimental and contain a picture of glitter filled pill capsules. If Nicky K had 100 Vicodin at the beginning of the novel——what did each one of those represent? And if I listed each individual pill as a representation—-Body, Love, An ex boyfriend, family, work, breasts, women, men—-could the reader infer that I was implying Nicky K was measuring the pills out on the bed, assigning them labels. Was Nicky K taking these pills?

To this point—-I still haven’t written a thing—-this is all still mental, nothing written down, but I have started a digital file folder for the cover pictures I’m considering and the master MS Word template. I tend to handwrite 80% of my work first so there are pads of each chapter generally. 1 fifty page legal pad generally types up to 30+ pages so I know by pad count how many pads to get to my ideal page count.

(All of the above is in a mental egg-bubble, Anders in Peak, being one of the first places I’ve seen it so accurately described——so that when I get to the page/writing I can flow out (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s writing in his amazing book Flow of how certain actions and creativity take place.) 20, 30, 50 pages at a time because I literally know the chords, music, notes, arrangement—-I’m just filling in some lyrics, tightening some of the transitions, adding a bridge).

Tranny came out in maybe a dozen writing sessions, across several states, and I completed it a few hours after my mother died. Ironically in the editing, I showed some pages to a friend and their sister, who is trans (possibly), mentioned a term said to her by a man—-a “Kabuki nigger”—-I damn near pissed on myself, stopping the (editorial) presses, going back and finding a delicious space for that slur in the book. It resonated so fundamentally with Nicky K’s self insights and attacks.

I generally write for a handful of hours at a time, so I would call it one of my fastest Draft #1 to Draft #12 and then edits, projects ever—-call it 15 sessions—-which is about 60 to 100 hours in total. It took less time, by a third to a fifth, than other novels because it was so obsessively focused on one character and it was a stream of consciousness, relating of experiences and ideas——the main other characters being other trans folk, along the spectrum, in a therapy group—-to give breadth of experience. At the end is a glossary/explanatory framework that I generally teach, but I thought someone might pick this up and need to have a clear picture of this for themselves or someone else. Ironically, it’s like my 4th highest selling book.

A (Spherical) Process

To backwards design tracking to how I construct a protect—-most of them happen in the above way—-what tends to get me to constructions beyond simply mental representation constructions are when it’s a larger project (more characters, more pages, research needed) or some sort of collaborative effort where I have to gather data from other people/places.

I mostly though have chunks of the work mentally “worked out” and then I simply write down those chunks—-which is why in examining my process, the process is not linear, it’s spherical.

Stage 1:

By “spherical” I mean the 5 Stage process above. First a global idea—-transsexuality/sexuality/race/conflict—-that’s the first Stage.

Stage 2:

is finding a locality, a central workable point in that—-individual identity in regards to race and sexuality and how that is eased or complicated by homosexuality vs. transsexuality.

Stage 3:

Is comprised of all of the individual segments that comprise race, sexuality, identity more acutely identified in either scenes or perspectives or characters. Each one of those segments are scenes that I’m sewing into a cohesive narrative.

Stage 4:

Is laying the pattern-segments against/onto the Stage 1/2 goals or foundation. I know I want a character to go through this, I know that the character has to represent these things as it will be first person, so I need the character to have:

• a beginning point—-discovery of this state of being, and then
• a conflict point—-why aren’t they happy with this state of being?, and then
• a final end point—-what challenges this happiness and can it be overcome?

In Beginner writer lessons/classes/books it is often simplistically reduced to the conflict point being resolved in the final end point. But for different works, for varying reasons, I often decide no, I’m going to leave this open ended.

Another novel Stay With Me—-I had some back and forth editorial discussions with how I was going to end the novel—-Kirk is awaiting his husbands return from China with two adopted babies and discussing with his therapist how all of love is faith based and there are no guarantees except that it will end in divorce, death, separation.

I thought that was an excellent faith based ending so that like life, the story is without resolution—-as so many other characters in this exploration of five different parallel relationship multiverses—-both ended, resolved and were left, unresolved. It was also the first novel where so much (600+ pages) had moved/evolved these characters, that I wanted sort an ending where we thought we knew a possible ending, a happy ending, and it was not guaranteed—-much like the therapy session. Then it was pointed out to me that there was an undercurrent story to the book in all of this multiverse jumping that I could snag to several other books (S, Hush and the forthcoming Myriad)

which would be connective tissue and still a treat for the reader, if I extended a bit farther, and then put in a chapter from the forthcoming Myriad series. I liked the linking in direct and circumspect ways so I did it. Creating spherical novels.

One of my over-goals in writing, in each novel, is that it be different in some way—-in the sex, sexuality, gender of the main character (s), and/or, in that it be sci-fi, magical realism, straight thriller, horror, drama, first person, third person, experimental, mixed forms, news articles as meta-fiction, and/or, that I do something experimental with the form, the format, of the book itself with design, layout, graphics. I, Kyle, must be challenged. Tranny’s challenge was first person, inside the mind of a trans person who is confused and build her perceptions and world on what is a disfiguring day, that potentially ends in death.

Stage 5:

is the summation of all of the above elements, both fleshed out and connected across space and writing space-time. I may not write, rewriting or edit in chronological sequence—-Chapter 1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.

Chapter 10 I wrote after Chapter 1, then I re-did 7,8,9 after I’d completed 1 to 6 because I needed to get to Nicky K sitting in the City Center auditorium—-where I've been many times—-watching the Alvin Ailey dancers perform and seeing bodies move—-male, female, athletic, pronounced and supremely comfortable. people of color centered in, enjoying and expressing their bodies in such a direct, spectacularized way—-much like a trans presentation to the world——to someone who is not comfortable in their body, who has been accepted and rejected and rejected and accepted and questioned, to the point of a form of madness—-so that the reader understands they’ve read through to Chapter 9——and that the next chapter—-chronologically (upended to when you the reader entered—-you truly entered the novel at the decision from Chapter 9, so that the movement to Chapter 10 is logical and you have all of the information to understand it—-because you now understand and have experienced a spherical sequencing of Nicky K’s reality—-you know completely how and now, in and out of time, when Nicky K got to the decision that led to Chapter 1) would be Chapter 1 and Chapter 1 is a call and response

(In music, call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually written in different parts of the music, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or in response to the first. This can take form as commentary to a statement, an answer to a question or repetition of a phrase following or slightly overlapping the initial speaker(s). It corresponds to the call and response pattern in human communication and is found as a basic element of musical form, such as verse-chorus form, in many traditions. ——Wikipedia)

so that when you turn to Chapter 10—-you, the reader understand glittery pills and 100 “Reasons”. And then the reader decides (response), because they now see into and across and through the novel.

(Yes, I’m consciously playing with the form of how you receive and perceive the text itself in your mind. Yeah, that’s when you’re really writing at a higher level—-when you understand how to manipulate unwritten text/responses.)

I would offer that the pedantic writer/writing comes from following the cliché linear design, especially when trying to envelop a reader into a character-world.

Almost like a physical globe one should be able to hold a book—-in it’s written form—-as the writer and see how every portion—-or space connects across the novel to the next—-this character to that, that one to that idea, that idea to that outcome.

To me, at this point in my writer “career”, it would be a form of limiting to think of a work as directly linear-chronological because I’m constructing it as large patches of connectable real estate—-like assembling a bookshelf or a musical piece or a gourmet dinner.

The Inevitable Change

It never is at it is imagined into the ending that I first conceived. I think this is because in a novel there are more time gaps of writing. I might get to a conclusion, an end, but it’s never how I thought I would get there or what I thought the end would be. It’s always different. I didn’t know Chapter 10 of Tranny until writing Chapter 1 and the clutching of that bottle of Vicodin—-and I was like: this is the ending, the conclusion, the choice, the precipice. BUT how do I design it so that I have an ending in mind, you, the reader, have one too——and we’re BOTH right?

There’s my Writing Construction Challenge raising like a slumbering phoenix—-how you gonna make this different, make it dance, make it unique, Kyle?

Then I discover that and I have these two buttresses that allow me to play in the center. I get to play with a character living or dying, pro or con, yes or no, maybe, maybe not——and I’m not going to answer what I think happens or I know, doesn’t happen.

Or even what became of Valencia, in real life, a decade ago, because we’re now in Fiction Land.

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenix