The end of a story!
Last Monday at 4:55 in the afternoon was a landmark moment for me. I completed my first novel. Provisionally, it’s called, Love's Passage.
The story is long, probably too long for a first novel. Originally, it ran out at almost 111,000 words and some 14,000 lines. In paperback terms that’s a doorstep. It’s around 500 or so pages.
The excitement I felt in completing this story was indescribable. It was a euphoric moment, but as ever I held myself close to the ground and did not get carried away on some wave of personal inflation. I may have drunk one or three too many glasses of red wine on Monday night. I’ll confess that I probably did.
It’s been a long process. I started writing in May last year. My writing stalled in about mid-August. In terms of word count then, I was about half way through. There were links between my personal life and the story. My story had foreseen what might happen in a way, but it was overtaken by real life events. I stopped writing.
I stopped writing for more reasons than that too. I started to feel that my story and its characters were shallow and superficial. I was writing about emotions but I knew I was capable of expressing far deeper feelings than I had done in the story so far. I was recovering from a broken marriage. I did not know how to change up a gear and take the story on.
I may have suffered a bout of “analysis paralysis”. I’d go so far as to say, analysing something into a state of total inertia is, or at least was, a very irritating quality of mine. I’m learning how to trust my feelings and intuition better now in a way that avoids that particular trap of impotent intellectualisation, of thinking myself into a hole!
I need to get better at answering the questions, “What genre is it?” and “What’s it about?”
The genre question is tricky.
The story starts as an erotic romance with an underlying psychological narrative that exposes many of the failings and issues in modern emotional relationships within the the story itself. It’s not learned or pedantic, but it deals with big emotional issues that are commonplace and face a great number of people.
What do I mean? I’ll give you an example in a moment after I’ve explained a little of the plot.
Back to the genre... Perhaps, the story experiments with different genres. It is part erotic romance, part psychological reality, part comedy, part love story and intellectual thriller. I’ll have to get cleverer in describing it to publishers.
I have some anxieties about it.
My main anxiety is that the early chapters may contain too much explicit sex.
Sex is central to the plot as it is to most of our lives. But I’m worried about the reception it may be given by publishers, particularly those involved in the North American market where the predominant social direction seems to be one of ever-increasing puritanism. They may find my writing inordinately prurient. Prurience is not my aim, however. I believe that sex has gone off the rails in our culture. It is being commoditised and exploited ruthlessly, and dare I say it, immorally too. So my main themes in the book are often about people using sex as an escape from reality and pain, sex as a love substitute, sex as control, sex in an emotional void, and ultimately I deal with sex becoming a self-destructive force.
Last night, I signed into a book reader’s group to which I belong, and found that someone had posed the question, “Do you believe there is too much sex in novels these days?” The answers were not that inspiring. But I did find myself writing the “case for the defence”!
I wrote this and needless to say, it’s killed the discussion thread stone dead:
“I really love sex!
It’s healthy, it’s vital, it’s passionate, and it’s simply wonderful. In the context of love, it’s like heaven on earth!
Now did that catch your attention?
I’m not sure how many authors, I have read, capture the magic, the pleasures and passions of sex that well, however.
Sex is beautiful, so why should writing about it be pornographic?
The purpose of pornography is simple. It’s to achieve feelings of sexual arousal and lust in the viewer or reader that are not satisfied. Over 12% of internet content is pornography. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. Why? Because sex is thought to be bad, risqué, dirty, naughty, un-Christian, unwholesome, not something one’s parents might have enjoyed or approved of, although clearly they must have done it once!
By repressing sex, we make it into some dreadful taboo. But it’s what we all need and want, at least those of us who function as normal human beings do. So through repression we turn sex into something that needs to be satisfied by pornography, some nasty masturbatory hinterland full of exploitation.
I rather dislike this question, I suppose. Who would post a question that said, “Do you feel that there is too much eating in novels?” Sex is as fundamental a human need as food and eating. If we had a healthier attitude towards sex then this discussion might not be taking place.
Sex is such a primal urge; it can change our behaviour and who we are. I’m not talking about men exclusively either.
On the whole, I feel very little about sex in literature. I’m not sure if there is too much or too little. There’s a lot of denial about it, for sure. I would welcome a writer who captured its joys well, but I have yet to find one. I would love to read accounts of sex in the context of human struggle, love, fulfilment and human actualisation.
So where are they?”
QUOTE ENDS
I don’t think that response is going to win me too many friends!
What I tried to do in my writing is to convey the joys and passions of loving sex, contrasted with the manifest perversion of sex, something that leads us astray from the realisation of love, personal fulfilment and actualisation.
Here’s what Rosie and John had to say about it in my story. John is speaking in the first person:
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “How healthy good sex makes us feel.
“I feel like I’m glowing with wellbeing this morning. I feel happy, healthy and complete. I haven’t had sex for years and last night I had the best sex of my entire life. It made me feel so good…like a whole person again.”
She paused for thought.
“You know, I’m sorry to sound like the shrink-wrap I am, but Freud had it absolutely right. Living in some void of sexual repression does us no good at all. It makes us sick. If it doesn’t drive us to do crazy things then it just makes us sick at heart. So what goes wrong?” she said.
“Rosie, I’m with you on that one. It’s what I believe too but all sorts of things go wrong,” I said.
“Either we live in aloneness like you, or else we get caught up in emotional double binds and twists and turns with our loved ones that just do us harm. We lose the plot, I suppose,” I added.
“Have you lost the plot?” she asked.
“Yes, me too,” I replied. “I’ve got caught up in that world where money and material stuff controls what I do both in and out of my marriage.
“And by the way, you weren’t the only one to have the best sex of their lives last night. I did too.”
I caught Rosie’s eye and returned her smile.
“Sex is a basic human need, as basic as food, drink and sleep,” I said. “Denying it makes people crazy. It not only causes social disease, but makes for a lot of perverted and crazy people out there too. Freud was right on the mark in my view.
“So you see we’re both a pair of shrink-wraps leading lives that are opposed to what we believe, and therein lies the rub!” I added.”
QUOTE ENDS
Same points, different medium!
Now where was I? I’m introducing characters without saying who they are or anything of the plot!
The Plot
Here’s a quick thumbnail sketch (that's deliberately not intended as a plot summary):
John meets Rosie.
The tensions in the beginning of the story are those that arise between John and his estranged, emotionally disturbed, American wife in the context of a developing love relationship with Rosie, a practising psychotherapist. John is qualified as a therapist, but he does not practice.
The story maps the complexity of emotions and their development in John's love for Rosie. Initially they both use sex as an escape from past emotional pain.
John has to fight off the sexual attentions of Rosie's sister, a successful but unhappy dentist, who has used sex to ensnare all of Rosie's past lovers including her ex-husband. There's a lot of humour in that part of the tale!
Just as we feel John and Rosie may live happily ever after, John almost dies.
Meanwhile, Jane becomes mentally ill and develops multiple personality disorder with four separate identities, all of which have names and separate existences.
All of Jane’s delusional personas have their own lives too. One even has her own car! Jane has a predatory sexual persona called Jo; a saintly do-gooder persona, who sometimes impersonates nuns, called MaryJo Bernardette; and a little girl persona called Dorothy (who wants a dog called Toto!). While enacting the Jo persona, Jane is brutally attacked and gang-raped. She is mortally injured. John is summoned to her bedside in California. Jane is comatose.
Rosie is wracked by personal insecurity, when John leaves to be with Jane.
She gets drunk and the next morning crashes her car. Will she meet the grim reaper?
John is away in California at his wife's bedside. Jane is dying and John is torn apart with grief and guilt.
Rosie is lying unconscious in an overturned car in the Cambridgeshire countryside.
Jane dies.
You didn’t think I’d give the whole plot away, did you?
That’s about two thirds of the way through the story and gives away very little. John’s struggle with life and death is a cliff-hanger. There are twists and turns at every stage, and a lot of human banana skins to slip up on too.
I shared this next passage with a wonderful friend of mine, a counsellor and holistic therapist. She was very enthusiastic about its psychological message. It's integral to the plot. It's about finding one's bearings in love relationships.
It’s John and Rosie playing “truth or dare” or “true confessions”. It’s John speaking about his past:
"Rosie giggled and looked straight at me. Not once during my monologue had she diverted her eyes from me.
“So here comes the brief summary and analysis as far as I understand it,” I said. “I’m not sure how far that is really.
“I’m a qualified therapist. I’ve done relationship and marriage counselling. I’ve even been published on the subject. But when it comes to close intimate relationships for me personally, I’m totally useless, complete crap you could say.
“I’ve been through hundreds of hours of training therapy. Every part of my past has been laid out before me and dissected in detail, but still I get into such terrible messes.
“There’s one important factor, like a missing piece of the jigsaw, that I know is missing too. It’s the therapist’s dream really. I had a totally loveless childhood. It was worse than that too. Some of it verged on brutal cruelty and abuse. It was probably the biggest reason I took up therapy in the first place. During training I had to get all this out and look at it in the minutest detail. I got angry, raged and I wept going through all that stuff. I was so scared that I almost gave up the course, but I didn’t want it to beat me. I felt so much turmoil inside, I was afraid I would have a breakdown, but there were good and supportive people at the Institute and I made it through intact.
“I supposed all that we looked at was the stuff that was there, rather than the parts that were missing. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s more complicated, I don’t know.
“The emotional bonds of childhood are what form and shape our lives. If there’s no point of reference for a person’s emotional world, no emotional frame of reference, they have difficulty in understanding their own feelings, particularly their deep feelings. Perhaps they can pick the rest up on the way, but without that frame of reference, there’s no guide to love, loving and being loved. And it doesn’t stop there; they probably don’t know where their emotional limits or boundaries sit either. It’s like trying to follow a route map without a compass; you keep getting lost.
“So perhaps that’s me, no emotional frame of reference and intimate relationships by trial and error, only in my case, there are a lot of errors.
“I don’t even know if that’s right. How could I? It’s like how would you know what’s missing if it’s never been there, but I think I’m on the right track. I'll have to try and follow my heart and be true to myself. Part of that journey may be finding that truth and even knowing or hearing what my heart is saying." "
QUOTE ENDS
So how is your compass? Mine works most of the time these days. Is the monologue overlong? I do need to work on tightening up some of the dialogue in the first part of the story from which that quote was drawn. The second half of this tale is much more taut and racy. Editing is going to be a challenge!
The destroyed words?
I’m editing and today I’ve cut out almost as many words as I would be capable of writing in a day. I need to get the story down to below 100,000 words. There’s lot of plod, fat and flab to cut out yet and I’m struggling hard with the idea of whether there is too much sex. Probably, I feel not, but I’m sure others would differ.